{"id":3059,"date":"2017-10-30T08:03:54","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T05:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aeneas.byzantinewalls.org\/?p=75"},"modified":"2020-09-15T00:28:51","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T21:28:51","slug":"the-second-trial-of-socrates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3059\/the-second-trial-of-socrates\/","title":{"rendered":"The second trial of Socrates"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Apology<\/em>, Socrates presents, in defense against his indictors, the reasons why he was considered by the Delphian Apollo to be the wisest man. While it may be logical to think that he was deemed so because he knew more than others, the reson of his wisdom lay precisely in the contrary statement. After examining several classes of professionals reputed skilled, Socrates realized that the defect that deprived them of wisdom was that they thought to be wise because of<\/em> their skills. This statement was the reason of the hatred against him, which later turned into judicial indictment. Thus, not only did consciousness of wisdom mean rather a lack of wisdom, but also wisdom was now deemed to reside elsewhere than in mere professional skills. <\/p>\n

It is Plato who later defined the meaning of education: <\/p>\n

At present, when we speak in terms of praises or blame about the bringing up of each person, we call one man educated and another uneducated, although the uneducated may be sometimes very well educated for the calling of a retail trader, or of a captain of a ship, and the like. For we are not speaking of education in this narrower sense, but of that other education in virtue from youth upwards, which makes a man eagerly pursue the ideal perfection of citizenship, and teaches him how rightly to rule and how to obey. This is the only education which, upon our views, deserves the name; that other sort of training, which aims at the acquisition of wealth or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence and justice, is mean and illiberal, and is not worthy to be called education at all.
\nLaws I: 643-4<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The important point in this passage is that Plato here differentiates between education and training. To him, education was of the utmost importance in the upbringing of the citizen within the phratry of the polis,<\/em> the city organized after the divine pattern which we ought to contemplate. He clearly explains that education, the one that deserves the name, aims first and foremost at the perfection of the soul. Because the soul is the only reality, it is her that we must polish and cultivate first of all. Education, in this sense, was to make the citizen of the polis as perfect as he ought to be in order to conduct the affairs of the city as justly and rightly as possible, so that it may ressemble as closly as possible the divine prototype, God. In the Republic, Plato develops an entire allegory of the human soul with the city: both achieve excellence only so far as they are patterned after the divine prototype. He who rules himself is also able to rule the city, because he conforms to the model of the supreme good. All of Plato’s ideas on education–what ought to be allowed or not, the manner in which it is to be taught, etc–are thus based upon this principle: its chief aim is the improvement of the soul, and whatever threatens to dirt it is to be discarded, so that it may as the result of this beautification attain to divine status, and its tangible result is the fraternity and perfection of the polis.<\/em><\/p>\n

If Plato is right, it is easy to understand in what way we, today, suffer from a deficit in education.
\nUntil modern times, few people reached the university level. It was not so much because fewer could afford it, although it certainly was a factor. Rather, this factor depended on another: it was because people learnt their trade and occupation not in a university class but gained experience and training by the side of a master. One became a mason, a carpenter, a glass-blower, not by taking classes at a university, but by working with a master who would teach the students his skills, and thus allowing him to gain first-hand experience. Universities and secondary education institutions, on the other hand, were the vector of transmission, up until the 20th century, of a certain culture, marked by a strong Classicism, which was to make the student into a citizen of his country. The German word ‘Gymnasium’ and the French ‘Lycee,’ both meaning high-school, reflect this ideal sought by the modern nation-state, that education, a Classical education, was to build the citizen to a certain perfection. <\/p>\n

This education, which still echoed Plato, though only to a certain extant, was associated primarily with the educated class, the aristocracy that was in power, a characteristic which would later result in the first failure of education: it is in this aristocracy and bourgeoisie’s blossom that was also created the ideology of nationalism and colonialism. To this elite, a perfected education was to include a strong component of Classical studies, including Greek and Latin; yet, if the ideal of perfection remained, its coexistence with those other characterizing elements (nationalism, colonialism, capitalism) would prove lethal. At times, through the educated elites who ruled over the colonies, and who were also associated by many with the capitalistic class, education would become the tool that differentiated at home this upper-middle class form the rest of the population, and, in the world, the one that would become the cultural model justifying<\/em> the colonial enterprise, setting Western European culture as the only criteria of culture (“la mission civilisatrice”). In spite of itself, then, this education, provided by higher education institutions, became not a way to conform one’s soul to the divine, but a political and cultural tool which would necessarily fall once the institutions it was seen to justify fell. When colonialism was discarded, when the frenetic capitalism of the 19th century became rejected, the elite who promoted these fell, and its education with it. <\/p>\n

As we said above, it was not necessary for many in the past to attend such schools, because these schools provided an intellectual education that was not available elsewhere; craftsmen and artisans, on the other hand, needed not attend school since no class provided courses to teach what they did: it was done under the roof of a master, or, with the industrial revolution, no skills were necessary at all. Theoretically, the idea of providing as many children as possible with a primary and, even better, secondary education, is a good idea. Yet, the problem is that this movement became intertwined with the failure of traditional education of the political and social elite. When the ideal of citizenship had clearly failed, schools lost much of their substance, and their curriculum was redirected towards more immediate needs, especially economic needs. Perhaps the mistake here was to ‘popularize’ schools in a way that only concerned itself with numbers: the more graduates come out of schools, the more successful things will be. And as economic needs required more and more flexibility, schools, and especially universities, lost most or all of the ideal of citizen perfection that had helped create them to become rather agents of the new economic system, providing it with skilled intellectual and manual workers. <\/p>\n

When one enters the university, the main focus is the career: one enrolls in a business program, in a science program, or psychology program, with a view to get a job and then climb the social ladder. this, is turn, breeds competition. We have often heard that schools and universities are places where the student “learns life,” meaning by this competition with one another. If one wants to work as a sales person, as a manucure specialist, as a business person, etc, one must<\/em> beforehand obtain a degree form a specialized institution, i.e. a university, where one would have, in the past, received direct, perhaps better, training with a working person. In this way, where schools and universities previously had offered education, they now provide specialized training rather than true education, as Plato remarked in the quote above. It is doubtful whether we may rightly be justified in having more graduates than ever before: it is brushing off the value of diplomas. <\/p>\n

With the business-like mentality that we have today, i.e. promotion of competition and with it the feeling of being better than another, innovation, etc–education has lost its inner meaning of cultivation of the soul. Because we take too much pride in our university education, or rather training, we are in effect wise men without wisdom, because we imagine that we know something, and that we can achieve greatness and (worldly) happiness with it. We are in fact putting Socrates on trial a second time. <\/p>\n

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In the Apology, Socrates presents, in defense against his indictors, the reasons why he was considered by the Delphian Apollo to be the wisest man. While it may be logical to think that he was deemed so because he knew more than others, the reson of his wisdom lay precisely in the contrary statement. After […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6604,46,6,6605],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-society-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}