Education, Tradition, Argh

Reading Plato & Havelock was a reflective experience for me. I felt inspired to Google the Latin motto of Columbia University and found that Columbia's motto was "In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen", translated as "In Thy light shall we see light". Although this motto comes from the book of Psalms in the Judeo-Christian Bible, perhaps Plato's Allegory of the Cave is useful to think about as well. From Plato onwards we have seen this metaphor of education as light, as a beacon, etc. But for whom, and how do we educate? These questions were as urgent then as they are now. Not everyone then could be educated; people had to work. Someone had to bury the dead and bake bread and deal with a primitive sewer system. People had their places and class distinctions. They fought in the military and some learned how to be priests. They did a million things, with and without institutional or formal "education" as we might describe it. Mandatory education is a modern invention, and mandatory education for young people of even more recent origin.

Plato says that those in the light must not stay in the light. Yet- he insists in a Socratic idea of knowledge as the ultimate abstraction. The progression of cultivating philosopher-kings is such: they have to first learn about abstractions like arithmetic, and music, and then they will learn how to love knowledge, and then they can be socialized with other types of people in order to rule them, with love of knowledge and (to be extrapolated from this) some kind of commutative love for people. They can't learn poetry- because that would be the equivalent of us contemporary people learning in the classroom from telenovellas or other kinds of televised entertainment. If I continue with this analogy from a Platonic/Havelock perspective, I might argue that although there are history and science and other kinds of channels teaching us the ways of the world, we are ultimately not learning to think for ourselves if we engage in this medium or allow ourselves to be overwhelmed with the totalizing reality of these communicative instruments. This sounds familiar. We are not cognizant of what is virtue when we watch television or when we listen to Homeric epics, because when we do either one of those things, we are presented with a relativist portrait of virtue that we then imitate. (What is virtue, by the way?) Is that a good analogy? Hm. Are we trapped in cave-television where (true) knowledge evades us?

On the side of Butler Library the names of the illustrious dead Greek philosophers and poets are inscribed: HOMER< CICERO< ETC. (or maybe it is HOMER > CICERO >ARISTOTLE etc) As part of the Core Curriculum I had to read the works of these men, with the occasional woman and person of color added to our syllabus.

What are we preparing ourselves to do with education? Do academics stay in the light a little too long? Are we simply guilty of the same kind of oral-psychological mimesis as Homer when we read these "canons of Western literature/philosophy and thought"? Obviously I am overstating these issues; clearly, many of our legal, political and educational institutions have emerged from these principles and from many conflicting attempts to answer these questions. What about learning or education outside of the institution? Is there room in Plato's philosophy or Havelock's analysis of it for the autodidact? Why must learning be about virtue? Where do different systems of learning play a part in our cognitive and historical development? Isn't learning, for one thing, about self-discovery and possessing a greater appreciation for things like technological inventions or the human body or the rigor of Homeric poetry (and potentially trying to add to these worlds ourselves)? What of learning and practical applications of it, like helping sick people get better? Why do some of us continue, as Plato/Socrates did, to fetishize learning as something elite or conceive of it as something that requires an almost militaristic training? Learning and education: learning > education or learning < education. Please tell me.