Isocrates: Historiography, Methodology, and the Virtues of Educators (SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education) 3031009703, 9783031009709

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUC ATION KE Y THINKERS IN EDUCATION

James R. Muir

Isocrates Historiography, Methodology, and the Virtues of Educators 123

SpringerBriefs in Education

Key Thinkers in Education Series Editors Paul Gibbs, Middlesex University, London, UK Jayne Osgood, Middlesex University, London, UK Labby Ramrathan, School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

This briefs series publishes compact (50 to 125 pages) refereed monographs under the editorial supervision of the Advisory Editor, Professor Paul Gibbs, Middlesex University, London, UK; Jayne Osgood, Middlesex University, London, UK; and Labby Ramrathan, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. Each volume in the series provides a concise introduction to the life and work of a key thinker in education and allows readers to get acquainted with their major contributions to educational theory and/or practice in a fast and easy way. Both solicited and unsolicited manuscripts are considered for publication in the SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education series. Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Editor: Nick Melchior E-mail: [email protected]

More information about this subseries at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/10197

James R. Muir

Isocrates Historiography, Methodology, and the Virtues of Educators

James R. Muir Department of Philosophy The University of Winnipeg Winnipeg, MB, Canada

ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Education ISSN 2211-937X ISSN 2211-9388 (electronic) SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education ISBN 978-3-031-00970-9 ISBN 978-3-031-00971-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00971-6 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Once again, for Alison. Nulla dies sine linea1

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Beethoven’s motto (Beethoven’s Letters 1790–1826, Volume 2, Letter 459: To Wegler, Vienna, October 7, 1826), inspired by Polydorus Vergilius (1498) Proverbiorum libellus and originally from Pliny the Elder (77 A.D.) Naturalis Historia 35.84.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Prof. Paul Gibbs for his exceptionally thorough reading of an earlier draft of the entire manuscript, and for the helpful corrections and many insightful suggestions. I am also grateful to Nick Melchior, Prashanth Ravichandran and Vidyalakshmi Velmurugan at Springer for all their efficient work on this project. I am grateful to Taylor and Francis Group LLC (Books) US for permission to reuse, in revised form, material from my book _The Legacy of Isocrates and a Platonic Alternative_.

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Contents

1 The Political Philosophy of Isocrates: Paideia, Discourse, and Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Intention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Historiography in Educational Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Recent Isocrates Scholarship: Two Approaches to Hermeneutics and Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Isocrates and the History of Educational Ideas: Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Isocrates and Non-educationist Historiography: The Evidence of Isocrates’ Importance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography I: “Consensus” Replaced Historical Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography II: Defining History Replaced the Study of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography III: Hermeneutics and Isocrates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 The Result of the Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography: Hirst’s History of the Liberal Arts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 If We Ignore Everyone Else, Then Aristotle Must Have Been First . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 How to Remain in the Dark About the Myth of “The Dark Ages” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.8 When Renaissance Educational Thinkers Said “Isocrates,” They Must Have Meant “Aristotle” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.9 Return to Condorcet: Recognizing and Admitting Error is a Precondition of Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 1 5 7 11 13 14 20 24 29 32 34 36 41 45 47

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Contents

3 First Philosophy in Educational Thought: The Four Questions and Two Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Four Questions of Educational Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Question 1: What Is the Logical Structure of Education? . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Question 2: What Is the Nature of Education? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Questions 3 and 4: What Are the Normative Methods and Value of Education? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.1 Two Kinds of Political Doctrine: Empirical and Inductive Versus A Priori and Deductive . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Inductive-Empirical Versus Deductive-Rationalist Political Doctrines: The Problem of Individuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Abstract Agents, Abstract Reasoning and Coercion in Deductive-Rationalist Political Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 A Specific Example: From Kant’s Moderate Enlightenment to American Compulsory Liberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 Education and Academic Deductive-Rationalist Liberalism: Coercive Habituation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9 Isocrates’ Alternative Method in Political Doctrine: Experience, History, and Induction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9.1 Schematic 1: Inductive-Empirical Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9.2 Schematic 2: Formulating the Normative Axiom in IE Normative Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Against the Sophists: The First Virtues of the Educator and the Limits of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 What Educators Claim They Can Achieve Versus What Educators Actually Do Achieve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 From the Promise of Autonomous Virtue to the Demand for Submission to Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Authoritarian Factions and the Erosion of Citizenship in Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Self-knowledge of the Educators and What Education Can Actually Achieve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 The Heart of Eristic Argument: Knowing Words but not What the Words Refer to . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Human Nature and the Limits of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 The Teachers of Political Discourse: Speaking Power to Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8 Isocrates on the Good Educator: Self-knowledge and Moderation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.9 An Ending and a Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 59 60 62 63 66 67 69 72 78 81 83 85 86 91 94 97 99 104 108 113 118 126 128 129

Chapter 1

The Political Philosophy of Isocrates: Paideia, Discourse, and Justice

1.1 Introduction Knowledge of the traditions that have shaped us, for good or ill or some of both, is not a sufficient preparation for the kind of future that will face our children and our grandchildren in the twenty-first century --- not a sufficient preparation, but a necessary preparation. The rediscovery of tradition belongs to the design of the curriculum, and to the definition of one of the goals and content of general education, also in a nation that has --- if I may say so, traditionally --- been more hungry for its future than addicted to its past.1

1.2 Intention The intention of this short book is not to provide a comprehensive study of the whole of Isocrates’ thought, a long overdue task which will require many books to accomplish. At present works on Isocrates’ educational philosophy fall into two general categories. On the one hand are short, simple introductory accounts of some of his educational ideas, most of which are book chapters or parts of books.2 The value of these introductory accounts is limited, for three common reasons. First, they present an outline of Isocrates’ ideas but do not discuss the historical evidence and sophisticated arguments Isocrates provides for those ideas. Second, these accounts are often less concerned with Isocrates’ ideas and arguments than they are with his relation to better known—yet less influential—ancient Greek philosophical educational thought and practices, the sophists and the Socratic philosophers especially. Isocrates is not a sophist or sophistic educator,3 he explicitly explains that he is not a rhetorical educator, but neither is he a philosopher in the Socratic or Platonic sense

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Pelikan (1984), p. 20. e.g. Proussis (1965), Finley (1975), Benoit (1984), Kimball (1986), Kimball and Iler (2021). 3 See Isocrates, Against the Sophists. 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. R. Muir, Isocrates, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00971-6_1

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1 The Political Philosophy of Isocrates: Paideia, Discourse, and Justice

of that word,4 and so it becomes unclear just how he ought to be categorized and interpreted. What will be needed in the future is recognition that Isocrates does not fit into any of the conventional categories, and some understanding of the uniqueness of his educational philosophy and ideas. Third, these accounts are too often marred by the uncritical adoption of dated, usually Victorian English assumptions about what kind of educator Isocrates must be. These assumptions, in turn, acted as the basis of what was the only translation of his works available in English between 1928 and 2000, the three volumes of the Loeb collection.5 The result has been that interpretation of Isocrates, and especially of his educational thought, sometimes depends on translations which render him as saying what Victorian academics thought he should have said rather than what Isocrates’ Greek texts do say. For example, as others have argued and as I will reiterate, there is a Victorian version of Isocrates—both in the old Loeb translations and in some introductory interpretive works—which dogmatically repeats the view that Isocrates is a “rhetorical” educator, ignoring the fact that Isocrates never refers to himself as a rhetorician, denies that he is a rhetorical educator, and describes himself and his educational program in quite different terms. While it is certainly true that his historical influence was greatest among rhetorical educators, it is not true that he was himself a rhetorical educator.6 These works no longer provide an adequate introduction to the educational thought of Isocrates and must be replaced with much more extensive (re-) interpretations of his political and educational philosophy that begin from renewed study of his Greek texts. On the other hand, there are an increasing number of very sophisticated and book-length scholarly studies of specific aspects of Isocrates’ thought.7 None of them concentrate on Isocrates’ educational thought specifically, though all of them provide useful discussions of some specific part of it. These works provide a welcome departure from the preemptive Victorian assumptions of some of the introductory accounts of Isocrates’ educational ideas especially and will serve as a foundation of any recovery and reinterpretation of those ideas and (more importantly) the arguments for them. These studies, however, are too specialized and too concerned with specific aspects of Isocrates’ thought to serve as introductions that could revitalize both renewed interest in that thought, and recognition of its importance to educational debates today. What is needed—and has been needed for a very long time—is an articulation and critical examination of Isocrates’ educational ideas and arguments which is somewhere between the short, dated introductory accounts and the new, scholarly, and longer accounts. My intention in this book is to provide an account of some of Isocrates’ philosophical arguments and ideas concerning politics, education, 4

Plato offers praise of Isocrates’ philosophical potential in the Phaedrus, but also criticizes Isocrates in that work and the Gorgias. See Howland (1937). 5 This is the inadequate Norlin and van Hook translation, which will hopefully be widely replaced by the new Mirhady, Too, and Papillon translations (Isocrates 2000, 2004) or, even better, by a new generation of educationists competent in classical languages. 6 Muir (2018). 7 E.g. Mikkola (1954), Eucken (1983), Englisch (1994), Too (1995), Livingstone (2001), Haskins (2004), Noël (2010), Warah (2012), Collins (2015), Ribas (2019).

1.2 Intention

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normative methodology, and their relevance today, which is somewhere between the level of an introductory textbook and the specialised scholarly treatise. Specifically, it is my intention (1) to focus on Isocrates’ philosophical arguments about the nature and value of education, (2) to provide an unconventional interpretation which takes account of recent scholarly recovery and appreciation of Isocrates’ elaborate and allusive modes and methods of writing which cannot always be interpreted literally and, especially, of the ways in which his writings are sometimes deliberate imitations of Plato (the Apology specifically), and thereby to (3) fulfill my primary intention of showing that Isocrates’ ideas and arguments can contribute to a trans-historical understanding of education itself, including education and state schooling in the 21st Century. I want to show that Isocrates’ ideas are not antiquarian curiosities but philosophically well-argued ideas which are directly relevant to us, now. There is also a fourth, informal intention of my argument: if I may risk being idealistic, I strongly believe two propositions that are no longer widely—and certainly not confidently—believed: (1) that educational philosophy and its two millennia history as an autonomous discipline are of vital importance to intellectual, social, and political improvement (in that order), and (2) that educational philosophy ought to find its academic home primarily in Educational Studies, but that the subject-matter, modes, and standards of (especially historical) scholarship in Educational Studies will have to be dramatically improved, reformed, and brought up to date if that is to happen. Educational Studies must become an academic specialty concerned with acquiring knowledge of the history, nature, normative methods, and value of education, not (as it is now) a proxy branch of the civil service concerned with training government employees for government schools valued as means of conforming the young to the political goals of political activists in their various doctrinal congregations. For my purposes here, there are six main reasons to revive study of the political and educational thought of Isocrates, especially in contemporary Educational Studies, all of which will be discussed at various points throughout this book.8 First, his ideas about the nature and value of education, the relation between education and politics, and especially about normative methodology in educational thought, are sophisticated and well-argued and so merit renewed study in their own right. Second, no other educational philosopher has had a greater influence on the entire history of educational philosophy, ideas, policy, and practice, especially in the Western nations though also in North Africa and some of the Middle East.9 Regardless of what we think about the merits of Isocrates’ educational ideas, the historical fact of his pervasive influence on every part of educational philosophy, ideas, and practice, from 8

I use the generic terms “Educational Studies” and educationists to denote those academics working in college or university-level Schools of Education, Departments of Education, Institutes of Education, and teacher training faculties. These academics are distinct from classicists, philosophers, historians and others who also study the history of educational philosophy and ideas, but do not work in Educational Studies. The two groups have little interaction with one another, and the standards of Educational Studies are the poorer for it. 9 Hadas (1969: 129). Cf. Laistner (1957: 447), Muir (2005, 2018).

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1 The Political Philosophy of Isocrates: Paideia, Discourse, and Justice

classical antiquity to today’s schools and universities, necessitates that we understand just what his ideas were and what methodology and argumentation he uses to support them. Third, despite Isocrates’ well-established influence in the history of educational thought and practice, philosophers of education and historians of education working in Educational Studies ignore (or are unaware of) that influence until very recently and have produced no scholarly discussions of it over the past century or more. This ignorance of Isocrates and his legacy in the history of their own subject has had many deleterious consequences which direct us to the next reasons to study his educational thought. The fourth reason to study Isocrates is that it has been widely recognized and repeatedly acknowledged for decades that educationist histories of educational thought and practice are marred by a very large number of major omissions and errors; as guides to the history of educational philosophy, educationist accounts are of no value.10 A revival of Isocrates scholarship is a necessary part of the long overdue and much needed corrective of educationists’ accounts of the history of educational philosophy and ideas, and of the wholly inadequate historiography that produced them. The fifth reason is that one part of this recovery will be a renewed recognition of the power and dangers of Isocrates’ argument that education ought to be subordinate to politics, and specifically that the normative principles, goals, and criteria of the value of education ought to be deduced from political doctrine. The (largely habitual and unrecognized) use of Doctrinal Conditional Deduction as the primary normative method has become all but universal in contemporary educational philosophy and in the political activism that is effectively replacing it. Yet the conditionally deductive normative method inherited from Isocrates is never explicitly articulated and seems to be largely unrecognized.11 This is a vitally important problem because, as Isocrates was acutely aware, the danger of such a method is always that the (sometimes) well-intentioned idea of the political supply and control of education can quickly become the practical fact of the authoritarian control of educational institutions by whichever political faction happens to attain the most effective power.12 As I will argue, Isocrates’ arguments warn us of the ever-present danger of encroaching political and social coercion in education by advocates of all political doctrines and members of all political parties, and derivatively the inclination of educators to conform to them. This is a continuous feature of the history of education in the 20th and 21st Centuries, whether in the extreme cases of the (lest we forget) self-subordination of virtually the entire teaching profession and state schools to Soviet or Nazi or Fascist or Maoist political authority, or the routine subordination of educational institutions to the fluctuating agendas and ephemeral doctrines of competing academic factions in the service of political parties and activist agendas in contemporary democracies. There is something seriously wrong about the now common-place fact that each—and every—political party, when it gains enough power, seeks to modify the state schools so that the young people required to attend 10

Grafton and Jardine (1986), Muir (2005, 2018), Part 1; Mintz (2016), Muir (2021). See Chap. 1 below. 11 Muir (2018), pp. 28–29, Chap. 7. 12 Glenn (2011), Glenn and De Groof (2012), Berner (2016), Muir (2018), Chap. 7.

1.3 Historiography in Educational Studies

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them can be used as a means to impose the dominant party’s social and political goals. One means of such imposition is to ensure that both the curriculum and academic educational thought are cleansed of the other party’s ideas and, especially, of the evidence and arguments for those ideas as much as possible. All political parties do this—liberals are outraged when conservatives do it, conservatives are outraged when liberals do it—and in the end schools and other educational institutions become little more than a cog in the political machinery of party politics, fought over by political groups who care very little about education and even less about developing the capacity of the minds of the young for freedom of thought or the moral autonomy dependent on it. Renewed critical study of Isocrates’ educational philosophy, and especially of his subordination of educational institutions to political authority and his doctrinal normative method, can contribute to a long overdue and much needed diversification of normative methodology in educational philosophy.13 Finally, the sixth reason is that at a time when educational philosophy has a rapidly shrinking and increasingly precarious academic existence, and educationists are actively seeking new historiographical and methodological approaches to the philosophical study of education, there is much to be gained by recovering and reevaluating both the historical ideas and normative methods of Isocrates and the role they play in educational discourse and practice today. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. This outline of the book’s intentions raises questions about two subjects, historiography and hermeneutics, both of which are subjects of this book. My approach to these subjects provides the methodological foundations of the interpretations of Isocrates I develop, and so a few brief comments about each are necessary.

1.3 Historiography in Educational Studies The interpretation of Isocrates I develop is quite different from the few, introductory interpretations that have been offered by educationists, and one of the causes of that difference is to be found in historiography. There have been two quite distinct approaches to the study of Isocrates specifically, and the study of the history of educational philosophy and ideas generally over the past century: one in Educational Studies, and a diversity of very different approaches in classics, philosophy, history, communications, rhetoric, literary criticism, and other disciplines and divisions of the 13

The very low quality of argument about philosophical methodology in Educational Studies can be quickly discerned by comparing introductory accounts of methodology by philosophers, e.g., Cappelen et al., (2016) or D’Oro and Overgaard (2017), to vague and simplistic accounts by educationists, e.g., Ruitenberg (2009, 2010). Cappelen et al., D’Oro, and Overgaard provide detailed, specific, and argued accounts of philosophical methodology. Ruitenberg (2009, 2010) parrots vague “post-modern” clichés deduced and simplified from ephemeral doctrines which replaced method with jargon and deduction from ideology and “theory” (see Felsch 2021). It is a methodological solipsism distinctive of Educational Studies which has sustained a state of stable stagnation for decades but which cannot progress. Current trends suggest the discipline is unlikely to survive at all if nothing is improved (Muir 2018), p. 6.

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contemporary university. The difference was observed and evaluated some thirty-five years ago by two distinguished historians, who observed that The history of education was rarely taught or studied systematically outside faculties of education, and even within them it was pursued at too primitive a level to capture the interest of professional historians.14

Since then, the history of educational thought has become a thriving and growing field of scholarship, though almost entirely outside—and largely unnoticed by—Educational Studies.15 This is especially true of scholarship concerned with the educational ideas and influence of Isocrates. At the same time, however, what was called the “primitive” nature of historiography within Educational Studies has changed very little and continues to be a cause of widely held historical errors and omissions. If someone believes, as I do, that educational philosophy ought to find its primary academic home in Educational Studies rather than being dispersed and inadvertently fragmented as an addendum to other many other subjects and disciplines—as it increasingly is in departments of classics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, rhetoric, communications and more—then the primitive nature of educationist historiography must be recognized (and acknowledged), understood, and replaced. I use the case of Isocrates to illustrate this problem and its solution. The deficiencies of Educationist historiography is a large and multifaceted subject, well beyond the parameters of this book and its subject. It is necessary to briefly discuss two problems, however, because they have affected the way in which this book is written and consequently may affect the ways in which it is interpreted. As I will argue in Chap. 3, educationist historiography was undermined by two distinctive features of historical writing within the discipline: first, ignoring the primary texts and other primary historical evidence, and second, supporting historical assertions about the history of educational philosophy and ideas by appealing to the authority of a supposed consensus (usually of educationists) for which there was no evidence. As we shall see, there are many historical assertions about the history of educational philosophy which educationists have uncritically reiterated for decades as something “everyone knows”, and yet for which no historical evidence was ever produced and, indeed, which were widely known to be false in non-educationist historical scholarship which did take account of the historical evidence. These two features have combined to cause a long series of dogmatic claims made by educationists concerning the origins, historical duration, fundamental ideas, and philosophical merits of educational philosophy, which in turn helped to both undermine Isocrates scholarship and to privilege an eccentrically Victorian English interpretation of his thought that is still used as a standard—and a barrier—against which any new historical method or interpretations are judged. Educationist historiography grounded in appeals to the

14

Grafton and Jardine (1986), p. xi. Cf. Koerner (1965), Wilson and Cowell (1989), p. 52; Muir (1996), Richardson (1999a, 1999b), Too (2001), p. 14; Muir (2005, 2018), Mintz (2016). 15 A sign that change may be coming is the new, five-volume A History of Western Philosophy of Education, edited by M. J. Laverty and D. T. Hansen, published by Bloomsbury.

1.4 Recent Isocrates Scholarship: Two Approaches …

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authority of a “consensus” must be replaced by a historiography grounded in historical evidence obtained from study of the primary historical documents interpreted in their original languages.16

1.4 Recent Isocrates Scholarship: Two Approaches to Hermeneutics and Historiography In the case of my approach to Isocrates, there have been two intersecting divisions within Isocrates scholarship over the past century: (1) the division between English vs. Continental (especially French and German) scholarship and (2) the even larger division between departments of Educational Studies vs. departments of philosophy, classics, history of ideas, rhetoric, communications, and literature. Isocrates’ educational philosophy and ideas, and their pervasive influence throughout the history of education, were almost entirely unrecognized in Educational Studies between c1900 and c2000, and certainly never discussed at any length in books or journals. (Even Kimball’s indispensable Orators and Philosophers devotes only four pages to Isocrates’ ideas, and none to Isocrates’ arguments for those ideas.) Yet during that same century, Isocrates’ ideas and their importance in the history of educational thought were widely discussed by philosophers, classicists, historians, literary scholars and others, in England and especially in Germany and France. Over the past few decades (c.1980-present), there has been a large increase in Isocrates scholarship (especially in English), once again entirely outside Educational Studies. This increase in Isocrates scholarship has brought about (1) new methods of interpreting Isocrates and consequently (2) new interpretations and (3) a more generous evaluation of Isocrates’ philosophy and educational thought. Unfortunately, however, interpretations of Isocrates (and other historical figures) within Educational Studies have not taken account of the “newer” scholarship, and consequently still consists largely of reiterations of interpretations of his educational thought that have not changed since the late 1850s and were dubious even then. Approaches to Interpretation I: Beyond Literalism My book develops the results of this new scholarship (in English, but even more in German and French) and so deliberately provides an interpretation of Isocrates quite different from that which has prevailed in Anglo-American Educational Studies since the late 1800s. The difference has two parts: (1) renewed attention to the sophisticated literary methods by which Isocrates is interpreted and consequently (2) a fresh interpretation of Isocrates’ ideas and arguments offered over the past several years (e.g., Papillion, Ober, Walker, Collins, Too). It is this later set of recent scholarly and academic works, which have been replacing the older, conventional interpretive methods (of Jebb, Dobson, Barker, Proussis, perhaps Kimball), and emphasizing Isocrates’ sophisticated literary imitations of the literary devices and argumentative 16

See the detailed account I provide in Chap. 2.

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techniques of Platonic works, that are the starting point of my own interpretations. Understanding Isocrates’ unstated literary and argumentative devices and strategies is necessary to understanding his arguments and conclusions. There are three modes of argumentation which Isocrates uses but does not directly state, which I examine in turn: dialogue with Plato, induction from historical evidence to tentative and testable general conclusions, and self-referential intertextual structure. First, it is now well understood that Plato and Isocrates are in continuous dialogue with one another: Plato’s Menexenus is a reply to Isocrates’ Panegyricus, Isocrates’ Antidosis explicitly reworks portions of Plato’s Apology, and Plato and Isocrates both use and manipulate history in the same ways for didactic purposes.17 One of the great untold stories of the history of educational thought is the hidden dialogue between the great ancient educational thinkers who called themselves philosophers, Plato and Isocrates. Isocrates’ use of these complicated and subtle literary devices and dialogue are never directly acknowledged, and inferring arguments from them has served as one important basis of both my interpretive methods and my interpretations. Second, some of Isocrates’ most important arguments are not what he states directly, but what he leaves unstated to be logically inferred by the reader, usually by induction or patterns of intertextual self-reference. One clear example of his use of the method of induction is his argument to Phillip that … it is not impossible for you to bring these many cities together. I think I can make you understand from many examples that you will do this easily. (To Phillip 57)

Isocrates goes on to provide others examples of the means to attaining political unification from the past. Although he does not state it directly, his argumentative method is clearly to reason by induction from many historical examples to the tentative, practical conclusion that diverse cities can be unified in common action for a common purpose. The fact that Isocrates does not use the phrase “inductive method” or explicitly say that he is inducting general principles from historical cases does not mean that he was not doing so, and it especially does not mean that he was not deliberately doing so.18 In other words, what Isocrates is teaching is primarily use of the unstated inductive method which can be inferred from the structure of his argument, in which one begins with observation of many historical cases and then by induction infers a (tentative) general claim.19 Teaching this method is not stated as directly as teaching the importance of political unity, but is more important because it is the means to understanding and attempting to attain political unity, and so in fact the primary subject. Third, as Too argued with characteristic clarity, Isocrates’s texts cannot be interpreted only with reference to what is said directly and explicitly. On the contrary, By means of a series of cross-references, which produce a sense of chronology, repetition, contrast and antilogy, Isocrates suggests why we should regard his political discourse as a 17

Muller (1991), Momigliano (1971), Isocrates (2000), p. 202; Harte and Lane (2013), pp. 33, 119. Similarly, the fact that Socrates and Plato do not use the phrase “Socratic method” does not mean that there is no such method or that Socrates and Plato did not know that they using such a method. 19 Dobson p. 147, To Phillip 57–67 illustrates this mode of induction. 18

1.4 Recent Isocrates Scholarship: Two Approaches …

9

body of texts that obliges its reader to perceive it as such. Generic coherence is affirmed less by coherence of the text’s “speaking” voice than by patterns of thought and argument, even those, as in the case of antilogy, which seem at first to indicate discontinuity and inconsistency.20

What Isocrates says directly is rarely all that he means, and often not even primarily what he is seeking to communicate.21 It is for this reason that one cannot fault interpretations of Isocrates simply by pointing out that the interpretation cannot be supported by a direct quote from Isocrates’ text which says the same thing; if that were the case, there would hardly be any reason for interpretative scholarship at all. More fundamentally, it is not possible to provide a direct quote for a claim that Isocrates presents indirectly, by implication or allusion or inductive inference from what he says rather than simply what he says. Once Isocrates’ sophisticated but unstated dialogue with Plato and elaborate but unstated argumentative and intertextual structures are recognized and understood, it is clear that interpretation dependent on a rather literalist hermeneutic limited to what he seems to directly assert and explicitly claim is inadequate. It is for this reason that I have chosen to make my interpretive arguments in the form of a commentary on one of the two texts in which Isocrates most directly articulates his educational ideas, Against the Sophists,22 emphasizing especially (though not only) what can be inferred from his literary forms, his uses of induction from historical examples, and his partly unstated comparisons between himself and other educators in which he emphasizes his uniqueness as an educational philosopher and educator. My interpretations take account of some of Isocrates’ explicit arguments and claims, but are also concerned with what he does not explicitly say but rather demands that his readers discover and articulate from his allusive and elusive argumentative structures. Approaches to Interpretation II: from Antiquarianism to Trans-Historical Arguments The interpretations of Isocrates offered in this book differ from the conventional interpretations in two ways. First, Isocrates has been almost exclusively interpreted in relation to educational ideas and debates of classical antiquity. This approach begins by classifying Isocrates in the conventional category of “rhetorician”, and then interpreting him on the assumption that he does indeed fit into that category and, therefore, that he ought to be interpreted in contrast with other categories, Socratic philosopher and sophist especially. This approach to Isocrates may (or may not) have its uses, but it is certainly incomplete and sometimes misleading. Isocrates’ philosophical arguments about the nature, conduct, and value of education ought to be interpreted in their own terms. Similarly, Isocrates does not think of himself as an educational writer limited to his time and place, but as an educational thinker concerned with the trans-historical nature of education. If we approach our study of Isocrates dogmatically assuming 20

Too (1995), p. 73. [Anon.] (2018). 22 The same interpretive method is used by Bloom (1955), Livingstone (2001), and Too (2008). 21

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that his ideas are relative to ancient Athens, or relative to the context of debates between sophistic and Socratic educational thinkers, then we risk reducing Isocrates to a piece of antique statuary, beautiful perhaps but unable to speak to us. The claim I am making is not that all of Isocrates’ educational ideas are universal. We need only observe his neglect of the education of women to see that in some ways he is very much a man of his time and place. It ought to be noted, however, that his conventional opinion about who ought to be educated does not necessarily undermine his argument about what education is, or what normative method ought to be used.23 The fact that Isocrates’ ideas about the education of women are relative to his time and place, for example, does not necessitate that his ideas about the dependence of education on political doctrine, or about the dangers of coercive power in education, or about the nature and role of rhetoric in public life are also relative to his time and place. He is not only a man of his time and place, and a fair-minded interpretation ought to take this into account. Some of his arguments are concerned with what he clearly recognized to be historically and politically relative about educational ideas and practices, but he is also concerned with what is universal about those ideas and practices. If we limit our interpretations of Isocrates to a merely antiquarian interest in his relation to the sophists and the Socratics, then we risk making Isocrates seem to be irrelevant to contemporary education by excluding the ideas and arguments that can illuminate educational questions we face today. This is not a merely hypothetical concern, but supported by historical evidence.24 It is for this reason that my interpretations of Isocrates’ texts will often turn from his arguments and claims to educational debates of today. These are not digressions away from Isocrates, but examples and illustrations of the ways in which his methods, ideas and arguments are indeed directly applicable to educational philosophy in our own time. As such, they are offered as evidence for the claim that, sometimes, Isocrates really did succeed in transcending the limitations of his own time and place and, perhaps, discovered something trans-historically true about the very nature of education. The conventional view of Isocrates is incomplete without understanding that the influence of Isocrates’ educational ideas and arguments are not limited to classical antiquity; indeed, as I will reiterate in Chap. 2, Isocrates’ educational ideas and methods of argumentation are among the most influential throughout the history of educational thought and practice, from classical antiquity to the state schools of today. Understanding Isocrates is a necessary part of understanding the history of educational thought and the nature of education in our homes, schools, colleges, and universities today. Such an understanding is also a necessary part of reversing the decline of educationist historiography, and of replacing the study of state schooling as little more than a governmental institution subordinated to the power of competing political authorities of all parties with renewed study of education itself as an autonomous discipline and human activity.

23 24

Goodrich (2012). Muir (2018).

