Conservative Historian

Teacher Teacher: Plato and the Modern Academy

October 01, 2022 Bel Aves
Conservative Historian
Teacher Teacher: Plato and the Modern Academy
Show Notes Transcript

We go back to the Platonic Academy and then up to modern times to see the K-12 takeover by the 1960s ideology now ruling the Universities.  

Teacher, Teacher

Plato and the Modern Academy

 

October 2022

 

Teacher, teacher, can you teach me?

Can you tell me all I need to know?

Teacher, teacher, can you reach me?

Or will I fall when you let me go?

 

Bryan Adams and James Douglas Vallance

 

Plato’s Academy has always fascinated me. The concept of a sort of school built on the foundation laid by Socrates began under Plato and featured Aristotle, who later tutored Alexander of Macedon. It is like a who’s who of ancient times linked to one place. Obviously, proto-educational establishments existed long before the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. But as a product of the western tradition, Plato’s academy is always prominently noted. 

 

In the introduction to a translation of Plato’s The Republic, Benjamin Jowett notes of Plato, “He was the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in him, more than any other ancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are contained.” 

 

The Academy was founded by Plato in 387 BCE in Athens. Aristotle studied there for twenty years before founding his own school, the Lyceum. The Academy persisted throughout the Hellenistic period as a skeptical school until coming to an end destroyed by the Roman dictator Sulla in 86 BCE.

 

Why the word Academy? The site acquired its name from the legendary hero Academos. And thus, certainly, on this podcast, we refer primarily but not exclusively to colleges and universities as the academy, but in a broader context, it could be education itself.  

 

The guy who brought the first end to the Academy was one of the most fascinating figures of the Late Republican Roman period, Lucius Cornelis Sulla. This Roman has the distinction shared by few other rulers in that he laid down power, though, in the tradition of the Roman Republic, this was not as rare as in a traditional monarchy.  

 

Though the academy was open to the public, the main participants were upper-class men And, at least during Plato’s time, did not charge fees for membership. It was not exactly a school in the sense of a clear distinction between teachers and students or even a formal curriculum. Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others. There is evidence of lectures given, most notably Plato’s lecture “On the Good,”; but probably the use of dialectic was more common. There was, however, a distinction between senior and junior members. Two women are known to have studied with Plato at the Academy, so the idea of collegiate co-education is apparently as old as the idea of a college itself. We know that subjects debated at the academy included philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and geometry. 

 

But the core concept of the Platonic academy, a knowledgeable person sharing information with a group of young, or younger, people, is something that a 3rd century BCE teacher could immediately recognize today. And the subject matter would also not have been that foreign, carrying on a tradition that has lasted millennia. Excepting for the current backlash against the classics we have seen lately which will talk about now. In a recent podcast, I took on the issue of presentism and will describe this later in this podcast, but first, we will go back in time to a period of big hair, parachute pants, and the Reagan administration. The Netflix series Stranger Things represents an update of movies ranging from the Gremlins to the Goonies, in which gangs of plucky teens would take on otherworldly challenges. It was also a time of teacher movies.  

 

In the 1980s, many teacher movies were premiered, building on traditions started by earlier works such as Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Blackboard Jungle. Like lawyer and doctor movies, these non-superhero, non-action, or fantasy genres have a baked-in dramatic presence, the saving, or opportunity granting, to young people.  

 

These 1980s films ran the gamut from the excellent Stand and Deliver, a movie about Jaime Escalante teaching calculus to barrio students, to The Principal. In the latter case, Jim Belushi drives his motorcycle up a stairwell to save a female teacher from being raped. The potential rapist was white. The leader of the bad students in The Principal was black, but the white rapist was part of his gang. In the end, Jim Belushi, after a violent fight with said gang leader student, literally kicks him out of the doors of the school onto the pavement. Thinking that if The Principal were made in the 2020s, the violent gang leader would not be black, considering the optics of a white, middle-aged man beating on an 18-year-old African American. The 1980s even featured Socrates though no Plato. And the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure was not really about Socrates but about many historical figures. We will feature this movie in a future podcast but suffice it to say our titular protagonists pronounced Socrates name as So Crates. 

