The question of education never goes away. For better or worse, it is prioritised every election cycle as of key concern; at least at the level of rhetoric, which speaks to a significant part of its history, even if all concerned are entirely, ironically, ignorant of any such history; it is posited as the cure for all social ills and the ill of any socius; it is a matter of money – too much or too little; and money, it is supposed, guarantees the appearance of the object, and attaining the object is then the guarantee, it is supposed, of the best life in this best of all possible worlds. The claims to education can be multiplied in this manner — all these ‘questions of education’. ‘Questions’ is itself an ironic terminology, because the above ‘questions’ are not posited on the basis of an enquiry, but are effectively asserted knowledge; all clearly assume the knowledge of education. That is to say, education, what it is, is known. Yet, as we can see by the contradictory or maybe dialectical positing of education as filling or lacking, cure or poison, and so on, that it is exactly what education is that is lacking. This lack fuels the rhetoric, which fuels the work of instrumentalisation, which fuels the work of legitimacy, that accompanies every status quo.
At his trial Socrates was described as the singular figure in all Athens who did not educate. He corrupted the youth and undermined the ideological state apparatus. Plato built an entire ‘education’ system on this corruption, this corruption by truths as he almost puts it. He links education, thereby, not to the rhetoric of the politicians, the interests of the businessmen, or the knowledge of the poets, but to something ‘subtractive’ or corruptive of each and, as combined, the state. This Athenian state of education can, in Lacan’s terms, get along without truth very well. But can it? And if it ever did, why does the question of education return in every epoch, under every and any form of state – all the ones retailed in the Republic for example which, as forms, perverted or converted, reach down the centuries as manifest to this day. Plato, we might say, is or should be, our contemporary.
This course will contend and present four orienting contentions:
- that the Platonic corpus is oriented by one key Idea – education. Education is the core of the dialogues, around which it produces its form or its ‘object body’
- that this radical and subjective intervention into the dominant intellectual and pedagogical ethos of ‘all Hellas’ not only traces out an educational trajectory anathema to that ‘state’ ethos, but in doing so provides education with its concept.
- consequently, that the received image of Plato given to us in the last century or so occludes the radical, subjective core of Plato’s intervention and thus its history
- that this received image has had a significant role to play in the construction of what education ‘is’ today, this via philosophy itself and in terms of the institutions which still pretend to bear Plato’s name, the Academy.
By examining ‘education’ as presented in the dialogues – what it cannot be but is interminably represented as, and by juxtaposing these enquiries with some more immediate interventions – Bourdieu, Ranceire, Friere, et. al. – we will see that Plato is our contemporary, and that to think education other than in the terms it is consistently and instrumentally represented to us is our priority; the priority of philosophy.
The course will range across the dialogues of the Platonic corpus but most attention will be given to: Apology, Phaedo, Sophist, Cratylus, Republic and Laws. The Idea of education manifest in these dialogues is that education is a matter of truth. The course will explore this Idea of education: an Idea being always subtractive of knowledge.
A series of passages from the dialogues will orient each lecture:
Lesson 0: W 1. Overview of course, conceit and other corruptions unknown.
Lesson 1: W 2/3. Introduction: with regard to this question of an education by truths.
Lesson 2: W 4/5. In the dialogues: representation or known knowledge.
Lesson 3: W 6/7. In the dialogues: what is unknown in known knowledge and what ‘makes a hole in it’.
Lesson 4: W 8/9. In the dialogues: the obscure subject of education.
Lesson 5: W 10/11. In the dialogues: from what is no-where to be seen, to what is not impossible.
Lesson { }: W 12. What is to be Done?