References

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References [Anon.] (2018). Introduction. Trends in Classics, 10(1), 1–10. Benoit, W.L. (1984). Isocrates on rhetorical education. Communication Education, 33(2), 109–119. Berner, A. R. (2016). Pluralism and American public education: No one way to school. Palgrave Macmillan. Bloom, A.D. (1955) The political philosophy of Isocrates. Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Thesis Number 2852, University of Chicago. Cappelen, H., Szabó Gendler, T., & John Hawthorne, J. (Eds.). (2016). The Oxford handbook of philosophical methodology. Oxford University Press. Collins, J. H., II. (2015). Exhortations to philosophy: The protreptics of Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle. Oxford University Press. D’Oro, G., Overgaard, S. (Eds.). (2017). The Cambridge companion to philosophical methodology. Cambridge University Press. Englisch, B. (1994). Die Artes liberales im frühen Mittelalter (5.–9. Jahrhundert). Das Quadrivium und der Komputus als Indikatoren für Kontinuität und Erneuerung der exakten Wissenschaften zwischen Antike und Mittelalter, Stuttgart: Steiner. Eucken, C. (1983). Isokrates: Seine Positionen in der Auseinandersetzung mit den zeitgenössischen Philosophen. Walter De Gruyter. Felsch, P. (2021). The summer of theory: History of a rebellion, 1960–1990. (transl. Tony Crawford). John Wiley & Sons. Finley, M. I. (1975).The heritage of Isocrates. In The use and abuse of history. Chatto and Windus. Glenn, C., De Groof, J. (2012). Balancing freedom, autonomy, and accountability in education (Vol. 4). Wolf Legal Publishers. Glenn, C. (2011). Contrasting models of state and school: A comparative historical study of parental choice and state control. Continuum. Goodrich, J. (2012). Returning to the Lady Lumley’s schoolroom: Euripides, Isocrates, and the Paradox of women’s education. Renaissance and Reformation/renaissance Et Réforme, 35(4), 97–116. Grafton, A., & Jardine, L. (1986). From humanism to the humanities: Education and the liberal arts in the 15th and 16th century Europe. Harvard University Press. Hadas, M. (1969). The living tradition. Meridian Books. Harte, V., & Lane, M. (eds.) (2013) Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. Haskins, E. V. (2004). Logos and power in Isocrates and Aristotle. University of South Carolina Press. Howland, R. L. (1937). The attack on Isocrates in the phaedrus. Classical Quarterly, 31(3), 151–159. Isocrates (2000). Isocrates I (trans. David Mirhady, Yun Lee Too) Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Isocrates (2004). Isocrates II. (trans. Terry L. Papillon) Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Kimball, B., Iler, S.M. (2021). Isocrates: The founding and tradition of liberal education. In A. Mintz (Ed.), A history of western education in antiquity. Bloomsbury. Kimball, B. (1986). Orators and philosophers: A history of the idea of liberal education. Teacher’s College Press. Koerner, J.D. (1965 [1963]). The miseducation of American teachers. Penguin Books. Laistner, M.L.W. (1957) Thought and letters in Western Europe A.D. 500 to 900. Methuen and Co. Livingstone, N. (2001). A commentary on Isocrates’ Busiris. Brill. Mikkola, E. (1954). Isokrates: Seine Anschauungen im Lichte seiner Schriften. Annales Academiae Scientarum Fennicae, Serries B, Tomus 89. Helsinki: Finnische Literaturgesellschaft. Mintz, A.I. (2016). The use and abuse of the history of educational philosophy (pp. 483–492) In N. Levinson (Ed.), Philosophy of education yearbook 2016. https://ojs.education.illinois.edu/index. php/pes/article/view/5109/1603

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Muir, J.R. (2021). Roman educational philosophy: The legacy of cicero. In A. Mintz (Ed.), A history of western philosophy of education in antiquity. Bloomsbury. Muir, J. R. (1996). The strange case of Mr. Bloom. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 30(2), 197–214. Muir, J. R. (2005). Is our history of educational thought mostly wrong? Theory and Research in Education, 3(2), 165–195. Muir, J. R. (2018). The legacy of Isocrates and a Socratic alternative: Political philosophy and the value of education. Routledge. Muller, C. W. (1991). Platon und der ‘Panegyrikos’des Isokrates: Uberlegugen zum platonischen ‘Menexenus.’ Philologus, 135, 140–156. Noël, M.-P. (2010). Rhétorique ou philosophie? La structure du Contre les Sophistes et la polémique d’Isocrate contre Gorgias. In L. Brisson & P. Chiron (Eds.), Rhetorica philosophans, Mélanges offerts à Michel Patillon (pp. 49–65). Vrin. Pelikan, J. (1984). The Vindication of Tradition. Yale University Press. Proussis, C.M. (1965). The orator: Isocrates. In P. Nash, A.M. Kazamias, H.J. Perkinson (Eds.), The educated man: Studies in the history of educational thought. John Wiley and Sons. Ribas, M.-N. (2019). La Querelle de l’expérience, Aristote, Platon, Isocrate. Classiques Garnier. Richardson, W. (1999a). Historians and educationists: The history of education as a field of study in post-war England, part 1: 1945–72. History of Education, 26(1), 1–30. Richardson, W. (1999b). Historians and educationists: The history of education as a field of study in post-war England, part 2: 1972–96. History of Education, 28(2), 109–141. Ruitenberg, C. (Ed.). (2009). Special issue: What do philosophers of education do? (and how do they do it?). Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43(3), i–ii, 315–469. Ruitenberg, C. (Ed.). (2010). What do philosophers of education do? (and how do they do it?). Wiley-Blackwell. Too, Y. L. (1995). The rhetoric of identity: Text, power, pedagogy. University of Cambridge Press. Too, Y. L. (2001). "Introduction: Writing the History of Ancient Education", in Too, Y. L. (ed.) (2001). Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Boston: Brill. Too, Y. L. (2008). A commentary on Isocrates’ Antidosis. Oxford University Press. Warah, T. (2012). The theory and practice of life: Isocrates and the Philosophers. Harvard University Press. Wilson, J., & Cowell, B. (1989). Taking education seriously. Althouse Press.

Chapter 2

Isocrates and the History of Educational Ideas: Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography

Les opérations de l’entendement qui nous conduisent à l’erreur ou qui nous y retiennent, depuis le paralogisme subtil, qui peut surprendre l’homme le plus éclairé, jusqu’aux rêves de la démence, n’appartiennent pas moins que la méthode de raisonner juste ou celle de découvrir la vérité, à la théorie du développement de nos facultés individuelles : et, par la même raison, la manière dont les erreurs générales s’introduisent parmi les peuples, s’y propagent, s’y transmettent, s’y perpétuent, fait partie du tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain. Nicolas de Condorcet1

One of the unifying themes of Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain is his insistence that intellectual and political progress requires the discovery and correction of fundamental errors just as much as it requires the discovery of truth. Isocrates is an especially timely illustration of the necessity of correcting errors as a condition of intellectual progress, for two reasons. First, Isocrates argues that progress in educational thought requires recognizing and correcting errors made by educators that are likely to recur in every period of history. Second, the history of the neglect and misinterpretation of Isocrates over the past century exposes pervasive and long-standing deficiencies of educationist historiography and hermeneutics that have prevented progress in our understanding of the origins and history of educational philosophy. On both counts, learning about Isocrates will contribute to the self-knowledge of educators. This chapter will outline the historical evidence of Isocrates’ unequaled influence in the history of educational thought and practice, and examine deficiencies of historiography that have caused errors in our understanding of the educational thought of Isocrates specifically and of the history of educational philosophy generally. Examination of the case of Isocrates will provide us with a better understanding of historiography in educational philosophy, and this in turn will prepare the ground for examination of Isocrates’ approach to the problem of normative methodology (Chap. 3) and his arguments about deficiencies of self-knowledge and errors about the powers of education to which educators—including us—are especially prone (Chap. 4). 1

Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, P. 16.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. R. Muir, Isocrates, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00971-6_2

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2.1 Isocrates and Non-educationist Historiography: The Evidence of Isocrates’ Importance Isocrates is one of the most profound and influential thinkers in history. Recognition of the high quality of Isocrates’ philosophical thought was reiterated in our own century in Karl Popper’s claim that in classical Athens there were “only three outstanding men who might have claimed to be philosophers: Antisthenes, Isocrates, and Plato himself.”2 In the field of political philosophy, Isocrates was regarded as Plato’s equal until well after the Renaissance.3 Over the past century, classicists, philosophers, historians of ideas, political scientists, literary scholars specializing in classical Greek and Roman, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and contemporary intellectual history have provided scholarly discussions of the influence of his ideas in the history of historical writing, rhetoric, the visual arts, music, religion and theology, political science, philosophy4 and, above all, education.5 Isocrates’ arguments for the integration of the economies, laws and civil administrations, and militaries of the diverse Hellenic city-states are recognized as a model for European integration6 generally and of institutions such as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the movement toward European integration7 specifically.

2

Popper (1945), Vol. 1, p. 153. Cf. Hume, Enquiry, Sec. 7, Jebb (1893), Dobson (1919), Chap. 6; Burk (1923), Mathieu; Murray (1937), p. 345, p. 349; Marrou (1948), 1.7.2. 3 Sinclair (1962), p. 347; Dickens (1972), pp. 24–25; Kennedy (1969), p. 111; Laistner (1957); Kimball (1986); Hadas (1962, p. 30); Curtius (1953), Chap. 3; Knowles (1988), p. 61; Jaeger (1947), vol. 3. 4 Muir (1998). Cf. Greene (1982), Power (1965), p. 69; Beck (1964), pp. 269–270, p. 288; Marrou (1948), I, pp. 133–134, p. 377; Johnson (1959), Boyd (1966), p. 25; Proussis (1965), p. 62; HudsonWilliams (1940), p. 166; Laistner (1957), p. 435; Jebb (1893), II, pp. 6–7; Harvey (1984), p. 224; Howatson (1989), p. 203; Howland (1937), p. 151; Jaeger (1947 [1943]), Vol. 3; Burk (1923); Dixon (1971), p. 9; Strauss (1967); Strauss (1989), Chap. 5; Cherniss (1977); van Hook (1919); Howland (1937), p. 158; Jebb (1893), II; Dobson (1919), pp. 128, p. 153, pp. 156–157; Norlin (1980), p. xxxi; Harvey (1984), p. 162; Norlin (1980), p. xix; Hubbell (1913), p. 3; Grube (1965), p. 39; Hudson-Williams (1940), p. 166; Bloom (1953), Chap. 4; Lord (1982), Nettleship (1935 [1880]), Quick (1880), Laurie (1903), Davidson (1892), Freeman (1922), Gwynn (1926), Finley (1975), Brann (1979), Tarcov (1984), Pangle (1992), Pangle and Pangle (1993), Herrick 2018. 5 E.g., Burk (1923), Mathieu (1925), Marrou (1948), Acts du Quatrieme Congres International de Philosophie Medievale (1969), Eucken (1983), Dihle (1994), pp. 16–17; Muir (1996b), Poulakos (1997), Said and Trede (1999), p. 84; Poulakos and Depew (2004), Muir (2005), Marsh (2010), Walker (2011), Warah (2012), Marsh (2012), Burke (2013), Collins (2015), Mintz (2016), Herrick (2018), Chap. 2; Muir (2016); Muir (2018), Muir (2021). For his influence is the US, see Muir (2016), Romano (2012). 6 Finley (1983), p. 114; Sinclair (1967), p. 135. 7 Barker (1948), p. 23; Hay (1966a), p. 2, p. 5; Pangle (1992), p. 81; de Romilly (1992), p. 4.

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In the history of education specifically, classicists, political scientists, literary scholars, philosophers, and historians have argued that Isocrates is “the educator of Europe,”8 “the father of modern liberal education,”9 and “one of the greatest educationalists of history.”10 He has been a major influence in educational thought and practice in every period of European history, and in in Jewish, Islamic, North African, and Middle Eastern education.11 In all of these periods and places, Isocratic educational thought was much more influential than Plato or Aristotle. It was common knowledge as early as 1919 that in antiquity Isocrates … exerted a wider influence than any, not excepting Demosthenes, who devoted their lives to political activity, for he originated and promulgated ideas which completely changed the course of Greek civilization.12

Isocrates’ school was the source of “an entire Who’s Who of Greek intellectuals and public figures,”13 and Pliny the Elder reported that the reputation of Isocrates’ writings was so high that he could sell a single oration for the enormous sum of twenty talents.14 As Cicero put it, “from the school of Isocrates, as from the Trojan Horse, none but true heroes emerged,” including such important Greek figures as Theopompi, Ephori, Philisti, Naucratae, Demosthenes,15 Hyperides, Aeschines, Lycurgus, Dinarchus “and a multitude of others.”16 So great was the political influence of Isocrates’ pupils that he has been credited with being the single most important source of Athenian cultural hegemony during the classical and Hellenistic periods.17 The great educational debates of the Pedagogical Century were largely between four groups of rival educators, the traditionalist teachers of epic poetry, the sophists, Platonic philosophers, and Isocrates’ philosophy of political discourse. The debate was ended in practice by the triumph of the Isocratic alternative.18 Whatever the merits of Plato’s educational ideas may have been, the Western tradition of education derives primarily from Isocrates. As Henri-Irene Marrou demonstrated, “it was 8

Newman (1975), p. 358. Proussis (1965): 74. Cf. Corbett (1989), pp. 267–77. 10 Knowles (1988), p. 60; Corbett (1989), p. 276. 11 Muir (1997), Muir (2001). 12 Dobson (1919), p. 130. Cf. Turner (2014), p. 7. 13 Finley (1975), p 198. cf. Kennedy (1980), p. 31. 14 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 7.30. Cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus 1. 15 In his lectures on rhetoric, Nietzsche (1922), pp. 287–319 argues that Demosthenes was a student of Isocrates, while the great Greek historian Constantine Paparrigopoulos (1925), pp. 396–398 provides a detailed scholarly argument for the same claim. Plutarch, “Demosthenes” 5.4 ff and Dionysus of Halicarnassus, “Isaeus” 1 report a story, unsupported by any evidence, that Demosthenes was turned away from Isocrates’ school because he could not afford the fees. Even if this were true, these same sources also report that Demosthenes sought an Isocratic education indirectly by studying with Isocrates’ student Isaeus and Isocrates’ follower Callias of Syracuse. See Jebb (1893), p. 270; Walker (2011), pp. 88–89; Kosch (2017), Chap. 4. 16 De Oratore II.23. Cf. Plutarch, Demosthenes, 5.5; Marrou (1958), p. 86; Hadas (1962), p. 37]. 17 Hadas (1969), p. 129; Dobson (1919), p. 130. 18 Finley (1975), pp. 196–197; Marrou (1958), p. 81; Marrou (1984), pp. 198–199; Knowles (1988), p. 55; Turner (2014), p. 7, p. 17. 9

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Isocrates, not Plato, who was the educator of fourth-century Greece and subsequently the Hellenistic and Roman worlds,”19 and consequently The importance of this fact must be emphasized from the beginning. On the level of history Plato had been defeated: he had failed to impose his educational ideal on posterity. It was Isocrates who defeated him, and who became the educator first of Greece, and subsequently of the whole of the ancient world.20

Kevane reiterated (in 1963) that “it was Isocrates who established the pattern of the Greek paideia, of the classical educational system, which came to characterize the civilization of classical antiquity as a whole.”21 It was Isocrates who introduced “one of the permanent features of our own classical tradition, that the best students in our literature classes are chosen and brought up to be teachers themselves”22 and consequently “… Isocrates appears as the original fountainhead of the entire great current of humanist scholarship.”23 All of this is transmitted to Hellenistic and Roman educational thought and practice. The historian and educator Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60–c. 6 BCE), one of those who brought the Isocratic tradition of education to Rome, argued that Isocrates did not merely transform the study of sophistic rhetoric of Gorgias and Protagoras, but rather he replaced it with an art of political deliberation and discourse that was a genuine mode of philosophy. As we shall see, Isocrates refers to himself as a philosopher and teacher of political discourse, and never refers to himself as a rhetorician or as a teacher of rhetoric. His philosophy consisted of a unity of political science and deliberative political discourse, understood as the study of what is most probably best for the regime as a whole, and the ability to express what is best in advice and in virtuous deeds worthy of emulation.24 In doing so, Isocrates became the outstanding figure among the famous men of his day, and the teacher of the most eminent men of Athens and in Greece at large, both the best forensic orators and those who distinguished themselves in politics and public life. Historians, too, were among his pupils, both those who wrote of Greek affairs and those who included the outside world, and his school came to represent Athens herself in the eyes of literature men abroad.25

Dionysius insisted that “the best possible education in virtue is found in Isocrates’ discourses (λ´oγoις),”26 and that Isocrates was so clearly superior to other educators and writers on political discourse that “there is little to be gained in writing a critique of each of them.” These other writers on “every branch of literature”—politics, history, poetry, and rhetoric—include the dramatist and rhetorician Theodeectes, 19

Marrou (1948), I, p. 79. Cf. Turner (2014), p. 7; Bloomer (2011). Marrou (1948), Vol. I, p. 292. Cf. p. 128. My translation. Cf. Kennedy (1999), p. 41; Turner (2014), p. 7. 21 Kevane (1963), pp. 2–3. 22 Marrou (1958), p. 81. 23 Marrou (1958), p. 89. Cf. Turner (2014), Chap. 1. 24 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Isocrates, 1. Cf. Ant. 175, 255 ff, 276; Nicocles 7–8. 25 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Isocrates, 1. 26 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Isocrates 4. 20

2.1 Isocrates and Non-educationist Historiography: The Evidence …

17

who was a student of Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle, the historian and student of Isocrates, Theopompus, and the historian Ephorus.27 The exceptional success and respect for these former students are an indication of the importance of history in Isocrates’ conception of political discourse, and in his legacy to education. Cicero—another vitally important educational philosopher largely omitted from educationist historiography28 —praises the educational thought of “Isocrates, an eminent teacher of eloquence”29 and observed that. [Isocrates’] house stood open to all Greece as the school of eloquence. He was an accomplished orator and an excellent teacher. Although he did not display his talent in the splendour of the forum, but cherished and improved within the walls of an academy the glory which, in my opinion, no orator has since acquired.30

The rhetorician and literary critic Hermogenes of Tarsus, who was active while Marcus Aurelius was Emperor, sustained Isocrates’ self-understanding as a teacher of logos politikos rather than of rhetoric.31 Recent historians of Roman education agree with these early assessments, arguing that, “in comparison to Plato or Aristotle, the educational program of Isocrates demands closer attention: partly for its intrinsic interest, partly because of its immense and abiding influence on Greco-Roman education”32 in which “Isocrates’ standpoint remained authoritative in practice for the whole of antiquity.”33 As the influence of Christianity increased during the Roman Empire, Julian the Apostate sought to counter its intellectual prestige by arguing that the pagans had been wiser than anyone in the Christian Bible. As examples of the superiority of pagan wisdom, he chooses Isocrates and two Isocratic poets, not Plato or Aristotle: Is their ‘wisest’ man Solomon at all comparable with Phocylides or Theognis or Isocrates? Certainly not. At least, if one were to compare their exhortations with Solomon’s proverbs, you would, I am very sure, find that [Isocrates] the son of Theodorus is superior to their “wisest” king.34

27

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, “Isaeus” 19. E.g., Curren’s (1998) account of Roman educational thought omits Isocrates, Cicero and Varro despite the demonstrated primacy and influence of their educational ideas and a wealth of contemporary scholarship. Compare Parker (1890), West (1969 [1892]), Turner (2014), Chap. 1; Muir (2018), pp. 69–73; Muir (2021). He also omits the most important three centuries of Roman educational thought; it is like an account of the history of modern science that omits everything between1600 and 1900. 29 De oratore 3.36. 30 Brutus 8. Cf. Orator 13.40–42; De oratore 3.16.59; 6.26–9.35. 31 Hermongenes, On Types of Style 2.10. 32 Gwynn (1926), p. 46; Cf. Marrou (1984), p. 201; Bolgar (1954), p. 28; Colish (1997), p. 5; Good and Teller (1969), p. 29; Grube (1965), p. 38, 41, 45; Kennedy (1980): 31; Dihle (1994), p. 16; Gnoza (2012), Chap. 2; Colish (1997), p. 5; Kevane (1963). 33 Curtius (1953): 36–37. 34 Contra Galilaeos 224–224d. Cf. Ep. 36. 422b–423d. 28

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Julian chooses Theognis because he was admired by Isocrates as one of best counselors for virtuous human conduct.35,36 Ironically, Isocrates prevails in the triumphant Christian educational thought as well: the importance of Isocrates’ educational thought for Augustine is well known, as is the dominance of the educational thought and practice of Isocrates over the Platonic and Aristotelian alternatives throughout the Christian Middle Ages, including the Carolingian and Twelfth-century renaissances.37 Knowles emphasized that Great and permanent, even in this field, as was the influence of the two philosophers [Plato and Aristotle], the victory and the future lay with Isocrates.38

During both the Carolingian Renaissance and the Quattrocento Renaissance, the European recovery of the lost Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle initiated a brief renewal of the debate between the educational thought between the Socratic philosophers and the Isocratic philosophers,39 but it was the Isocratic idea of education which emerged triumphant over the Socratic in practice, and it remained the more influential idea of education throughout the Renaissances and well into the 18th Century. Jaeger argued in 1943 that the legacy of Isocrates extended directly from Renaissance humanism to the present day: … there is no doubt that since the Renaissance he [Isocrates] has exercised far greater influence on the educational methods of humanism than any other Greek or Roman educator. Historically, it is perfectly correct to describe him (in the phrase used on the title-page of several modern books) as the father of “humanistic culture” --- inasmuch as the sophists cannot really claim that title, and from our own pedagogic methods and ideals a direct line runs back to him, as it does to Quintilian and Plutarch.40

The great French historian, Marrou, reiterated in 1948, insofar as the three Renaissances [Carolingian, 12th Century, and Quattrocento] returned to the classical heritage, insofar as this tradition has been perpetuated in our own methods of education, it is to Isocrates more than any other person that the honour and responsibility belong...41

The Isocratic tradition prevailed in education from the end of the Renaissances well into the 18th Century: Although Plato is better known and more highly regarded today, Isocrates had a much greater influence than his rival during the Hellenistic and Roman periods and down into modern

35 Isocrates, To Nicocles 42–44. For Phocylides, a philosophical poet, see Aristotle, Politics 4.11; Dio Chrysostum, Discourses 36.13. 36 Kevane (1963), Muir (2018), pp. 81–86. 37 Muir (1998), Clarke (1971): 2; Finley (1975): 199; cf. Hadas (1962): 172; Marrou (1948): 128. 38 Knowles (1988), p. 61. Cf. Turner (2014), p. 7; Muir (1998); Clarke (1971), p. 2; Finley (1975), p. 199; Hadas (1962): 172; Marrou (1948): 128. 39 Breen (1952): 384–426; Curtius (1953); Sidney (1973), p. 20. 40 Jaeger (1947 [1943]), Vol. 3, p. 46. 41 Marrou (1948), I, p. 128. Cf. Marrou (1984), p. 200; Finley (1975), p. 199.

2.1 Isocrates and Non-educationist Historiography: The Evidence …

19

times, for until the eighteenth century education in most European schools was based on his principles.42

Generations of historians of educational thought have argued that Isocrates’ educational ideas were—and still are—more influential in the history of educational thought and practice than those of any other classical thinker, from third century BC until well into the eighteenth century and the beginnings of contemporary state schooling. Indeed, for better or worse,43 the influence of Isocrates’ educational ideas continues to the present day.44 In 1969, Moses Hadas summarized the conclusions of a generation of scholars when he concluded that It was the program of Isocrates which has shaped European education to this day, which has kept humanism alive, and which has given Western civilization such unity as it possesses.45

Some fifteen years later, the great historian of educational thought H. I. Marrou carefully argued46 that, Isocrates’ ideas and the system of education which put them into practice reigned virtually unchallenged in Western Europe almost to our own generation.

Twenty years later, Corbett described Isocrates as “the patron saint of all those, then and now, who espouse the merits of a liberal education,”47 while Power observed that “throughout education’s history, this schoolmaster of antiquity [Isocrates] had a profound and permanent influence upon the curriculum and purpose of secondary schools.”48 In 1999, Said and Trede reiterated that Isocrates’ school and its principles “set the canons of education for the Western elite until the early twentieth century,”49 while other scholars across a wide variety of academic disciplines have repeatedly

42

Powell (2002), p. 1. Cf. Gnoza (2012), Chap. 2; Good and Teller (1969), p. 30; Turner (2014), p. 7. 43 Finley (1975); Hadas (1962): 62–63, 103; Power (1991): 102; Welch (1999), Chap. 2; Muir (2015). 44 E.g., Burk (1923), Mathieu (1925), Marrou (1948), Acts du Quatrieme Congres International de Philosophie Medievale (1969), Eucken (1983), Dihle (1994), pp. 16–17; Muir (1996b); Poulakos (1997); Said and Trede (1999), p. 84; Poulakos and Depew (2004); Muir (2005); Marsh (2010), Walker (2011), Warah (2012), Marsh (2012), Burke (2013), Collins (2015), Mintz (2016), Herrick (2018), Chap. 2; Muir (2018), Muir 2021. 45 Hadas (1969): 129. Cf. Laistner (1957): 447; Jaeger (1947 [1943]), Vol. 3, p. 46; Muir (2018). 46 Marrou (1984): 200; cf. Finley (1975): 208; Good and Teller (1969): 29; Hadas (1962): 103; Jaeger (1947 [1943]): III, 46; Kimball (1986): 11; Knowles (1988): 55; Powell (2002); Welch (1999), Chap. 2; Quintilian (2016), p. xii. 47 Corbett (1989), p. 276. 48 Power (1991), p. 44. 49 Said and Trede (1999), p. 84. Cf. Power (1996), p. 44; Marrou (1984): 200; cf. Finley (1975): 208; Good and Teller (1969): 29; Hadas (1962): 103; Jaeger (1947 [1943]): III, 46; Kimball (1986): 11; Knowles (1988): 55; Powell (2002);Welch (1999), Chap. 2.

