As it happens (if I may interject a story of my own here to connect with Socrates tale of Er) many years before I met Socrates and his powerful teaching, I had a dream about an old friend I hadn’t seen for a very long time. In my dream, I came upon a cottage in what seemed an enchanted wood. I might have gone around the small bungalow, for I could see an alluring glow arising from behind it, but my way was blocked by an impenetrable thicket of bushes on either side. So I knocked and was greeted, to my surprise, by my long lost friend, Pete. Pete invited me in and offered me a seat beside a large window overlooking a beautiful meadow. We had a lot to talk about, apparently, for I remember the sun rose and set several times, while the glow from the meadow was continuous. I thought I could see figures there, coming and going, sitting in circles around what appeared to be campfires. But when I tried to walk out the back door for a better look, I was surprised to find it wouldn’t open.
When I finally awoke, it was with a profound sense that we had been discussing something worth remembering, but I could not for the life of me remember what it had been. I could see and feel and almost touch it, but I could not find words to explain to my worried fiancé the deep sadness I couldn’t shake. Nor could I quit thinking about the haunting image of that luminous fog that hung over the enchanted meadow But I did remember, and could still hear looping through my mind, that immortal Beatles epilogue – “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
The year was 1979, and I was about to be married, so dreams about old boyfriends did not seem at all peculiar. Prenuptial jitters, I told myself. Pete had not been the love of my life, by any means, but he had been a good friend, and we did share critical consciousness of what seemed amiss with the world. I hurt for him as I became aware of the level of violence he had grown up enduring (and developed a fear of his alcoholic father myself). I understood the depth of his anger that he felt he could do nothing about it – but grow his hair, rebel against authority, and pour his heart into his music. And I never forgot how many like him fall through the cracks of the world system as we know it.
And as I was still drinking my first cup of coffee that morning when the phone rang – a call from another old friend who was sad to report that Pete had been in a motorcycle accident the night before. He was in a coma, she said, and they did not expect him to live.
For a moment, I felt certain I must still be dreaming.
That such a thing had happened to Pete came as no surprise to either of us, since he had always lived on the edge with what sometimes seemed like an actual death wish. I asked him about it once, and he had plenty to say. But all I could remember the next day was something about people who love power, wolves in sheep's clothing, and his frustration with a world that could not to tell the good guys from the bad.
I did not mention any of this, or my dream, to my friend.
Pete lingered in a coma for five days. And for five nights I returned to that cottage in the woods. Almost certainly I was willing this recurrence, for I could hardly shake the thought of it even while awake. Every night we talked as if for days, and each morning I tried with all my faculties to remember what we’d said, to no avail. And each time, like the first, I was unable to exit through the back door with him, just as he could not leave with me through the front. And when I awoke, I had a kind of hangover, as if I’d been intoxicated by light and love that rendered my waking life dark and my eyes unable to adjust. But I did remember the music, the laughter, and the sense I had been handed a gift.
And after Pete died, I never found my way back to that cottage. My dreams ended as quickly as they’d begun, and I never expected to see that meadow again… Until years later when I came across it in the final pages of Plato’s masterwork, Republic, where Socrates was telling this story in the days just before his own execution at the hands of the oligoi who had come to rule what was now democracy in name only.
Mind you, Socrates only speculates here, for he would be the first to remind us that we simply cannot ‘know’ on this side of death what happens on the other side. But true to his dialectic ways, Socrates is willing to hear all voices, because true or not, they might be offering us something instructive. Like all the best of ancient wisdom, we needn’t ‘believe’ in any of it, but simply open our minds to receive whatever it has to offer.
And it was in this vein that Socrates tells the story of Er, the son of Armenius, who had lay dead for ten days after falling in battle.
Perhaps I too had drunk from the river of forgetfulness. I don’t know; I forget. But whatever I had learned in my dream that was obscured in an impenetrable fog upon waking came rushing back like deja vue upon reading this story of Er’s near-death experience. And I can still see and feel it now, all these many years later, as if I too had just stepped out of that enchanted woods where souls linger between life and death.
I don’t pretend to know what this means, or to remember all that we talked about in those dreams. But I can say with certainty that it moved me to learn and set me on a quest to understand and rediscover so much that I, we all, have forgotten in the business – the busy-ness - of living.
