Aristotle (Part 2)

            I’ve been thinking about the implication that Aristotle’s ideas have for education theory and practice so that I can contribute to the conversation on Tuesday. I’ve been looking through articles and highlighting and making notes, then realizing my thoughts are drifting from my original idea into tangential stuff, then stopping to clear my head, then returning to the reading and starting all over again.  I’m sure I won’t get to share all of the ideas and questions that Nicheomachean Ethics presents; I’ll probably be sticking to Aristotle’s influence on Dewey, the various discussions that fall under the “democracy and education” heading, and multicultural education.  But there is one part of the reading that has stuck with me.  Randall Curren touches on it in the afterword. He writes,

“Note well that education is preparation for leisure “spent in intellectual activity,” according to Aristotle.  It is not preparation for work, as is so often now assumed.  Greek education…was from the beginning preparation for leisure….Leisure was, in any case, not equated with mere amusement.  It was contrasted with productive labor in such a way that public service – even military service- was generally considered a use of leisure, or time not spent satisfying material needs.  For Aristotle, leisure provided the opportunity to flourish as a human being or to pursue what is intrinsically, not just instrumentally, good.

How far we’ve moved from this!  I think about students tracked into vocational programs who are deprived of even the opportunity to decide if that path is the one they want to travel. They are often the least consulted and most patronized when educational decisions are being made.  But in a larger sense, I don’t know of many people who don’t suffer from the distance education policy has put between school and the “leisure” that Aristotle described, no matter what their social position. Most American people think of the link between education and work (and the economic competitiveness of the US) as if it has always been that way, and now that the “sorting mechanism” that our education system has been is being questioned by some (http://www.racetonowhere.com/), I wonder if we’ll start looking for alternatives. (Probably not, as the idea that America should always be able “the best” is a hard one for some folks to let go of, but it doesn’t hurt to think about some different ways…)

Nichomachean Ethics

            In Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle explores the good and happiness. He discusses what their defining characteristics are, how people attain them, to what extent it is even possible to attain them, their relationship to virtue, their relationship to knowledge, their relationship to character and morality, their relationship to education and, as the discussion ended, their relationship to society, which, I think, will extend into Politics.

            Because the writing is so dense, I found it really hard to understand at times.  There were lots of middle sections that confused me, and one feature of the writing that made me pause time and again was the tendency for there to be drawn-out explanations for some points, and mere recollection of consensus for others. What I mean is, phrases like, “Surely, one would agree that…” or “…it is absurd to assume that…” seem to pop up a lot (in this piece and in others we’ve read).  I understand that is sometimes done because a point has already been expounded upon earlier, and there’s no need to explain it again, but there are instances when I think the philosophers take for granted things that could be argued differently.  Of course, that’s the purpose of having a stance and defending it: you use prior knowledge and assumptions based on that knowledge to make points. But what are interesting to me are the instances when what is assumed is just as interesting as what’s being argued.  When the discussion in Nichomachean Ethics moves toward man’s actions and the degree to which something is right or wrong, Aristotle writes about how ridiculous it is to think that “there is a mean, an excess, and a deficiency in an unjust or a cowardly or a self-indulgent act” (p116).  He then continues to expound on his point.  You could have an entire conversation about the relativity of right and wrong before finishing that section on virtue, one that would be just as informative and important for the following sections, and yet a totally different point is being argued.

            Later on in the piece, Aristotle writes, “For just as legal traditions and [national] character prevail in states, so paternal words and ancestral habits prevail in households – and the latter have even greater authority because of the ties of kinship and of benefits rendered, [for members of a household] have the requisite natural affection and obedience [toward the father] to start with” (p130).  Do they?  Aristotle is making an argument about education and how it should be “done”, whether access to it should be given to the few or to many, which is one of the most important debates to be had, but embedded in that argument are assumptions about family life and the roles of men and women and “who leads”, which are just as compelling, in my view.  I’m guessing this is where critical perspectives enter the debate, to bring to the forefront not only the obvious questions, but the varying positions from which we pose those questions.

Plato's Republic

In The Republic, Plato sets out to define justice. To do this, he and those he converses with describe the construction of a great city. By imaginatively “building” this city and examining its party, they believe that they will be able to determine what makes it just or unjust. Following this “construction”, they think they can understand what makes a single person just or unjust, because the same qualities that make a person’s city just or unjust make a person so.