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demonstrated that many of the most prevalent contemporary ideas—and problems— in educational philosophy, policy, curricula, and practice can all be traced directly to Isocrates and his legacy.50 As we make a transition to educationist historiography, there are two features of the historical claims made by Hadas, Marrou, Corbett, Powers, Said and Trede, and others that ought to be emphasized. The first is that their claims were supported by both extensive and systematic study of the primary historical documents, and by historical scholarship published by others since the late 1800s. The second is that these accounts of the history of educational philosophy and ideas were published before and during the same period in which educationists were publishing accounts of the history of educational thought in which Isocrates and his tradition are omitted entirely. In other words, the only part of the contemporary university which omitted study of the ideas and influence of Isocrates was Educational Studies, the very division of the academy that ought to be especially cognizant of his ideas and influence.51 The cause of these omissions is not a difference of opinion between educationists and all other scholars concerning the merits and influence Isocrates’ ideas; indeed, to make such an argument would require discussion of Isocrates’ arguments, but educationists simply omit him. This omission is caused by a deficient historiography, found only in Educational Studies, in which claims made about the history of educational philosophy are “supported” by appeals to the authority of an alleged consensus which literally ignores both the historical evidence and recent historical scholarship.52 As I will argue in the next section, what mattered in Educational Studies was not that one’s historical claims were supported by evidence but that they were the same as everyone else’s.53

2.2 Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography I: “Consensus” Replaced Historical Evidence Every one of us has an internal veneration of the opinions and the manners approved and received around him and cannot rid himself of them without remorse, nor apply them without applause. Montaigne “Of Custom”54

50

Muir (2005), Muir (2018). See below for detailed examples. Muir (1998), Muir (2005), Johnston (2007), p. 49, p. 53 n. 4; Marsh (2010), p. 289; Burke (2013), p. 22; Marsh (2012), Mintz (2016), p. 11; Power (1965), p. 69. 52 Muir (2005), Muir (2018), Chap. 1; Muir (2021). 53 One thinks of the salutary admonition about the importance of self-knowledge for educators articulated in the concluding two paragraphs of Diderot’s article “Encyclopedia,” the defining article of the great educational project of Encyclopédie, Ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers. It is an admonition emphasized by Isocrates (see Chap. 3). 54 Montaigne (1958), p. 83. 51

2.2 Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography I: “Consensus” …

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We will better understand the nature and magnitude of the historical errors and omissions that characterize historical texts in Educational Studies, especially in relation to Isocrates (described in “Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography III” below), if we first examine their primary cause, namely pervasive deficiencies in historiography.55 Historiography in the study of educational philosophy within Educational Studies has been undermined throughout this century by a combination of a deficient question and a deficient method. Beginning in the 1960s, the primary historical question for educationist historians of educational philosophy and ideas has not been: What is the history of educational philosophy, given the primary evidence? On the contrary, their question has been: What “must have been” the history of philosophy of education, given the current opinions of educationists?56 The corresponding historiographical method has been to appeal to the authority of a consensus of educationists without reference to historical evidence. This question and method are combined in the primary conditional deduction that has stultified educationist historiography since the 1960s57 : if educational philosophy begins with academic educationists in Educational Studies, then the history of educational philosophy cannot have begun before the advent of state schooling and philosophy of education in Educational Studies (with Peters in the 1960s or Dewey in the 1930s), although the discipline might have had a “pre-history” extending to the late 1800s (Kaminsky) or even to the advocacy of state schooling in the late 1700s (White). The historiographic consequence of these dogmatic pronouncements about the origins of educational philosophy was that educationist historians did not examine primary historical texts or any other historical evidence existing outside these parameters: the evidence was selected to conform to the pre-determined conclusion, and then reiterated as a “consensus.” The case of R. S. Peters is worth examining in some detail, both because it is an exemplar of this combination of evidence-free historiography and dependence on specious appeals to the authority of a supposed consensus,58 and because his pronouncements are uncritically repeated to this day. The clearest examples of the deficient historiography and methodology underlying Peters’ historical assertions are exemplified by three of his pronouncements about the history of educational philosophy. 55

Muir (2021), Muir (2018). Koerner (1965), Grafton and Jardine (1986), p. xi; Richardson (1999a, b), Muir (2005), Muir (1998), Muir (2018). 57 Naïve belief in historical uniqueness was a commonplace of the time. As the first line of Phillip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis ironically observes, “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three.” Larkin (2003), p. 146. 58 Peters’ (1977, p. 21, p. 76) only mention of Isocrates asserts that Isocrates advocated “professionalism” and “specialization” but not “versatility” in education. There is no reason to accept Peters’ assertion because the descriptive terms are not explained, Isocrates’ texts are not referred to, there is no reference to any Isocrates scholarship, no argument is provided. On the contrary, it had been widely recognized for decades before Peters made this pronouncement that a defining feature of Isocrates’ educational thought and practice is his exemplification and advocacy of the versatility of teaching methods, literary style, modes of argumentation, and professional vocations. See Jebb (1893), Chaps. 14 and 15; Dobson (1919), Chap. 6; Usher (1973). 56

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The first pronouncement is Peters’ claim “that education should be ‘democratic’ no one in a democracy would seriously dispute.”59 There is no reason to believe that Peters’ claim is true because no evidence is given for it. In the place of historical evidence, Peters appeals to the authority of a consensus in the indirect form of the assertion that “no one” would dispute the claim, but there no evidence to show that such a consensus exists. On the contrary, Peters’ historical claim and his historiographical claim that there is a consensus are demonstrably false: there is a long and rich tradition of democratic educational thought, well known and widely discussed outside Educational Studies, that argues that education in a democracy should not be “democratic” but rather ought to be aristocratic in curricula and goals though provided to all citizens who desire it. This tradition extends from Isocrates in classical antiquity through Condorcet, the American Founders, the Encyclopedists in the radical Enlightenment, de Tocqueville, Arendt, and to the present day.60 Peters’ rhetoric simply eliminates this entire debate in the history of democratic educational thought with a single dogmatic assertion which is—aspiring students in Educational Studies be warned—“indisputable.” This is a leitmotif of educationist historiography: evidence-free histography and appeals to authority, and intellectual isolation that sustains them. A second example of deficient historiography is Peters’ assertion that “no one who knows any philosophy would rate Rousseau’s Emile very highly as a piece of philosophical analysis or argument.”61 Once again, Peters’ only mode of argumentation is appeal to the authority of alleged consensus of “those who know any philosophy.” He does not provide any evaluative argument, or reference to anything Rousseau wrote, or reference to Rousseau scholarship; nor does he provide evidence that such a consensus ever existed. Peters’ assertion about Rousseau’s philosophical merits is also demonstrably false, and in a manner that exposes his ignorance of Rousseau’s high philosophical status within a long and diverse tradition of philosophers and scholars who were unquestionably among “those who know philosophy.” The most obvious examples are Hume and Kant, who argued in great detail that Rousseau’s Emile was among the greatest works of philosophical argument and analysis in the history of philosophy, even when they disagreed with him.62 Similarly, it is a measure of Peters’ intellectual isolation from international Rousseau scholarship that had been 59

Peters (1966), p. 291. Repeated uncritically by White (2004). For a historically astute re-statement see Burns (2021). For accounts of the long history of debates between advocates of aristocratic and democratic education in modern democracy, see Condorcet (1795) Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, Letter of Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 October 1818; Federalist 9, 10, 47, 49 and 57; Hannah Arendt (1954) “The Crisis in Education”; Lancien and de Saint-Martin (2007), Pennington (2014), Avramenko and Alexander-Davey (2018), Säfström (2021), Boonschoft (2020). 61 Peters (1966), p. 65; (1973), p. 77. Peters also excludes Plato from the history of educational philosophy. The absoluteness of the “consensus” to which Peters’ appeals is striking: he asserts that “no one”—not one person—could disagree with him! 62 Kant (1798) Anthropologie 7: 326–7, 8:116; Kant (1942) = Ak. 20. 44 and 58–59; Letter of Hume to Andrew Millar, 22 November 1762. Cf. Blom (2010), Chap. 14; Zaretsky and Scott (2009), Edmonds and Eidinow (2007), Rousseau (1979), pp. 3–4; Piché (1990), Bloom (1990), pp. 277–278; Shell (1996), Chap. 4; Ferry (2010), pp. 104–117; Naragon (2014). 60

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thriving for decades before he made this assertion,63 and which consistently argued that Rousseau’s Emile rates very highly as a piece of philosophical analysis and argument. Finally, it is a measure of the intellectual and academic isolation of Educational Studies generally that Peters’ evaluation, and the clunky literalist hermeneutic which caused it, was not only unchallenged, but was uncritically repeated for decades.64 A third example of Peters’ dogmatic and evidence-free historiography is found in his claims about the origins and duration of educational philosophy, which are most directly related to my main argument. Peters asserted that if a philosopher “is concerned with central questions about education itself,” there is very little established work to consult. Most of it has in fact been done recently by philosophers of education.65

Peters reiterated his emphatically “factual” claim that “philosophers and educationalists” in the 1960s were “plowing the uncultivated field of the philosophy of education.”66 Once again, no historical evidence and no historical argumentation were provided to support any of these historical assertions. On the contrary, the assertions all have the form of (circular) conditional deduction: “if recent educational philosophers assert that educational philosophy originates with us, the ‘recent philosophers of education,’ then the history of educational philosophy ‘must have’ begun with us.” As late as 2005, Hirst was uncritically repeating the claim that he and Peters were trying “to articulate for the first time a clear notion of philosophy of education”67 though he too provides no explanation, no philosophical argument, no comparative historical evidence, and no examination of any educational writings of the past to demonstrate that, as he claims, no one had ever successfully articulated, or even attempted to articulate, a “clear notion” of the philosophy of education. It is a dogmatic assertion about the history of educational philosophy made without explanation, without historical evidence, and without argument of any kind. It is interesting to observe that these early evidence-free assertions about the origins and duration of educational philosophy took on oddly nationalistic limits. For example, British educationist Tibble uncritically reiterated the historical claims of Peters when he asserted that the study of education generally began at the end of the 19th Century,68 and that philosophy of education specifically can “barely come within the scope of a historical survey”69 because it began in England in 63

See Schinz (1929), Cassirer (1954), Burgelin (1963–65), Wirz (1963–65), Cassirer (1963), Masters (1969), Shklar (1969), Cook (1975). See also Orwin and Tarcov (1996), Meier (2015), Villa (2017), Gill (2010). 64 E.g., Gray (2009). See Williams (2007) or Goldschmidt (2012) or Mintz (2012) for clear and through explanations of the necessity of an entirely new hermeneutic methodology and interpretation of Rousseau’s educational philosophy. 65 Peters (1973), p. 3. My emphasis. Cf. Peters (1983), p. 55. My emphasis. 66 Peters (1966b), p. 88; Peters (1983), p. 55. My emphasis. 67 Hirst (2005), p. 630. My emphasis. 68 Tibble (1966), pp. vii–viii. cf. Scheffler (1960), pp. 3–6; Kaminsky (1986), Kaminsky (1992), Johnston (1995), p. 1. 69 Tibble (1966), 21.

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the 1960s.70 In contrast, American educationist Kaminsky asserted that educational philosophy began with John Dewey in 1935 in the USA, and his assertion has been uncritically repeated by several educationists for decades.71 Although their assertions about the historical origins of educational philosophy differed, the historiography was the same: neither presented any historical evidence for their claim or even examined historical texts or other evidence that pre-dated Peters or Dewey.

2.3 Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography II: Defining History Replaced the Study of History And another said of history: to him who has ideas it has nothing new to say --- in short, they always discovered reasons why it was more philosophical to know nothing than to learn something.72 Nietzsche

This sort of liberation of educationist historiography from the shackles of historical evidence has been sustained to the present day in educationist accounts of the origins and history of educational philosophy. J. S. Johnston73 most recently reiterated Kaminsky’s historical claim that educational philosophy does not exist before John Dewey, or perhaps a little before. This absolute historical claim is reiterated uncritically, and neither Kaminsky nor Johnston nor anyone else provides any historical evidence for it. On the contrary, the historical claim is conditionally deduced from two a priori claims for which no historical argument or evidence is provided. The logical structure of the “historical” argument is this: Axiom 1: pre-Dewey thought about education lacks both “disciplinary self-consciousness” and “self-understandings of the discipline”;

and Axiom 2: educational philosophy originates in Victorian social and political reform, and advocacy of state schooling;

Therefore74 … 70

Tibble (1971), p. 1. Cf. Peters (1973), p. 81. Cf. Peters (1973), p. 3. Cf. Peters (1983), p. 30, p. 55; Peters and Hirst (1970), p. ix, p. 1; Peters (1973), p. 1; Moore (1982), p. vii; Dupuis and Gordon (2010), p. 1; Burbules (2002), p. 350; Chambliss (2009), p. 249. 71 Kaminsky (1992), p. 179. Cf. Johnson (2007), p. 35; Harris, (1988), p. 51; Dupuis and Gordon (2010), p. 1; Johnston (2007), p. 35; Burbules (2000), pp. 3–6; Kaminsky (1992), Chambliss (1968), Biesta (2014), p. 68; Tibble (1966), pp. vii–viii. cf. Scheffler (1960), pp. 3–6; Johnson (1995), Chap. 2. Compare Muir (2005), Muir (2018). 72 “Schopenhauer as Educator” 8. Cf. Muir (1996a, b). 73 Johnston (2019), p. 21, n. 2. Cf. Johnson (1995), p. 35; Chambliss (1968), p. 1. 74 Johnston (2019), p. 21, n. 2. This is obviously a non sequitur, but I will examine the more fundamental errors of historiography. There is also the obvious problem of privileging current academic opinion over everything pre-Dewey by assuming that “our” understanding of the discipline

2.3 Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography II: Defining …

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Conclusion: the history of educational philosophy must have begun after the Victorian era, when it achieved “disciplinary self-consciousness” and “self-understandings of the discipline” by focusing on state schools

Since no historical evidence is provided for the conclusion, the soundness of the argument depends wholly on the two axiomatic claims from which the conclusion is deduced. I will begin with an examination of the first axiomatic claim that there is no “disciplinary self-consciousness” and no “self-understandings of the discipline” in the works of educational philosophers before Dewey. Although no argument is provided for this claim because these two phrases—“disciplinary self-consciousness” and “self-understandings of the discipline”—are never defined, the essential historiographical point is this: the assertion that pre-Dewey educational philosophers lacked “disciplinary self-consciousness” and/or “self-understanding” can be proven only by detailed examination of the methodology and arguments of the primary texts written by pre-Dewey educational philosophers. Specifically, one must proceed through a minimum of three argumentative steps: first, analyze the primary texts of Isocrates or Cicero or Augustine or Martianus Capella or Cassiodorus or Alcuin or Rabanus Maurus or Isidore of Seville or John of Salisbury or Hugh of St. Victor or Aquinas or Francois Poullain de al Barre or Condorcet or Locke or Rousseau or Catherine Macaulay or any other of the many pre-Dewey educational philosophers75 ; second, articulate the argumentative methodology of those texts; third, demonstrate that their argumentation does not possess “disciplinary self-consciousness” and/or “selfunderstandings of the discipline” in a manner that can be proven to be deficient rather than merely different from that of contemporary academics. Yet neither Kaminsky nor Johnston does any of this: neither provides an analysis of even one primary text from the entire two millennia of educational thought between Plato and Dewey, neither articulates what the argumentative methods are for any text of that entire period, neither demonstrates that any specific text lacks disciplinary self-consciousness or self-understanding or is methodologically deficient; in fact, not one primary text is the universal and trans-historical standard by which all others are judged. The scholastics thought the same thing, with the same results: short-term academic dominance and long-term philosophical irrelevance. See Diderot’s article “Encyclopedia” for a more detailed explanation. 75 All of these educational philosophers were widely discussed in pre-Dewey educational philosophy, but Johnston also omits historical scholarship of the period: e.g., West’s Alcuin (1892), Chap. 1; K.A. Schmid’s six volume Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis aufunsere Zeit (1884–1902) W. T. Harris’ collation of German and English scholarship in the history of educational philosophy for his The Philosophy of Education (1893); J. A. MacVannel, Professor of the Philosophy of Education at Columbia University published The educational theories of Herbart and Froebel (1906) and his widely used Outline of a Course in the Philosophy of Education (1912); P. Abelson’s (1906). The Seven Liberal Arts, A Study in Medieval Culture; H. Horne’s The Philosophy of Education (1904) and The Democratic Philosophy of Education (1932), a critical debate with Dewey; Paul Hanus, Harvard’s first professor of education in 1891, listed philosophy of education as one of the established disciplines of teacher education; D. B. Leary’s Philosophy of Education: a Survey of Fundamentals (1920); John Brubacher had been Professor of the History and Philosophy of Education at Yale University since 1928 when he published his historically informed Modern Philosophies of Education (1939).

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and not one work of contemporary scholarship is examined, and almost all of the primary texts are not so much as mentioned. This is philosophical evaluation in which nothing is evaluated, historiography without any history, and methodology without any examination of method—hardly the makings of a discipline now claiming to have attained “disciplinary self-consciousness and self-understanding.”76 The historical claims by Kaminsky and Johnston—like the historical claims made by Peters, Hirst, Curren or White (see below)77 —are wholly unsubstantiated a priori pronouncements about the origins, history, and quality of the methodology of pre1960 or pre-1935 philosophical texts that are never examined or identified. Thus, books ostensibly concerned with the origins and history of educational philosophy mention Abbie Hoffman and Mick Jagger78 but do not mention the best known educational philosophers in history or examine their philosophical works explicitly devoted to education, or to any scholarship of the past century which examines even one of those works. An absolute and universal claim about the deficient “selfconsciousness and self-understanding” of every educational philosopher in the entire history of educational philosophy before Dewey is made without any analysis of the arguments of even one of them. Without evidence, analysis, argument, explanation or examination of any tract, it is simply asserted that “it is best to consider timeworn philosophical tracts concerned with education as proto-philosophy of education.”79 Cicero understood this phenomenon better: “Nesc¯ıre autem quid antequam n¯atus s¯ıs acciderit, id est semper esse puerum.”80 This startling combination of absolute historical and methodological assertion with an absolute absence of historical evidence or methodological argument also characterizes the second axiomatic claim, namely that educational philosophy “must have” arisen in the Victorian era in response to the advent of state schooling and movements for social and political reform in the 1800s that hoped to use schooling as a means to such reform.81 The petitio principii circularity of this approach to historiography is obvious: having assumed that educational philosophy “must have” originated in the Victorian era, these educationists consequently examine only the

76

A standard criticism of my argument can be anticipated; namely, that I have not proven that earlier philosophers do possess “disciplinary self-consciousness and self-understanding.” First, this criticism has no relevance to my argument, even if it were true: Kaminsky and Johnston have made a claim about pre-Dewey educational philosophy but provided no evidence or argument to support that claim. Consequently, my conclusion is correct: there is no reason to accept their claim. Second, the criticism is not true: the self-conscious philosophical sophistication of the earlier philosophers has been repeatedly demonstrated in scholarly works for over a century (see the evidence collected in this chapter, and in Muir (2018) or Laverty and Hansen (2021). It is the responsibility of educationists to know this widely known and easily available material; it is not the responsibility of historical scholars to reiterate it every time an educationist decides to make unsubstantiated historical claims. 77 Muir (2005), Muir (2018), Chap. 1; Muir (2021). 78 Kaminsky (1992), p. 92. 79 Kaminsky (1993), p. xiii. 80 Cicero, Orator 34.120. 81 Kaminsky (1993), pp. xvi–xvii, Chap. 1, p. 19, p. 43, p. 152.

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post-Victorian texts consistent with that assumption while ignoring all earlier historical texts and all historical scholarship concerned with this question. It is as if someone were to claim that music does not exist before 1964, and then “verified” that claim by examining only material written about music after 1965 and ignoring everything written before: the “evidence” would indeed be consistent with the claim but could not demonstrate it. Indeed, the only thing demonstrated by such an argument is the pervasive and systematically deficient nature of historiography throughout Educational Studies and the academic conformism that has sustained it for decades. Despite the passage of some thirty years, and despite the rich scholarly interest in the history of educational thought during that time, John White reiterated a slightly modified account of the conventional educationist account of the origin and duration of educational philosophy. His argument is a simple conditional deduction from a two-part dogmatic hypothesis wholly unsupported by historical evidence or any reference to non-educationist historical scholarship: (I) (II) (III)

If educational philosophy originated with and is limited to “the role of education in the modern state,” and … if advocacy of such a role for the state begins in the 18th Century … then it “must be” true that educational philosophy begins in the 1700s.82

White provides no historical evidence for the two axiomatic assertions (I and II) and no evidence for the conclusion deduced from them (the deduction being a non sequitur in any case). On the contrary, the two hypothetical and a priori historical claims are based only on the same appeal to authority that Peters used,83 replacing Peters’ appeal to the authority of a consensus of “those who know philosophy”84 or “general philosophers”85 with White’s own appeal to the authority of a consensus86 which is “typical of many other workers in our field” and held by “many in our field.”87 The rhetorical consistency of such appeals to authority over a span of some 40 years, from Peters to White, is striking: they both appeal to the authority of a consensus as their only evidence for their historical assertions, and yet they both provide no indication of who the members of the historiographic consensus are, no evidence to show that any such consensus ever existed, and no historical evidence to show that such a consensus would be justified even if it did exist. Indeed, White is explicitly dismissive of the question of historical evidence: he states directly that he knows (his words) “practically nothing” about the nearly two millennia of educational philosophy between classical Greece and the 18th Century, and yet he also asserts that he somehow knows that philosophy of education begins in the 1700s in response 82

White (2004), p. 456. Cf. White (1999), pp. 485–487, p. 496; Meens (2013), p. 368; Palmer (2001), Cahn (2001, 2009), Curren (2003), Johnson and Reed (2011). Compare Muir (2004), p. 43. Cf. Muir (2005). 83 Muir (1998, 2004, 2005). 84 Peters (1966), p. 65. See below. 85 Peters (1964), 142; Peters in Tibble (1966), 66. Compare Muir (1996b). 86 Leavis (1972), p. 77. 87 White (2004), p 255. Cf. White (2013), pp. 295–297; Meens (2013), p. 369; Muir (1998).

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to what he somehow knows is the historically unique development of arguments for state schooling.88 The renegades who have examined the historical evidence before they propose historical assertions have known for centuries that both sophisticated educational philosophy and philosophical advocacy of state schooling does not originate in the 18th Century (nor in the Victorian period) at all. On the contrary, the historical evidence demonstrates that such advocacy is a continuous feature of the entire history of educational philosophy, and that the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance arguments for state schools were well known to and explicitly referred to by the educational philosophers of the eighteenth century.89 Among the most obvious are Aristotle’s philosophical arguments for state schools, the educational reforms of the Carolingian Renaissance,90 and Martin Luther’s advocacy and detailed proposal of state schools for girls and boys in his On the Christian Nobility (1520). Thus while White asserts that educational philosophy “must have” begun with 18th Century philosophers and the advent of state schooling, those very 18th Century philosophers clearly and explicitly understood themselves to be developing exactly the continuous traditions of both educational philosophy and advocacy of state schools that White claims “everyone knows” does not exist (but also admits not having studied).91 Once again, the same leitmotif of educationist historiography: evidence-free historiography and historical claims sustained by the authority of unsubstantiated “consensus.” None of this is historical scholarship in any sense; rather, it is preemptive dogma sustained by the institutional power of a self-referential consensus that had been widely known to be wrong for over a century.92 Educationist historians of educational philosophy still do not realize that serious historical scholarship in the history of educational philosophy and ideas simply left them behind a century ago,93 and they have never caught up or even realized how dramatically both the historiography and the history of educational philosophy and ideas have changed. Consequently, their endlessly repeated consensus of evidence-free assertions about the origins, chronology, and merits of educational philosophy have actually left them playing no role at all in the subject and—what is much worse—with no evidence-based account of the history and methods of what was once ostensibly their own subject.94 There is no better illustration of all of these deficiencies of educationist historiography than the case of Isocrates. 88

White (2004), pp. 455–457. Mintz (2018), p. 2. Cf. Ducat (2006), Rawson (1991), Curren (2000). 90 E.g., Hildebrandt (1992). 91 Compare White’s assertion to the historical evidence and argument provided by Compayre (1879a, 1879b), Durkheim (1938), Overfield (1984), esp. Chap. 6; Grafton and Jardine (1986), Gauthier and Tardiff (1996), Grandiere (2006), Grandiere (1998), Huppert (1984), Huppert (1999), Lahalle and Grandiere (2015). 92 Muir (2018). 93 Middlemarch (1871/72), Book 2, Chap. 21: “And therefore it is a pity that it should all be thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world.” 94 Curren (2000), p. ix; Muir (2018). 89

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2.4 Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography III: Hermeneutics and Isocrates Although Bruce Kimball’s indispensable historical survey, Orators and Philosophers, is certainly an exception to the deficiencies of educationist historiography, it is not an exception to my claim that there has been no discussion of Isocrates’ educational philosophy ideas or the historical influences of those ideas for three reasons. First, although he does mention Isocrates in a few very brief passages,95 Kimball provides no detailed articulation or examination of Isocrates’ educational philosophy and its arguments. Kimball tells us only two things about Isocrates’ educational thought, both of which are dubious. First, Kimball asserts that Isocrates shared some of Plato’s criticisms of the amoralism of the sophists,96 though Kimball refers only to passages of Against the Sophists in which Isocrates critiques the disputers and the teachers of political rhetoric for exaggerating what education can accomplish (as I explain below) rather than “amoralism.” Second, he claims that Isocrates “adopted, with very little analysis, the noble values of the past—the traditional standards of virtue recognized in epical heroes—as the arête of his educational ideal.”97 Kimball provided no argument for this claim and only refers the reader to some passages in Against the Sophists and Antidosis. Even in those works, however, Isocrates does not articulate or attempt to justify his account of the virtues by invoking “epical heroes” alone, but primarily through extensive analysis of some of the most effective statesman in history such as Pericles [Ant. 111].98 Moreover, contrary to Kimball’s claim, Isocrates provides extensive analysis and critique of the traditional virtues,99 though he does so in works Kimball does not mention such as the Cyprian Orations, Areopagiticus, To Nicocles, Panegyricus, and Panathenaicus. In the Antidosis, Isocrates explicitly directs the reader to these works,100 but Kimball did not follow Isocrates’ direction. This is directly related to a second methodological consideration in interpreting Isocrates’ use of historical and mythological figures which Kimball does not take account of. In his political works, Isocrates does digress to praise political exemplars such as Timotheus [Antidosis 117], and the epical heroes Theseus [Encomium of Helen] and Agamemnon [e.g., Panathenaicus 74–90], but the role those heroes play is sometimes by allusion rather than literal and historical. For example, it has been understood for over a century that Isocrates uses the mythological character Agamemnon as an image of the historical ruler Phillip of Macedon, his actual object of praise. Epical heroes are rhetorical devices that use commonplace exemplars in Greek mythology and history as images of the virtues and actions of 95

E.g., Kimball (1986), p. 2, p. 17, pp. 18–19, pp. 108–109. Kimball (1986), p. 17. 97 Kimball (1986), p. 18. 98 An opinion shared, albeit by nominal allusion, by Shakespeare in his Pericles, Prince of Tyre. 99 “Values” is far too vague and anachronistic to describe Isocrates normative ideas. 100 Ant. 59, 63, 66, 67, 73. 96

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actual statesmen.101 Isocrates’ arguments use historical and mythological figures to exemplify specific virtues, but the historical exemplars are presented with literary finesse and embellishment intended to clarify the political questions and methods of reasoning. It is not a falsification of history and in fact relies on the reader knowing what the historical facts were. A contemporary example could be the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), and President Obama’s role in guiding it through the acrimonious legislative process. Anyone familiar with the Act and its history will know that its final form was a result of a number of compromises with various opponents (e.g., Democrats lead by Bart Stupak who were opposed to federal funding for abortion services), and consequently that the final Act was both less than and different from what President Obama had originally intended. In this case, the literary-historical method used by Isocrates (and Xenophon, Virgil, Cicero and others) would be to begin with these historical facts, but then to reconstruct an account in which Obama’s original intentions and arguments were more fully realized. Doing so does “falsify” some of the historical facts102 but does so with the intention of providing a clearer and more complete representation of Obama’s ideas, reasoning, and goals, and consequently a more accurate representation of his ideas about the national good. This literary presentation of idealized historical events and persons is not at all unique to Isocrates, and awareness of it was once a familiar feature of the interpretive methods required for discovering the arguments and ideas of ancient writers. For example, Isocrates’ contemporary, the Socratic philosopher Xenophon, provides a literary account of the political science of the Persian monarch Cyrus103 that is not always wholly accurate in its historical facts. This is not an error on Xenophon’s part nor is it a willful misrepresentation, but rather a mimetic104 literary method that modifies literal historical facts in order to more clearly represent the logical structure of the ideas and deliberations imperfectly realized in those historical events. This is a literary method that was well understood for well over two millennia. In his letters to his brother Quintus, Cicero observed that The Cyrus of Xenophon is not represented according to historical accuracy but in the image of an exemplary ruler.105

The observation was reiterated in Sir Phillip Sydney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595). Sydney argues that when interpreting Xenophon’s Cyrus (along with Virgil’s Aeneas) the reader must always recall that … any understanding knoweth the skill of the artificer standeth in the Idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that a poet hath that Idea is manifest, by delivering 101

See Blass (1886), pp. 331–334; Race (1978), Papillon (1996). It is assumed that the informed reader would immediately recognize this, so deceit is not the intention. A simpler example is the concluding scenes of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which represents Tarantino’s conjecture of what might have been rather than an attempt to falsify history or deceive his audience. 103 Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus. 104 Sydney explicitly emphasizes this. See Sydney (1973), p. 101, lns. 32–36. 105 Cicero, Epistles to Quintus 1.1.8. My translation. 102

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them forth in such excellency as he hath imagined them. Which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as Nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses. If they will learn aright why and how that maker made him.106

The same methodological observation was reiterated by Walter Miller in the 1914 Loeb edition of Xenophon’s’ works and in several recent discussions of Xenophon’s methodology and political philosophy.107 Understanding Isocrates’ educational and political arguments requires readers who understand mimetic literary methods, and the relations between the representations of historical fact, mythological figures, and the literary representations of the exemplary deliberation and judgment of specific leaders. This brings me to my third and final reason for claiming that Kimball provides no account of Isocrates’ educational philosophy, namely that all of Kimball’s brief discussions of Isocrates begin from the Victorian assumption that Isocrates should be classified as a rhetorician or orator, and consequently examine Isocrates’ educational thought anachronistically as if it must be a part of the history of the debates between “orators vs philosophers.”108 In other words, Kimball does not examine Isocrates’ educational thought directly or in its own terms—Isocrates is never quoted—but rather he places Isocrates in the category “rhetorician” and then deduces what Isocrates’ educational ideas “must have been” from that category rather than from what Isocrates actually says. As I will explain in greater detail below, however, Isocrates explicitly and repeatedly argues that he is not a rhetorician or orator (or sophist [Ant. 168]), that his educational ideas are opposed to rhetoric [Ant. 147], and that he develops a system of education which is both a challenge to and an alternative to rhetoric and oratory [Ant. 160–173]. I have argued elsewhere that preemptively categorizing authors prior to examining their texts is a pervasive problem in Educational Studies: we cannot hope to understand the arguments and ideas of ancient, medieval, Renaissance, or modern authors if our first step is not to turn to their texts, but rather to anachronistically place them into contemporary academic categories and then try to deduce what they “must have” said from that category.109 Kimball does not examine Isocrates’ educational ideas because he adopted this conditionally deductive method: “if Isocrates is classified as a rhetorician then he must have advocated rhetorical education, and if he advocated rhetorical education then he must be understood as part of the rhetoric vs. philosophy in the history of education.” If the first premise of this conditionally deductive argument is wrong—that is, if Isocrates’ texts demonstrate that Isocrates is not a rhetorician, as indeed they do—then Kimball’s argument tells us little about Isocrates’ educational ideas or his arguments for them. For these reasons, Kimball’s

106

Sydney (1973), pp. 100–101. Original emphasis. See Ambler (2001), p. 3 n. 1. 108 Kimball (1986), p. 2. 109 Muir (1996a). 107

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fine book is not an exception to my claim that there has been little discussion of Isocrates’ educational ideas within Educational Studies since 1900.

