“Listen Then,or, Rather,Answer”: Contemporary Challenges to Socratic Education

The popularity of Jacques Rancière in recent work in educational philosophy has rejuvenated discussion of the merits and weaknesses of Socratic education, both in Plato's dialogues and in invocations of Socrates in contemporary educational practice. In this essay Jordan Fullam explores the implications of this trend through comparing Rancière's educational thought to an analysis of the relationship between dialectic and stultification in Plato's Republic. This task clarifies what is useful in the recent wave of scholarship that brings Rancière's work to bear upon Socratic education, and what we might redeem in the practice of teaching that Plato assigns to the character of Socrates in the Republic. Fullam also draws on the educational literature on Socratic education to provide further context to explore the usefulness of both Rancière and Socrates for contemporary teaching.     

诗人何为?——论柏拉图诗学观中的矛盾与中和之道

柏拉图在<伊安>、<理想国>等篇章中审视了诗人及其诗歌创作现状,从他的道德主义原则出发对诗人进行了严厉批评,要把诗歌驱出城邦以正视听;同时他又认可诗歌通灵的能力和诗性语言的魔力,希望诗歌以某种方式介入哲学领域,为城邦建设发挥潜力.柏拉图诗学思想中的矛盾是他的政治理想和他的诗人天性的矛盾,艺术与真理合一的构想和实践又体现了柏拉图作为诗化哲学理想先驱的深刻性.     

Knowledge and Forms in Plato's Educational Philosophy

In this essay, Mason Marshall argues that Plato's views on Forms play a central role in his educational philosophy. In response to what certain commentators have recently written, Marshall contends that this interpretation not only is accurate but also is advantageous because of how it can help philosophy of education. He also addresses the view, proposed by one philosopher of education, that Plato believes that the most valuable sort of knowledge cannot be fully expressed in words and that the objects of this knowledge are something other than transcendent Forms. Preferable to that view, Marshall argues, is the idea that Plato wants knowledge of Forms which is nonrepresentational.     

Education for Epiphany: The Case of Plato's Lysis

While a great deal has been written on Plato's Lysis in philosophy and philology journals over the last thirty years, nothing has been published on Lysis in the major Anglo‐American philosophy of education journals during that time. Nevertheless, this dialogue deserves attention from educators. In this essay, Mark Jonas argues that Lysis can serve as a model for educators who want to move their students beyond mere aporia, but also do not want to dictate answers to students. Although the dialogue ends in Socrates's affirmation of aporia, his affirmation is actually meant to persuade his interlocutors to reflect on an epiphany they had previously experienced. In what follows, Jonas offers a close reading of relevant passages of Lysis, demonstrating the way that Socrates leads his interlocutors to an epiphany without forcing his answers upon them.     

浅析柏拉图眼中的诗人

柏拉图是西方哲学和文艺理论的奠基人之一,但是这位伟大的哲人对于当时被众人追捧的诗歌却持着一种非认可的态度,并且还在他的著述《理想国》中提出了著名的"哲学与诗歌之间一直存在古老的论战"的观点。本文将通过柏拉图的视角,浅析柏拉图对诗人的看法,所涉及的角度有:柏拉图的模仿说,诗的技艺,诗人们对荷马的追随,以及神和宗教对诗歌的影响等。     

神话元素与柏拉图的文论思维

柏拉图的文艺思想神秘而富有旺盛的生命力,与其秉持的神学观点不无关联,其思想体系中的浪漫色彩和执着于彼岸理想的内在精神,无不深深打上神话和原始宗教的烙印。运用神话论证,柏拉图文艺对话中的思想观念得到个性的张扬,带给了柏拉图学说千百年来无法言说的魅力与气质。神话论证也深化了人们对柏拉图文艺思想的理解。     

