In an article on blogs in the New York Review of Books (one of my fave old-school rags), Sarah Boxer says, just like Plato, bloggers “often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education.” She uses the opening of Plato’s Republic by way of example:
‘I went down yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions to the Goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration.’This set off waves of flashbacks to grad school (deep, dark secret: I studied philosophy in a past life), when we had long discussions of exactly what Plato’s theory of education might be and whether one person can “teach” another anything. But, yeah, that’s it—you’re responsible for your own learning. The trick is to awaken people’s curiosity about the contradictions and limitations in their ideas. Come to think of it, that’s not too far off from my ideas about teaching children.
Wait a second! Who is Ariston? What Goddess? What festival?
So blogging isn’t just masturbatory opinionating divorced from any reality check. We bloggers are Important—we're Socratic gadflies (is this blog going to get me killed?). Anyway, check out Boxer’s article on blogging. Appropriately, although the NYRB has posted the article online, it didn’t include any links. Love it.
2 comments:
Rock,
You didn't mention that Sarah Boxer's article is a review of more than a six-pack's worth of books about blogging. Books about blogging: what a wacky idea.
Anyway, she isn't really serious about the connection to Plato. That's clear from her comment about not being responsible for your education and her quote from Mark Liberman that, "like Plato. . . . The unspoken message is: Hey, I'm here talking with my buddies. Keep up with me or don't. It's up to you." Both really focus on style rather than content.
You, on the other hand, are serious about Plato. And, while I guess it's proper to say that the final understanding of a Platonic principle is a wholly personal experience, that doesn't mean teachers don't teach and doesn't mean they have no responsibility or sense of responsibility. The student in the cave doesn't turn away from the wall alone; the student is forcibly turned by someone else. You don't just awaken people's "curiosity" about the contradictions inherent in their unexamined convictions. You show them the untenability--including the moral untenability--of those self-contradictory convictions.
But you don't abandon them at that point, either. You can help them overcome those initial contradictions, if they're willing to engage themselves in the conversation. (Setting up, of course, later, better contradictions with their own subsequent resolutions through more sophisticated conversations. And so on.) The whole of Socrates' life shows his sense of responsibility to those whom he forced to see the contradictions in their opinions, and whom he accepted as correspondents, if not students, properly speaking.
It is not without danger, as you notice. Though Socrates' condemnation was less a result of what he did than what those who styled themselves his students did. And their fault was, at least in part, doing something like what he did, but doing it without his sense of responsibility for the effect of his "teaching" on his "students."
Keep on trying to turn people around, Rock. But take care to point them in the right direction when you do.
Marc
Thanks, Marc, for the excellent corrective. Certainly Socrates-as-portrayed-by-Plato had a great sense of responsibility for educating his fellow Athenians, or he would have escaped death by going into exile or shut up long before he was sentenced to death. I meant only that you can't think of education as pouring learning into another person.
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