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Back to EpisodesPlato the Educator | Episode CX
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Plato's Academy was not just a philosophic debating society. It was, in the words of the historian H.I Marrou, "a seminary that provided councillors and law-givers for republics and reigning sovereigns." The Academy was small, elite, and functioned like a fraternity whose members could take concerted political action.
But creating a secret society of philosopher-politicians was probably not Plato's original goal. He was born into a reactionary clique of the Athenian aristocracy which had attempted to destroy democracy and refound the city on Spartan political forms. But the defeat of his cousin Critias and the rest of the Thirty Tyrants destroyed this political movement and gave a permanent ascendancy to democracy in Athens. With no place left in Athens for his politics, the execution of Socrates, and the subsequent failure of Plato's own efforts to turn tyrants in other cities into philosophers, he settled for the philosophic education of the young as a form of "politics in exile."
In doing so, Plato became one of the "masters of the classical tradition" alongside Isocrates, in the sense that both figures laid out the forms, content, and priorities education in the West would take in antiquity thenceforth. Plato's educational vision is on the one hand quite conservative, preserving the musical and gymnastic education for the young which the "old Athenian education" had centered upon, but also revolutionary in ultimately envisioning a complete transformation of society in order to be fully instantiated.
In this episode of New Humanists, Jonathan and Ryan discuss H.I. Marrou's chapter on Plato in the study "A History of Education in Antiquity."
H.I. Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149
Plato's Republic: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780465094080
Plato's Laws: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780226671109
NH episode on Martin Luther's "To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany": https://www.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/13419426
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Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com