把苏格拉底的教诲带入当下:柏拉图对话的教育意蕴

当下现实的教育主要向学生传授知识与技能,以使其获得外在于生命的生存能力。我们需要以培育心灵和爱智精神的教育来纠偏。对柏拉图对话的教育意蕴的探寻正是为此而做的具体尝试。苏格拉底终其一生在日常生活中进行对话性教育实践,以培育人们的爱智精神;柏拉图书写对话回忆苏格拉底的教诲;柏拉图的对话体写作避免了口头谈话的时空限制和惯常的书面写作的僵化问题,生动地再现了苏格拉底的教育精神。柏拉图的对话期待真正的读者,怀着生命热情在阅读中进行爱智精神的自我培育,真正地把苏格拉底的教诲带入当下。     

Reflecting Reflective Practice

This paper demystifies reflective practice on teaching by focusing on the idea of reflection itself and how it has been conceived by two philosophers, Plato and Irigaray. It argues that reflective practice has become a standardized method of defining the teacher in teacher education and teacher accreditation systems. It explores how practices of reflection themselves can suggest ways out of dictated pathways of reflection in teaching. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's and Plato's ideas on reflection, the paper includes a critical overview of how reflective practice can contradict its own aims and become non‐reflective, shutting off possibilities for transformations and educational differences that it has set out to achieve. Keeping up the deconstructive mood, the paper draws on Irigaray's re‐reading of Plato's parable of the cave to argue that reflective teaching that merely reflects phallogocentric educational systems and that attempts to universally reproduce standardized forms of reflective practice can never be conducive to the diversification of educational spaces.

The paper seeks to re‐think Plato's idea of reflection as mere copying and takes up Irigaray's strategic mimesis to explore ways through which reflective practice can regain its critical edge and reactivate teachers' reflective voices. It argues for the repetition of the practice of reflection by drawing on a feminist critique that challenges phallogocentric reflective tendencies in education and for mimetic strategies that engender difference.     

The Inner (and Unavoidable?) Violence of Reason: Re‐reading Heidegger via Education

Since Plato, Western thought has framed knowing as a method within ‘some realm of what is’ and a predetermined ‘sphere of objects’. The roots and the consequences of this stance towards reason and truth were noted by Heidegger, who equates the history of Western thought with the history of metaphysics. Since Plato, truth has relied on definition, hierarchy and mastery. Discourse on the truth begins to be discourse on the limits of things and, thus, on who is able to set these limits and discourse. This dominant position erases its own traces, presents itself as unique and unavoidable, and excludes all other ways of thinking. This exclusion includes violence, and this violence is not merely a philosophical matter. It is written in the history of the West, which is a history that includes conquest, genocide and war. However, we can also identify in Heidegger ways to transcend this inner violence by returning to the originating stance towards truth, namely, truth as aletheia, or world disclosure. This article provides the groundwork to argue that Heidegger's thought, based on a call for existential responsibility, requires education to remake our existence.     

柏拉图《斐德若篇》中的灵魂观

柏拉图在《理想国》中主张哲学家作为智慧的化身应该统治整个城邦。但是他后来的《斐德若篇》中,他放弃了这种主张,转而认为,哲学家的最终目的只是对智慧的追求,而不是去做现实的统治者。因为他相信真正的哲学家的灵魂会陷入了一种神圣的迷狂之中,它使哲学家仅仅执着于纯粹的真善美,并由此获得一种纯粹的精神爱情。     

Narrative Reflection in the Philosophy of Teaching: Genealogies and Portraits

How has philosophical reflection contributed to the ways that we think about teaching? In this paper I explore two forms of narrative reflection on teaching—genealogies and portraits. Genealogies tell a story about the origins of teaching; portraits find expression in myths and other narrative forms. I explore two genealogies of teaching—one deriving from the sophist, Protagoras, in which teaching is viewed as a technical skill employing methods of instruction; the other, deriving from Plato, in which teaching is seen fundamentally in terms of a special relationship between teacher and pupil. The Platonic account of the origins of teaching that finds expression in the myth, recounted in the dialogue Phaedrus, gives rise to a tradition of pedagogic portraiture that views the teacher/pupil relationship as foundational and presents the teacher as a wounded healer. This paper explores the grounds of this image and suggests that a tradition of portraiture in which the teacher is represented as a wounded healer can be traced back from Plato to the myth of Chiron and forward to St Augustine, Rousseau, and Nietzsche.     