Education-as-we-know-it
Some years later I was going through some old boxes and came upon a paper Pete had written for a high school English class. It was about the Beatles, and I didn’t remember ever having seen it before. Most likely he gave it to me, and – being less than the friend he needed - I neglected to read it. As a teacher myself by now, I read it with great interest, marveling that my own college students seldom wrote so insightfully. I would certainly have given this paper an A. But when I came to the conclusion, I was shocked, but not surprised, to find there on the last page, with no comments or explanation, a very large red D. Just one reason, among many, why Pete had lived – and ultimately died - in such defiance.
When my daughter was born soon thereafter, I was daily reminded with her steady flow of questions just how much I didn’t know and had yet to learn. And when I went back to school, for her sake and mine, I came to understand better what Pete and Socrates knew about lovers of power who react with distain at having their authority challenged.
That the world can be so unfair to so many escapes the notice of those who benefit most from playing the game well. As a college professor myself, I could hardly help noticing how many of my students suffered from the biases and preconceptions of their teachers, as well as how many of my colleagues had started out as teacher’s pets, having mastered the game but seldom questioned the fairness of the rules. They often saw their mission as sorting the ‘good’ students from the ‘bad’ – and assumed the right to judge and advance those who were likely to win the game, and to hold back those who were not, scarcely recognizing the arrogance of this power to misjudge and the self-fulfilling prophesy of its outcome.
This sorting function goes on at every level of academia, but it does the most harm early on, when it has the power to discourage the learning process altogether before it’s developed any momentum. Capital-P Philosophers my have the power to chase small-p thinkers into other college disciplines, but in grade and high school, this conceit and misplaced power can chase young minds away from learning altogether.
Socrates calls this misology, a distaste for learning that comes of hearing contradictory things both called true and nonsense called sense.(Phaedo) He himself would have been turned off altogether if he had not had so deep a passion for the for the pursuit of truth.[Theatetus 169c]
We might think this is an unintended side effect of institutionalized education, but evidence suggests this has been the heart of it all along. John Taylor Gatto, twice New York Teacher of the Year, took the opportunity this award presented to tell us what he’d learned in his “30 years in the public school trenches.” Education as we know it amounts, he says, to “long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers…virtual factories of childishness,”(Gatto, 2003) deliberately designed to discourage maturing of the spirit.
Back when “mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States,” Gotto argues, during that “enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions” of the early 1900s (1905 to 1915), many practitioners did at least pay lip-service to more noble sounding purposes. Then, the stated intention of public schooling was:
1.) to make good people
2.) to make good citizens, and
3.) to make each person his or her personal best.
This would be a fairly “decent definition of public education’s mission,” Gatto says, were it not that the actual purposes of modern schooling are more likely to be, “to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority…[which] precludes critical judgment completely....to make children as alike as possible…to harness and manipulate a large labor force….to determine each student’s proper social role…by logging evidence…on cumulative ‘permanent records’. And also to sort by role and train only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.”
Like the Prussian system on which it was modeled, Gotto argues, our public school system is “useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual heard of mindless consumers.”
This may seem an obvious overstatement to most who did well in institutionalized schools, but these effects are a good examples of what cannot be seen from the point of view of those who only benefit. But the whole truth includes those who ‘fail’ and ‘flunk’ – powerful concepts, given their permanent and long term effects on young minds. And that includes not just a minority of students, for the truth is, since only 40 to 60 percent of students ‘succeed’ in our schools, that leaves 40 to 60 percent to fall through the cracks!
This might seem an epic failure of the system, but in fact, Gatto argues, it may actually be built into the very purposes of it. For modern education is actually modeled on the compulsory system developed in Prussia in the 1820s, the purpose of which was to put down “the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table….to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.”
Gatto adds how unbelievable it is “that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens all in order to render the populace ‘manageable’.”(Gatto 2003) All this “can stem purely from fear,” he admits, “or from the by now familiar belief that ‘efficiency’ is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope.”