 

If 1980s teacher movies had a spectrum with Stand and Deliver on the excellent end and The Principal on the lousy end, one would have to put Lean on Me somewhere in the middle. Like The Principal, Lean on Me veers into the cartoonish, but it was about a real person, Principal Joe Clark, deals with real issues and, for me, has the best Morgan Freeman performance of his long career. I love the Shawshank Redemption, but that led to Freeman being typecast as the wise sage who does voice overviews of the action and often supports (primarily white) protagonists. In Lean on Me, the man was acting with capital A.  

 

But before any of these, and towards The Principal side of the spectrum, there were Nick Nolte’s Teachers. It was a movie about a well-meaning but burned-out high school teacher who tries to maintain order against the backdrop of a pending lawsuit against his school district when it comes to light they gave a diploma to an illiterate student. I love the naivete notably missing in Lean on Me, a movie made about two years later. In 2022 they give out diplomas like mint candies to forestall the inevitable questions around why some schools perform, and others do not.  

 

A 2015 piece in the New York Times, written by the editorial board, notes, “Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. But, in reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to know what, if anything, children were learning from year to year.

 

Congress understood this fundamental point and kept the testing requirement when it reauthorized the No Child Left Behind Act — now called the Every Student Succeeds Act — last month. But lawmakers ducked the most critical problem: the fact that most states still have weak curriculums and graduation requirements that make high school diplomas useless and that leave graduates unprepared for college, the job market, or even meeting entry requirements for the Army.

 

The costs associated with this problem are demonstrated in a recent report by Motoko Rich in The Times, which focused on Berea High School in Greenville, S.C., where the graduation rate has risen to 80 percent, from under 65 percent just four years ago. But college entrance exams given to 11th graders last year showed that only one in 10 students was ready for college-level reading, and only about one in 14 was prepared for entry-level college math. Moreover, on a separate job skills test, only about half of students demonstrated the math proficiency needed to succeed at most jobs.”

 

As frequent listeners may remember, I was once a teacher and left the profession when after receiving the highest performance ratings from my principal, the students, and their parents, I was laid off because I had the least tenure on the staff. Several social studies colleagues were retained who would have been right at home in some of those movies as hollowed shells that were more interested in hiding in the teacher’s lounge than interacting with the kids. But they stayed, and I went.  

 

In the case of Teachers, the movie, several archetypes emerge, such as the cynical Judd Hirsh, the one who cannot control his class and is bullied by the students, and Nick Nolte’s character, who is burned out but wants to believe. Even Morgan Freeman shows up.   

 

One of the more interesting subplots features actor Richard Mulligan as an escaped mental patient who inadvertently takes over a history class. He believes he is several historical figures going as far as dressing up as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, George Armstrong Custer, and Benjamin Franklin. What is funny is that the students love the class, and he is easily the best educator in the film. I find it amusing that the movie Teachers says that only an insane person could be an effective history teacher. God knows what that says about someone who blogs and podcasts on history. 

 

But growing up with MTV, I remember more than the movie’s constant playing of the video. As the incredible band Bowling for Soup said way back in 2005, “I remember when there were videos on MTV.” Well, that was me, but what movie studios did was show the band playing the song interspersed with footage from the movie. In reality, it was like a 3-minute trailer slash commercial for the film. But it was MTV, it was the 1980s, and we watched it. It is still done today, as the Billie Eilish title song for No Time to Die attests. It still seems weird. 

You have Eilish doing a pretty good torch song, but then we cut to Daniel Craig jumping from a bridge or getting shot at. 

It destroys the mood of which the song is trying to build. I began by quoting from the Song Teacher Teacher, written by Bryan Adams and performed by the band 38 Special, which is a gun, a name that would be accosted today faster than Lady Antebellum by those with too little to do but a keen sense of umbrage and being offended but I wanted to quote a bit more. 

 

So the years go on and on, but nothing’s lost or won

 And what you learned is soon forgotten

 They take the best years of your life,

 Try to tell you wrong from right, 

 But you walk away with nothing,

Teacher, teacher, can you teach me?

