Educational Systems articulated by Plato and Isocrates

Introduction

The education system established by Plato and Isocrates gained popularity among those who lived in Athens during the later part of Plato's life. However, there was intense competition between the two philosophers, which is known in the modern world as rivalry. As a result of the rivalry, Aristotle, who was the scholar of Plato, gave inappropriate opinions about Isocrates and established a school of rhetoric against Isocrates'. The rivalry between the education system between the two have since been existing.

Discussion

Isocrates

The political problems of Greece, always seen by Isocrates as moral problems, were confronted both in his essays and in his school. It was, no doubt, in the latter where he experienced the greatest success and achieved the highest acclaim. His school of rhetoric educated the leaders of Greece for more than fifty years and had a major impact on Western European education and culture for twenty-four centuries. Dobson suggests that the early stage of his school, until the mid 370s, attracted mostly Athenian students, while its greatest ascendancy was achieved during the next twenty years. Then, owing partly to Isocrates' acclaim and partly to Athenian prominence as economic and military leader of the Second Naval League, it attracted students from the entire Greek world. Measured by most standards, his school was a success (Poulakos, 112).

He claimed to accept payment only from non-Athenians, and he admitted only four to ten students at any one time. It has been estimated that he taught only about one hundred students during his career of more than sixty years. Nevertheless, the tuition payments and gifts that grateful former students bestowed on him made him one of the twelve hundred most affluent men in Athens. Moreover, over forty of his students became prominent in Greek life. They included teachers, historians, statesmen, generals, and kings. Students came to his school of rhetoric in their adolescence, after they had completed elementary schooling in writing, reading, numbers, grammar, physical education, and music, which included poetry. Typically, Isocrates' course required three or four years to complete (Poulakos, 201). This was much longer than his competitors' rhetorical schools, but less time than Plato's Academy. Rhetorical training and its competitor, philosophical training, were the higher education of the classical world. The competition between rhetoric and philosophy represented more than simply competing schools. It was a conflict about paideia, the cultural nurturing of the young. During the fourth century, rhetoric and philosophy were engaged in an intense cultural conflict for the soul of Greece.

Isocrates' major educational ideas and methods are contained in three orations, which are against the Sophists, written in 391 as an announcement of his new school, Antidosis, composed some forty years later, and his autobiographical work, Panathenaicus. Only the first portion of Against the Sophists has survived. In it Isocrates attacks his rival schools. Teachers of political discourse, both for the courts and the assembly, he notes, are just too simpleminded. They teach a few rules of argument and present their students with a number ...