As H. L. Menchen wrote, contrary to popular perception, the aim of public education is not, “to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim…is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States…and that is its aim everywhere else.” (American Mercury, April 1924, In Gatto’s Against Schools, 2003) And Menchen’s being a satirist does not change the truth of his observation, which Gatto argues is revealed in “numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose” that can be found in the literature, then and now. “It is simply in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform.”
Indeed, worst among “the purposes of mandatory public education in this country,” Gatto argues, is what he calls “the selective function” – “to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.”
And meanwhile, “a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.” All of which makes the young “sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era – marketing.” In this way, and by means of so many behaviorist conditioning processes, we are “turning our children into addicts,” Gatto argues. And the primary component of that is boredom. For what need would they have for so many extrinsic goods if they could access their inner resources they were born with, and make use of those intrinsic goods, all of which are free?
It is these that ancient wisdom would teach our young to make use of - to use their minds for all they are worth!
I was reminded of Pete again when I came across research into the voices of high school dropouts – the view from the inside, which is perhaps the most direct critique of our educational methods. As Aristotle once put it, it’s from the voices of the most affected that we can see and feel where the shoe pinches, and how our nature compensates to avoid pain. For when all the accolades seem to go to those who play the game best, making losers of many who refuse to play dirty, even good people might compromise themselves because the price of being good seems so high.
For this reason, what we call ‘human nature’ only seems the way it does because so many are convinced to play the game that is injustice, thinking it to be the best survival strategy. As one young gang member recently put it, lacking other options, the young are compelled to choose between being the predator or the prey.
It was for this reason that Socrates avoided what he called the Sophists – those who taught the tricks of seeming wise and good, but knew little of actually being so. Socrates himself took women and children, slaves and foreigners, and many others who had the humility to be fair and just as his teachers. And likewise, he drew on those sages from many ages who had the wisdom to know they did not know much, which is the same thing as a willingness to learn. He knew, and taught others, not to give power to those who are in love with it, who may seem many but are actually few (oligoi). But rather, to learn from those who are in love with truth and justice, who may seem to be few, but are actually many (demos).
This may seem the exception, rather than the rule, and we might think a few cannot do much harm. But even a few power mongers wearrin academic robes the way wolves wear sheep’s clothing can do a great deal of damage in any given child's life. The devil’s first objective, after all, is to appear good.
By contrast, those who seek to become what others only wish to appear are the true teachers we should revere. There are many who have built a reputation for great knowledge are in fact truly wise, and I was blessed to have found many such mentors who helped me learn the true meaning of philosophy. (Sadly, precious few of these actually taught in the philosophy department.) But like their students, they too struggled as their eyes continually adjusted while moving between the extremes of the dark of the cave we live in and the light of truth.
And while the living world may seem to produce few such great teachers, ancient history has produced many. They offer us the dream of what is still and always possible if we seek truth, justice, and true power over our own lives, instead of using deceit and injustice to gain power over others.
As synchronicity would have it, I received an email while writing this from a friend who shared an article that makes this point. Excerpting from his book, Why Teach? Mark Edmunson makes the point that, "The humanities are not about success. They’re about questioning success — and every important social value. Socrates taught us this, and we shouldn’t forget it. Sure, someone who studies literature or philosophy is learning to think clearly and write well. But those skills are means to an end. That end, as Plato said, is learning how to live one’s life."
“Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks for the spirit of the humanities in ‘Self-Reliance’ when he says that we ‘must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.’ He will not accept what the world calls ‘good’… He’ll look into it as Socrates did and see if it actually is good.”(Washington Post, August 8, 3013: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-major-in-humanities-not-just-for-a-good-job--for-a-good-life/2013/08/08/83bc2734-fed1-11e2-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop
And it is philosophy in this sense – the search for what stays true and what changes by comparison – that I have studied to discover and written to help us remember.
As Plato made clear, all hope for humanity lies in the fact that every generation is born fresh, with all the higher (and lower) potentials that are all part of our true nature. There may seem little hope for change in those of us who are too well conditioned into the habits of our culture, but it’s in the education of our young that real change happens.
The good news is that what we tend to call human nature is just a bundle of bad habits – and habits can be broken! What’s more, we can refrain from teaching these to begin with. It seems the very least we can do - indeed, a moral imperative - to stop teaching our young the same bad habits that we were taught, and now find so difficult to change in ourselves!