Seeing History: Malaika Favorite's Furious Flower Poetry Quilt Painting and Pan‐African Memory

Malaika Favorite's Furious Flower Poetry Quilt (2004) is an acrylic painting that depicts 24 portraits of leading poets of the African Diaspora. Commissioned by Dr Joanne Gabbin, English professor and director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, the painting is part of a larger programme of poetry education. The painting's interweaving of the portraits with fragments from the poets’ writing functions to create an interactive visual‐textual body of poets and poetry, a collection which has been taught at all levels of education from primary school to university. Its quilt structure pays homage to the historic role of women in preserving history and memory. The painting also serves to construct a pan‐African identity and collective memory about slavery, African American history and empowerment.     

Responding to the Message: providing a social context for children learning to write

Abstract In this classroom‐based research study, written expression was viewed as an interactive social process involving written communication between the teacher and the children. Children received increased opportunities to write on topics they chose themselves, and their teacher responded in writing to the content of their writing. The teacher did not provide corrective feedback for accuracy of spelling or grammar throughout the study. Written content feedback from the teacher was provided to each child according to an intra‐subject ABAB research design. Analysis of the teacher's written feedback identified her use of six specific categories of positive response to the themes, ideas and characters of each child's writing. Significant increases in both quantity and quality of writing occurred during the written content feedback phases. Spelling accuracy was maintained at a high level of accuracy throughout the study.     

What Does It Mean to Be an Educated Person?

Winner of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Student Essay Competition 2009 ¹ 1. The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Student Essay Competition takes place each year. The winner receives a prize and is offered free attendance at the subsequent Annual Conference of the Society, held at New College Oxford. For details see: http://www.philosophy‐of‐education.org/students/default.asp .
The competition question ‘What Does It Mean To Be An Educated Person?’ is associated with a powerful and influential line of thought in the philosophy of R. S. Peters. It is a question that needs always to be asked again. I respond by asking what it means, now, to be an educated person—that is, how the value of being an educated person is currently understood, and, further, how it might be understood differently. The starting point of this paper then is not exactly the question of how we should best conceive of education, or of the educated person, in terms, for example, of initiation or of moral development. Instead I am concerned with who the supposedly educated person is today, according to the particular discourses and practices to which we are subject. I begin, then, by outlining the notion of the entrepreneurial self from the perspective of governmentality, with particular reference to questions of economy and the way in which the economic imperative is present in current policy. I then reconsider the idea of the educated person with reference to notions of economy and visibility as these relate to ideas of education and the self in Plato's The Republic. Discussion of readings of The Republic and of other texts of Plato by Stanley Cavell and Michel Foucault indicates how prevailing constructions of knowledge, practice, and subjectivity might be resisted. The question of what it means to be an educated person is thereby released from a particular mode of accounting for the self.     

The Virtues of Unfulfilment: Rethinking Eros and Education in Plato's Symposium

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of eros in relation to a sense of lack in Plato's Symposium. It starts from a sketch of the idea of fulfilment that is often found in the contemporary culture, especially when it is connected to the sense of a good life. The term ‘fulfill’, consisting of ‘fill’ and ‘full’, implies a sense a lack and an action of filling. Filling the lack to the full is the image that is often entertained when a good life, or a good education, is considered. The paper examines the similar image contained in Plato's Symposium, where lack is assumed as the precondition for love. One of the aims for love is to fill the lack; that is, to obtain the object of love. Three speeches in the Symposium, given by Aristophanes, Socrates and Alcibiades, will be discussed in turn. In doing so, three issues, in particular, will be discussed: the sense of lack, the object of love, and the aim for love. I suggest that instead of a straightforward solution to the predicament of love, a better way of understanding Plato's account of love through the three speeches is by understanding it as a dilemma, an approach taken by Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum argues for Plato's hesitation in following Socrates’ program of the ascent of love, in which the ‘lack‐filling’ is guaranteed. The teacher's role is thus understood in two different ways. It is on the one hand, as the bridge between student and knowledge, and on the other, the revealer of the values of lack. The paper finally adopts a Lacanian idea of ontological lack to supplement Nussbaum's argument, taking up the often neglected values of lack in the Symposium, and its implication for education.     

