|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Student in Educational Reform
| Article
# : |
14562 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1988 |
14,063 Words |
| Author
: |
John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
The greatest of the philosophers are those who understood that the principal problems of human life are formulated and faced in the activity of education. Concern and affection for the young in a future society require a careful consideration of their proper moral and intellectual development. Philosophers who have been true to their name and really loved wisdom have also loved the young and, with them, have had a vision of a better world. They have reflected on the process of nurturing the child, the process the Greeks called paideia, by which society, through its leaders, its institutions, and its social structure, tries to influence or control its own future. That future gets its characteristic from society's intellectual capability (its "know-how" as well as its "know-what") and from the moral purposes toward which that capability is directed.
Plato, the founder of philosophy, banishes the poets from Callipolis, his most beautiful city, on moral and educational grounds, and reflecting on that banishment in the tenth book of the Republic (or Polity as I prefer to call it), he confirms that his work was good.
There are a great many things about city, [Socrates] said, which make me think in how extraordinarily sound a manner we have founded it; but I feel this most especially when I think about poetry... and our refusal to admit all imitative poetry.
Plato identifies "the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy" and sees himself, on behalf of philosophy, fighting Homer, the greatest of the poets. The Polity is the philosophic counterpart of or the counterattack on the Iliad. This "ancient quarrel" continues, although to modern ears its very formulation gives victory to poetry, for we find it hard to believe that poetry and music, in our sense, could undermine a city. We so easily forget the Beatles.
In Plato's sense of poetry, however, it is no innocent thing, and Homer is no innocuous entertainer, for the human ideal in the Iliad is ultimately Achilles, the fleet-footed, murderous sacker-of-cities. The beauty and greatness of Achilles, his love for and anguish over his friend, his magnificent anger cannot blind us to the fact that to justify himself he destroys Hector, and, with him, sacred Ilium, the well-built city, and himself. The educational ideal is a bronze-age Rambo.
Plato knows that human life is capable of a greater achievement, a greater moral achievement, but that its manner of achievement is through philosophy.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