So we owe it them young to be better guides than our own recent ancestors have been for us. It may be the primary challenge of our age to encourage our young to dream of what is still and always possible, since we cannot hit a target we don’t aim at. For this reason, we must “strive to bring back the dream of the earth…Democracy and true community…a light of hope for our children.” (Forest, 2007)
When I finally awoke, it was with a profound sense that we had been discussing something worth remembering, but I could not for the life of me remember what it had been. I could see and feel and almost touch it, but I could not find words to explain to my worried fiancé the deep sadness I couldn’t shake. Nor could I quit thinking about the haunting image of that luminous fog that hung over the enchanted meadow But I did remember, and could still hear looping through my mind, that immortal Beatles epilogue – “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”
The year was 1979, and I was about to be married, so dreams about old boyfriends did not seem at all peculiar. Prenuptial jitters, I told myself. Pete had not been the love of my life, by any means, but he had been a good friend, and we did share critical consciousness of what seemed amiss with the world. I hurt for him as I became aware of the level of violence he had grown up enduring (and developed a fear of his alcoholic father myself). I understood the depth of his anger that he felt he could do nothing about it – but grow his hair, rebel against authority, and pour his heart into his music. And I never forgot how many like him fall through the cracks of the world system as we know it.
And as I was still drinking my first cup of coffee that morning when the phone rang – a call from another old friend who was sad to report that Pete had been in a motorcycle accident the night before. He was in a coma, she said, and they did not expect him to live.
For a moment, I felt certain I must still be dreaming.
That such a thing had happened to Pete came as no surprise to either of us, since he had always lived on the edge with what sometimes seemed like an actual death wish. I asked him about it once, and he had plenty to say. But all I could remember the next day was something about people who love power, wolves in sheep's clothing, and his frustration with a world that could not to tell the good guys from the bad.
I did not mention any of this, or my dream, to my friend.
Pete lingered in a coma for five days. And for five nights I returned to that cottage in the woods. Almost certainly I was willing this recurrence, for I could hardly shake the thought of it even while awake. Every night we talked as if for days, and each morning I tried with all my faculties to remember what we’d said, to no avail. And each time, like the first, I was unable to exit through the back door with him, just as he could not leave with me through the front. And when I awoke, I had a kind of hangover, as if I’d been intoxicated by light and love that rendered my waking life dark and my eyes unable to adjust. But I did remember the music, the laughter, and the sense I had been handed a gift.
And after Pete died, I never found my way back to that cottage. My dreams ended as quickly as they’d begun, and I never expected to see that meadow again… Until years later when I came across it in the final pages of Plato’s masterwork, Republic, where Socrates was telling this story in the days just before his own execution at the hands of the oligoi who had come to rule what was now democracy in name only.
Mind you, Socrates only speculates here, for he would be the first to remind us that we simply cannot ‘know’ on this side of death what happens on the other side. But true to his dialectic ways, Socrates is willing to hear all voices, because true or not, they might be offering us something instructive. Like all the best of ancient wisdom, we needn’t ‘believe’ in any of it, but simply open our minds to receive whatever it has to offer.
And it was in this vein that Socrates tells the story of Er, the son of Armenius, who had lay dead for ten days after falling in battle.
Perhaps I too had drunk from the river of forgetfulness. I don’t know; I forget. But whatever I had learned in my dream that was obscured in an impenetrable fog upon waking came rushing back like deja vue upon reading this story of Er’s near-death experience. And I can still see and feel it now, all these many years later, as if I too had just stepped out of that enchanted woods where souls linger between life and death.
I don’t pretend to know what this means, or to remember all that we talked about in those dreams. But I can say with certainty that it moved me to learn and set me on a quest to understand and rediscover so much that I, we all, have forgotten in the business – the busy-ness - of living.
Education-as-we-know-it
Some years later I was going through some old boxes and came upon a paper Pete had written for a high school English class. It was about the Beatles, and I didn’t remember ever having seen it before. Most likely he gave it to me, and – being less than the friend he needed - I neglected to read it. As a teacher myself by now, I read it with great interest, marveling that my own college students seldom wrote so insightfully. I would certainly have given this paper an A. But when I came to the conclusion, I was shocked, but not surprised, to find there on the last page, with no comments or explanation, a very large red D. Just one reason, among many, why Pete had lived – and ultimately died - in such defiance.