 

 

Going back at least 2300 years to Plato’s Academy, the questions revolve around both methodology and curriculum. In this piece by Daniel Buck, called “The ’60s Radicals Have Come to K–12 Schools,” the author outlines how education is changing. “Henry Giroux, an influential professor of education, summarized the accomplishments of the 1960s student protests: Many colleges reduced the number of so-called breadth requirements; students won both the right to initiate new courses and a greater voice in educational governance, and they spurred the formation of a plethora of new programs in black, Latino, and women’s studies. In other words, the students hollowed out the commitment to a traditional body of knowledge worth knowing and replaced it with two things: student control and a focus on immutable characteristics. These two directives now drive K–12-education reform.

 

Regarding the focus on immutable characters, almost daily, another story circulates of high schoolers segregated by race under the guise of “affinity groups” or districts of students asked to dismantle “heteronormativity.” The National Council of Teachers of English argues that English teachers ought to “decenter” reading novels to instead focus on sexism and racism. And lest we think the sciences or mathematics are free of such ideological tinkering, Jefferson County Public Schools advanced an “anti-racist math” initiative this past summer. 

 

Underneath both trends is a philosophy that seeks to recast the role of schools: They are no longer to transmit the best that has been thought and said but instead foster political action and inculcate “correct” political opinions.

The “Port Huron Statement,” perhaps the most influential and famous statement of the 1960s student protests, makes clear that this, too, was the ultimate aim of the 1960s protests. The statement speaks derisively of universities “searching for truth” and instead envisions them as “the beginning point” of their new left agenda. Educational institutions are not to be locations of academic training but advocacy and radical social change. According to the authors of the statement, the central question scholars ought to ask is, “If we wanted to change society, how would we do it?”

 

Much of education, past and present, has included concepts of how to shape a society. But at the core of platonic education is to question, and an authentic liberal arts education is how to think, not what to think about things others wish you to think. 

Imagine the student who wishes to debate his progressive teacher about the divisiveness inherent in creating segregated curriculums. Imagine little Susie probing whether the use of pronouns belittles individuals by redefining them as one thing. Think about how much temerity it would require a student to aggressively argue that the 2nd amendment represents a possible answer to crime by arming well-meaning citizens, not just criminals. One can imagine where I stand on all these issues, but I am not banning any counterarguments. Let’s hear whether gun control is worthy and the allowance of abortions for rape or incest.  

But that is not the goal of the new education. Instead, the goal is indoctrination and recast society in the vision of those 1960s radicals who put down the protest signs, moved into the professor’s lounge, and created ideologies now seeping, unchallenged, into our schools and our society. 

Part of this movement is the removal of the classics from the curriculum. In a recent podcast, I noted the concept of presentism, wherein history is seen through the prism of our current moires and beliefs. Part of this trend is a tendency for history professors to focus on post-1500 C.E. time frames. So one of the victims of this is the classics. For this podcast, I am using two definitions. The first are those works of ancient times, particularly those of Greece and Rome.  

 

The second is a broader terminology for books such as Dante, Aquinas, Montesquieu, or Shakespeare. 

For the first, here is a piece from the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson in a 2021 piece called Classical Patricide. “Should the formal study of Greece and Rome die—or be killed off? Some classicists seem to think so. An April 2021 New York Times piece focused on the young Princeton classical scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta and his apparent advocacy of ending classics, at least as it now exists or as he envisions them. The subtitle of the hagiography reads, “Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal—even if that means destroying their discipline.”

 

The metaphor “pedestal” is revealing of the author’s general ignorance of how few Americans, on or off campuses, know anything about Greece and Rome. For a long time, classical antiquity has not been towering over anything. The idea that it still does reflects the self-importance of a few privileged Jacobin classicists who dream they are fighting on the barricades of the current American revolution. A better simile is functionaries rearranging the deck chairs on their sinking Titanic. Or perhaps envision Padilla’s Princeton Classics Department as the chosen parlor-suite class being paddled out on half-empty lifeboats away from the wreckage of their discipline, as thousands locked in steerage go down with their abandoned ship.