Because the group reasons that individuals are not entirely self-sufficient, the city, which starts out as a small group of people, becomes more and more populated. These people must be able to perform certain tasks very well, and do them for others as well as themselves. Farmers must be willing and able to provide food for themselves and the citizens, clothiers must be able to make garments for themselves and the citizens, and so on. This is necessary for the “collective good” a theme which carries throughout the piece.

The thinkers reason that there are groups of people who are necessary for the survival and thrust of the city: guardians, money-makers and the military. What is more; it is only when these people are focusing on their specific tasks (i.e. making money, protecting the city through military activity or governance) that the city functions in a just manner. Throughout the piece, there are many questions asked to get the philosophers (and, of course, the reader) closer to a more complete definition of justice and what just people and social groups looks like. Among them are:

• How should the guardians of a city be educated?

• How should they pass on knowledge?

• What is appropriate/inappropriate for them to teach?

• What should be taught to result in certain outcomes (academic, personality) from students?

The philosophers eventually use to the allegory of the cave to discuss what constitutes knowledge, and the disposition people have towards learning and sharing information, especially when it challenges all that they have known before.

What is most compelling to me, however, is how the thinkers never move far away from the idea that only when people are “in harmony” with themselves, and then “in harmony” with their fellow citizens is the city thriving, no matter how well people are educated (443c “The truth being that justice is…”). Or rather, the goal of education and “rearing” is to give a person the tools necessary to do the tasks they are most suited to do (?) If people are not doing the tasks that align with their talents, then they are not acting as “themselves”, and thus are not able to do the most good for the most people. The point of the governance of the city is not to make only one group of citizens happy, but to make the most that can be, happy. And justice is served when people are doing their own work well, not the work of others. How do we feel about this as educators, and if it’s agreeable, how do we present that idea to others with balance, not tipping the scale too far the side of individualism, or the opposite, encouraging people only to take on work that is beneficial to the group without contemplating what is satisfying on a personal level?

Plato's Meno

In Plato’s Meno, Socrates and Meno converse in an attempt to define virtue. The conversation is, I think, a larger attempt to understand whether what we call characteristics or personality traits are taught, are cultivated over time, or are natural parts of human beings.


I haven’t read the work of these Greek philosophers in a long time, and this piece, besides being provocative, was somewhat amusing. I’m not sure if this is a by-product of translation, or if I understood the tone incorrectly, but while reading certain parts of the text, I thought I was reading a really sophisticated version of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?” But wordplay, though interesting, is not the main focus of the piece.

Socrates wants define virtue, because he reasons that you cannot know if a trait is taught, cultivated or inherent unless you know exactly what that trait is. The two men discover that there are many virtues, but virtue in itself is a harder thing to define. First, they suggest that it is the ability to rule over someone or something justly, then that is the ability to want good things and attain them. They also posit that virtue could be knowledge. At the end of Meno, the two men conclude that virtue is bestowed upon men by the divine, and cannot be taught, nor is it natural. This conclusion raises important issues about education’s purpose and practice.

If virtue can’t be taught, not even by virtuous people among us, then the purpose of education cannot be to produce virtuous people or a virtuous society, right? Of course, there are many who say that the purpose of education is to socialize people, to prepare them for their socioeconomic station, to make them workers able to preserve this nation’s economic competitiveness. There are those who say that education is the process by which we make citizens. And for all of those things, one could argue, it is not necessary to be virtuous. You could be knowledgeable, capable of “acquiring good things” and ruling over others all without being virtuous (or intentional), according to the dialogues.

So what, then, is the purpose of education? In an American context, or in the context of nations that dominate most of the capital in the world, education’s purpose is to maintain control of the world economy, to the extent to which that’s possible. However, there are alternatives to this ideology all over the world. In many places, especially those not in the global north or west, a large part of education’s purpose is to encourage a self-determining society, one not at the whim of economic superpowers that view culture as merely one of the commodities that’s fresh for the taking in places like South America, parts of Asia and Africa. I think that sort of education is virtuous. And perhaps virtue cannot be completely taught, but virtuous ways of living can be: way that show respect for others, respect for the earth and its resources, etc.

One quote that really resonated with me in Meno was from 81e on page 11 in Philosophy of Education. It reads,

“Seeing then that the soul is immortal, and has been born many times, and has beheld all things in this world and the world beyond, there is nothing it has not learnt: so it is not surprising that it can be reminded of virtue and other things which it knew before.”

I think that education could be the process by which we remind each other of what is virtuous. It could be the way in which we share knowledge to ensure that more and more people can live with dignity. But is that possible in school communities given the context we’re in?