Seismic Shifts

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion…

(Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality p. 39

That we are in the midst of a tremendous upheaval in all aspects of human life, including education, is no secret at this point.  With all such seismic shifts education itself undergoes profound changes in nature and structure, and new treatises on education abound in such times.  Studying past upheavals and education’s innovative response to them is instructive.  One such shift occurred in ancient Greece.  What happened?

Northrop Frye states: “In the Athens of the fifth century BC, a momentous step in human consciousness occurred when the rituals associated with Dionysus developed into drama and the great evolution of what we now call literature out of mythology took a decisive turn.” (The Double Vision: 43)  Julian Jaynes, in his book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind, puts his finger on the mechanism for this step from mythology to literature in human knowledge.  First, he posits that: “The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory to a visual mind.” (Origins:269)   This shift began when the bicameral mind was mortally weakened by writing around 2500B.C.  This development evolved into the art of phonetic writing, which had profound effects on the encoding of human thought, seen mostly clearly—or at least studied most thoroughly--in the shift that occurred in Greece. 

That is, here on the cusp between classical Greek culture and Plato’s time an irreversible change takes place in language in the change from a predominantly oral culture to a written one.  All writing is the fixing of thought in space, but phonetic writing is also the translation of sound into sight as McLuhan most famously demonstrated.  This is another way of describing James' shift from an auditory to a visual mind.  This change in the encoding of knowledge changed thinking and consciousness, putting it on a new conceptual level.  In his germinal work titled Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock notes that “just as poetry itself, as long as it reigned supreme, constituted the chief obstacle to the achievement of effective prose, so there was a state of mind which we shall conveniently label the ‘poetic’ or ‘Homeric” or ‘oral’ state of mind, which constituted the chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its arrangement in sequence of cause and effect.  That is why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy and it is easy to see why he considered this enemy so formidable.” (Preface to Plato:46-47) 

            What is this momentous shift exactly?  In one sense, it begins a shift from memory to thought as the basis of education.  We hear Socrates in the Phaedrus complain that books will destroy the memories of students, which was the primary repository of knowledge in an illiterate, pre-Plato Greece.  This is also a shift from a practical and tactile grasp of things to a more abstract conception.  Havelock writes that in an oral culture before writing: “Kantian imperatives and mathematical relationships and analytic statements of any kind are inexpressible and also unthinkable.  Equally an epistemology which can choose between the logically (and therefore eternally) true and the logically (and eternally) false is also impossible.  This temporal conditioning is an aspect of that concreteness which attaches itself to all preserved Homeric discourse….Hence all ‘knowledge’ in an oral culture is temporally conditioned, which is another way of saying that in such a culture ‘knowledge’ in our sense cannot exist.” (Preface to Plato: 182)

With writing, especially phonetic writing, the development of abstract concepts through the manipulation of symbols to reveal laws of nature and thought itself can take place.  Thus not the poet, like Homer, but the philosopher becomes the most learned of the day.  Plato does not invent the idea of philosopher; rather, he attempts to identify the qualities of that kind of person.  Havelock believes that Plato “is trying for the first time in history to identify this group of general mental qualities, and seeking for a term which will label them satisfactorily under a single type.  We might almost say he is inventing the idea of the intellectual in society….In so doing, he, so to speak, confirmed and clinched the guesses of a previous generation which had been feeling its way toward the idea that you could think, and that thinking was a very special kind of psychic activity, very uncomfortable, but also very exciting, and one which required a very novel use of Greek.” (Preface to Plato:283-284)  

The first school for the systematic inculcation of knowledge was, perhaps, Plato’s Academy, although Pythagoras had set up a school about one hundred years earlier.  The curriculum which Pythagoras arranged for his pupils is instructive, as was its purpose.  Pythagoras’ curriculum led up to the hieros logos, i.e. the sacred teaching, the preparation for which the students received as mathematikoi, i.e. learners, or persons occupied with the mathemata, now known as mathematics, considered the "science of learning."  The preparation for this was, in turn, that which the disciples underwent as akousmatikoi, "hearers", after which preparation they were introduced to what was then current among the Greeks as  mousike paideia, “musical education", consisting of reading, writing, lessons from the poets, exercises in memorizing, and the technique of music. 

The highest grade of Plato’s educational system, outlined in his Republic, its pinnacle so to speak, was philosophy, which Plato calls dialectic.  Dialectic for Plato was no mere exercise in logical reasoning, as we know it, but signified the science of the Eternal as ground and prototype of the world of sense. The progress to dialectic is the work of our highest cognitive faculty,  the intuitive intellect.  Plato had a three-tiered basis for the sequence of his studies, namely: sense-perception, reflection, and intellectual insight.  The Platonic idea that we should advance gradually from sense-perception by way of intellectual argumentation to intellectual intuition is by no means antiquated, but is in fact the same kind of the curriculum for spiritual education today.  And, like Plato, while sense-perception is the first stage of learning, the eternal is the spiritual ground of all. 

This curriculum of Pythagoras and Plato evolved into the medieval academic curriculum composed of the trivium and quadrivium, what I have labeled the tool subjects of language and number.  The quadrivium consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These followed the preparatory work of the trivium made up of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In turn, the quadrivium was considered preparatory work for the serious study of philosophy (sometimes called the "liberal art par excellence") and theology. Together, the trivium and the quadrivium comprised the seven liberal arts (based on thinking skills), as opposed to the practical arts (such as medicine and architecture.  These "liberal arts" denoted those subjects of study that were considered essential for a free person to master in order to acquire those qualities that distinguished a free person from slaves - the latter of whom formed the greater number of the population in the classical world.

            As this one example shows, powerful new theories and technologies of learning always upset the applecart of established formal education, as do important innovations in learning theory and educational purpose.  Education is always changing, and we must push it forward for our children’s sake so that they may be properly educated—brought forth.  We cannot be afraid of innovation and change.  But we must possess the spirit of the pioneer, the discoverer, the trailblazer and the voyager.  Education needs a new Plato.