2.5 The Result of the Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography: Hirst’s History of the Liberal Arts Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian, ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Strachey (1918)110

The many and pervasive inadequacies of educationist historiography have been identified and lamented for several decades now.111 As two non-educationist historians of educational thought and practice observed over thirty years ago, The history of education was rarely taught or studied systematically outside faculties of education, and even within them it was pursued at too primitive a level to capture the interest of professional historians.112

Twenty years later, the editor of one of many new scholarly works in the history of education (by non-educationists) reiterated that If there is a body of pedagogical scholarship, it is for the most part one which leaves history aside even if “the Socratic method” is a prominent metaphor for ideal pedagogies. When it does treat its own history, the approach tends to be superficial or unhelpfully idolatrous: “antiquity” is uniformly and statically a text deju lu.113

The phrase deja lu suggests that one of the major problems in educationist historiography is that discussions of the history of educational philosophy uncritically repeat what “everyone knows” about that history rather than examining any original historical evidence or any historical scholarship by others.114 Educationist accounts of the history of educational ideas have been consistently marred by an inadequate historiography which causes major errors of fact and numerous large omissions. The omissions include the denial of the existence of over a millennium of educational philosophy,115 and ignoring some of the most profound and influential educational philosophers such as Isocrates.116 The errors include authoritative accounts of the 110

Strachey (1918) “Preface,” Eminent Victorians, p.v. E.g., Blyth (1961/62), Koerner (1965 [1963]), Herbst (1999), Richardson (1999a), Richardson (1999b). 112 Grafton and Jardine (1986), xi. 113 Too (2001), p. 14. 114 Koerner (1965), Muir (1998), Muir (2005), Johnston (2007), Marsh (2010), Burke (2013), Mintz (2016). 115 E.g., Noddings (1995), Palmer (2001), Cahn (2001), Curren (2003), Cahn (2009), Johnson and Reed (2011), Robinson (2015), Stehlik (2018), Marino and Russo (2018) [1st ed. 2013]. For a more extensive list see Muir (2018), p. 19. 116 See references in Note 4 above. 111

2.5 The Result of the Deficiencies of Educationist Historiography: Hirst’s History …

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history of educational philosophy which ignore all primary evidence and consequently are quite literally wrong in every major claim they make.117 This is especially true of educationists’ accounts of Isocrates: he is excluded from their histories of educational philosophy and yet they provide no detailed discussion or evaluation of his educational ideas or their influence, and do not discuss either the historical evidence or the historical scholarship of the past century.118 One of the foundational deficiencies of educationist historiography is that it proceeds in an academic vacuum, isolated from non-educationist historiography and historical argument. An especially instructive exemplar of both this deficient mode of historiography and its consequences is P. H. Hirst’s account of the history of liberal education and the liberal arts. Hirst’s history of liberal education has been regarded as authoritative since the early 1970s and has been uncritically repeated to this day.119 The question of Isocrates’ place in the history of educational thought is central to the veracity of this account. There are three primary deficiencies in Hirst’s historical methods and in educationist’s accounts of the history of educational philosophy and ideas generally. These deficiencies are all directly related to the failure of educationists to ground their historical claims in the primary texts and historical evidence, their failure to take account of contemporary non-educationist scholarship in the history of educational thought,120 and their failure to recognize the importance of Isocrates’ educational philosophy specifically. First, when Hirst set out to provide a history of liberal education and the liberal arts he did not begin with an examination of the rich and diverse primary historical evidence but instead began with a priori historical assumptions

117

Muir (1996b, 2005, 2018, 2021). E.g., Butts (1947), p. 72; Frost (1966), p. 58; Lucas (1971), pp. 85–86; Mitzel (1982), Gutek (1995), pp. 52–54; Blake et al. (2003), Cooper (2016), Dodds (2018), Muir (2018), Muir (1998), Muir (2005), Burke (2013), p. 22. Cf. Marsh (2010), p. 289; Marsh (2012); Mintz (2016), p. 11; Richardson (1999a), pp. 2–3, pp. 11–14, pp. 25–26; Richardson (1999b), pp. 110–111, p. 118, pp. 121–122; Tibble (1966), pp. 10–26; Lawn and Furlong (2009), Kaminsky (1993), Johnson (1995), Labaree (2008), Fraser (2007), Chap. 3: Labaree (2005), p. 286. 119 E.g., Ozolins (2021), p. 859; Mulcahy (2012), p. 3. Ozolins uncritically replicates Hirst’s meaningless historiographical denotation “the Greeks,” and the assertion that Aristotle is somehow the source of “liberal arts education.” Ozolins replicates the appeal to the authority of a “consensus” in the form of an appeal to what is “traditionally understood.” No evidence is provided to demonstrate that any such “traditional understanding” existed or was supported by historical evidence. This is one of many examples of the way in which Educational Studies renders itself moribund by replicating historical errors solely by rhetorical appeal to the authority of a “consensus” decade after decade, apparently unaware of the ample contemporary scholarship by historians of ideas, classicists, political philosophers and many others who demonstrated a long time ago that the claims of the “consensus” are false. 120 An instructive exercise is to take note of one of the many new scholarly works written by non-educationists in the history of educational thought, especially if they are widely reviewed and discussed. One then searches (almost always in vain) to see if any educationist journal publishes a review or even notice of the work. It is one measure of the academic and scholarly isolation of Educational Studies, and how such isolation sustains a stultifying “consensus” for decades after it has been thoroughly refuted by the very historical scholarship educationists seem to be unaware of. 118

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common in Educational Studies. Hirst assumed generally that educational philosophy “must have” originated with the canonical Athenian philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, and then assumed specifically that liberal education and the liberal arts “must have” originated with Aristotle. Hirst provides no reasons for conforming to this assumption and mentions no historical evidence; neither the primary texts in the history of educational thought nor any recent scholarship is referred to. His second error is deduced from his neglect of the primary history historical evidence and his assumption that Aristotle is the origin, though this error is methodological in nature: he selected Aristotle’s Politics as the “evidence” for his claim that liberal education originated with Aristotle’s Politics.121 The circularity of this historiographical procedure is obvious: Hirst assumes that the liberal arts must have originated with Aristotle, and consequently examines only the text consistent with that assumption while ignoring all other primary sources and historical texts, and all historical scholarship concerned with this question (see below). It is like claiming that England comes into existence after World War 2 and then “proving” that claim by examining only texts about England written after 1945: the evidence is consistent with the claim without being evidence for it. The third deficiency is that Hirst does not even examine the whole of the one primary text he did select, but instead depends on a collection of extracts found in an ephemeral textbook, Burnet’s (1903) compendium of Victorian classicism.122 This historiographic error is compounded by the fact Burnet explicitly explains that the selections he has taken from Aristotle’s works are intended to illustrate his own notion of “the Gospel of Leisure”123 ; the book was not concerned directly or indirectly with liberal education or the origins of the liberal arts, nor is it intended to provide an account of Aristotle’s ideas about education. Thus, Hirst’s history of liberal arts education is based wholly on a dated textbook that explicitly states that it is not concerned with educational thought or the history of educational thought at all. The pervasive errors and omissions caused by these three deficiencies are clear as soon as we examine the complete primary text, primary historical evidence by other authors, and recent historical scholarship.

2.6 If We Ignore Everyone Else, Then Aristotle Must Have Been First If we examine the complete primary text specified by Hirst, Aristotle’s Politics, rather than fragments in a dated textbook of tendentious selections and interpretation, we see that every claim Hirst makes about Aristotle is explicitly contradicted by Aristotle. Hirst asserts that in the Politics Aristotle is “enunciating the principles of liberal education for the first time” but Aristotle makes no such claim and Hirst provides 121

Hirst (1971), p. 500, p. 506. Burnet (1903). Uncritical dependence on discredited Victorian ideas and categories is a pervasive feature of educationist historiography. 123 Burnet (1903), “Preface,” p. i, p. 141. 122

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no evidence for this claim. Contrary to Hirst’s assertion, Aristotle himself explains that he is not enunciating the principles of liberal education at all and certainly not for the first time.124 On the contrary, Aristotle is discussing not the origin but the desirability of such an education,125 the principles of which were first enunciated by Pythagoras126 and especially by Hippias of Elis127 almost a century earlier.128 The fact that Hippias of Elis had already described liberal arts education was recognized by early educational thinkers such as Quintilian (Institutio Oratrio 12.11.21), but Hirst’s account also omits him and every other Roman educational philosopher despite their vital and well-documented role in articulating and transmitting the liberal arts.129 Hirst’s errors may be caused, in part, by a failure to distinguish between Aristotle’s ™λευθερ´ιων ™πιστημîν,130 “the science of the free man,” and the Greek phrase ™γκκλιoς ´ παιδε´ια,131 used by Quntilian to refer to a curriculum of liberal arts. Aristotle explains in the Metaphysics132 that the study suitable for the free man is philosophy, but this is not the same as education in the preparatory arts of the ™γκκλιoς ´ παιδε´ια which became the liberal arts after much modification. It is a fundamental distinction which is sustained throughout the history of educational philosophy. The first sentences of Denis Diderot’s 1755 article “Encyclopedia,”133 for example, reiterates the distinction between the educational arts of the ™γκκλιoς ´ παιδε´ια—the Greek root of the word “encyclopedia” in all European languages— and philosophy itself. Using phrases which echo Isocrates’ Against the Sophists, Diderot explains that while the goal of philosophy is the search for demonstrated knowledge, the goal of education in the arts of the ™γκκλιoς ´ παιδε´ια is utility and effective practical judgment in social, economic, and political life; the complete title of the work was, after all, Encyclopaedia, or Classified Dictionary of Sciences, Arts, and Trades. Thus, Hirst claims that Aristotle is the originator of liberal arts and liberal education while Aristotle himself explicitly says that he was not the originator, refers the careful reader of the entire primary text to earlier educational thinkers who were the originators and distinguishes between the liberal education developed by others and the philosophical education of particular interest to him.134 Hirst’s circular 124

Politics (1337b): 4–22. See Abelson (1906), p. 3, n. 1. Politics (1337b): 14–17. 126 Lehman and (2018), p. xv. Cf. Plato, Republic 600a-b. 127 Such education may also have Pythagorean roots. McCarthy (1976), p. 84. 128 Curtius (1953): 36–7. Cf. West (1969 [1892]), p. 4; Defourny (1920), Lasserre (1966), Simpson (1998), p. 258. 129 Muir (2018), Chap. 3; Muir (2021). 130 Politics (1337b) 15. 131 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 1.10.1. 132 Meta. 982b 20. Cf. Politics 1338a30-1338b4, beginning with Óτι μν τo´ινυν στι παιδε´ια τις ¿ν oÙχ æς χρησ´ιμην παιδευτšoν τoς ` υƒε‹ς oÙδ’ æς ¢ναγκα´ιαν ¢λλ’ æς ™λευθšριoν κα`ι καλην ´ … 133 Encyclopédie, Ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, 1755, Vol. 5. 134 It is a matter that will require much further study, but our present (mis-)understandings of the history of educational philosophy are no doubt partly caused by a failure to distinguish between liberal education and philosophical education in the classical and medieval periods especially. 125

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and assumption-based historiography ignores Aristotle’s explicit claims, ignores Aristotle’s identification of important educational thinkers who were not canonical philosophers (according to late 19th Century academic opinion), and ignores all contemporary scholarship concerned with all of these questions. Hirst’s a priori historical assumption that canonical philosophers such as Aristotle must be the originators of liberal education, and his resulting neglect of both the noncanonical philosophers who were the originators and of all the primary historical evidence, are the causes of the many errors and omissions in his subsequent claims about the history of liberal education and especially the cause of his neglect of the well-established role of Isocrates. For example, Hirst assumes that “liberal education” must have been transmitted from classical Greece to European educational thought and practice by Plato and Aristotle, but he provides no evidence for this claim. Indeed, he does not examine the primary evidence or any contemporary scholarship, which had consistently demonstrated for decades before Hirst made these assertions that In view of the towering position which Plato occupies in the history of western thought and the prestige which attaches to the word philosophy, it might be supposed that his was the school which affected subsequent educational theory most powerfully: actually it was Isocrates’ program which prevailed.135

“Isocrates’ influence was to make rhetoric the cornerstone of education for the next several centuries in both Greece and Rome.”136 As Turner noted, “In the last century BCE, the Isocratic ideal of higher education as rhetorical training became pervasive among the Roman elite, with grammar the universal stepping stone to it.”137 Although Hirst mentions “the Romans” as a source of liberal education, he does not discuss any Roman educational philosophers or Roman educational philosophy generally: he ignores all Roman educational philosophers, ignores all primary sources, ignores all contemporary scholarship concerned with the educational thought of the entire period, and indeed ignores the entire history of educational philosophy during the eight centuries (or more138 ) between Aristotle and the Middle Ages.

2.7 How to Remain in the Dark About the Myth of “The Dark Ages” Hirst’s history of liberal arts education then ignores the whole of Roman educational thought about liberal education and proceeds directly to the Middle Ages. He begins with two unargued and erroneous assertions about the structure of the liberal arts 135

Hadas (1962), p. 30. Cf. Turner (2014), p. 7; Colish (1997), p. 5; Curtius (1953), p. 37; Finley (1975), p. 198; Hadas (1969), p. 171; Howatson (1989), p. 204; Kennedy (1980), 35; Knowles (1988), pp. 54–5; Marrou (1984), p. 200; Wimsatt and Brooks (1957), p. 74; Colish (1997), p. 5. 136 Wagner (1983), p. 7. 137 Turner (2014), p. 17; Colish (1997), p. 5; Wagner (1983). 138 The number of centuries depends on how one dates the beginnings of the Middle Ages. Eight centuries are a minimum.

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and history of liberal education in the Middle Ages and sustains his neglect of the well-established role of Isocrates. First, he asserts that liberal arts education defined by the trivium and quadrivium was for centuries regarded as the finest possible, and it was not until medieval times that liberal studies suffered any challenge at all.139

It is difficult to know why Hirst would make this claim; he provides no historical evidence and mentions no works of historical scholarship. Moreover, this claim is directly refuted by ample historical scholarship examining the liberal arts in the Middle Ages that had been published since 1900—over the 80 years prior to Hirst writing the essay—but which he does not acknowledge or seem to have known. For example, in 1906, Abelson had written that. Although not the originator of the curriculum of the seven liberal arts, he [Augustine], more than anyone else, made possible its general adoption by the Christian world of the west. With the support of such eminent authority it was but natural that the position of the secular liberal arts as a part of Christian education in the mediaeval curriculum should become secure.140

He went on to argue that explicitly following Augustine’s advocacy of liberal arts education, Cassiodorus (480-575) was the first Christian to use the term ‘seven liberal arts’ in his De Artibus et Discipliniis Liberalium Literarum, a work designed to supplement his earlier work, De Institutis Literarutn Sacrarum. He supports Augustine’s contention as to the necessity of the study of the liberal arts as a preparation for sacred studies, and quotes biblical proof to show that the number of these studies must be seven.141

To mention only a few of the most readily available sources, it had been wellestablished and widely known since Parker’s (1890) essay “The Seven Liberal Arts,” A. West’s 1892 Alcuin, Abelson’s (1906) book The Seven Liberal Arts: a Study in Medieval Culture—which included a twelve and a half page bibliography of works about the history of liberal arts education, not one of them mentioned by Hirst—R. Martin’s article 1930 “Arts liberaux (sept)” and the 1969 collection by the Acts du Quatrieme Congres International de Philosophie Medievale that “the seven liberal arts,” consisting primarily of the trivium and quadrivium, was “the basic curriculum of medieval education” throughout the Middle Ages, including both the Carolingian Renaissance and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.142 Second, Hirst asserts that the liberal arts, defined as a trivium comprising grammar, logic and rhetoric, and a quadrivium comprising arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, were devised by “the Greeks and the Romans.”143 This claim is also contrary to—indeed, the opposite of—both the historical evidence and the results of generations of historical 139

Hirst (1971), p. 506. Abelson (1906), pp. 8–9. Cf. West (1969 [1892]), pp. 11–12, p. 24. 141 Abelson (1906), p. 9. The reference is to Proverbs 9.1: ‫ הָתְנָב ּהָתיֵב ; הָבְצָח ָהיֶדּוּמַע הָעְבִׁש‬, ‫ֹומְכָח‬. 142 Wagner (1983), p. xi. Cf. West (1969 [1892]), p. 4, p. 6; Colish (1997), Chap. 6, Chap. 12; Haskins (1972 [1927]). 143 Hirst (1971), p. 506. 140

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scholarship: the liberal arts were not in fact divided into the trivium and quadrivium by “the Greeks” or by “the Romans,” but by African and early medieval European educators in the Isocratic tradition.144 Moreover, it has also been widely known for centuries that the trivium and the quadrivium were not “challenged” in the medieval period, as Hirst claims, but rather remained authoritative and all but universal in medieval education until the Renaissance of the fifteenth century and beyond.145 I will turn now to the relevant historical evidence. All of Hirst’s claims concerning liberal arts education in the Middle Ages are wrong. More importantly, those claims are artifacts of a long-standing failure of educationist historiography, namely the omission of serious study of medieval educational thought and practice. Once again, there is a stark contrast between educationists compared to all other historians of education, who recognize the importance of the entire medieval period in the history of educational thought. On the one hand, medievalists have argued that Those who seriously study the history of Western pedagogy come to the inevitable conclusion that the Middle Ages are of fundamental importance. During the mediaeval millennium our education, like so much of the rest of our civilization, was conceived in its present-day lineaments.146

In contrast, educationists largely ignore the entire period,147 and still conform to discredited 19th Century prejudices148 that represented medieval intellectual life as anti-rational, dogmatic and theologically authoritarian.149 One result of this is that all of Hirst’s assertions about medieval education were decades out of date the day they were written. To reiterate the specific claims, Hirst asserts that the liberal arts, defined as a trivium comprising grammar, logic and rhetoric, and a quadrivium comprising arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, was devised by “the Greeks and the Romans,”150 and that liberal arts education defined by the trivium and quadrivium were first challenged in “medieval times.”151 As I shall explain in greater detail in 144

Augustine, Confessions 4.16; Augustine, De Ordine 2.33–44; Augustine De doctrina 2.56–61. Cf. West (1969 [1892]), p. 6; McCarthy (1976), p. 85; Turner (2014), p. 17. 145 Wallach (1955), Gibson (1975), Wagner (1983), Howatson (1989): 519; Kennedy (1992): 284; Drabble (1985): 802, 1000–1; Proussis (1965): 74; Rand (1928): 230; Jaeger (1994), Chap. 5. 146 McGarry (1955), p. xv. Cf. John of Salisbury (1955), p. ix; Haskins (1957), pp. 92–93, p. 368; Coulton (1940), Southern (1967), Chap. 4; Rand (1928), Chap. 7; Bullough (1972), Colish (1997), Chap. 6, Chap. 12. 147 E.g., Noddings (1995); Palmer (2001), Cahn (2001), Curren (2003), Cahn (2009), Johnson and Reed (2011) ignore over a millennium of educational thought, some of it the most influential in history. 148 Acts (1969), Russell (1997), Stark (2016), Chap. 7; Falk (2020), Gabriele and Perry (2021). Harper (2017, p. 12) noted that it has long been recognized that the phrase “the Dark Ages” is “best set aside. It is hopelessly redolent of Renaissance and Enlightenment prejudices. It altogether underestimates the impressive cultural vitality and enduring spiritual legacy of the entire period that has come to be known as ‘late antiquity’.” 149 Englisch (1994), Colish (1997), Falk (2020). 150 Hirst (1971): 506. 151 Hirst (1971): 506.

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the next two paragraphs, all of these assertions are wrong and had been known to be wrong for decades (even centuries) before Hirst made them.152 The division of the Liberal Arts into seven, the organization of the arts into two main groups, and naming the two groups trivium and quadrivium, did not originate with “the Greeks” and “the Romans” as Hirst claims. Leaving aside the anachronistic notion that “the Greeks” might have given the Latin name liber to their educational program, and Latin names—trivium and quadrivium—to its two major divisions, the primary historiographic inadequacy of the claim must be observed: in light of the diversity and divisions between traditional, sophistic, rhetorical, philosophical, and other conceptions of the nature and practice of education within Greek and Roman educational thought, there simply is no such thing as the educational thought of “the Greeks and Romans.”153 Moreover, on any interpretation of the phrase “Greeks and Romans” Hirst’s claim is wrong: both the division of the liberal arts into two groups, and the naming of each group, was begun in another part of the world altogether and finalized in the medieval period rather than by “the Greeks and Romans” of classical antiquity. The early medieval North African educator Martianus Capella, “an author of genius” writing during the final collapse of the Roman Empire, is “the true author of the list of seven arts,”154 and was the first to establish the number of arts at seven, and to divide them into two (unnamed) groups. This tradition of liberal arts education did not derive from Aristotle as Hirst claims, but from Isocrates. As Cook and Herzman concluded. Following a classical tradition that can be traced back as far as Isocrates in the fourth century B.C., Martianus divides the seven [liberal arts] into two groups: the trivium, consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the quadrivium, consisting of music, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry.155

Although Martianus set the number of liberal arts at seven and divided them into a group of three language arts and a group of four mathematical arts, the names of the divisions were devised much later. Boethius formalized the division which originated with Martianus and named the four mathematical arts the quadrivium. As Katzenellenbogen noted, ... it was Boethius who, early in the sixth century, had given structure to the system of the Liberal Arts. He called the four mathematical disciplines (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy) the Quadrivium [...] The three other Arts were accordingly termed Trivium from Carolingian times.156

152

Drabble (1985), p. 802, 1000–1; Howatson (1989), p. 519; Kennedy (1992), p. 284; Proussis (1965), p. 74; Rand (1928), p. 230. 153 Knowles (1988), p. 73; Rand (1928), pp. 229–30; West (1969 [1892]), p. 6. 154 Parker (1890), p. 488. Cf. West (1969 [1892]), p. 18. 155 Cook and Herzman (1983), p. 155. Cf. Abelson (1906), p. 8; Knowles (1988), p. 73; Kristeller (1965), p. 173; Marenbon (1994), p. 173; McCarthy (1976), p. 85; Turner (2014), p. 17, p. 26. 156 Katzenellenbogen (1966), p. 41. Cf. Wagner (1983), p. 249; Novikoff (2013), p. 64.

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As Katzenellenbogen implies, the Seven Liberal Arts were transmitted half named and half unnamed until their definitive form was established during the Carolingian Renaissance of the late Ninth Century. It was the medieval Englishman and Carolingian educator Alcuin who, seems to have originated the division of the seven arts which became standard in the later middle ages, separating off the four mathematical subjects, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, into the quadrivium, and making the literary trivium of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic into the basic course.157

Contrary to Hirst’s assertions, then, the division of the Liberal Arts originates with Martianus Capella in North Africa in the 5th Century, the quadrivium originates with Boethius in the sixth century AD, and the trivium was named during the Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century.158 As for Hirst’s claim that liberal arts education was first “challenged”—whatever that may mean—in the Middle Ages, once again we are confronted by the fact that he provides no evidence and refers to no primary texts. His assertion is dogmatic and there is no reason to accept it. Moreover, there is ample evidence justifying rejection of Hirst’s entire set of assertions: it is contradicted by over a century of historical scholarship directly concerned with this question but to which he never refers.159 What the historical evidence and scholarship do demonstrate is that every major educational philosopher of the Middle Ages—Titus Flavius Clemens, Origen, Boethius, Augustine, Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus, Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, Aquinas, Vittorino de Feltre, Petrarch, Vergerius and more160 —and every major educational institution throughout the European Middle Ages advocated and practiced liberal education and the liberal arts curriculum in the Isocratic tradition.161 As Colish reiterated “The seven liberal arts were the basis of the medieval educational curriculum,”162 and as she noted in her description of the liberal arts education of young men, “medieval education saw to it that the trivium was as much a part of their mental equipment as their Christian faith.”163 Furthermore, contrary to Hirst’s assertion that liberal arts education was somehow “Aristotelean,” with the exceptions of some of the Organon—primarily Boethius’ Latin versions of Categories and On Interpretation—Aristotle’s texts were just beginning to be recovered and translated into Latin during the 12th Century Renaissance, and educational 157

Heer (1961), p. 184. C.f. Rashdall (1936): Vol. 1, 34 n. 2; West (1969 [1892]), p. 21. West (1969 [1892]), pp. 22–23; Clarke (1971), p. 4; Curtius (1953), p. 37; Wagner (1983), p. 1; Kimball (1986). p. 14, p. 51; Laistner (1957), p. 41; Wagner (1983), xi, Marrou (1984), p. 190; Oakley (1979), p. 49. 159 E.g., West (1969 [1892]), Parker (1890), Abelson (1906), Paetow (1910), Acts du Quatrieme Congres International de Philosophie Medievale (1969), Riche (1962), Wagner (1983), Colish (1997), Turner (2014), Chap. 1. 160 Kimball, esp. Chap. 3; Kimball (1986), esp. Chap. 3: Gamble (2007), Kimball (2010), Colish (1997), Chap. 12. 161 Rashdall (1936 [1895]), Jaeger (1994), p. 3; Black (2001), Orme (2006), esp. Chap. 2. 162 Colish (1983), p. viii. Cf. Novikoff (2013), Chap. 3, esp. pp. 62–65. 163 Colish (1983), p. xi. Cf. Turner (2014), p. 28; Smalley (1983 [1940]), p. 43. 158

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philosophers such John of Salisbury incorporated those texts into the seven liberal arts because their emphasis on rhetoric and persuasive reasoning supplemented the Isocratic educational tradition.164 Indeed, the prevalence of the Isocratic educational tradition over any Aristotelean ideas was so well established and so pervasive in the later Middle Ages and early Quattrocento that Petrarch tried to justify the inclusion of some Aristotelian philosophical texts on the grounds that Aristotle shared Isocrates’ (and therefore Cicero’s) conception of philosophy and education.165 Hirst’s historical claims about medieval education are wrong in every particular and were plainly contrary to both the primary evidence and the findings of generations of earlier historians of educational thought.

2.8 When Renaissance Educational Thinkers Said “Isocrates,” They Must Have Meant “Aristotle” Hirst’s discussion of the post-medieval history of liberal education perpetuates his omission of both the primary historical evidence and non-educationist scholarship, and continues to omit the legacy of Isocrates. As a result, his account of Renaissance educational thought consists of claims which are unsubstantiated and had been known to be wrong for decades. His next claim is that, With Renaissance humanism and the rediscovery of classical literature, the full significance of Aristotelian liberal education was temporarily reaffirmed.166

Once again, there is no reason to accept Hirst’s claims because no evidence or argument is provided. Once again, his claims are contrary to both the historical evidence and contemporary historical scholarship. The same historiographic deficiencies then cause the major errors and the major omissions of Hirst’s claims about history of liberal education in Quattrocento Renaissance. Turning first to Hirst’s major error, the rather vague claim that “the significance” of “Aristotelean” liberal education was “reaffirmed” in the Renaissance is quite wrong. We cannot evaluate Hirst’s evidence for this claim because he makes no reference to any text that discusses the “significance” of such education or seeks to “reaffirm” it; indeed, he does not even refer to any primary text or historical evidence or contemporary scholarship. Moreover, contrary to Hirst’s claim, the defining features of Renaissance thought was widespread criticism of Aristotle and especially of the academic Aristotelianism that had stifled so much philosophical education in the universities, and revitalization of the Isocratic tradition in liberal arts education. As early as Petrarch’s De sui ipsius et multorum aliorum ignorantia 164

Novikoff (2013), p. 110; Kretzmann and Stump (1988), esp. Chap. 2. Petrarch, “Of His Own Ignorance and that of Many Others,” in Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall (1948), pp. 53–54, p. 105. Cf. West (1969 [1892]), p. 6; Siegel (1968), pp. 40–41; Gnoza (2012), Chap. 3. 166 Hirst (1971): 507. 165

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there is a sustained critique of Scholastic Aristotelianism in both education and the articulation of any conception of the good life. The great humanist educational and political philosopher Francesco Patrizi’s De regno advocated an explicitly Isocratic and Ciceronian version of humanistic education as the best preparation for good government.167 The humanist educational thinker Lorenzo Valla was a critic of Aristotelean scholasticism and of Aristotle himself, and he articulates an Isocratic humanist program in his Elegantiae linguae Latinae (1471).168 One thinks of Valla’s two book-length critiques of Aristotle and Aristotelianism, and especially the thorough critique of every major tenet of Aristotelianism in his Repastinatio dialecticae et philosophiae (Reploughing of Dialectic and Philosophy)169 Martin Luther was notoriously critical of the effects of Aristotelianism in the education of both priests and laity, arguing that such a dogmatic approach to education prevented the development of the rational and critical faculties.170 The very title of Bacon’s Novum Organon signifies an explicit critique of and replacement of Aristotle in both natural philosophy and educational preparation for it, while his essay “The Refutation of the Philosophies” consists entirely of a critique of both Plato and Aristotle and what he calls their corruption of natural studies. These critiques were sustained in direct relation to education in his The Advancement of Learning.171 The great advocate of women’s education, Juan Luis Vives, advocated a return to Isocrates’ thought in his De Europae Dissidiis et Republica, providing both new Greek texts and new translations of Isocrates Areopagiticus and Nicocles. Thomas Hobbes explicitly rejects the metaphysics, political philosophy and ethical thought of Aristotle and of academic Aristotelianism, and argues that they must both be replaced in education and philosophy.172 The primary evidence demonstrates that there was no “reaffirmation of the full significance of Aristotelian liberal education” during any part or any period of the Quattrocento Renaissance as Hirst claims. On the contrary, the defining feature of Renaissance educational thought is a rejection of Aristotle and a reaffirmation of the tradition of Isocrates in education. As for what is omitted from Hirst’s account of Renaissance liberal education, it is this reaffirmation of the tradition of Isocrates. The great early Renaissance humanist Guarino de Verona (1374–1460) set about to revitalize the Isocratic tradition in Italy, translating Isocrates’ works and using them as a foundation for extensive reform of education and culture generally.173 Within a decade, translations of Isocrates’ works into Latin and vernacular languages were numerous and widely read: a new 167

See Hankins (2019) for a masterful account of Renaissance educational and political thought. Although very widely reviewed, praised, and discussed, I have not found an education journal that even mentions it. 168 Gerl (1974). Cf. Hankins (2019), Gnoza (2012), Chap. 4; Israel (1995), Chap. 3, Chap. 34. 169 Gilbert (1960), p. 130. 170 Painter (1889), p. 83, p. 144. 171 Varvis (1983). More generally see Butterfield (1957), Chap. 4: “The Downfall of Aristotle and Ptolemy.” 172 Hobbes, Leviathan, Pt. 4, Chap. 46. The title of this chapter is “Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous Traditions,” which does not suggest a “reaffirmation” of Aristotle in any obvious way. 173 Gnoza (2012), Chap. 4.