When my daughter was born soon thereafter, I was daily reminded with her steady flow of questions just how much I didn’t know and had yet to learn. And when I went back to school, for her sake and mine, I came to understand better what Pete and Socrates knew about lovers of power who react with distain at having their authority challenged.
That the world can be so unfair to so many escapes the notice of those who benefit most from playing the game well. As a college professor myself, I could hardly help noticing how many of my students suffered from the biases and preconceptions of their teachers, as well as how many of my colleagues had started out as teacher’s pets, having mastered the game but seldom questioned the fairness of the rules. They often saw their mission as sorting the ‘good’ students from the ‘bad’ – and assumed the right to judge and advance those who were likely to win the game, and to hold back those who were not, scarcely recognizing the arrogance of this power to misjudge and the self-fulfilling prophesy of its outcome.
This sorting function goes on at every level of academia, but it does the most harm early on, when it has the power to discourage the learning process altogether before it’s developed any momentum. Capital-P Philosophers my have the power to chase small-p thinkers into other college disciplines, but in grade and high school, this conceit and misplaced power can chase young minds away from learning altogether.
Socrates calls this misology, a distaste for learning that comes of hearing contradictory things both called true and nonsense called sense.(Phaedo) He himself would have been turned off altogether if he had not had so deep a passion for the for the pursuit of truth.[Theatetus 169c]
We might think this is an unintended side effect of institutionalized education, but evidence suggests this has been the heart of it all along. John Taylor Gatto, twice New York Teacher of the Year, took the opportunity this award presented to tell us what he’d learned in his “30 years in the public school trenches.” Education as we know it amounts, he says, to “long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers…virtual factories of childishness,”(Gatto, 2003) deliberately designed to discourage maturing of the spirit.
Back when “mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States,” Gotto argues, during that “enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions” of the early 1900s (1905 to 1915), many practitioners did at least pay lip-service to more noble sounding purposes. Then, the stated intention of public schooling was:
1.) to make good people
2.) to make good citizens, and
3.) to make each person his or her personal best.
This would be a fairly “decent definition of public education’s mission,” Gatto says, were it not that the actual purposes of modern schooling are more likely to be, “to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority…[which] precludes critical judgment completely....to make children as alike as possible…to harness and manipulate a large labor force….to determine each student’s proper social role…by logging evidence…on cumulative ‘permanent records’. And also to sort by role and train only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.”
Like the Prussian system on which it was modeled, Gotto argues, our public school system is “useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual heard of mindless consumers.”
This may seem an obvious overstatement to most who did well in institutionalized schools, but these effects are a good examples of what cannot be seen from the point of view of those who only benefit. But the whole truth includes those who ‘fail’ and ‘flunk’ – powerful concepts, given their permanent and long term effects on young minds. And that includes not just a minority of students, for the truth is, since only 40 to 60 percent of students ‘succeed’ in our schools, that leaves 40 to 60 percent to fall through the cracks!
This might seem an epic failure of the system, but in fact, Gatto argues, it may actually be built into the very purposes of it. For modern education is actually modeled on the compulsory system developed in Prussia in the 1820s, the purpose of which was to put down “the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table….to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.”
Gatto adds how unbelievable it is “that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens all in order to render the populace ‘manageable’.”(Gatto 2003) All this “can stem purely from fear,” he admits, “or from the by now familiar belief that ‘efficiency’ is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope.”
As H. L. Menchen wrote, contrary to popular perception, the aim of public education is not, “to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim…is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States…and that is its aim everywhere else.” (American Mercury, April 1924, In Gatto’s Against Schools, 2003) And Menchen’s being a satirist does not change the truth of his observation, which Gatto argues is revealed in “numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose” that can be found in the literature, then and now. “It is simply in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform.”
Indeed, worst among “the purposes of mandatory public education in this country,” Gatto argues, is what he calls “the selective function” – “to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.”
