Philosopher Plato sat in his cave,

With flick'ring shadows that would not behave

These false appiritions

Encompassed his vision

And were the reality most crave

With this prompt, I find my two classes intersecting in a beautiful way. Two weeks ago I had to write about my personal philosophy of education. As a graduate of progressive institutions, I had always received an education that focused explicitly on interdisciplinary connections, critical thinking and analytic reasoning. It wasn’t until I got much older that I realized that this was not a normal educational experience. So to comment directly to the discussion prompt: I feel that preparing a person to lead an examined life should be one of the primary educational objectives and that it is very feasible, particularly at a time in technological development where the need for people to have raw information memorized is growing less and less relevant. Of far greater importance is people’s ability to critically reason, draw connections and apply problem-solving and deductive reasoning to a variety of subjects.

These educational developments and directions owe themselves in some part to Plato’s ideas, though they thankfully recognize the relevance of art, poetry and metaphor as “pointing the soul upwards” as well. While Plato’s list of prescribed subjects was extremely limited, it is to be understood that he was proposing a pedagogical revolution and thus had a great deal to consider. Educational practice should function to constantly point the soul upward and allow everyone the opportunity to enrich themselves through learning about themselves and the world around them. Havelock focuses a great deal on explaining exactly how difficult Plato’s task was and how important the development of writing was to permitting that. Right now we face a similar period in educational evolution. With all this information available at our fingertips, “what” teachers should teach becomes significantly less important than “why” and “how” teachers should teach it. Were Plato alive to assess modern education, hopefully he would feel more amenable to the role of art, though he might still wonder why so much emphasis is placed on memorization when students should be taught analytic skills.