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scholarly editio princeps was published by Demetrios Chalkokondyles published in Milan in 1493, while Aldus Manutius published Epistles 1–8 in 1499 and an edition of the Orations in 1513.174 Hieronymus Wolf published a Latin edition of the complete works in Paris in 1533 and then again in 1570. It is hardly surprising, then, as historian A.G. Dickens observed, that the Renaissance humanist educational program was derived from the educational legacy of Isocrates, and explicitly opposed to Aristotelianism: The specific influences at work were neither Plato nor Aristotle, but rather Plutarch’s tract on the upbringing of children, Cicero on the training of the orator, above all Quintilian’s Education of the Orator... From the work of these men sprang a lasting ideal of liberal education, one which has dominated the schools of the privileged classes in Western countries.175

Plutarch, Cicero and Quintilian all adopt the Isocratic idea of liberal education in conscious opposition to Plato and Aristotle.176 Cicero’s Republic and Laws are modeled on Plato’s dialogues of the same titles but are intended to provide an Isocratic alternative to them, substituting Isocrates’ learned orator for Plato’s philosopherking.177 In Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the purposes which Quintilian had in view and the manner in which he thought to attain them, namely by an appropriate training in rhetoric, are in substance the purpose and method of Isocrates.178

This importance of Isocrates in Renaissance humanism and educational philosophy was widely known and well-documented outside Educational Studies.179 As classicists Mirhady and Too observed, Isocrates’ two works: To Nicocles and Nicocles are especially significant texts in the history of education. In the Renaissance, they were translated into Latin, English, French, and German as paradigms for the genre known as the ‘instruction of princes’.180

In Renaissance England specifically, we see even more clearly how Hirst’s historical assertions are contrary to the historical evidence and generations of historical scholarship. In general terms, Dixon observed, the Isocratic ideal of eloquent wisdom transmitted by Cicero, was inherited by the Renaissance. Isocrates himself was admired by the humanist Ascham, and at the end of the sixteenth century his works were a regular part 174

Too (1995), p. 15, n. 17; Proctor (1930), pp. 66–9; Bisaha (2006), pp. 113–15; Gnoza (2012), Chap. 4. 175 Dickens (1972): 24–5. Cf. Hadas (1962): 68; Seigel (1968): 141–3; Kennedy (1980): 196; Kimball (1986): 222; Knowles (1988): 55; Bauman (1998), p. 8; Bizzell and Herzberg (2001), p. 43; Poulakos and Depew (2004), pp. 4–5; Gnoza (2012), Chap. 3. 176 Curtius (1953): 37; Finley (1975): 199; Good and Teller (1969): 30; Grube (1965): 41, n.2; Hadas (1962): 37–8, 53; Halliwell (1997): 107; Kennedy (1980): 31; Oakley (1979): 48; Quintilian (2016), p. xxix. 177 Hubbell (1913), Kimball (1986): 33; Wimsatt and Brooks (1957): 65, 74. 178 Adamson (1922): 96. Cf. Gilbert (1960), p. 68; Kennedy (1980): 271. 179 See Gnoza (2012). 180 Mirhady and Too (2000): 138, n. 2. Cf. Too (1995), p. 1; Highet (1949): 122–3.

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2 Isocrates and the History of Educational Ideas: Deficiencies … of the English grammar school curriculum. Milton venerated ‘the old man eloquent’ for practicing the wisdom he taught, and his own Areopagitica, in its title, its literary form --that of ‘written speech’ --- and its passionate concern for liberty, quite deliberately recall Isocrates’ Areopagiticus.181

Despite the ample primary evidence and contemporary historical scholarship demonstrating the centrality of Isocratic educational thought in the Renaissance, Hirst mentions none of it. As for Hirst’s claim that Renaissance humanism was an affirmation of “Aristotelian” liberal education, Tudor and Elizabethan humanists affirmed the Isocratic tradition in education in explicit opposition to the “Aristotelianism” that had dominated scholastic philosophy. As Shepherd argued, In seeking to dethrone Aristotle the humanists reasserted the cause of Isocrates and the old rhetoricians.182

This predominance of the educational legacy of Isocrates in not surprising, and evidence of it is plain to anyone who examines the primary texts. For example, the educational ideas of Renaissance humanism were brought to England by Erasmus, whose educational treatise, The Education of a Christian Prince, was explicitly written in imitation of Isocrates.183 Indeed, Erasmus appended his own Latin translation of Isocrates’ To Nicocles to the published editions of his educational treatise. Sir Thomas Elyot translated the first classical text from Greek into English, Isocrates’ To Nicocles,184 and wrote one of the most influential humanist educational treatises in English, the explicitly Isocratic The Boke Named the Governor (1531).185 Francis Bacon’s great educational project, The Great Instauration, is based on an explicit rejection of Aristotle and advocates a combination of scientific education and the Isocratic tradition of rhetorical education.186 Bacon attributed the survival of Aristotle’s philosophy to its superficiality187 and in his epistle (c 1596) of practical educational advice to Fulke Grenville recommends an Isocratic curriculum of literary, historical and rhetorical works that does not include Aristotle. It is an Isocratic and Ciceronian approach to education sustained by Greville himself in his elegant poem A Treatise on Humane Learning.188 When Elizabeth I and James IV sought to resolve a disagreement about the nature and value of moral constancy, they did so by referring to the authority of Isocrates’ instructions to monarchs, and James himself wrote the explicitly Isocratic political treatise—The Prince’s Cabala: or Mysteries of State. With Isocrates’s discourse to a prince, on kingly government.189 Elizabethan and 181

Dixon (1971), p. 10. Sidney (1973): 20. 183 Erasmus (1986), Vol. 27: 203–4. cf. Kimball (1986): 88; Oberman (1975): 61; Rummel (1985): 104–5; Tracy, (1978): 62, 66; Highet (1949), pp. 122–123; Jebb (1893), Vol. 2, pp. 81–82. 184 Elyot (1962): viii; Lanthrop (1933): 41; Lehmberg (1960): 125–6. 185 Bush (1939): 79; Kinghorn (1971): 92; Rollins and Baker (1954): 106. 186 Bacon (1861), p. 147 ff. Cf. Klein (2003). 187 Novum Organon, Book 1, Chap. LXXVII. Cf. Chap. LXIII. 188 See Buncombe (1966), p. 73, p. 174, p. 198. 189 Hume, History of England, Chap. 41: Elizabeth. 182

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Renaissance humanism is plainly not an “affirmation of ‘Aristotelian’ education” as Hirst asserted, but rather a self-conscious reaffirmation of. the technical instructions and moral insistences from an unbroken line of rhetoricians stretching back through the humanists to Quintilian, Cicero and Isocrates.190

As we have seen above, and as others have recently recognized191 —albeit without Isocrates’ role—there is a continuous route from early modern humanism to the educational ideas, policies and curricula of today’s compulsory state schooling. There are fewer historical facts better established and more widely known than the unequaled influence of Isocrates in the entire history of educational philosophy, ideas, policy, and practice, from classical antiquity to the present day.192 As Aron observed, “Cultural traditions are the more imperious for being the less conscious,”193 and Isocrates is a prime example.

2.9 Return to Condorcet: Recognizing and Admitting Error is a Precondition of Progress The quotation from Condorcet that opened this chapter reminds us that intellectual progress, and the moral and political progress that follows from it, is not possible unless it includes recognition of ignorance and correction of errors. Beginning in the 1960s, prominent educationists—Peters, Hirst, Curren, White, Kaminsky, Johnston, and many more—have made definitive assertions about the history, content, merits, and methodology of educational philosophy. Yet the assertions are not only unsupported by historical evidence or methodological argument, but are in almost every particular directly contradicted by both the primary texts and generations of historical scholarship by non-educationists. This scholarship was easily available in well-known scholarly and even introductory texts, and all of the primary texts were readily available in the library of any research university. Yet educationist historiography took no account of this material, but instead uncritically reiterated historical assertions and methodology for decades on the basis of a supposed consensus unsupported by historical evidence. Educationist historiography of the past century, dependent on “consensus” without evidence and sustained by intellectual isolation, must be completely replaced. In recent years, institutional facts such as the dramatic decline in the number of academic positons in educational philosophy, accompanied by the rapid disappearance of philosophy, the history of ideas, and the liberal arts generally from teacher training, have compelled a few educationists to cautiously consider the possibility 190

Sidney (1973), p. 45. E.g., White (2006), pp. 43–59; White (2009), Powell (2002), p. 1. Cf. Good and Teller (1969), p. 30. 192 E.g., Finley (1975), Hadas (1962): 62–63, 103; Power (1991): 102; Welch (1999), Chap. 2. 193 Aron (1968), p. 72. 191

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that the discipline might need to be changed or even improved in some way.194 The problem with these works is that they sustain the self-referential intellectual isolation and dependence on “consensus” that has plagued Educational Studies since the early 1900s and are the primary causes of the discipline’s decline. These books take no substantial account of the educational scholarship of non-educationists in the history of educational philosophy or in methodology, do not recognize the pervasive errors and omissions that are the salient feature of educationist historiography (and well-known outside Educational Studies) and therefore cannot correct them, and are limited to discussion of state schooling subordinated to political doctrine expressed indirectly by rhetorical phrases such as “the empirical realities of teaching.” What these books fail to recognize is Condorcet’s observation that progress cannot occur until pervasive and foundational errors have been corrected; that educational philosophy cannot recover by slightly modifying the very things that caused its decline. One of many examples of what is necessary and long overdue is a recovery of some understanding of the educational philosophy of Isocrates and its unequaled influence in the history of educational thought, in normative methodology and in contemporary educational thought and practice. Such a recovery of the history of educational philosophy will not occur until educationists reject their reliance on an a priori “consensus”—until they reject the primacy of conformity over evidence—that ignores historical evidence and scholarship and instead develop an adequate historiography defined by a return to the primary texts (in the original languages) of the wonderfully rich and diverse history of educational philosophy. A long overdue return to adequate historiography and methodology, including recovery of Isocrates’ educational philosophy and its legacy, are necessary if substantive educational philosophy is once again to have any presence in Educational Studies.195

194

E.g., Colgan (2018), Colgan and Maxwell (2020) offer a genuine but insular attempt to discover what has gone wrong. Kincheloe and Hewitt (2011) advocated “regenerating” educational philosophy by doing exactly what has failed for decades but doing it more “radically,” namely subordinating educational philosophy to trendy doctrines from other disciplines—critical theory, deconstruction—in conformity with the already dominant subordination of state schooling to academic political doctrine. Its opening lines do establish the vanguard’s imitation of proletarian street-cred— “Cold ass February, 2008 […] The ‘fucking’ situational irony of it all was too much to bear”—but it did nothing to “regenerate” educational philosophy. It has already been replaced by the deduction of implications for state schooling from a new generation of briefly fashionable, non-philosophical doctrines trivialized and simplified from their decades-old original forms in other disciplines (postcolonialism, intersectionality, Critical Race Theory.) For example, the theme of the 2022 Conference of the Philosophy of Education Society (https://www.philosophyofeducation.org/Conference) replaces philosophy with a resurrection of the notion of “contact zones” taken from literary theory the year Color Me Badd was top of Billboard, and then deduces the standard political prescriptions from the imagined subordination of educational institutions to this notion. What is most striking about this is not the minimal role of anything resembling philosophy or the 30-year time lag or the stultifying methodological uniformity—all that has become de rigueur—but the near absence of a “contact zone” between educationists and the genuinely diverse and thriving contemporary philosophical thought about education (e.g., Marks 2021; Kitcher 2021; Montas 2021; Koganzon 2021a). 195 E.g., Herbst (1999), Richardson (1999a, b).

References

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Quick, R. H. (1880). Introduction. In J. Locke & R. H. Quick (Eds.), Some thoughts concerning education. Cambridge University Press. Quintilian. (2016). In J. J. Murphy & C. Wiese (Eds.), On the teaching of speaking and writing (2nd ed). Southern Illinois University Press. Race, W. (1978). Panathenaicus 74–90: The Rhetoric of Isocrates’ Digression on Agamemnon. Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), 108, 175–185. Rand, E. K. (1928), Founders of the Middle Ages. New York: Dover Publications. Rashdall, H. (1936 [1895]). The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (ed. F.M. Powicke and A.M. Emden) (3 vols.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawson, E. (1991). The Spartan tradition in European thought (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Richardson, W. (1999a). Historians and educationists: The history of education as a field of study in post-war England, Part 1: 1945–72. History of Education, 26(1), 1–30. Richardson, W. (1999b). Historians and Educationists: The history of education as a field of study in post-war England, Part 2: 1972–96. History of Education, 28(2), 109–141. Riche, P. (1962). Education et culture dans l’Occident barbare, 6e–8e siecles. Editions du Seuil. Robinson, J. C. (2015). Foundations of education: A social, political, and philosophical approach. Canadian Scholars Press. Rollins, H. E., & Baker, H. (eds.) (1954). The Renaissance in England. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Co. Romano, C. (2012). America the philosophical. Knopf. Rousseau, J. J. (1979). Emile, or On Education (trans. with Introduction, A. Bloom). New York: Basic Books. Rummel, E. (1985). Erasmus as a Translator of the Classics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Russell, J. B. (1997). Inventing the flat earth: Columbus and modern historians. Praeger. Säfström, C. A. (2021). The ethical-political potentiality of the educational present: Aristocratic principle versus democratic principle. Teoría De La Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria, 33(1), 11–33. Said, S., & Trede, M. (1999). A short history of Greek literature. Routledge. Scheffler, I. (1960). The language of education. Charles C. Thomas. Schinz, A. (1929). La Pensee de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Libraire Felix Alcan. Seigel, J. E. (1968). Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shell, S. (1996). The embodiment of reason: Kant on spirit, generation, and community. University of Chicago Press. Shklar, J. N. (1969). Men and citizens: A study in Rousseau’s social theory. Cambridge University Press. Sidney, P. (1973 [1595]). An apology for poetry. In G. Shepherd (Ed.), Manchester University Press. Simpson, P. L. P. (1998). A philosophical commentary on the politics of Aristotle. University of North Carolina Press. Sinclair, T. A. (1962). A history of classical Greek literature: From Homer to Aristotle. Collier Books. Sinclair, T. A. (1967). A history of Greek political thought (2nd ed.). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Smalley, B. (1983). The study of the Bible in the middle ages (3rd ed.). University of Notre Dame Press. Southern, R. W. (1967). The Making of the Middle Ages. London: Hutchinson and Co. Stark, R. (2016). Bearing false witness. Tempelton Press. Stehlik, T. (2018). Educational philosophy for 21st century teachers. Palgrave Macmillan. Strachey, L. (1918). “Preface”, Eminent Victorians. Garden City Publishing. Strauss, L. (1967). Liberal education and mass democracy. In R. A. Goldwin (Ed.), Higher education and modern democracy. Rand McNally. Strauss, L. (1989). The rebirth of classical political rationalism. An introduction to the thought of Leo Strauss (selected and introduced by T. L. Pangle). University of Chicago Press. Sydney, Sir Phillip. (1973). An apology for poetry. In E. Shepherd (Ed.), A. Wheaton and Co.

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Tarcov, N. (1984). Locke’s Education for Liberty. London: University of Chicago Press. Tibble, J. W. (Ed.). (1966). The study of education. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Tibble, J. W. (ed.) (1971). An Introduction to the Study of Education. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Too, Y. L. (1995). The Rhetoric of identity: Text, power, pedagogy. University of Cambridge Press. Too, Y. L. (2001). Introduction: Writing the history of ancient education. In Y. L. Too (Ed.), Education in Greek and roman antiquity. Brill. Tracy, J.D. (1978). The Politics of Erasmus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Turner, J. (2014). Philology: The forgotten origins of the modern humanities. Princeton University Press. Usher, S. (1973). The style of Isocrates. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, No. 20, pp. 39–67. van Hook, L. (1919).Alcidamas versus Isocrates: The spoken versus the written word. The Classical Weekly, XII(12), 89–94. Varvis, S. (1983). Humanism and the scientific revolution: Bacon’s rejection of Aristotle. Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 14(1), 59–79. Villa, D. (2017). Teachers of the people: Political education in Rousseau, Hegel. Chicago University Press. Wagner, D. L. (Ed.). (1983). The seven liberal arts in the middle ages. Indiana University Press. Walker, J. (2011). The genuine teachers of this art: Rhetorical education in antiquity. University of South Carolina Press. Wallach, L. (1955). Education and culture in the tenth century. Medievalia and Humanistica, 9, 18–22. Warah, T. (2012). The theory and practice of life: Isocrates and the philosophers. Harvard University Press. Welch, K. A. (1999). Electric rhetoric: Classical Rhetaric, oralism and a new literacy. MIT Press. West, A. F. (1969 [1892]). Alcuin and the Rise of the Christian Schools. New York: Greenwood Press. White, J. (1999). ‘Review of A.O. Rorty’s philosophers on education: new historical perspectives’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 33: 3, pp. 485–500. White, J. (2004). ‘Reply to James Muir’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 36(4), pp. 455–458. White, J. (2006). The Puritan origins of the 1988 school curriculum in England. In A. Moore (Ed.), Schooling, society and curriculum. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group. White, J. (2009). Why general education? Peters, Hirst and history. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43(1), 123–141. White, J. (2013). ‘Philosophy, philosophy of education, and economic realities’, Theory and Research in Education, 11(3), pp. 294–303. Williams, D. L. (2007). Rousseau’s platonic enlightenment. Pennsylvania State University Press. Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., & Brooks, C. (1957). Literary criticism: A short history. Vintage Books. Wirz, C. (1963–65). Note sur Emile et Sophie, ou les Solitaires. Annales de la Societe Jean-Jacques Rosseau, 36, 291–303. Zaretsky, R., & Scott, J. T. (2009). The philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the limits of human understanding. Yale University Press.

Chapter 3

First Philosophy in Educational Thought: The Four Questions and Two Methods

By and large the greatest philosophers have been the greatest, and the most self-conscious, methodologists; indeed, I am tempted to regard this fact as primarily accounting for their greatness as philosophers. H. P. Grice1

In 1895, pioneering theorists of state schooling James McLellan and John Dewey wrote that It is, indeed, advisable that the teacher should understand, and even be able to criticize, the general principles upon which the whole educational system is formed and administered.2

McLellan and Dewey argued that general principles are rarely criticized because they are too often concealed beneath long-standing practices that have become habitual rather than self-consciously understood and articulated. Consequently, they argued the principles on which educational policy and practice are based must be periodically re-stated and re-evaluated if educational theory and practice are not to succumb to the easy conformism of the conventional and customary. The nature of this undertaking is captured by Locke’s image of the philosophical under-laborer clearing away the detritus of unexamined ideas and habitual methods so that we can prepare the ground for advancement of human understanding.3 Locke proceeds from this image to a restatement of the primacy of Socratic self-knowledge of our own ignorance: The problem is not that what we believe is false, although that is possible, but that we do not know whether what we believe is true or not because we do not really understand what we believe or why we believe it. For Locke, as for Socrates and, indeed, for Heidegger, such self-knowledge of our own ignorance must lead us directly to questions of method (Plato, Apology 38a; Plato Parmenides 136c-d; Heidegger (1993)4 ): how do we discover and examine our own habitual assumptions, how did we come to believe such things in the first place? Self-consciousness about method, whether of analysis or argumentation, is always one of the primary subjects 1

Grice (1986), p. 66. McLellan and Dewey (1895), pp. 14–15. 3 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Epistle 9. 34–35. 4 Heidegger (1993), Sects. 3, 8, 31. 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. R. Muir, Isocrates, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00971-6_3

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for any person and for any discipline which purports to seek knowledge. This is “first philosophy” in Aristotle’s Socratic sense—in Aristotle’s sense of τα` περ`ι τÁς πρωτης ´ ϕιλoσoϕ´ιας (On First Philosophy), the title he gave to the book others5 renamed Metaphysics centuries later—and by derivation in the sense of Hobbes’, Descartes’ and even Nietzsche’s use of the phrase “first philosophy” to denote the unity in self-consciousness of methodology and knowledge of our own ignorance that stands at the beginning of philosophical argumentation.6 The triadic relation between our habituated opinions, philosophical selfknowledge of our ignorance, and the primacy of philosophical methodology is repeatedly articulated in the history of philosophy—from Polemarchus’ dependence on Simonides7 to Aristotle’s preliminary articulation of popular opinion about any subject he examines8 to Aquinas’ use of Islamic neo-Platonism to examine presuppositions of the Church9 to Descartes’ contemptuous faux deference to academics of the University of Paris10 to Hume’s scornful discussions of the “servile philosophy” of the universities11 and other conformist critics12 and beyond—but it is adumbrated with admirable clarity by A.N. Whitehead: When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.13

If there is a presupposition that is virtually universal in contemporary educational philosophy, policy, and practice, it is that formal education ought to be valued primarily as a means to attain social or political justice as defined by political doctrine.14 This presupposition about the value and purpose of education has an obvious corollary for normative method: the normative principles of the conduct and goals of education ought to be deduced from an axiomatic political doctrine that defines justice and the acceptable means by which justice can be attained. This unity of normative method and conception of the value of education are our “general principles upon which the whole educational system is formed and administered,” and in need of renewed understanding and criticism. 5

Possibly Adronicus of Rhodes in the mid-first century BCE, some three centuries after Aristotle’s death. 6 Hobbes, Elementorum Philosophiae, Preface 18; Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, Preface 9–10. Cf. Pippin (2010). 7 Plato, Republic 331d-e. 8 E.g., Metaphysics 1.3 ff. = 983a ff.; Politics Bk. 2. 9 Commentary on De Trinitate of Boethius, Qs. 5 and 6, “Division and Methods of the Sciences.” 10 Meditations, “Letter of Dedication.” 11 Hume, “The Rise of Arts and Sciences.” 12 Hume, “On Moral Prejudices.” 13 Whitehead (1952), p. 48. 14 E.g., Burbules (1989, Ayers et al., (1998), Marshall and Gerstl-Pepin (2005), Ayers et al., (2009), Ruitenberg (2009), Heyting et al., (2001), Hytten and Bettez (2011), Adams and Bell (2016).

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The questions of the normative method and criteria of value of education present us with two immediate problems. First is the problem of what we believe justice to be: there are many conflicting and sometimes incommensurable political doctrines which define what justice is: for example liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, feminism, free market libertarianism, a fluid intersectionality of rights of cultural, gender and other identities, as a theological–political doctrine15 defining the rule of God’s Will, and the many variants of each doctrine. As Whitehead’s claim suggests, however, there is a second and much more fundamental problem in the form of a methodology which is not articulated explicitly and consequently not provided with a justification, and yet which advocates of very different political doctrines—liberals, neo-liberals, feminists, patriarchal religious believers, conservatives, and socialists—all use to articulate their understanding of the normative relation between politics and education. This normative method is doctrinal conditional deduction (DCD), the deduction of the value of education from political doctrine. The pervasiveness of DCD method in educational philosophy was once widely discussed, but explicit articulation or even recognition of it faded after the early 1960s when educationists replaced systematic study of educational philosophy and its history16 with “applied philosophy” and almost uniform advocacy of state schooling. In the spirit of first philosophy, I intend to provide a schematic articulation of DCD for two reasons. First, my primary intention is to articulate the normative method Isocrates uses to determine what the value of education ought to be. Second, since one of Isocrates’ most pervasive legacies to contemporary educational theory and practice is dependence on DCD normative method, my Socratic intention is to contribute to methodological self-knowledge in contemporary educational philosophy generally.17

3.1 The Four Questions of Educational Philosophy The first philosophy of education is defined by four philosophical questions. The questions are: (1) (2) (3) (4)

15

Logical Structure: What is the logical structure that all education has? The Nature of Education: Is education an autonomous enterprise, or is education subordinated to other (presumably more important) enterprises? The Value of Education: What are the normative criteria or standards by which the goals of education are judged to be valuable? The Normative Method(s) of Educational Value: What normative methods are used to articulate and justify the criteria or standards of the value of education?

See Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise; Tanguay (2003), Israel (2010), Meier (2017). Dielt (1954), Stanley (1958), Burns (1962), Kneller (1962), Lucas (1969), Nordenbo (1979), Evers (1993). 17 For a much more detailed version of this argument, see Muir (2018). 16

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These four questions constitute the first philosophy of education because educational policy, practice, popular discourse about education and schooling, academic theorizing about education and schooling, and the history of educational philosophy and ideas all consist largely of answers to these questions. In other words, these four philosophical questions must be asked and answered because everything else in educational philosophy, theory, policy, and practice is determined by the answers given to these four questions. Furthermore, all four questions must also be answered together as a cohesive whole: if we remove any one of these questions, then there can be no coherent educational philosophy and no coherent educational policy or practice.

3.2 Question 1: What Is the Logical Structure of Education? Any discussion of the nature, normative methodology, and the value of education depends on a prior conception of what education is; one cannot talk about what the value of a thing is without first describing what the thing is. The logical structure of formal education can be articulated by the following nine-part schematic18 :

All formal education consists of (1) a teaching agent which (2) transmits content using (3) methods by which content is transmitted to (4) a learning agent, (5) the transmission of content from the learning agent to the teaching agent, (6), (7), and 18

Muir (2018), Chap. 1 provides a more elaborate argument.

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(8) the specific knowledge, skills, and moral dispositions that are transmitted, and (9) the institution within which all of this takes place. Although each part of the logical structure of education is universal, each part at the same time takes a specific form that is relative to the particular community in which the education occurs. For example, while it is universally true that all formal education must have a teaching agent, it is also true that those teaching agents will take specific forms which are relative to particular communities: there is always a teaching agent, but that teacher may be a parent, an instructor hired by the parents (as tutor or in a private school), an instructor hired by the state, a person of theological authority,19 or a traditional elder,20 to name a few. In the same way, while it is universally true that there must always be content transmitted from the teaching agent to the learning agent, that content (or curriculum) will be relative to the time, place, and regime in which the education takes place: the content can be dogmatically religious or dogmatically secular; the content may be multicultural or it may be monocultural (as it is in much of the world); the educational system may instruct the learning agents in one language or it may instruct the students in more than one language. The same is true of teaching methods used to transmit content from the teaching agent to the learning agent: it is universally true that there must be teaching method(s), and it is also true that the teaching methods will be relative to the community, and may include, for example, the transmission of religious or political dogma by methods of rote memorization, the transmission of pluralism in matters of religion and politics by self-guided instructional methods, the transmission of practical skills by the methods of apprenticeship and practice, or various combinations of some or all of these teaching methods. Finally, while all formal education is intended to transmit specific beliefs, skills, and moral dispositions to the learning agents, the specific beliefs, skills, and dispositions will be relative to the community and may include the knowledge and moral dispositions of an exclusive religious tradition or of a secular, multicultural state. While there are many relative conceptions of the nature of teachers and students, teaching methods and teaching materials, and beliefs, skills, and morality, the fact remains that all such conceptions are particular expressions of the nine universal components of the logical structure of formal education.

19

Religion can be too easily dismissed as the “opiate of the masses,” a phrase best known from Marx’s 1844 Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie although it had long been a commonplace of German literature, from Novalis’ 1798 Blüthenstaub to Heinrich Heine’s 1840 memorial to Ludwig Borne (Heine 2006). It ignores religion’s rationally sophisticated theological groundings, the practical fact of its political power and, perhaps most of all, the role and value it has for believers in their own experience. 20 This is a vital feature of the recovery of Aboriginal education in Canada. See Stiegelbauer (1996), Anonson et al. (2014).

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3.3 Question 2: What Is the Nature of Education? The question of what the value of education ought to be has two necessary parts: the nature of education and the normative method of education. There are two ideas of the nature of education in the history of educational thought. The first is the Subordinate Idea of the Nature of Education, which has been accepted by the great majority of educational theorists, in history and especially in contemporary educational thought. They argue that it is the nature of education to be subordinate to more important human activities such as politics, economics, or religion (or usually amalgams of all three), and consequently that education is valued as a means by which the goals of those activities can be attained. Specifically, education can be subordinated to politics or to religion (or both) and valued as a means to their goals, namely (social) justice, faith, or some combination of them. If education is subordinate to politics, and if politics in a regime is guided by democratic political doctrine, then education will be valued as a means to attain and sustain a democratic regime. If education is subordinate to politics, and if politics in a regime is guided by theologico-political doctrine, then education will be valued as a means to faith and righteousness (or obedience to Revealed Law) required to attain and sustain the theologico-political regime. The Subordinate Idea of the Nature of Education is the most common idea of the nature of education in history and arguably the only idea of the nature of education throughout the history of Educational Studies, though the arguments for it have always been dubitable and may no longer be sustainable.21 Although they will not be discussed in this book, it should be acknowledged that in the history of educational philosophy there have always been philosophers— usually more profound but far fewer in number—who adhere to the Autonomous Idea of the Nature of Education. They argue that it is the nature of education to be autonomous—literally, able to generate its own unique principles—and consequently that education is valued as a means to a goal which is unique to it and not the goal of any other enterprise.22 That goal is freedom of thought (without which there can be no “autonomy”) and an unrestricted search for demonstrable knowledge. One implication of the autonomous idea of the nature of education is that it will always be in some tension with other human enterprises, such as politics, economics, and 21

Muir (2018), p. 27; Chap. 7. I have frequently been told that R. S. Peters’ notion that education is initiation into “intrinsically worth-while activities” is—somehow—advocacy of autonomous education. It is not, for two main reasons. First, education can be and is subordinated to normative activities and criteria external to education but regarded as “intrinsically worth-while”, in which case education is both subordinate and aimed at those activities. Second, and more decisively, Peters acknowledged that he had “failed to give a convincing transcendental justification of ‘worthwhile activities’” (Peters 1983, p. 37), and for several years earlier had already argued that education is normatively subordinate to democracy (e.g., Peters 1981, p. 49, 1989, p. 35). Indeed, he had advocated the subordination of education to political doctrine from the beginning of his career, claiming “that education should be ‘democratic’ no one in a democracy would seriously dispute” (Peters 1966, p. 291. Cf. White 2009, pp. 123–124). Throughout his career, Peters explicitly conformed to the dominant axiom of Educational Studies, the belief that education ought to be subordinate to political doctrine.