 

For the second, I thought this was an interesting take from the actual recipient of information and knowledge, a student. In her Why we should read classical literature Dongnia Xiao.

 

“The term “classical” is used for the literature of any language in a period notable for the excellent quality of its writers’ works. It is also a term used to note that something is pure, genuine, and worth remembering. While other literary efforts come and go, some literature, because of its high quality, gets preserved over time.

 

In the fall of 2016, my parents agreed to send me to a specialized academy in China for one year that focuses on reading, studying, and memorizing classical literature from all around the world, such as the Analects of Confucius, Sanskrit poetry, and European and American writers like Shakespeare, Spenser, Byron, Dickinson, and Frost. We also read nonfiction excerpts of significant writings by Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, and Martin Luther King, among others.

 

I delved into the works of great thinkers and writers. The literature we read during this year has influenced me a lot. For example, “Of Study” by Francis Bacon has changed the way I think about studying. Bacon’s observation that “studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability” made me think of studying in a new way, not as a burden or obligation, but as an activity that is meant to give joy and enhance our thinking, speaking, and writing abilities and add charm to our personality.

 

Most of the teachers at this school had graduated from top colleges and had great backgrounds. Many used to be professors but chose to teach at a school that focused on classical literature instead. I think it is because they knew how important classic literature is in our daily lives that they made this life choice.

Classic literature is important because it opens up a perspective to different worlds and historical perspectives. Readers understand places like America or Russia better after reading their literature. Books like “Gone With the Wind,” “Of Mice and Men,” “A Tale of Two Cities,” “War and Peace,” etc., weave a tale of history and friendship into the bleak times they depict. I also gain more knowledge when I read classical literature because many stories are based on history. Studying history suddenly becomes exciting when I look at the past through the vibrant characters in these stories. 

  

Of Plato, Jowett adds, “The sciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so many instruments of thought after ages, are based upon the analyses of Socrates and Plato. The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction between essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and conditions.” 

 

In other words, the person who began education as we understand it is no longer read or deemed relevant. This kind of thinking has been replaced, starting with the universities and now in K-12, with that of subjectivity, impressions, feelings, and emotion. And there is another aspect. Plato’s Republic can, at times, be a hard slog. 

 

Subjective, student-chosen works are, by nature, easier. It is why, when given a choice, many students aggregate to young adult novels. Not that I would discourage reading of any kind-significantly better than the crappy screens on which most teens spend an inordinate amount of time. But Y.A. is to bubble gum what the classics are to a healthy meal. Even our classic-loving student likes historical fiction better than the real thing. But as the rock band the Fray, notes, “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.” I would argue most of the time. But the new curriculum outlined by Buck is easier for the students and something which should never be discounted, easier for the teachers. 

 

I have been in the teacher’s lounge and observed dozens in earning my minor in education, and many can be lazy both by inclination and by structure. I have rarely seen actual lawyer act in court the way they do in movies. I wonder if being a surgeon is quite as dramatic as portrayed in E.R. or Grey’s Anatomy. But I know for a fact that many of the teachers portrayed in those 1980s movies are alarmingly spot on.  

 

One of the arguments against the classics is that they are simply too white and that a minority reader cannot identify with them. But the reason we read Plato, Bacon, Locke, and Shakespeare is not because they are white, but because our traditions ranging from the concept of a Republic or a Democracy to how we perceive the world to the concept of individual liberty, does not emanate from African, Indian or Chinese sources. This is not to say those works do not contain a value for the reader. Instead, they will provide as much insight into who we are as 21st Century Americans.  

 

As Davis Hanson notes, “The study of classical antiquity is a holistic and humane enterprise that transcends both race and gender—a fact forgotten by the self-interested who are either indifferent to the discipline or now eagerly promoting the end of something they have never really understood.”

 

And this gets us back to the big question of history. It is not just to not repeat it, though there is value. It is not just about garnering insights into our politics and society, but that is also important. One of the reasons we read history is to stimulate thinking, and the imagination, to expand our minds. But this requires hard work, passion, and a willing brain, something the best teachers have, something that Plato’s academy taught, and something the great teachers can instill, and the poor ones never will.