Third graders' use of writing to facilitate learning of engineering concepts

Incorporating engineering instruction into the elementary curriculum is not without challenges. Traditionally, researchers investigated using engineering design to promote students learning science concepts. More recently, researchers have conducted qualitative investigations to measure students' learning of engineering concepts after engaging in engineering design. In this study, we extended work on elementary engineering instruction by implementing an integrated engineering and writing unit with 58 third-grade students. Using stratified random assignment based on pre-intervention engineering vocabulary assessment scores, we assigned students to treatment (n = 28) or comparison (n = 30). During a 10-day unit, all students participated in design challenges, emulated the practices of actual engineers, and used writing to support and document their learning, as they designed and authored their own five-page pop-up books. Students in the treatment condition participated in additional writing during 8 of the 10 unit lessons. During this time, they responded to journal prompts related to lesson objectives. At the same time, students in the comparison condition participated in small-group discussions during which they discussed journal prompts orally. We found that all students made statistically significant gains from pre- to posttest on an engineering vocabulary assessment; total words written, number of different engineering concepts used, and depth of understanding of engineering concepts in a written essay response; and number of different engineering concepts used in an oral interview response, regardless of their incoming writing skills and regardless of whether they participated in additional writing or small-group discussion of lesson objectives. This study is the first to quantitatively document the effectiveness of a combined elementary engineering and writing intervention for promoting students' learning of engineering concepts in multiple ways (rote recall, written representation, and oral representation). We argue that literacy, particularly writing, provides an effective and feasible method for incorporating engineering instruction into the elementary curriculum.     

Plato and the Police: Dogs,Guardians, and Why Accountability is the Wrong Answer

Attention to significant commonalities between the position of teachers and police officers, we suggest, illuminates problematic aspects of their position within a democracy. Demographically, both the teaching force and the police force are disproportionately white, yet the commonalities extend beyond race. We suspect too little attention has been paid to other social categorizations, namely social class and gender. Toward this end, we explore the significant commonalities between the position of teachers and police officers and suggest that aspects of their position within a democracy make accountability a problematic tactic for addressing systematic failures. In this article we turn to Plato's discussion of the guardians for his ideal Republic because Plato squarely faces a problem that still dogs us: How are those persons given the right to uphold order to be prevented from turning on the polis they are meant to protect? The answer we offer rests on a theorization of a middle position and on a democratically situated ethical response to the other.     

Platonic & Freirean Interpretations of W. E. B. Du Bois's, “Of The Coming of John”

In the current Neoliberal climate of educational reform, the enlightenment project in education is more susceptible than ever to the machinations of historical amnesia. The notion that education can be transformative in a positive sense represents a moral ideal that teachers in the foundations of education find increasingly difficult to integrate into their pedagogies. As an antidote to this cultural forgetting, the article makes the case that W. E. B. Du Bois's lone fictionalized chapter in The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Coming of John,” can be used in classrooms to reinvigorate students’ thinking not only about the enlightenment project in education in a general sense, but more specifically, about the paradoxical and tragic dimensions that accompany this project and tradition. I argue that Du Bois's bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, can be most fruitfully interpreted when read alongside Plato's “turning around of the soul” (periagoge) and Paulo Freire's concept conscientization. When these 3 enlightenment-oriented narratives are studied in concert, they have an enormous potential to help cultivate the moral, political, and aesthetic sensibilities of our students as they construct their vocational identity as teachers in relation to the enlightenment project in education.