22

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religion, because those enterprises doctrinally—and sometimes violently—limit both freedom of thought (and therefore autonomy) and the search for knowledge. There is no regime and no group of political activists that does not believe that its political doctrine justifiably limits freedom of thought, freedom of speech and communication, and the search for knowledge. Whether it is the tragedy of communism, Nazism or fascism or the farce of our own anti-fascist or populist or liberal book banning and “cancel culture” enthusiasts,23 the fundamental principle is the same: if an idea or argument does not conform to their political doctrine, then no one is permitted to teach it or read a book that states and provides arguments for it.24 It is a transhistorical feature of the subtle relation between education and political doctrine that underlies the fact that Isocrates in his Antidosis presents himself as a potential martyr of philosophy, just as Plato and Xenophon present Socrates as an actual martyr of philosophy in their respective Apology of Socrates.25

3.4 Questions 3 and 4: What Are the Normative Methods and Value of Education? The Autonomous Idea of the Nature of Education and the Subordinate Idea of the Nature of Education each has its own distinct normative method.26 Isocrates always treats education as subordinate to politics and consequently valued as a means to attain the goals of politics. In methodological terms, Isocrates deduced what the value of education ought to be from political doctrine (albeit with religious elements in some cases). Isocrates recognized that political doctrines differ from regime to regime, and from time to time within the same regime, and consequently understood that the normative goals and conduct of education will always be relative to the particular regime at the particular time in which it is conducted. This implies a relation between the universal and relative parts of Isocrates’ argument that must be emphasized: Isocrates argued that education is normatively relative because it is the universal nature of education to be subordinate to politics and because politics varies from place to place and time to time. Education is valued as a means to attain

23 Books various dogmatic constituencies sought to ban in Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/books/ 29-books-that-were-challenged-in-canada-1.4551912 and https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/novascotia/pride-breaks-with-halifax-libraries-after-controversial-book-kept-on-shelves-1.6045823. In 2021, the Toronto District School Board censored distinguished attorney Marie Henein’s book Nothing But the Truth: A Memoir, and Nobel Prize-winner Nadia Murad’s book The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State. See https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/an-ontario-school-board-undergoes-review-ofevery-book-in-every-library-to-cull-those-harmful-to-students. 24 Bloom (1987), pp. 313–314, Bloom (1990), pp. 29–30. 25 The normative method of autonomous education is beyond the scope of this book. See Muir (2018) for a more thorough argument. 26 Muir (2018), Chap. 8 for the normative method of autonomous education.

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political goals as defined by the political doctrine—or clash of changing political doctrines—that prevails in each particular time and place. If we accept that it is the nature of education to be subordinate to politics, then the normative method used to determine the value of education will be Doctrinal Conditional Deduction (DCD),27 a species of conditional deduction in which the first premise of the normative deduction is a political doctrine. Political doctrine (which often includes economic and, increasingly rarely, theological components), consists of definitions of justice and the acceptable means to attain it. In the case of DCD in contemporary education, the value of education is deduced from a first premise which consists of an axiomatic political doctrine.28 Normative judgments about the value and ethical conduct of education are made using DCD whenever normative criteria of each of the nine components of the logical structure of formal education, and the relations between them, are deduced from an axiomatic political doctrine. Such DCD as normative method in education universally has the following structure: Step 1:

Axiom I: it is the nature of education to be subordinate to politics; i.e., education is valued as a means to the goals of politics. | ∨

Step 2:

Axiom II: the normative method in education is DCD in which the normative criteria of all nine parts of education are deduced from political doctrine. | ∨

Step 3:

Selection of a Political Doctrine (e.g., theologico-political doctrine [Islamic, Christian, other], secular liberal political doctrine, conservative political doctrine, anarchist political doctrine,29 Marxist political doctrine, and many more.) | ∨

Step 4:

27

Application of Doctrinal Conditional Deduction: deduce the normative criteria of the nine parts of education from the selected axiomatic political doctrine:

This is explained in Muir (1999a, 2018). There are instructive similarities between DCD and what Guess (2008) calls “ideal theories” or “ethics-first” political theory. 29 Long Live Kropotkin! 28

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This conditionally deductive normative method assumes (1) that it is the nature of education to be subordinate to politics, (2) that education is valued as a means to justice as defined by political doctrine, and (3) that our conceptions of the valuable teacher, valuable curriculum, valuable teaching methods, the valuable knowledge, skills, and dispositions students will acquire, and the valuable institutional modes of delivery are all deduced from a political doctrine. While DCD normative method in education has this universal structure, its application to normative judgments about education produces results which are relative to particular doctrinal commitments. In other words, the method (Steps 1–3) is always the same, and only the axiomatic political doctrine will vary. The fact that this one method is used in exactly the same way by advocates of very different political doctrines must be emphasized because it is necessary to understanding the uniformity of normative method that underlies the (albeit limited) diversity of doctrinal normative educational debate today. Whenever adherents of any specific political doctrine—theologico-political or (neo-)liberal or democratic or feminist or anti-racist or patriarchal or conservative or progressive or communitarian political doctrine—claim that education ought to be valued as a means to justice as defined by their political doctrine, they are using exactly the same DCD method, and they are using it in exactly the same way. If one begins with a commitment to feminist political doctrine, then one deduces from that doctrine what the valuable feminist teacher, feminist curriculum, feminist aims, feminist teaching methods, and so on

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ought to be; on the other hand, if one begins from a commitment to conservative political doctrine, then one deduces from conservatism what the valuable conservative teacher, conservative curriculum, conservative aims, conservative teaching methods, and so on ought to be. If I begin with a commitment to a racist authoritarian political doctrine, then I will deduce from that doctrine that the valuable teacher will be a member of the favored race who inculcates that doctrine, that teaching methods will emphasize obedience and rote learning, and that I will try to produce students with beliefs and moral dispositions that dispose them to discriminate against other races, and so on. If, however, I begin with a commitment to a multicultural doctrine, then I will more likely deduce from that doctrine that the valuable teachers are those who represent the ethnic diversity of the regime, that teaching methods should emphasize diversity and cultural self-expression, that I will try to produce students who are morally disposed to repudiate racial discrimination, that ethical instructional methods are those which do not discriminate and so on. In these and all such cases, the value of education is relative to a specific political doctrine and the logical mode of that relativity is deductive dependence on the axiomatic political doctrine. The rhetorical claim that education is relative to a political doctrine is an imprecise way of expressing the universal logical claim that the value of education is conditionally deduced from a political doctrine.

3.4.1 Two Kinds of Political Doctrine: Empirical and Inductive Versus A Priori and Deductive Before we proceed to examine Isocrates’ articulation of some important features of the idea of subordinate education and its DCD normative methodology, it will be useful to distinguish between two general genera of political doctrine of which specific political doctrines are species. The two general genera of political doctrine are deductive-rationalist (DR) and inductive-empirical (IE), while each specific political doctrine—such as liberalism, feminism, conservativism, and Marxism—is a species of one of these genera.30 It will be easier to articulate Isocrates’ IE political doctrine if we first contrast it with the DR form common in contemporary academic political philosophy, especially liberalism (in its many variants). These DR-doctrines have a logical structure in which specific political principles, policies, and practical judgments are deduced from abstract axiomatic doctrine, with the consequence that the principles, policies, and judgments are said to be rational if they are validly and soundly31 deduced from the doctrinal axiom. For example, Rawls’ principles of justice are deduced from 30

For descriptions of the two general modes of articulating political theory and political doctrine see Machiavelli, Prince, Chaps. 9 and 15; Geuss (2008), Israel (2010), Chap. 5; Scott (2020), esp. Part 2. 31 I am using the terms valid and sound in their formal logical sense, as found in any introductory logic textbook.

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axioms consisting of highly abstract conceptions of the political agent and the agent’s situation in the Original Position (as described below). The axioms of DR political doctrine are formulated by academics or other intellectuals abstracted from the actual citizens’ history, experience, and understanding of political life. In this mode of political theorizing, intellectuals formulate conceptions of both human agency and principles of justice, and then impose them on to both citizens and political life. In contrast, Isocrates does not formulate axiomatic principles of agency and justice and then impose them on political discourse because he respects and takes account of the political reasoning, history, experience, record of success and failure, and practical judgment of ordinary citizens and political rulers, who develop political doctrine with an inductive logical structure which is quite different from the deductive mode so often preferred by modern theorists and contemporary academics. The great AngloGerman scholar F. C. S. Schiller reiterated what he understood to be an Isocratic pragmatic argument: The noblest service philosophy can render us is to pass a self-denying ordinance: to draw our attention away from idle and inactive speculation about reality, and towards the real ways in which ideals are articulated and the world of reality is rendered fit to live in.32

The IE-method model of formulating political doctrine begins by observing the political opinions and practices of citizens and leaders as they are and as they live in real political communities. These political doctrines are inducted from past political experience and history and then empirically tested in present and future political experience. The empirical test consists of a determination of whether the citizens find that the practical results of these doctrines meet their needs and preferences. Consequently, these doctrines and opinions are not said to be rational because they can be validly and soundly deduced from an abstract axiom by an abstract agent but because they have been shown by an empirical method of trial-and-error in political experience to serve the interests of most citizens sufficiently to gain their allegiance.33 The differences between these two models of political theorizing—one abstract and deductive, the other empirical and inductive—are fundamental to Isocrates’ political and educational thought and therefore require more detailed description and explanation.

3.5 Inductive-Empirical Versus Deductive-Rationalist Political Doctrines: The Problem of Individuality One of the primary tasks of political philosophy is to seek knowledge of the principles and administrative procedures of justice that can regulate human activity in the 32

Schiller (1907), p. 223. Cf. Mikkola (1954), p. 71. Schiller’s belief that the American pragmatism of William James and Charles Peirce is part of the legacy of Isocrates may not be as eccentric as it once seemed (Matson 1957; Mailloux 1995; Romano 2012; Kegley 2016). 33 This is a method used across the political spectrum, “right” and “left.” See Scruton (1984), Geuss (2008), Trepanier and Callahan (2018), Scott (2020), Horcher (2020).

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best interests of all citizens, if not all human beings. One of the primary problems we confront as soon as we begin to seek such knowledge is the remarkable diversity of human beings and human interests.34 There are many intersecting modes of diversity, from individuality to identity to culture to religion and many more. These modes of collective and individual diversity raise a primary question of political philosophy: How is it possible—is it possible?—to discover and articulate principles and procedures for the just and stable35 regulation of individual and collective conduct which take full account of the very different individual persons and their very different goals, modes of proceeding, sentiments, experiences, histories, priorities, goals, identities, and so much more. Individuality is not (nor is it a basis of) individualism: individuality is a fact of human nature, while individualism is a normative preference. Understanding individuality begins with the descriptive task of seeking knowledge of what real people are like in all their diverse particularity, not the prescriptive task of advocating that all people ought to be independent and self-reliant individuals with priority over any collective interest. Academic philosophers, lawyers, politicians, and activists are trying to articulate moral principles, laws, and modes of education and government to regulate and order human persons and communities by a common set of principles and institutions, but they can never quite succeed unless and until they have knowledge of the real diversity—the actual individuality—of human nature. Isocrates’ educational thought is grounded, in part, in an account of human nature that recognizes such diversity and the dangers of ignoring it. Political philosophers who use the IE-method argue that description of human nature and the real diversity of human beings must precede political philosophy itself because we cannot seek knowledge of justice and the good life for persons and communities until we have some empirical knowledge of what persons and communities are like, what they seek, and how they do things. It is not philosophers who best provide such an education and such knowledge of human diversity, but rather it is the historians and the mimetic artists who have such knowledge, and so who best describe and explain human diversity and individuality. One thinks of the remarkable array of very diverse and individual characters mimetically represented in the literary art of the Gilgamesh, Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Cao Xueqin, Luo Guanzhong, Murasaki Shikibu, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austin, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Miklos Banffy, Hermann Hesse, Vasily Grossman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Chinua Achebe, Naguib Mahfouz, Ludmila Ulitskaya and so many more. These are mimetic descriptions of the diverse types of human beings and characters that really do live in human communities, and their diverse histories, which together are the raw material that political philosophy must seek to know before it can prescribe principles intended to regulate and direct their lives. Moral, social, and political philosophers need a prior education in (philosophical, mimetic) literature, history, and other arts which describe the

34

Rawls (2005), p. xviii. Xenophon’s The Education of Cyrus argues that stability of just government is the primary political problem, especially for democracies.

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diversity of human beings as they are. Without historical and literary education,36 the philosopher’s self-knowledge and knowledge of the human world is limited, and consequently their capacity to politically regulate and educate others toward justice and good lives is also limited. Indeed, it might be argued that abstract academic conceptions of “agents” and the arid “political rationality” of deductive-rationalist political philosophy are too often a means for avoiding the messy reality of individuality and real political differences and deliberations, a substitute for detailed knowledge and experience of the diversity of the real political opinions and aspirations of real human beings; it is risk-free and much easier to imagine what ahistorical and passionless “rational agents” might want or do than it is to learn and try to deliberate what Palestinians and Israelis, or Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants, or capitalists and communists, or theological traditionalists and secular egalitarians or government schoolers and home schoolers might want or do. It is a temptation of academic political philosophy to by-pass these sorts of intransigent problems and their complex histories by imagining what the people involved might do if they were “rational agents,” thinking and acting “rationally” in an imaginary situation, that is, thinking like the academic with no direct experience, no direct involvement, and nothing to lose. It is a temptation which is only a short step away from (always “beneficent”) coercion.

3.6 Abstract Agents, Abstract Reasoning and Coercion in Deductive-Rationalist Political Theory Men will always deceive themselves by abandoning experience to follow imaginary systems. d’Holbach (1821 [1770]).37

Although Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, expressed some intellectual fascination with the ideas of the European Enlightenment—she invited Diderot to visit and converse with her, and used ideas of John Locke in the design of the Smolny Institute for the education of young women—she remained a despotic and imperial ruler.38 This very rare combination of the dual roles of sympathetic observer of the Enlightenment and authoritarian ruler, shared perhaps only with Fredrick the Great II,39 provided Catherine with a unique understanding of the subtle role of coercion 36

One should add experience of the world of the kind acquired only by learning the languages of, and travelling (not “tourist-ing”) in, places very different from one’s own. I am often struck by “expert” academics and journalists who speak authoritatively of the conditions and problems of people whose language they cannot speak in parts of the world to which they have never been or, if they have visited, it was as carefully controlled “guests” of the authorities in regimes they were supposedly impartially examining. See Dalrymple (1991), Hollander (2016, 2017) [1st ed. 1981]. 37 Systeme de la Nature, des Lois du Monde Moral, Premiere 1, Chapitre 1, p. 1. 38 Ransel (1975). 39 E.g., Lifschitz (2021).

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in even the most apparently enlightened and “rational” political thought. Catherine observed to Diderot, Monsieur Diderot, I have listened with the greatest pleasure to all that your brilliant genius has inspired you with; but all your grand principles, which I understand very well, though they will make fine books, would make sad work in actual practice. You forget, in all your plans for the reformation, the difference between our two positons: you work only upon paper, which submits to everything; it is altogether obedient and supple, and it poses no obstacles, either to your imagination or to your pen; whereas I, a poor Empress, work upon human nature, which is, on the contrary, irritable and easily offended.40

Catherine’s phrasing indicates her recognition that while Diderot’s politics may be rational, enlightened and liberating in rhetoric, his political aspirations and mode of political action may not be so different from her coercive authoritarianism: the paper on which he writes is “obedient” to his will, and he can compel the paper to “submit” to anything he can imagine without concern for the reactions of real subjects and citizens. In other words, just as Catherine can command the very real people who are her subjects to think and act as she wills, so too can Diderot command the imaginary people (or “agents”) who are the citizens of his imagined republic to think and act as he wills, without their having any means of participating in deliberation or resisting “submission” to his will. The difference is that Diderot’s citizens cannot reject or resist or resent what is required of them in the imaginary world they occupy, whereas the subjects of Catherine’s empire are real people who can and do actively reject or resist what she requires of them in the material world they occupy. The fact that Catherine and Diderot may manipulate and coerce those they rule in such different ways should not be confused with the fact that manipulation and coercion are salient features of the politics of both. When we turn to so much modern and contemporary academic political philosophy,41 the empirical facts of linguistic and cultural diversity, historicity, and individuality are minimized or even suppressed altogether and replaced by a deductiverationalist methodology which depends on abstract, uniform, ahistorical “persons” (or “agents”) one can never meet—in life or in literature—because they do not and, in fact, cannot ever exist as actual people. They are rational and yet metaphysically impossible. There are no individuals or individuality in Hobbes’ State of Nature but only featureless “men” possessing abstract rationality in the form of “right reason”42 40

Quote taken from Wilson (1972), p. 640. See the discussions in Blom (2010), Chap. 16 and Zaretsky (2019). Diderot possessed the rare honesty to confront the troubling similarities between the coercive inclinations of both the intellectually powerful and the politically powerful in Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître (1796). 41 Political philosophy is, alas, almost entirely done by academics today; this is quite unlike the tense and distant relation between the universities and so many of the great early modern and Enlightenment political philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Diderot, Spinoza, Joseph Priestly, Algernon Sydney, or Condorcet. The effects of the academicization of political philosophy, and especially of the protective isolation of academic political philosophy from the uncooperative principles and aspirations of the despised non-imaginary citizens, would make an interesting study, but one unlikely to be undertaken by academics. 42 De Cive, Chapter 1, Articles 2–7 and Chapter 2, Section 1.

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in an ahistorical state of nature; there are no individuals or individuality in Rousseau’s State of Nature, but only abstract persons sensing the freedom of their natural existence as they float on a raft in Lake Geneva43 ; there are no individuals or individuality in Marx but only the schematic and abstract characters Proletariat and Bourgeoisie shaking fists at one another across the means of production while awaiting salvation at the hands of the Vanguard of “the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (Marx’s borrowed phrase44 ). Similarly, there are no individuals or individuality in much contemporary academic liberal political theory, but rather abstract persons somehow possessing the preconditions of political agency without having experienced, or knowing anything about, the individual, material, economic, political, social or cultural world,45 and without knowledge of themselves, their condition, their language or the histories of such a world.46 It is not possible to generate a “rational” account of how such people would reason about political principles, or indeed about anything at all, because such people cannot exist and, in fact, like matter without form, cannot even be grasped in imagination. It is possible, however, for The Theorist to imagine how such abstract agents “must” reason precisely because The Theorist decides and controls every aspect of their imaginary existence no less than Catherine the Great controlled the existence of her subjects. This mode of academic political philosophy does not inductively discover and articulate principles of justice from the real, historical, culturally, linguistically situated particular people of the human community as it is, but rather deduces principles of justice from the imagined abstract reasoning attributed to imagined abstract “agents” constructed to ground the political principles of the academic who invented them and who determines their every thought and passion. The deduction from abstract people to abstract justice (and inevitably vice versa) is why so much contemporary academic political theory seems so irrefutable in the abstract: If you accept the abstraction of the State of Nature (Hobbes) or the Dialectic of the Means of Production (Marx) or the Original Position (Rawls) or the Ideal Speech Situation (Habermas) or the Garden of Eden (authorship disputed), all of which declare that all “rational” people ought to (or “must”) reason identically about their material selfinterest and goals in identical but imaginary and in fact impossible conditions, then you logically must accept the normative principles deducted from them and—here begins the totalitarian temptation—anyone who differs is declared to be “irrational” 43

This example is perhaps less familiar than the others. See Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Fifth Walk. Cf. the first line of Du Contract Social. 44 Marx took the phrase from an article published by Joseph Weydemeyer in Turn-Zeitung (1852), translated and re-published in 1962 as “The dictatorship of the proletariat,” Labor History, 3(2), pp. 214–217. Lenin added the “Vanguard” in his What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1905) when he noticed the absence of actual proletarians in the revolutionary leadership. Oops. Stalin codified the conceit as Party doctrine in his 1924 speeches to the Sverdlov Communist University. See McAdams, A. J. (2018) Vanguard of the Revolution: the Global Idea of the Communist Party. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 141. 45 Geuss (2008), pp. 72 ff., 82 ff. 46 E.g., Rawls’ Original Position and Veil of Ignorance, or Habermas’ Ideal Speech Situation, later his Discourse Ethics grounded on the presuppositions of rational argumentation by rational agents who cannot exist (Habermas 1990, pp. 43–115).

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because they do not deduce the normative principles of their lives from the axiomatic abstractions which have been declared to be the essence of all lives.47 It is a conception of political reasoning that bypasses the “irrational” and yet empirical diversity of real people and the real diversity of the communities and normative principles they have constructed, and instead proceeds directly to the imposition of “rational” moral and political uniformity in the guise of an abstract conception of the supposedly universal nature of “human agency.” As we shall see, the task of education in such political schemes is to articulate two modes of coercion: the first is to coercively habituate people to become replicas of the academic theorist’s “agent,” and then to reason about every aspect of their lives as the theorist requires them to; the second is to coercively compel the speech and actions of those who refuse such habituation and are consequently declared to be “irrational.”

3.7 A Specific Example: From Kant’s Moderate Enlightenment to American Compulsory Liberalism48 Our century will properly be called the century of the intellectual organization of political hatred. Julien Benda (1927)49

In the context of seeking to understand the arguments of Isocrates, there are two reasons to examine the methods and consequences of abstract, DR methodology. The first is to illustrate some of the differences between the mode of empirical and inductive political methodology used by Isocrates in contrast to the axiomatic and deductive mode of methodology so prevalent in academic (post-)modernity, with particular attention to sources of political coercion. Second, a comparison between John Rawls’ developments of the DR methodology of the Kantian tradition will enable us to understand some of the ways in which Isocrates’ philosophy is relevant to contemporary debates in educational philosophy. Rawls provides a convenient example because he is so well known and was widely influential in contemporary Anglo-American academic liberal political theory.50

47

Eze (1997), Estlund (1998), Davion and Wolf (2000), Chaps. 3 and 5; Sandel (1982), p. 14), reiterated Sandel (1984), Kruks (1990), Habermas (1995), Young (2000, 2001, 2004); Trepanier and Callahan (2018), Chap. 8; Freidman (2003), esp. Chap. 8; Geuss (2008), pp. 70–76. 48 By the time academic liberal doctrine has seeped from political philosophy down to educational advocacy, it is transformed into little more than a collection of the slogans of another quasi-religious dogma imposed on sinners to save them from their sin of not being liberals (Forrester 2019; Nelson 2019). My critique of the coercive tendency of some rationalist liberalism is less severe than Losurdo (2014) but similar in logical structure. I obviously do not imply that there is no coercive tendency in non-liberal political doctrine. 49 Benda (2014), p. 15. 50 For accounts of Rawls’ rise and decline in academic political philosophy, see Forrester (2019), Nelson (2019).

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For our limited purposes of describing different methodological approaches to formulating political doctrine, we can begin with Kant’s adherence to the moderate rather than the radical Enlightenment,51 and hence his ambivalence about individuality, diversity, and the desirability of democratic government. In the Perpetual Peace, for example, he advocates a mode of representative republican government which grants greater rights to citizens than they have had in the past, but which also limits those rights not by principle but by a monarchical authority which has greater power than the republican institutions and against which citizens have no rights.52 This ambiguity and tension between rights and powers, between autonomy and coercion, is sustained in Rawls’ “Kantian constructivism,” which also limits autonomy and democracy according to authoritative yet abstract principles originating beyond history and political experience in the Divine Right of American Academic Liberalism (whose missionaries ignore the merely empirical facts of history and local custom while “nation building” in foreign lands with rationalist infallibility and unmitigated empirical failure). The tension between autonomy and coercion—originally between republican autonomy and monarchical authority—is a feature of the entire Kantian tradition and the moderate Enlightenment of which it is an expression, and is unresolved and sometimes unrecognized in Rawlsian political liberalism and its educational implications.53 Rawls’ “Kantian Constructivist” liberal political theory emphasizes that his intention was to “generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant,”54 and that he favors this contractual tradition because, he asserts, it “best approximates our considered judgments of justice and constitutes the appropriate moral basis for democratic society.”55 The use of the word “our” immediately raises Lenin’s question, “Who, Whom?”56 : Who is included in this “our” that is making these “considered judgments” and “social contracts”? How “social” is the contract if the contracting parties are all “highly abstract,” existing only in the imagination of a small group of privileged, like-minded academics with (indirect) access to those who wield the power of the state? The “we” who formulate “our” judgments are the imaginary and homogeneous people (the Last Men, one might say57 ) who act as stunt doubles for real people in academic liberal theory, and for whom some of the central questions are therefore 51

Israel (2010), Chap. 1; Blom (2010). Kant, Perpetual Peace 17–19. Cf. Israel (2010), p. 129; Frazer (2007), Eze (1997). 53 As Rawls (2005), p. 198, n. 1 eventually recognized. 54 Rawls (1971), pp. viii, 3, 11. 55 See Footnote 54. 56 Geuss (2008), pp. 23–30. In the context of my argument, it is instructive that Lenin’s “Who? Whom?” is a historical question of who could hold political power over whom in the future, but that by the time it gets to Stalin it is a practical question of who will coerce, dominate and destroy whom in the present. Compare the uses of the phrase in the record of Lenin’s speech to The Second AllRussian Congress of Political Education Departments (October 17, 1921) to Stalin’s 1929 Speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. See Sebestyen (2018), Morson (2019). 57 For this prescient critique of Rawls, see Hare (1973a, b), Bloom (1975). 52

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“taken as settled.” Rawls’ imaginary “agents” reason about the moral and political principles they would prefer in the famous “Original Position” and behind the “Veil of Ignorance” in which these agents have no social or political experience, no history (political, social, cultural, linguistic, or personal), no customs, no religion, no family traditions, no self-knowledge, and, in fact, no human existence. Such “agents” (they are hardly persons) and the Original Position they are placed in have never been real nor can they ever be real: This original position is not, of course, thought of as an actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice.58

The “essential feature” of this axiomatic hypothesis is the Veil of Ignorance, which requires that persons are ignorant of their socio-economic class, their status, their natural abilities and assets, intelligence, conceptions of the good, rational plan for their life,59 or psychological propensities. If we put all this together, “we” are asking what “our” principles of justice would be if people that can never exist, in a state of mind that is not possible for a human being, in a position and situation that can never occur, are imagined by an academic to be “rational” only in the sense that they deduce political principles from a wholly hypothetical state of such profound and dehumanizing ignorance imposed on them by an academic. Such “persons” are puppets, not human agents. It is a strict deduction60 from a hypothetical situation, made by hypothetical agents, where the hypotheses—the axioms of the deductions— can never be real, and yet which are required to deduce principles of justice that “best approximates our considered judgments of justice and constitutes the appropriate moral basis for democratic society.” In other words, the three primary objections to this variant of axiomatic and deductive-rationalist methodology are metaphysical: (1) that the Original Positon and the Veil of Ignorance can never occur, (2) that the “agents” in the Original Position cannot exist, and consequently (3) that there can be no “rationality” and no reasoning of people who cannot exist in a condition that can never occur. The actual agents in the Original Position are not persons who do or ever could exist or be educated for freedom of thought or moral autonomy, but are rather the subjects of American academic liberals who believe that their own reasoning ought to be the reasoning of everyone, and consequently that any “agent” not accepting the same liberal axioms and deducing the same liberal conclusions from those axioms is by definition not a “free and rational person.”61 The imaginary but required result is, 58

Rawls (1971), pp. 120, 12. Rawls (1971), pp. 137, 12. Cf. p. 142. The very assumption that people should have, or could have, a “rational plan for their life” is dubious. One thinks of the skepticism about the very idea and possibility of a rational life-plan portrayed so vividly in the novels of Saul Bellow, William Boyd, David Adams Richards, or David Foster Wallace—a literary mode of argument about real people, as Isocrates recommends. For formal critiques of the idea of a “rational plan” for persons or for societies, see Gaus (2016), Scott (2020), Geuss (2020). 60 Rawls (1971), p. 121. Cf. Pettit (1997), p. 11. 61 Rawls (1971), pp. 119, 121. Cf. pp. 11, 17; Rawls (2005), pp. 488–489. This criticism of Rawls specifically is articulated in Arrow (1973), Bloom (1975), Hare (1973a, b), Eze (1997), Estlund 59

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in Rawls words, that “the conception of justice eliminates the conditions that give rise to disruptive attitudes,”62 and thereby eliminates any “disruptive” person failing to conform to the deduced conception of justice simply by declaring them to be “irrational” or worse.63 The citizen in the agora must conform to the “agent” in the seminar room. It is a case of “a tendency to transcendental megalomania,” a subtle combination of metaphysical and sociological sources of academic political doctrine that Diderot long ago recognized as a danger of academic reason consisting of deductions from abstract axioms made by abstract “agents” who are fabricated by intellectuals but otherwise cannot exist, and protected from the critical reactions of mere citizens by the moat and battlements of the faculty lounge.64 For the purposes of my argument concerning Isocrates and the logical structure and methodology of political doctrine, there are four major problems with this deductive-rationalist method of political philosophy. First, we must ask in what sense it is “rational” for an academic, firmly committed to a version of academic liberalism relative to a very particular time and place, to imagine asking how people (“agents”) he/she has invented would articulate and justify practical principles he/she has deduced from axioms the same academic has formulated, which will be applied to a social world the “agents” have never experienced,65 the future results of which cannot be known by anyone? How “rational” is it to deduce the principles which will regulate each person’s and each community’s actual life from axiomatic conditions of ignorance so extreme that such agents can never exist, that consist of imaginary conceptions of oneself that can never be empirically real, in a situation that can never be empirically real, with results that are wholly unknown and untested in experience? How rational is it for The Theorist66 to define a citizen as irrational solely because they do not “autonomously” agree to what the academic declares “best approximates our considered judgments of justice and constitutes the appropriate moral basis for democratic society”67 that the Theorist has attributed to imaginary agents? The reasoning may be validly deductive, but it cannot be sound because the “agents” supposedly carrying out the reasoning cannot exist; the rhetorical appeal to (1998), Davion and Wolf (2000), Chaps. 3 and 5; Sandel (1982), p. 14, reiterated Sandel (1984), Kruks (1990), Trepanier and Callahan (2018), Chap. 8; Freidman (2003), esp. Chap. 8 “John Rawls and the Political Coercion of Unreasonable People”; Geuss (2008), pp. 70–76. 62 Rawls (1971), p. 144. 63 Rawls (2005), pp. 61–62, n. 1. Cf. Freidman (2003), esp. Chap. 8; Geuss (2008), pp. 70–76; Losurdo (2014), Gaus (2016). 64 Blom (2010), p. 249. 65 Rawls (1971), p. 18. 66 The rhetoric of the abstract notion of “agents” is not a description of normatively reasoning persons but an a priori definition imposed on persons before their “reasoning” is fabricated by The Theorist. Requiring “agents” to reason by deduction from abstract doctrine to political beliefs, sentiments and actions is common to both the dominant modes of contemporary academic political doctrine, liberalism and Marxism. For the peasants and proletariat, it makes little practical difference to their liberty or autonomy whether the imaginary persons who replace them in these doctrines are required to reason deductively from an Original Position or from the Material Relations of Production. See Scott (2020), Dikotter (2019), Geuss (2008) 67 Rawls (1971).

