HISTORY OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

The History Of The Philosophy Of Education

What is the primary aim of education in Plato's Republic?

The specific parts into which Plato divides the soul would also have been controversial for an Athenian reader, although it has been extremely influential in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and, more generally, Western thought since Plato. He subordinates the source of pride and anger, which the Greeks called the thumos, to the rule of reason, treating it as a subordinate means rather than as an independent source of value as the competitive, touchy Athenians tended to see it. And he controversially denudes appetite, seen as only part of any capacity for evaluative discrimination, in order to argue that it must be wholly controlled by reason. Finally, while in the case of the city he had argued that political rule will benefit the subject, so he claims that the psychic rule of reason will benefit the whole person by taming his subject appetites and thumos, enabling him to identify himself with his human attributes rather than his lionlike thumos or beastlike appetites. The notion that citizens' happiness—in Greek, eudaimonia, which can be roughly understood as a blessed life of good fortune and flourishing—should be the aim of politics, and that this depends on individual self-rule where possible, to be supplemented or replaced by political rule where necessary, is a key contention in political theory (Ornstein, 1981,, 112).

The Republic is radical in arguing that they must be philosophers, and so refers to them as “philosopher kings.” Only philosophers, driven by the love of truth and learning, will be sufficiently indifferent to ordinary desires and appetites to ensure that they will not misuse their power for personal gain. Such a philosophic nature is a requirement for being a philosopher, but it must be allied with a range of physiological and temperamental good qualities, and then perfected by gaining knowledge. Within the just city being described, this will be done by a thorough process of education. Such education must begin at birth, or even before, with proper treatment of pregnant women, and develop through childhood games, stories, and songs that train both body and mind into the habit of being governed rationally and moderately. For example, children are to be educated not to express excessive emotion at funerals. Those youth deemed capable of continuing to a full philosophic education will engage in mathematical studies combined with military training; after the age of 30, they will be trained in philosophy and dialectic; and at 50, those surviving further intellectual and practical tests will be brought to see and comprehend the good in itself, which they will then use as a model for ordering themselves and the city as they alternate turns of ruling with one another (Ornstein, 1981,, 112).

Plato believed that the  "capacity" of understanding idea and goodness is already presenting in the soul, regardless of the visual in the sun, or the loss in the dark, the eyes have their own visual ability is ...