Plato vs. Aristotle and the Soul of Education

Plato vs. Aristotle and the Soul of Education

McCann and Fitzgibbons

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Einstein

You don’t hear much in education circles these days about inspiration. What we hear is about differentiated instruction, data driven instruction, vertical and horizontal alignment, ya day a da. Listen to the metaphors. They sound like math. There’s a reason for that.

When I ask people about their best teachers or best classes, what I hear most often is that the teacher they remember best had the ability to bring the material to them or communicate the ideas on their level, or that the teacher aspired them to see things from a point of view that they had never considered before. Not to borrow too much from religious imagery, but the experiences of the most profound and lasting impact are often described as “eye opening” or “challenging one’s world view.” There is an almost evangelical quality to a course or instructor who can do that.

One of my first instructors to bring such good things to my life was Kevin McCann. An Irishman in the most stereotypical ways, but even more, a teacher of poetry who made you feel like you knew who Seamus Heaney was up close and personal. When it came to writing, my memories include feeling both freed and at war simultaneously. I was a newbie to fundamentalism in the late 1970s and was exploring issues of my faith, and had chosen to write a research paper on the very topic for my Senior Seminar. It was a half year devoted to researching and writing a 10 page paper on any topic. While I had a particular agenda in mind for my paper- to save people’s souls- Mr. McCann carefully engaged me to move my thinking toward a more objective stance. The paper was certainly not perfect (grammatically, I was only barely readable), it demonstrated a student who had gone from one place intellectually to quite another. I can still remember my graduation day, introducing him to my mother. He said with a wink in his eye, “this is the smartest of all of them…” He was comparing me to four other siblings he’d known in his career. It was a compliment that would change how I saw myself.

The only other memorable teacher was a guy named Fitzgibbons. He was my drawing teacher. Mechanical drawing. He was an elvish looking little guy with a bushy brown beard. ‘Fitz’ was easy going and encouraged creativity from his drawing students, even while demanding that line weights be correct and that papers stay free from smudges and erasures. From my young days, I had mistakenly believed my uncle in Georgia was an architect because his house there looked like Mike Brady’s. Much to my surprise, I discovered that he was a professor of political science. Nonetheless, with this myth in place, I wanted to become an architect, and so I took Fitz’ Drawing I and went on to Architectural Drafting and Design the year after. Somewhere along the line, we all decided I was not going to be an architect, but I can still remember designing my house with a water ski slip its basement instead of a garage. I can still remember competing against other groups to create solar thermal units to heat water in the fields behind the shop.

By and large, the rest of my high school career was a blur. I remember getting a passing grade on my Trig Regents; I remember my physics teacher cooking hot dogs on a filament wire. I remember Avogadro’s number- 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd… I remember a great deal of time learning how to use the ‘Readers Guide to Periodical Indexes’. These beauties were the be all and end all to research. It was a very complicated system that took years to master. All totally useless today. I remember getting our super cool computers to draw a smiley face on a printer using xs and os.

When I teach these days, I hear kids saying the same things I said: why do we have to learn this stuff? I have to be honest, and say ‘because they said so’. Most of what you learn, I tell them, is completely pointless and due to be outmoded within five years. You are here to learn how to learn- not to learn anything of real value. Or, better, you are here to learn what you might want to learn something more about, and what you might want to avoid learning more about.

My time with the Irishman and the Scot taught me those two lessons. I learned from the Irishman that writing, reading, and the liberal arts were my strong suit. I learned from the Scot that I was far too careless to be a draftsman or an engineer. The other thing I learned from both men was how to learn. Both teachers engaged me by bringing their course material into my life. I was able to explore my faith in one and my water skiing fantasies in the other. My assumption is that these two also shared this ability to inspire other students.

Here’s the basic phrase I want to hear from a kid who finishes a course with me: “I’m not sure I know much more than I did before, but I sure did think a lot.” I want students to walk away from a course understanding that the field we’ve studied is so wide and so interconnected to so many other fields, and to their daily lives, that one cannot help engaging the subject moment to moment and never feeling like you’ve come to a conclusion- these are lofty and high minded goals indeed. Very difficult to quantify. Very difficult to create grade level benchmark assessments for. Quite a step from analyzing data response graphs.

Speaking of interconnectivity and the idea that we cannot come to conclusions, I have been reading Stanley Fish lately, and Fish is very concerned about the idea of cultural studies, fearing that his discipline (literary criticism) will be corrupted by other disciplines. He seems to favor keeping his p's and q's all in a row so that each discipline can maintain a sense of order and structure and procedure. This is because he has abandoned theory, in theory if not in practice. His book, The Problem with Principle, is a pragmatic attempt (through theory) to repair damage he and others have done to the discipline by allowing the taint of relativism in the door. His solution is to leave behind any claims to universal principles like freedom and reason. His only sacred cow left is the word "truth." He still claims to aim for this, but as a practicer of rhetoric, his only stable goal is truth. This was the battle Plato waged with the Sophists of his day, and it still goes on. These are the kinds of conversations that have and will go on forever, and they are the kinds of conversations I want students to be aware of. So let's get to Plato.