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the authority of the collective “our” considered judgments conceals the fact that the collective being referred to is privileged academic theorists, not citizens. Second, the Original Position specifies what a small coterie of (largely American) liberal academics declares you must conclude if and only if they permit you to have only the characteristics and objectives and rational capacities they attribute to you, and only if you are compelled to reason deductively from the axioms and in a way they prescribe and attribute to you, all from an empirically impossible conception of an empirically impossible self they have imposed on you and in an empirically impossible position they put you in. There is plainly an element of social power and status operating beneath these demands, as Santayana—echoing Diderot—recognized early in the history of American academic liberalism’s drift from inductive-empirical to deductive-rationalist methodology: Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs. If you refuse to move in the prescribed direction, you are not simply different, you are arrested and perverse.68

Third, Santayana explicitly recognizes here that there is a clear but unstated (and perhaps unrecognized) social division of the populace underlying the new liberal program, especially in education. Academic liberals write as if liberals (themselves) adhere to liberalism in a rational and argued manner constitutive of “autonomy,” while non-liberals—the conservatives and the religious believers who are identified as an abstract class but whose beliefs and arguments are not examined—are declared to adhere to their beliefs in an irrational and dogmatic manner contrary to autonomy.69 There is no evidence to support this prejudice: there are rational liberals, and there are dogmatic, conformist, and irrational (academic) liberals; there are rational conservatives and religious believers and dogmatic, conformist, and irrational conservatives and religious believers.70 The meaningful comparison is not between John Rawls and Rush Limbaugh, but between Rawls and George Will or Roger Scruton; the comparison is not between Bruce Ackerman and Jerry Falwell but between Ackerman and Hans Kung or Alasdair MacIntyre. The crude rhetorical division between autonomous liberals and anti-autonomous non-liberals exposes a lack of self-knowledge, a failure to acknowledge that liberalism is no different than any other doctrine: it can be and often is adhered to in an irrational, dogmatic, conformist, anti-pluralist and autonomy-denying manner no less than conservatism or religion can be, and consequently, its primary task can quickly become eliminating alternative beliefs and institutions from educational practice rather than examining—or allowing

68

Santayana (1922), p. 181. E.g., Levinson (2004). 70 https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-frenzied-folly-of-professorial-groupthink. 69

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students to examine—the evidence and arguments for non-liberal beliefs.71 It overlooks the lesson of history that liberalism can be just as much a part of academic conformism as Marxism or Roman Catholicism can be in other academic systems, and just as hostile to “pluralism,” freedom of thought, and autonomy as any other doctrine. As Santayana intimates, in real political life the primary task is not to decide what “we” will do with “irrational” people who “fail” to conform their thoughts, sentiments, goals, and actions to abstract hypotheticals fabricated by one clique of academics, but rather if and how we will examine their systems of thought in a manner genuinely open to the possibility that what they say may be true. There is no freedom of thought, and consequently no autonomy and little liberty, without an active examination of the arguments for such beliefs and a willingness to accept the possibility that the beliefs of Others are true. The obvious danger is Lenin’s “who, whom” problem72 : “we” will coerce “them” because “they” are “irrational,” and the proof that they are “irrational” is the fact that they do not deduce the principles and goals of their entire lives from “our” academic abstraction of their selves and their condition and their aspirations.73 Fourth, then, as Santayana anticipated, the logical structure of contemporary versions of modern political rationalism suggests that such deductive-rationalist methodology easily drifts into advocacy of coercion of those who are not “rational” according to those who proclaim themselves to be rational. Rawls recognized the problem of coercion when he argued that, “political power is always coercive power backed by the government’s use of sanctions, for government alone has authority to use force in upholding its laws,” and also recognized that he had not resolve it.74 At this point, the essential question concerns the mode(s) by which such coercion is enacted and enforced and justified. This is a large and multifaceted set of problems, and I will focus only on its relation to education.

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E.g., “The liberal educational ideal … does not permit either homeschooling or non-autonomypromoting schools” (Levison 2004, p. 231). Perhaps academics should ask for evidence than homeschooling promotes “autonomy” any less than state schools before “we” forbid it? 72 Geuss (2008), pp. 23–30; Geuss (2005), pp. 29–39; Losurdo (2014), Trepanier and Callahan (2018), Scott (2020), Part 2. 73 Rawls (2005), pp. 61–62, n. 1. It’s not clear whether it is true that only government has the legitimate authority to use force to enforce its laws. Over the past 100 years we have repeatedly seen non-governmental mobs wearing read sashes or black clothes or brown clothes or other accoutrements of moral purity and political intimidation rampaging through the streets or Twitter coercively “enforcing” the “laws” as they understood them, and interpreted as legitimate by media and politicians, e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/nov/03/kathleenstock-says-she-quit-university-post-over-medieval-ostracism and https://www.bbc.com/news/ukengland-sussex-59084446. For general critiques of such coercive results of rationalist and deductive political doctrine, see Kukathas and Pettit (1990), Stears (2007), Geuss (2008), Losurdo (2014), Wood (2015), Gaus (2016), Dikotter (2019), Scott (2020). 74 Rawls (2005), p. 136. Cf. Pettit (1997), p. 50.

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3.8 Education and Academic Deductive-Rationalist Liberalism: Coercive Habituation The coercive element of deductive-rationalist methodology and political doctrine has slowly but relentlessly seeped into educational thought since early modernity. Kant’s three-stage educational program confronted this educational problem directly when he asserted that Above all things, obedience is an essential in the character of the child, especially of a school boy or girl. This obedience is two-fold: absolute obedience to his master’s commands, and obedience to what he feels to be a good and reasonable will.75

The means of habituating obedience is punishment in the three stages of education are, first, physical punishment in early education76 followed second by moral punishment such as shame and contempt expressed by others,77 and concluded by “voluntary obedience” to customary maxims, customs, and laws.78 The “autonomy” of Kant’s metaphysical moral philosophy plays very little role in his practical educational philosophy.79 Explaining the objective of such obedience, Kant asserted that Under the present educational system man does not fully attain to the object of his being; for in what various ways men live! Uniformity can only result when all men act according to the same principles, which principles would have to become a second nature in them.80

The reform of education, then, was understood as a means by which the “irrational” diversity of human beings and ways of life can be ordered into a “rational” uniformity,81 the tendency so clearly recognized by Santayana. The tendency is discernable in the Kantian language Rawls uses to describe political reasoning as it changes subtly from the rationally persuasive to the compulsory, and hence from a recognition of diversity to a demand for uniformity: “What is necessary is that the principles that would be accepted [in the Original Position] play the requisite part in our moral reasoning and conduct,” where those principles are “the only choice consistent with the full description of the original position”82 Consequently, the “free” people reduced to abstract “agents” in the original position “are presented with a list [of alternative conceptions of justice] and required to agree unanimously that one conception is best among those enumerated,” within the limits permitted by the uniform Original Position in which their proxies have been uniformly placed.83 75

Kant, Lectures on Pedagogy 9.481. Ibid. 9.4. 77 Lectures on Pedagogy 9.483–484. 78 Lectures on Pedagogy 9.482. 79 See Herbert (2012). One of the most pervasive errors in post-1960s philosophy of education is the unwarranted assumption that the educational ideas of the canonical philosophers are “applications of”—that is, deductions from—their “general philosophy”. 80 Lectures on Pedagogy 9.445. 81 Described in “Of Practical Education,” Lectures on Pedagogy, especially 9. 487ff. 82 Rawls (1971), pp. 120–121. 83 Rawls (1971), p. 122. 76

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This goal of a “rational” uniformity of political ideas, sentiments, and modes of reasoning is to be achieved slowly over time by the political control and manipulation of citizens through political control of education.84 Rawls is explicit that such education will require the slow and subtle transformation of the family and child-rearing so that they provide a politically liberal informal education. The nature of such coercive education is not direct indoctrination but a slower process of habituation which is conducted without the knowledge, and therefore without the consent or rational participation, of the students who have been transposed from the imaginary original positon and into the very real state school. As Gursozlu argued, the goal of such education is to inculcate political virtues thereby shaping children’s beliefs, thoughts, and desires from the early ages both at home and in school. As Nussbaum rightly indicates, one of the most important educational tasks of the Rawlsian state is the cultivation of “sentiments and attitudes required by the political conception and its replication over time.85

In other words, without their knowledge or consent or rational understanding, each and every student’s “beliefs, thoughts, and desires,” their “sentiments and attitudes”—their whole personalities—will be subjected to the “inculcation,” “shaping,” and “cultivation” that is “required by the political conception” of the academic liberal theorists. Clearly, the terms “inculcation,” “shaping,” “cultivation,” and “required” do not indicate an educational process or an educational goal in which the freedom of thought or the autonomy of students plays any role at all; the students are permitted to be “autonomous” only after they have been inculcated by political authorities with the required “beliefs, thoughts, desires, sentiments, and attitudes.” Steven Macedo recognized that rationalist American liberalism constitutes a political doctrine and a mode of government that ought to actively seek to shape every aspect of their citizens’ lives “deeply” and “relentlessly” and without their knowledge or consent.86 In his view, Rawlsian liberalism logically implies and politically justifies the “educative” formation of people’s beliefs, sentiments, and reasoning “without exactly announcing that purpose on their face.”87 Of course none of this advocacy of intellectually coercive state schooling would surprise the early architects of liberalism, such as Locke or Rousseau, who advocated domestic education (i.e., home education) precisely because they foresaw these problems arising from the subjection of schooling to political agents with access to the power of the state.88 As John Stuart Mill warned, A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority 84

Rawls (2005), p. 195. my discussion follows Gursozlu (2014), pp. 16–17. Gursozlu (2014), p. 19. Gursozlu refers to Nussbaum (2006). 86 Gursozlu (2014), Wood (2015). See Macedo (1990), p. 69, n. 98. For a reiteration in terms of compulsory state schooling, see Callan (1996). 87 Macedo (1990), p. 69; Levinson (2004). 88 See Koganzon (2020). 85

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3 First Philosophy in Educational Thought: The Four … of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.89

The same observation and warning that the new political liberals were becoming ever more smugly coercive because they were contemptuous of (their own fabricated images of) the rational capacities of the citizenry was repeated by Thomas Mann in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918) in terms easily recognized today. He observed that the new liberal “literary politician’s.” morality in general is directed morally toward the outside, it is aggressive, for he himself is right, he himself is unassailable, the man of progress and of moral security: only the others need criticism, the community, the nation; the literary politician’s criticism is the pedagogical mockery and satire of his own people.90

This succinctly captures the attitude toward public education of a major stream of academic liberalism, and increasingly in teachers’ unions and school boards.91 If, as such pedagogical mockery advocates, the minds of the benighted citizens are to be habituated in a relentless but clandestine manner by authorities prior to and as a precondition of political deliberation and participation, then there can be neither freedom of thought nor personal autonomy nor political liberty nor “agency”: the citizen can desire, believe, and deliberate only as they have been clandestinely trained to do, and will be permitted to seek “autonomy” only after they have been habituated by other people in the prescribed liberal manner in the prescribed liberal institutions. In this view, both students and their education are thoroughly subordinated to those committed to authoritative political doctrine, and consequently, education is valued as a means to inculcate the “rational” principles (academic) liberals with sufficient institutional power have selected for them, almost miraculously as a means to their “autonomy.” This is no autonomy at all, largely because there is no freedom of thought. In this way, the circle of deductive political doctrine is complete: the imaginary imposition of the axiomatic principles and modes of reasoning on imaginary “agents” in the imaginary Original Position and Veil of Ignorance are transformed into an actual imposition of those same principles and modes of reasoning on unknowing citizens by the control of the family policy and habituating educational institutions by academic liberals whose ideas are empowered by the state, thus producing a citizenry conditioned to reason and judge as the “agents” in the Original Position were compelled to do. The uniformity of this reasoning is ostensibly a means to their rational autonomy, although “autonomous” is merely the appellation we receive as a reward for reasoning as we’ve been habituated to do by academic-political

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Mill (1869), On Liberty, Chap. 5. Cf. Israel (2010), pp. 44, 53; Koganzon (2020). Mann (1918), p. 243. 91 This is a problem across the continuum of political doctrine: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2022/jan/31/holocaust-novel-maus-bestseller-after-tennessee-school-ban; https://www. realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/12/26/nikole_hannah-jones_professional_educators_not_par ents_are_experts_in_what_children_should_be_taught.html. 90

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authorities.92 In such a thought-world, it is simply inconceivable (which is akin to impermissible) that any elegiac hillbilly could have any rational opinion about their own best interests and good life. As Isocrates understood,93 what is missing from such totalizing and homogenizing political theory and political theorists is moderation and self-knowledge of the limits of their own doctrinal opinions, not to say some small and humble recognition that their own conformity to liberalism might be the result of academic conformism rather than autonomous reasoning. As Plato and Isocrates both understood, reasoning about political justice ought to begin with the humility of self-knowledge of one’s own ignorance, a virtue of philosophy but not of academia.

3.9 Isocrates’ Alternative Method in Political Doctrine: Experience, History, and Induction Whenever political philosophy deduces principles of education from ostensibly “universal” axiomatic abstractions preferred by one small, unrepresentative, and privileged segment of the citizenry rather than from real people and their diverse histories, it is quickly driven to coercion in both politics and especially state schooling. Political and educational action motivated and guided by the axiomatic DR-political theory of unrepresentative conventional minorities is eventually revealed to be ever more gradually totalitarian and vengeful because it has no ground in real human diversity and aspiration: if our test of political rationality is the willingness to deduce principles of conduct from axiomatic abstractions, then anyone who fails or refuses to do so is by abstract definition irrational: whether our political rhetoric then condemns the “irrational” citizen as left-wing “libtards” or as right-wing “deplorables” is entirely secondary to the shared tendency toward intellectual contempt and coercion of those who are categorized as irrational or unintelligent solely because they do not agree with a group of people who hold more (academic, social, or political) power. In contrast to the implicit—albeit quickly actual94 —coerciveness of the deduction of principles of political justice and, derivatively, education from abstract persons 92 This is not so much Orwell as Huxley’s Brave New World or Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange or, more subtly, Patrick Modiano’s Such Fine Boys. For the direct approach see Wojdon (2021). 93 See the Antidosis. 94 The demands of this mode of (politically) liberal education eventually filtered down from political philosophy to political doctrine to educational dogma: “we” must deduce all educational principles and goals from current American academic liberal doctrine, “we” will be pluralist yet prevented from learning “irrational” alternatives (e.g., religious or conservative or anything not liberal), and required to attend monopolistic government schools (with a few private schools for those wealthy enough to escape state schools), all as means to “our” autonomy and political liberty! (Levinson 2004) This is “autonomy’ without its prerequisite, freedom of thought. It is a historically familiar tragic-comic world in which “autonomy” would be compelled by uniform doctrinal prescription imposed by agents of the state in uniform state institutions, perhaps best understood through Soviet satire, such as A. Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights or Y. Dombrovsky’s The Faculty of Useless Knowledge.

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and situations, and the slow drift to soft paternalism that follows from it,95 Isocrates argues that there is no reason to believe that there can ever be a philosophical (and certainly not an academic) elite which can define what “rational” is in a priori terms that are so extremely hypothetical that, in fact, neither the persons nor their conditions in which they are supposed to reason about their political principles can ever occur. Isocrates’ method is to begin empirically with historical (and literary) study and careful observation of the wonder of human individuality and diversity,96 and to accept the fact that real people have traditions, histories, cultures and more that they value because they have quite rationally discovered, by empirical observation and inductive reasoning, that their interests are well served in that way. When observed in the abstract and isolated from the self-understandings of the people who know them and adhere to them, these histories, traditions, religions, and cultural preferences can seem “irrational” or arbitrary; they can also be declared to be irrational when evaluated by comparison to abstract standards deduced from abstract principles by academics who have not considered (and too often never really experienced) real people who are different from themselves and their experiences. To the real people who treasure these histories, traditions and cultural preferences they are not “irrational” at all because they have in fact been formulated by induction from empirical experience and then tested and modified by the entirely rational, inductive method of trial-and-error over historical time, and found to contribute to the interests and pursuit of the good life of those who adhere to them. We may not be able to deduce the centrality of religious observation to daily life or deduce practices such as arranged marriages from the Original Position or from its conditions of rational agency, but that is not enough to demonstrate that these ways of life are irrational or that they ought to be required to justify themselves before the tribunals of Western liberal academics.97 The rational justifications for such practices are inducted from the real experiences of real people rather than deduced from abstractions, and no conclusive reason is given for privileging the deductive over the inductive in moral and political reasoning. Indeed, the inductive-empirical (IE) method used by Isocrates and others could claim that it is more rational to reason inductively from what real people—imperfect and sometimes mistaken as they are98 —deliberate, debate, decide, and tentatively practice in the real circumstances of their lives, and then to test the success of the results of those ideas and practices in the history of lived experience, than it is to try to deduce principles of justice from abstract axioms and imaginary and wholly 95

Rahe (2009). For an optimistic account of one variant of the great historical cycle from compulsory liberation back to more modest and genuinely diverse humanism, see Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia. 96 Of language, culture, traditions, religions and modes of argumentation. 97 It is too often forgotten that the equally authoritative academics in, say, Saudi Arabia or Iran, have quite different political and educational principles which, for the sake of the current version of academic “diversity” and liberating “conscientization,” we do not study, engage in dialogue with, or permit acknowledgment of. See Brooks (2021). 98 This is, admittedly, quite different from we academic political and educational theorists, who are perfect and have never been known to make a mistake.

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homogenous “agents” that do little more, in the end, than surreptitiously privilege the moral preferences and political axioms of a particular group of people who present themselves as the very standard of rationality, knowledge, and autonomy.99 Accordingly, he claims that it is logos—reasoned speech and deliberative discourse with other people—that is the distinctly human attribute, the faculty and ability that transforms human life from animal impulses and the moral principle of animal nature, “Might is Right,” to a life guided by tentative and experimental practical principles formulated collectively. These principles are practically effective because they are inducted from experience and public discourse rather than deducted from abstract axioms and academic discourse, and because they are negotiated between citizens of shared history and common interests rather than imposed by an academic who has devised “irrefutable” a priori principles with little regard for the experience, history, preferences, and practices of the “irrational” citizens on whom they will be imposed. A schematic of the logical structure of the IE-method of political and educational reasoning and prescriptions then is this100 :

3.9.1 Schematic 1: Inductive-Empirical Method Step 1

Observe people directly, through history, and through literature, seeking to empirically discover, recognize, and articulate their own understanding of their individuality, language(s), family, customs, religion(s), moral and political principles, aspirations, modes of education, deliberation, discourse and debate in individual and collective decision-making, and more, | ∨

Step 2

Identify and articulate the historical evolution of tentative principles and practices the people themselves have inducted from their experience of collective life (this step is described in detail in Schematic 3 below); | ∨

99 As Isocrates will argue in Chap. 4, the primary problem is self-knowledge, perhaps the first condition of rational thought about any subject. 100 While the names given to this structure of political reasoning vary (rather frustratingly), the structure itself is a recognized part of contemporary political philosophy, articulated theoretically by Geuss (2008) and historically by Scott (2020), to mention only two examples. It is a one half of a methodological debate that originates with advocates of the radical Enlightenment against the moderate Enlightenment of Locke, Rousseau and Kant (Israel 2010; Blom 2010, perhaps Graeber and Wengrow 2021).

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Step 3

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Testing in practice and experience whether or not particular principles and practices of collective life are believed by the members of the community to serve their own individual, familial, and collective interests and aspirations and thereby secure their allegiance; | ∨

Step 4

Principles and practices which have secured the allegiance of citizens over time in this way are formalized into political doctrines, constitutions, laws, customs, institutions, and so on101 … | ∨

Step 5

The conduct and goals of education are deduced from the inductively formulated political doctrines, constitutions, laws, customs, and so on and modified after empirical evaluation of their effects by the people directly involved.

This method does not claim to be rational because it deduces political principles from an absolute but abstract axiom such as the State of Nature or the Material Relations of Production or the Original Position. On the contrary, the ID-method can claim to be rational for two reasons: first, because it inducts its primary political principles from historical and practical experience, and second, because it modifies those principles on the basis of empirical study of their actual results for the people directly affected by them. Nevertheless, this description of the IE-method used by Isocrates can seem self-contradictory, if interpreted superficially or merely verbally—i.e., deductive-rationalist and inductive-empirical method both include normative deductions—because he then seems to reject and to advocate deductive normative deliberation and judgment. There is no (self-)contradiction because the principles (or axioms) from which the normative deductions proceed are different in nature and origin and occupy a different place in the sequence of reasoning in the two normative methods. There are two main differences for present purposes. First, only Step 3 of the IE-method is present contemporary DR-method, and it is in the form of a deduction of normative criteria of educational value from a political doctrine formulated as the first step of normative reasoning. The crucial difference is that Steps 1 to 3 and Step 6 of the IE-method are wholly absent in DR-method and are replaced by abstract axiomatic concepts of “agents,” their “situation,” and the deduction from these abstractions 101

F. W. Maitland’s (1908) classic The Constitutional History of England provides a wonderful description of this empirical, trial-and-error method in English history, “warts and all” as it were. One might add John Dalberg-Acton—originator of the phrase “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Letter to Creighton, 5 April 1887)—and his great inductive histories of intellectual and political freedom.

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as their only (permitted) mode of reasoning. Second, and more specifically, the IEmethod formulates the normative axioms from which educational value is deduced by a first step consisting of a process of induction from empirical experience: the axiomatic political doctrine is articulated from what is observed in experience, not fabricated in the abstract. The key to understanding the difference between the DRmethod and the IE-method in education, then, is not to be found the role of deduction but in the nature and, especially, the origin of the axiom from which the normative deduction proceeds.

3.9.2 Schematic 2: Formulating the Normative Axiom in IE Normative Method

When Isocrates argues that the principles and goals of education will be deduced from a political doctrine, it is essential to understand that the political doctrine is not an a priori system of normative axioms and deductions formulated in the abstract. On the contrary, he argues102 that when the goals and value of education are deduced from axiomatic deductive-rationalist political doctrines which are formulated by this method, educators become both divided into doctrinal camps and quickly tempted to turn to the coercive powers political and legal authority. Isocrates understands political doctrine as tentative political principles and practices articulated by induction from political history and experience, and then empirically shown in practice to serve the interests of the members of the regime sufficiently to earn their allegiance. 102

See Against the Sophists and Chap. 4.

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Those principles and practices can be changed whenever they cease to serve the interests of the regime and its member, though by a process of political deliberation and discourse in which anyone may participate. Education, then, is valued as means by which the virtues and skills of empirically informed, deliberative and discursive rhetoric and oratory are learned. It is mode of education and of educational philosophy that demands detailed historical knowledge of the subject and self-knowledge of the educator.

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McLellan, A. M., Dewey, J. (1895). The psychology of number and its applications to methods of teaching arithmetic (Vol. 23). International Education Series. D. Appleton and Co. Meier, H. (2017). Political philosophy and the challenge of revealed religion. University of Chicago Press. Mikkola, E. (1954). Isokrates: Seine Anschauungen im Lichte seiner Schriften. Annales Academiae Scientarum Fennicae, Serries B, Tomus 89. Helsinki: Finnische Literaturgesellschaft. Morson, G. S. (2019). Leninthink: on the pernicious legacy of Vladimir Lenin. New Criterion, 40(1), 4. Muir, J. R. (1999). Political doctrine and the value of education: The legacy of isocrates and the socratic alternative. Journal of Educational Thought, 33(3), 255–278. Muir, J. R. (2018). The legacy of Isocrates and a socratic alternative: Political philosophy and the value of education. Routledge. Nelson, E. (2019). The theology of liberalism: Political philosophy and the justice of God. Harvard/Belknap Press. Nordenbo, S. E. (1979). Philosophy of education in the western world: Developmental trends during the last 25 years. International Review of Education, 25(2–3), 433–459. Nussbaum, M. (2006). Political soul-making and the imminent demise of liberal education. Journal of Social Philosophy, 2, 301–313. Peters, R. S. (1981). Democratic values and educational aims. In Essays on educators. George Allen and Unwin. Peters, R. S. (1983). Philosophy of education. In P. H. Hirst (Ed.), Educational theory and its foundation disciplines. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Peters, R. S. (1966). Ethics and education. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pettit, P. (1997). Republicanism: A theory of freedom and government. Oxford University Press. Pippin, R. B. (2010). Nietzsche, psychology, and first philosophy. University of Chicago Press. Rahe, P. A. (2009). Soft despotism, democracy’s drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the modern prospect. Yale University Press. Ransel, D. L. (1975). The politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin party. Yale University Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (2005). Political liberalism. Columbia University Press. Romano, C. (2012). America the philosophical. Knopf. Ruitenberg, C. (Ed.) (2009). Special issue: What do philosophers of education do? (and how do they do it?). Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43(3), i–ii, 315–469. Sandel, M. J. (1982). Liberalism and the limits of justice. Cambridge University Press. Sandel, M. J. (1984). Liberalism and its critics. New York University Press. Santayana, G. (1922). The irony of liberalism. In Soliloquies in England and later soliloquie. C. Scribner’s Sons. Schiller, F. C. S. (1907). Studies in humanism. Macmillan and Co., Ltd. Scott, J. C. (2020 [1998]). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press. Scruton, R. (1984). The meaning of conservatism (2nd ed.). Macmillan. Stanley, W. O. (1958). Current tasks of educational philosophy. Phi Delta Kappan (October) 12. Stears, M. (2007). Liberalism and the politics of compulsion. British Journal of Political Science, 37(3), 533–553. Stiegelbauer, S. M. (1996). What is an elder? What do elders do? First nations elders as teachers in culture-based uran organizations. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, XVI(1), pp. 37–66. Tanguay, D. (2003). Leo Strauss: Une biographie intellectuelle. Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle. Trepanier, L., & Callahan, E. (Eds.). (2018). Tradition vs. rationalism. Lexington Books. White, J. (2009). Why general education? Peters, Hirst and history. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43(1), 123–141. Whitehead, A. N. (1952). Science and the modern world. Mentor Editions. Wilson, A. M. (1972). Diderot. Oxford University Press.

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Wojdon, J. (2021). Communist propaganda at school: The world of the reading primers from the Soviet Bloc, 1949–1989. Routledge. Wood, B. E. (2015). Freedom or coercion? Citizenship education policies and the politics of affect. In M. Blazek, P. Kraftl (Eds.), Children’s emotions in policy and practice. Studies in childhood and youth. Palgrave Macmillan. Young, S. (2001). Divide and conquer: Separating the reasonable from the unreasonable. Journal of Social Philosophy, 32, 53–69. Zaretsky, R. (2019). Catherine and Diderot: The empress, the philosopher, and the fate of the enlightenment. Harvard University Press.

Chapter 4

Against the Sophists: The First Virtues of the Educator and the Limits of Education

ESCALUS What news abroad i’ the world? DUKE VINCENTIO None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness, that the dissolution of it must cure it: novelty is only in request; and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course, as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure; but security enough to make fellowships accurst: much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news. [Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act 3, Scene 1, lines 479 ff.]