And meanwhile, “a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.” All of which makes the young “sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era – marketing.” In this way, and by means of so many behaviorist conditioning processes, we are “turning our children into addicts,” Gatto argues. And the primary component of that is boredom. For what need would they have for so many extrinsic goods if they could access their inner resources they were born with, and make use of those intrinsic goods, all of which are free?
It is these that ancient wisdom would teach our young to make use of - to use their minds for all they are worth!
I was reminded of Pete again when I came across research into the voices of high school dropouts – the view from the inside, which is perhaps the most direct critique of our educational methods. As Aristotle once put it, it’s from the voices of the most affected that we can see and feel where the shoe pinches, and how our nature compensates to avoid pain. For when all the accolades seem to go to those who play the game best, making losers of many who refuse to play dirty, even good people might compromise themselves because the price of being good seems so high.
For this reason, what we call ‘human nature’ only seems the way it does because so many are convinced to play the game that is injustice, thinking it to be the best survival strategy. As one young gang member recently put it, lacking other options, the young are compelled to choose between being the predator or the prey.
It was for this reason that Socrates avoided what he called the Sophists – those who taught the tricks of seeming wise and good, but knew little of actually being so. Socrates himself took women and children, slaves and foreigners, and many others who had the humility to be fair and just as his teachers. And likewise, he drew on those sages from many ages who had the wisdom to know they did not know much, which is the same thing as a willingness to learn. He knew, and taught others, not to give power to those who are in love with it, who may seem many but are actually few (oligoi). But rather, to learn from those who are in love with truth and justice, who may seem to be few, but are actually many (demos).
This may seem the exception, rather than the rule, and we might think a few cannot do much harm. But even a few power mongers wearrin academic robes the way wolves wear sheep’s clothing can do a great deal of damage in any given child's life. The devil’s first objective, after all, is to appear good.
By contrast, those who seek to become what others only wish to appear are the true teachers we should revere. There are many who have built a reputation for great knowledge are in fact truly wise, and I was blessed to have found many such mentors who helped me learn the true meaning of philosophy. (Sadly, precious few of these actually taught in the philosophy department.) But like their students, they too struggled as their eyes continually adjusted while moving between the extremes of the dark of the cave we live in and the light of truth.
And while the living world may seem to produce few such great teachers, ancient history has produced many. They offer us the dream of what is still and always possible if we seek truth, justice, and true power over our own lives, instead of using deceit and injustice to gain power over others.
As synchronicity would have it, I received an email while writing this from a friend who shared an article that makes this point. Excerpting from his book, Why Teach? Mark Edmunson makes the point that, "The humanities are not about success. They’re about questioning success — and every important social value. Socrates taught us this, and we shouldn’t forget it. Sure, someone who studies literature or philosophy is learning to think clearly and write well. But those skills are means to an end. That end, as Plato said, is learning how to live one’s life."
“Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks for the spirit of the humanities in ‘Self-Reliance’ when he says that we ‘must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.’ He will not accept what the world calls ‘good’… He’ll look into it as Socrates did and see if it actually is good.”(Washington Post, August 8, 3013: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-major-in-humanities-not-just-for-a-good-job--for-a-good-life/2013/08/08/83bc2734-fed1-11e2-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop
And it is philosophy in this sense – the search for what stays true and what changes by comparison – that I have studied to discover and written to help us remember.
As Plato made clear, all hope for humanity lies in the fact that every generation is born fresh, with all the higher (and lower) potentials that are all part of our true nature. There may seem little hope for change in those of us who are too well conditioned into the habits of our culture, but it’s in the education of our young that real change happens.
The good news is that what we tend to call human nature is just a bundle of bad habits – and habits can be broken! What’s more, we can refrain from teaching these to begin with. It seems the very least we can do - indeed, a moral imperative - to stop teaching our young the same bad habits that we were taught, and now find so difficult to change in ourselves!
So we owe it them young to be better guides than our own recent ancestors have been for us. It may be the primary challenge of our age to encourage our young to dream of what is still and always possible, since we cannot hit a target we don’t aim at. For this reason, we must “strive to bring back the dream of the earth…Democracy and true community…a light of hope for our children.” (Forest, 2007)