Plato and Aristotle

Two other teachers I need to bring up (since they are in my title) are Plato and Aristotle. Plato was Aristotle’s teacher. Socrates was Plato’s mentor and Aristotle went on to tutor Alexander the Great. Much of what I say about these two is gleaned from my memory or my impression of these two and I use them as two magnetic poles, each attracting a certain type of approach into their vastly different spheres. At times, I may mis-represent them or one could find passages to refute issues I raise about them. For my purposes, they are convenient poster children for two significantly different approaches to the philosophy of education. Other paradigms might be more effective, other “isms” might work better, but by and large, I see these two as offering teachers two ways to approach the nature of instruction and learning. As you will see, one might easily use Skinner vs. Rogers (if one were to use ed psych paradigms), or some other pair of thinkers as well as my choices. Be that as it may, I am not alone in arguing that throughout the history of philosophy after Plato, one is either a Platonist or an Aristotelean. I am the former.


Plato’s notion of learning is tied up with his teacher and his character, Socrates. In Socrates’ classroom, there was no large screen computer display, no smart board, no desks, and no tests for that matter. When Plato constructed his own academy years later, the sign to its entrance read “let none enter here not well schooled in geometry.” There was no one ‘on one aide’ there, and no one was given extended time. To be fair, everyone was given extended time because you came or went as you pleased.

The mode of instruction was dialectic. That’s it: talk. How were students evaluated? Talk. How did students learn? Talk. Through a process of give and take, Socrates “educed” from his students what they seemed to already know. The Greek word ‘educe’ means to draw forth, and it gives us our starting point about how one might approach the role of a teacher. One becomes, not the giver of data, but the helper who shows one how to find the well of knowledge. Socrates is later described as the great midwife for others’ ideas. One of my students was frankly grossed out about this image until I explained the etymology of the word “concept” and its relation to “conceive” and how our language has built into it this rich metaphor of ideas and babies being beautiful correlates. Hamlet wisely reminds Polonius, “Conception is a blessing, sir.. look to’t”

Of course, my students are often quite flustered by Plato’s silly notion of innate ideas, of the soul as an indestructible thing that comes back again and again, each time remembering what it may have known from the past. Such superstitious ideas are so passé in our modern (and Aristotelian) era. In his defense, I point out that there is much we still have to learn about the brain and about genetic imprinting and evolutionary biology. There may indeed be much more to our baby brains than the simple blank slates that empiricists like Locke have imagined for us.

Still, it is difficult to create a curriculum in this day and age with such mystical underpinnings. To argue that each of our students comes to us with all they really need to know buried deep in some cavern of their mind is tantamount to psychoses. But to argue its polar opposite is equally absurd. To argue that the mind is simply a repository for images and “facts” and “skills” that need to be “covered” or, better, installed on our hard drives, is equally loony. The mind is not a hard drive or a black board or a map or any thing else. It is something we still do not understand very

When I consider the minds of my students, I see them as characters on a journey. I step into the road and begin to ask them questions, or better yet, sit off on the side of the road with some refreshment in the shade, and when they stop by, I engage them in conversation. “Ever seen the movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?” I might ask, and before long… well…we’re cooking.

No real education occurs without a student being the one in the driver’s seat. Well, at least they have to be in the front of the car for Pete’s sake. Much of a typical student’s career is as passenger or observer, not as participant, and rarely as driver. While I may select the material to read in class and I’m the guy who takes attendance and turns in the grades, the last thing I want to do is come prepared with a learning objective. I want to pose some questions perhaps, but better yet, can I set things up so that the kids have the questions? And then, when I have no answers, they can work on some? Sounds like a pretty shaky plan that wouldn’t pass muster with the state ed department. But it works. It really can. It really can work.

So back to Plato. The real paradox of Plato is that as you read his dialogues, there’s this consistent image of an avuncular and lovable fat man sitting around making fun of the stuffed shirts of his day, pulling slave boys from their chores to teach them math, or quietly accepting his own inevitable execution with the firm peace of an ascetic monk. The paradox is that Plato is not Socrates. In fact, the Socrates we read about is Plato’s Socrates, not the real thing. The fellow who asks leading questions in Plato’s dialogues, and draws his fellow dialecticians into impossible contradictions, is highly ironic and not fully honest. See note below Plato does not begin with a proclamation and go on to prove it using his data. He begins with Socrates asking a question, and his pupils often answer as audience and Socrates bends the discussion around using various metaphors and analogies. His favorite game is to ask not for a virtue or a single definition of love, but for the over reaching common idea linking each individual exemplar. In his classes, facts are not to be memorized for standardized testing. Instead, the goal is what we today call moving from concrete operational to higher order thinking.

Notes
1] Education derives from the verb educe, which means "to draw forth from within." The original teaching method of Socrates of drawing from within has been largely displaced by professorial deference to received scholarly authority. Students are taught how to take exams but not how to think, write or find their own path. I took this from a blog.
2] The mind is the seat of perception of the things we see, hear, and feel. It is through the mind that we see the beauties of the earth and sky, or music, of art, in fact, of everything. That silent shuttle of thought working in and out through cell and nerve weaves into one harmonious whole the myriad moods of mind, and we call it life. Charles Fillmore Source: The Revealing Word
3] This notion of “working” is pretty loaded, and I will address this issue in more depth later. Suffice it to say that my definition of “works” here is equivalent to “I feel kids are getting pretty jazzed.” Or something equally kooky sounding.
4] Jasper Neel indicts Plato for his rhetorical treachery in Plato, Derrida, and Writing