Shakespeare has the Duke of Vienna articulate a commonplace observation that is a thread that winds its way through so many of his plays and classical sources from the history of literature, from Ovid to Plutarch to Petrarch to Edmund Spenser. It is the same thread that ties together so many of Isocrates’ disparate writings: that much of the ethical comedy and tragedy of human deliberation and action appears and re-appears at different times and places, in familiar and in novel forms, but always at the root of it all is a trans-historical need for knowledge of human nature, and of the errors and injustices that are caused by our failure to seek—or our failure

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Muir and J. Muir, Isocrates, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00971-6_4

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to permit others to seek—such knowledge.1 We find this concern for human nature2 throughout the whole of Isocrates’ career as an educator and as a political philosopher, the two inseparable parts of his life and thought. The subject of his arguments and the method by which he articulates those arguments need to be clear from the beginning. We should not dogmatically assume —as so much earlier English3 interpretation of Isocrates had done4—that Isocrates’ “relevance” to the study of education is limited to the educational ideas and practices of his own time and place, ancient Athens, and even then further limited to description and advocacy of rhetorical education. On the contrary, we ought to follow the lead of more recent and less dogmatic interpretations in recognizing that Isocrates’ ideas and arguments influenced, and are relevant to, the whole of educational thought and practice, in our own time and place no less than in his own.5 Isocrates provides trans-historical ideas and arguments about human nature and the nature of education, not only ideas about education in his particular period of history alone, and certainly not arguments that are limited to rhetorical education. The subject of his arguments is what is common to education in all times and places, including our own. The method by which he articulates those ideas and arguments is inductive logical inference. His educational thought begins with observation of the educational thought and practices of his own day and examples from the history of education, as exemplars or specific cases from which the nature of education can be inductively inferred. In other words, Isocrates’s method begins with examination of empirical evidence, and then inductively infers from that evidence to hypotheses about the nature and value of education. As I mentioned in the Introduction, this method of argumentation forms one part of the sophisticated rhetorical structures by which he constructs his arguments: his claims are made both by direct descriptive statement of what is observed and by logical inference from what is observed, and consequently the reader must be attuned to what he says directly and to what can be inductively inferred but sometimes is not stated directly.6 Our interpretation of Isocrates’ educational thought begins with Against the Sophists. Isocrates describes Against the Sophists as having been written near the beginning of his career as a teacher, c. 390 B.C. It is a short work intended to

1

Wilson Knight (1971) and Rowe (2004), Chap. 5, Sect. 2. A concern he shares with Plato. The Cave [Rep. 514a] is explicitly an image of human nature: lesὰ saῦsa dή, eἶpom, ἀpeίjarom soioύsῳ pάhei sὴm ἡlesέqam uύrim paideίa1 se pέqi jaὶ ἀpaidetrίa1. 3 The difference between the grudging English Isocrates scholarship and the generous German and French Isocrates scholarship can be discerned as early as Blass (1887–1898), Vol. 3, Chaps. 1–4; Gomperz (1905), Burk (1923) and Mathieu (1925), and sustained by Jaeger (1947), Marrou (1948), Mikkola (1954) and Eucken (1983). 4 E.g. Dobson (1919), Chap. 6; Barker (1948), p. 23; Norlin and van Hook. 5 E.g. Jaeger (1947), Marrou (1948), Kimball (1986), Collins (2015), Poulakos (1997), Muir (2018). 6 This mode of argumentation is not peculiar to Isocrates. See Melzer (2014). 2

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articulate some of the educational ideas and political wisdom that he hoped would distinguish him from some of the many other educators that jostled for primacy in the Pedagogical Century,7 450–350 B.C.E., “perhaps the most important period in the whole history of education”.8 The brief introductory remarks that open Against the Sophists set out Isocrates’ two primary intentions in the work, which are (1) to examine and critique dubious claims made by rival educators about how much educators and formal instruction9 can achieve and, by implication, (2) to set out the much more limited claims Isocrates makes for his educational ideas and practices, and his arguments for those claims. These two primary intentions are, in turn, the base upon which Isocrates constructs a number of logically implied, secondary arguments about the nature of both education and educators. Among these secondary claims are his insistence that the three primary advantages of his unique educational ideas and program over others are: first and most importantly, that he soberly recognizes the limits of what education can achieve in the lives of individuals and the communities they inhabit; second that he recognizes those limits because he is a man who has sought and attained the inseparable virtues of moderation and self-knowledge of one’s own ignorance of the most important things; and third, the reasons our knowledge of human nature and ourselves places limits on educational and political aspiration alike. In other words, although he does not state it directly, the comparison between himself and other educators logically implies that one of the most important virtues any educator ought to have, in any time and place, is moderation expressed, in part, in self-knowledge of their own intellectual and pedagogical abilities, and of the efficacy and limits of the education they offer. His discussion, then, is not circumscribed by the educational ideas and practices of his time and place, but rather uses those relative ideas and practices as specific cases of the nature of education itself and the nature of the good educator in any time and place. Isocrates claims that he is a superior educator in his own time and place because he understands some of the trans-historical virtues of educators and the nature of education itself. His arguments for this claim are not stated directly in his discussions of the Athenian and Greek education of his day, but rather are embedded in, and so discovered by inference from, the logical structure of his works. It is a mode of instruction-by-text that demands that the reader actively infer and (re-)construct the argument themselves rather than passively relying on the instructor to simply present it to them. For Isocrates, intellectual autonomy must be learned by exemplars and by practice of genuine debate.

7

Antidosis 193. Barrow and Wood (2006), p. 18 reiterate conventional educationist historiography and do not discuss Isocrates’ educational ideas. Compare the accounts of the Pedagogical Century in Jaeger (1947), III, p. 46; Marrou (1948), I, pp. 140–143; Finley (1975), pp. 196–197. 9 I use “formal instruction” to translate Isocrates’ paideueiv, from paidetsijό1, meaning the art and science of teaching. This is related to, but different from paideίa (paideia) which refers to child-rearing and education generally. 8

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4.1

What Educators Claim They Can Achieve Versus What Educators Actually Do Achieve

Isocrates’ explicit arguments begin with a two-part empirical observation of the difference between what educators claim to be able to achieve and what they actually achieve. Isocrates then inductively infers from this observation to claims about the immoderation and lack of self-knowledge exhibited by most educators, and the ways in which this lack of moderation and self-knowledge is exposed by the exaggerated and sometimes impossible claims they make about the effects that education can have. His argument proceeds as follows. Isocrates begins with the observation that If all who were engaged in the profession of education were willing to state the facts instead of making greater promises than they can possibly fulfill, they would not have such a bad reputation with the general public.10

It should be noted first that Isocrates’ subject is not sophistic or Socratic or Athenian or Greek educators of his day, but (as he says) all educators. He provides us, then, with a clear albeit implied method and criterion by which his claims ought to be evaluated: if his inferences are indeed true of all education, then we ought to find evidence for them in the educational ideas and practices of our own particular time and place. The first claim that can be evaluated in this way is Isocrates’ claim that educators are not held in low esteem by their fellow citizens because of the results of the education they offer, but because the education they offer achieves so much less than the educators boast of its being able to do. Parents and the public generally recognize that there is a large difference between what educators claim to be able to do and what they are actually able to do, and that this in turn implies a second deficiency of the educators, namely that educators may know much less about education—and about themselves—than they think they do. Isocrates claims, then, that a defining characteristic of the inadequate educator is lack of self-knowledge about their own knowledge and abilities. I will examine each of these deficiencies in turn, referring to specific cases. If Isocrates is right that all educators ought to understand the distinction between what education can actually achieve and what educators claim it could achieve, then we should be able to find specific examples of this distinction throughout the history of education. In more explicitly methodological terms, Isocrates’ claim that educators overstate what formal instruction is able to achieve is a hypothesis which can be tested by examining three groups of educators: educators in the history of education prior to Isocrates’ day, educators in his own day, and the educational claims of future educators. As Isocrates suggests, the difference between what educators promise and what they achieve is not a feature of education only in his own day, but rather is a trans-historical attribute of all education and educators 10

Ag Soph. 1. Cf. Harvard Committee (1948), p. 249.

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which we can expect to be present in our time. And indeed, concluding a discussion of a recent book on the state of the education in the humanities,11 two academic educators observed that over-stating the potential success of doctrinal activities, including education, is a trans-historical phenomenon and problem: Gutkin: I wonder if, like the church, the humanities can’t really do without overpromising. Otherwise people might stop believing in us. Reitter: Maybe it’s a matter of improving the overpromising.12

More generally, as Isocrates’ hypothesis predicts, over the past century contemporary educators have immoderately claimed that education can achieve a remarkable variety of goals which can dramatically transform whole regimes and all the people in them, and have not fulfilled those predictions. To mention only a few well-known examples, the Report of the Harvard Committee (1948)13 claims that education can enable students to master the methods and forms of knowledge of the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, inculcate the abilities and habits of effective thinking, beginning with formal logic, induction and deduction in particular,14 the ability to manipulate complex concepts, imaginative thinking,15 the ability to communicate clearly and effectively in rhetoric and oratory,16 the ability to make true and effective judgments of both fact and values,17 and finally the ability and habit of using all of this knowledge and skill to become a “good man and citizen” of a free society and liberal democracy.18 Similarly, twenty years later the Ontario, Canada Hall-Dennis Report (1968), still profoundly influential in Canadian education, opens with the assertion that The underlying aim of education is to further man's unending search for truth. Once he possesses the means to truth, all else is within his grasp. Wisdom and understanding, sensitivity, compassion, and responsibility, as well as intellectual honesty and personal integrity, will be his guides in adolescence and his companions in maturity. This is the message that must find its way into the minds and hearts of all Ontario children. This is the key to open all doors. It is the instrument which will break the shackles of ignorance, of doubt, and of frustration; that will take all who respond to its call out of their poverty, their slums, and their despair; that will spur the talented to find heights of achievement and provide every child with the experience of success; that will give mobility to the crippled; that will illuminate the dark world of the blind and bring the deaf into communion with the hearing; that will carry solace to the disordered of mind, imagery to the slow of wit, and peace to the emotionally disturbed; that will make all men brothers, equal in dignity if not in ability; and that will not tolerate disparity of race, color, or creed.

11

Reitter and Wellmon (2021). Emre and Gutkin (2021). 13 Harvard Committee (1948). 14 Harvard Committee (1948), Chap. 15 Harvard Committee (1948), Chap. 16 Harvard Committee (1948), Chap. 17 Harvard Committee (1948), Chap. 18 Harvard Committee (1948), Chap. 12

2, 2, 2, 2, 2,

p. 65. pp. 66–67. pp. 67–68. pp. 70–71. p. 73 ff.

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Similarly in the UK some ten years later, James Callaghan’s well-known speech, “A Rational Debate Based on the Facts”,19 in which he explained that The goals of our education, from nursery school through to adult education, are clear enough. They are to equip children to the best of their ability for a lively, constructive, place in society, and also to fit them to do a job of work. Not one or the other but both. […] Both of the basic purposes of education require the same essential tools. These are basic literacy, basic numeracy, the understanding of how to live and work together, respect for others, respect for the individual. This means requiring certain basic knowledge, and skills and reasoning ability. It means developing lively inquiring minds and an appetite for further knowledge that will last a lifetime. It means mitigating as far as possible the disadvantages that may be suffered through poor home conditions or physical or mental handicap.

The 2002 Public Law 107–100, popularly known as the No Child Left Behind initiative of the American federal government, claimed that formal instruction in schools could ensure that all children20 have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments,” [and] “closing the achievement gap between high- and low performing children, especially the achievement gaps between minority and nonminority students, and between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers.21

The report of the Harvard Committee, the Hall-Dennis Report, Callaghan’s speech, and No Child Left behind all claim that state schools and other educational institutions can attain a remarkable range of goals, and that attaining those goals would dramatically transform the lives of all young people and their entire societies: formal instruction can enable all students to master the methods and content of all subjects, ameliorate as far as its possible to do the disadvantages of physical disabilities, mental disabilities and deficient home life, and historical prejudice, can transmit basic literacy and numeracy to all young people, can prepare all young people to have lively and enquiring minds which will desire and pursue “lifelong” learning, can prepare all young people for gainful employment, can teach all young people how to live and work together, can teach all young people the moral dispositions required for respect for both individuals and others, and thereby can enable every young person to find a lively and constructive place in society. It is an astonishingly broad list of lofty goals, and yet there is no evidence to show that formal education ever has or ever could attain even a small fraction of them or even a fraction of any one of them. By induction, Isocrates inferred from observing his teaching experience, from observing other educators, and from the history of educational ideas and practices, that education has always been a practice prone to such exaggerated and unsubstantiated claims about what it can accomplish. He also 19 Delivered at Ruskin College, Oxford, 18 October 1976. Like Hall-Dennis, Callaghan uses the term “education” rhetorically to mean “compulsory state schooling directed by government”. See http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/speeches/1976ruskin.html. 20 See Sec.1001 (2–3). 21 Sec. 1001 Statement of Purpose (1)–(3).

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points out that parents, students, citizens, and other concerned about education have no difficulty observing that education does not achieve anything near what educators claim they are able to achieve, and that one result of such observation is popular cynicism about educational institutions and the educators held in low esteem. It is a hypothesis that would seem to be supported by observation of the difference between claims made by educators in the 20th Century as compared to the actual results.22

4.2

From the Promise of Autonomous Virtue to the Demand for Submission to Authority

Isocrates also understood that such exaggerated assertions about the results of formal education, and the repeated failure to attain them, is the source of an additional effect that further undermines the reputation of education and (especially) educators in the estimation of their fellow citizens. Once again, Isocrates employs the method of articulating testable general principles (or hypotheses) about all educators by induction from specific empirical observations of the educators of his day and from the history of education. As we have seen, Isocrates observes that many of the educators he criticizes claim that the instruction they provide can transform their students into virtuous, truthful, and just young citizens who are competent to be successful in every aspect of their personal, family, social, and political life [Ag. Soph. 2–4]. These claims about the effects of instruction, however, are not only unsupported by the actual results of instruction but are in an important way directly contradicted by the behavior of the educators themselves. Specifically, at the beginning of the various programs of instruction the educators require their students (or their parents) to commit themselves to legal contracts which will ensure that they pay the educator’s fees at the end of instruction. This is evidence of the fact that the educators do not believe their own claims that their students will attain the promised moral excellence: if the educator’s promise that education will cause students to become truthful about their obligations were really true, then such legal compulsion would be unnecessary [Ag. Soph. 4]. Plato follows Isocrates when he makes the same observation and offers the same criticism in the Gorgias.23 The demand that students commit themselves to such legal contracts, enforceable by legal authority, obviously reveals that the educators are not entirely confident that the instruction and education they provide will in fact cause their students to be virtuous. Thus the guarantee of the success of instruction—in part as measured by the degree to which the educator is treated justly by their students—is transferred from the moral authority of the educated soul to the material authority of the institutions of law.

22 23

Consider Brooks (2021). Gorgias 519d. Too (1995), p. 153 argues that Plato is following Isocrates here.

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There is, then, a second and more subtle implication which echoes an observation made by educators throughout the history of educational thought, from Plato to Rousseau24: the educators Isocrates criticizes do not rely on the moral excellence of persons to guide the fulfillment of promises but rather rely on formal contracts analogous to those used for exchanges of property and enforced by the authority of law [Ant. 4–5]. So while the educators may sincerely praise moral excellence and promise to teach it, the principle on which they rely to ensure desirable behavior and their own material self-interest is in fact authority and coercion. These educators rhetorically praise and promise to teach moral virtues, such as honesty and justice, and consequently their reliance on authority rather than virtue is not to be discovered in their explicit statements, nor is it directly asserted by Isocrates. Isocrates’ claims about the centrality of authority as a regulative principle in education are inferred by induction from his observation and descriptions of the actions of the educators. Corresponding to the nature of such reasoning, the literary method Isocrates uses to expose this feature of the reasoning of educators, and their lack of self-knowledge about the unrecognized role of such reasoning, exemplifies the logical structure of inductive method and its role in Isocratic instruction, whether in his school or his writings. Isocrates’ argument is a mimetic imitation of inductive reasoning from experience, from the observation of behavior rather than from words and declamations alone, and so Isocrates’ reader is prodded to perform the same induction inference themselves rather than rely on Isocrates directly stating it. This is the use of rhetorical and argumentative structure both to exemplify and to teach by habituation to reason for oneself rather than relying on direct, explicit instruction, surely one of the first steps on the longer road25 of philosophical education and genuine autonomy. It is by such an inductive method of argumentation that Isocrates implies that education has always produced rather authoritarian factions of educators, educators who rely to a large extent on legal or political authority to regulate deliberation and behavior. The obvious question, which Isocrates adumbrates, is why any educational system which claims to be rational cannot be implemented by rationally persuading citizens of its attainable benefits and then instructing them to attain those benefits, but instead must be imposed on citizens by some mode of formal compulsion, whether that compulsion be social, political, or legal?

24

Ant. 5. See Plato Sophist 223a–226a; Protagoras 310c–310d; Gorgias 519. Cf. Aristotle Sophistical Refutations 1.165. Rousseau, Emile, Bk. 1 (Bloom ed. pp. 49–50). 25 “The Longer Road” is the phrase Plato uses as a name of the philosophical education described in the Republic Books 5–7, a detour from the doctrinal education represented by shorter road from the Piraeus to Athens. See Republic 543a–c, and L’Arrivee (2015) for a full account.

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4.3

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Authoritarian Factions and the Erosion of Citizenship in Education

As Isocrates’ argument would predict, the question of authority and educational factions are familiar features of contemporary educational discourse and practical politics. It is certainly present in contemporary debates about education and, especially, about the curriculum in state schools.26 Authoritarian factions in education can be identified by three characteristics. First, each faction believes that they know so much about the nature, practice, and attainment of the goals of education that, second, they believe that their conception of the conduct and goals of education is incontrovertible and so ought to be compulsory for everyone because (rather inconsistently) only their conception of the practice and goals of education could be accepted by a rational and autonomous person. These two dogmas imply, third, that parents (or any other citizens) with different opinions about the education and, ultimately, the nature of the good lives of their own children ought to have any claim to parental rights in matters of education minimalized or eliminated.27 In other words, this third implication is to demand—and to use political authority to enforce—the proposition that no citizen can be considered rational until they act according to the opinions selected for them by currently dominant academics and educationists, and imposed by the state, and that they cannot be considered morally or intellectually autonomous until they are willing to choose the opinion declared to be correct by the same academics and institutions of the state. To believe that persons can be educated to be rational and autonomous by being educated wholly in accordance with some political theory or other, in compulsory, state-controlled

26

Peter Gray (2013, 2020) has examined this problem from a variety of perspectives. For histories of coercion and authoritarianism in state schooling see Tyack (1976), Katz (1976), Katz (1977), Edwards (1978), Rich (1982), Melton (1988), Glasser 1990, Klepper (1996), Bellah (1999), Noddings (2001), Osipian (2008), Bradley (2009), Evans (2010), Osei-Kofi (2010), Murtin and Viarengo (2011), Saito (2014), Wood (2015), Anderson (2015), Edmundson (2016), Warnick (2017), Justman and Peyton (2018), Farnen and Meloen (2000), Orejudo et al. (2020), and Moorman (2020). Renewed recognition of the origins and legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools has reminded us of the dangers of using compulsory schooling as a means of beneficent coercion. One might say that Aboriginal Canadian students were a kind of experiment in imposing a real “Original Position” and “Veil of Ignorance”: they were separated from their families, communities, customs, culture, language and history so that they could be compelled to undergo “rational” and compulsory schooling which educational and political authorities—“experts”— had declared to be better for them. The results were not autonomy and justice. 27 E.g. Jones (2021) https://reason.com/2021/12/28/nikole-hannah-jones-understand-parents-whatthey-tech-critical-race-theory/; Bartholet (2019), Curren and Blokhuis (2011), Levinson (2004), p. 231; Levinson (1999), “Introduction”; Dwyer (1994). Compare these doctrinal and programmatic writings to Girard 1965; Koganzon (2021a), Moschella (2016), Zagzebski (2012) and Rahe (2009) for much more sophisticated—and prescient—account of the development of this soft despotism in contemporary democracy.

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institutions,28 with no alternative educational institutions permitted, is both formally irrefutable within the closed circle of each political theory and a bizarre triumph of hope over experience for which the entire history of education provides only contrary evidence. In this regard, liberal political theory is not more or less of an intellectually closed circle than any other political doctrine: if I accept liberal political doctrine or the liberal conception of the “agent” as the axiom of political judgments, then the “rational person” must and can only deduce liberal educational policy from liberal doctrine and conceptions of the rational agent; if I accept Marxist political doctrine as the axiom of political judgments, then the “rational person” must and can only deduce Marxist educational policy from Marxist doctrine and conceptions of the rational agent; if I accept any theological-political doctrine as the axiom of political judgments, then the “rational person” must and can only deduce theological educational policy from theological-political doctrine and conceptions of the rational agent; if I accept Islamic theologico-political doctrine as the axiom of political judgments, then the “rational person” must and can only deduce Islamic educational policy and conceptions of the rational agent; and so on.29 In all of these cases, there is a correlative drive to reduce or eliminate parental rights to any alternative, and to use institutional power to marginalize or eliminate alternative models of education, which must be by definition irrational and unjust.30 Consequently, each party declares that all the other parties are “irrational”, and therefore justifiably (because necessarily) compelled by the academic or theological or political authority to accept what is “rational”. One arena of such compulsion by political power will be education, especially its institutions and curricula. This is a commonly recognized problem which was widely discussed throughout the educational thought of the pedagogical century, and especially in the debate and practical contest between education rooted in traditional theologico-political doctrine and the new modes of sophistic and philosophical education.31 For example, Xenophon places the use of political power to determine what education will be at the center of Socrates’ life and trial: 28

Similar problems arise in private schooling purchased in the free market, but parents have more effective power in such institutions. For examples in the US—some successful, some not—see the series of Supreme Court decisions Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940), Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township (1947), Engel v. Vitale (1962), Stone v. Graham (1980), Wallace v. Jaffree (1985); Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum v. Montgomery County Public Schools (2005) and Skoros v. Klein (2006); and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972); Brown v. Hot, Sexy, and Safer Productions (1995), or more recently Flanagan (2021). It is instructive and sobering to recall that in the five cases amalgamated into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, it was the state school educators who opposed racial desegregation and then tried to use social and political power to subvert it after it was legally enforced. 29 See Muir (2018), Chaps. 1 and 8 for a more detailed discussion. 30 E.g. In totalitarian history: Wunderlich (1937), Teitelbaum (1945), and Roche (2013). In contemporary liberal legal and educational advocacy: Dwyer (1994), Carter (2007), Curren and Blokhuis (2011), and Bartholet (2019). Compare Koganzon (2021a). 31 Xenophon, Apology 20; Isocrates Antidosis 1–13, 270–309; Diogenes Laertius, “Socrates”, 19, 37.

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“Well then”, Socrates reportedly said, “doesn’t even this seem a wonder to you: that in other affairs the strongest do not get merely an equal share, but are preferred in honor, while I, because I was selected by some as the best in what concerns the greatest good for human beings — education [paideίa1] — on account of this, I am being prosecuted by you as warranting the death penalty?”32

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates explicitly recognizes that the argued criticisms of his educational practices articulated by Aristophanes33 in his play The Clouds (Neuέkai) are less important than the political power of the much less knowledgeable second accusers at his trial, Anytus, Meletus, and the minor participant Lycon. Anytus is a politically powerful man presented as a representative of the interests of politicians34 and a defender of the traditional educational practices that do not criticize them and so supports their power. He is explicitly presented as a man not much interested in understanding arguments or in presenting counterarguments: in the Meno35 he is presented as condemning Socrates and threatening him with persecution on the basis of a small fragment of a conversation he has over-heard and is briefly invited to participate in. Anytus is unable to present arguments that defend his conception of political virtue and the education supposedly best suited to develop it, and as a result immediately proceeds to threaten Socrates with legal and political power. Similarly, Meletus accuses Socrates of educational practices which corrupt the youth but is unable to provide evidence to support the claim or even to coherently explain what the accusation means.36 He does not seek to understand or to rationally refute Socrates’ educational practices and goals. On the contrary, he seeks only to use legal institutions and political power to eliminate them, and thereby to restore the monopoly of traditional educational institutions and goals. Once alternative educational ideas and practices have been suppressed, and a monopoly of educational provision has been achieved, each party of doctrinal educators can truthfully claim that they offer the best education available. Isocrates’ approach to these problems and modes of argumentation has two main parts. First, that citizens can inductively infer from the observation of educational practice and the history of education the predictive principle that advocates of educational (political, religious, and other) doctrines all begin by claiming that their doctrines are rational and can be rationally taught to the young, but that such claims are not as rational or as rationally efficacious as their proponents claim. Second, and consequently, that appeals to rationality will soon be supplemented by and eventually replaced by the use of the coercive power of political authority to impose educational practices precisely because the educators know less than they think they do and consequently irrationally promise more than they can deliver. The history of

32

Xenophon, Apology 21. Cf. Apology 20 for context. Apology 18a–d. Socrates calls Aristophanes “the first accuser”. 34 Apology 23e–24a. Cf. Xenophon, Apology 29–31; Diogenes Laertius, “Socrates” 39. 35 Meno 90–91. 36 Apology 23–24. Cf. Euthyphro 2b–3b. 33

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education reveals many variants of the same pattern: from diversity of educational provision toward ever greater uniformity compelled by political authorities across the political spectrum and the academics who serve them, always accompanied by the relentless reduction of citizens’ means to participate in educational policy debates.37 Even today educational reformers promise that “No child will be left behind”, and then make acquiescence to that promise compulsory regardless of its (in)effectiveness. I am alluding, of course, to the series of educational reforms and policies guided by educational theorists and policy-makers working in the service of government and convinced that they (and they alone?) possess sufficient knowledge of education not merely to provide education to everyone but to justify making it compulsory for everyone. As Isocrates’ implicit inductive argument predicts, a glance at the history of state schooling reveals that it is common for such theorists to justify their arguments for state control of education by rhetorically appealing to “the interests of the state”, and by vaguely asserting that “the state has an interest in the conduct and goals of education”. The question, however, is not whether the abstraction “the state” has interests: every state, from communist to fascist to National Socialist to Maoist to theologico-political to liberal has interests. The real question is what those interests are said to be, how clearly they are articulated, and whether they are sufficiently justified to over-ride the freedom and autonomy of deliberating citizens which is a primary interest and duty of the state to facilitate and protect. If we peal back these rhetorical fig-leafs, then, we discover that the “interests of the state” are in fact not those of “the state” but merely the doctrinal political preferences of the educational theorists who have secured support of a powerful political faction by conforming to its preferences, but which they have failed to persuade their fellow citizens to accept. What is actually being proposed, then, is not control of education by “the state” in the interest of all citizens, but rather the use of the power of the state to exclude citizens from deliberations and to compel those (by definition, irrational) citizens who cannot afford private education to adopt the educational ideas and political agenda of academics and educational activists with access to political power. Persuasion and argument having failed—or, increasingly, not even having been tried—these educational endeavors are imposed on citizens by the authority of the state38 and the power of federal funding. This is the case from the Hall-Dennis Report, Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario (1968)—the first chapter of which is ironically entitled “The Truth Shall Make You Free”,39 which replaces the traditional liberating phrase “set you free” 37 Apple (1982), Bowles and Gintis (1976), Glenn (1988), Provasnik (2006), Glenn and De Groof (2012), and Berner (2017). 38 See Muir (2018), pp. 170–174. 39 Although not acknowledged in the Report, the Hall-Dennis Report was directly inspired by a tour three of its members took of Soviet schools in 1966, and by the ruthlessly coercive pedagogy of A. S. Makarenko, author of A Road to Life: an Epic of Education. See Cole (2013) and the sobering evaluation by Hennessy (2011).

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with the doctrinally programmatic “make you free”40—in Canada, or from the Elementary and Secondary School Act (1965) to the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) in the USA, or from the Report of the Schools Inquiry Commission (1868) to the Butler Act (1944) to the Education Reform Act (1988) and the National Curriculum it imposed on schools in the UK. As Isocrates anticipates, there is a strange and rather paradoxical history of academic advocacy of compulsory educational systems and reforms promising to convert students into “autonomous” citizens who nevertheless must have only liberal or Marxist or particular religious41 opinions, will (almost) always vote for a specific political party, have limited or no parental rights, and little or no choice about which (state) school they are “autonomously” permitted to send their children,42 and no effective means to participate in deliberations and debates about curricula or educational provision generally. In Isocrates’ day as in ours we are confidently told that, with enough resources, with the right curriculum, the right classroom design, the right teachers, and the right (compulsory) national curriculum, compulsory state schooling can transform every student into an autonomous citizen, education can transform our regime from whatever it is to one of social justice for all, education can solve almost every social problem, from the rectification of past injustices to rates of teen pregnancy to racism and other modes of prejudice and discrimination, to economic inequality to world peace, all the while transforming every student into an avid “lifelong learner” imbued with a love of reading. Isocrates argued (and the history of education verifies) that there is no reason to believe that educationists really do possess the knowledge of education they say they do, that there has never been any evidence to show that education could even begin to have such pervasive and multifaceted effects, and that no educational system has ever come remotely close to doing so. Indeed, if education and educators were able to achieve what is promised, there would be little need for the constant drives to reform education, society, and the regime. The first lesson for educators to learn from the history of education and the first two virtues of the educator, then, ought to be humility about their own knowledge of the nature, conduct, and goals of education and, derived directly from that humility, moderation of their claims about what education can achieve and of their claims to power over their fellow citizens. It is for these very reasons that Isocrates begins his account of education with a plain statement (quoted above) about the vast gulf that separates what educators say they know about education and can accomplish by their teaching and what they really do know and can realistically be expected to accomplish, and, derivatively, the gulf that separates the power they believe they ought to have over their fellow citizens from the power they can justify having or be granted. Gospel of John 8.32: ἡ ἀkήheia ἐketheqώrei ὑlᾶ1. There are powerful neo-liberal and conservative educational-political activists who prefer to use the power of the free market rather than the state, but they have little presence in the academy and even less in Educational Studies. 42 See Freire (1970), Searle (1990), Levinson (2004), Giroux (2011), Ford (2015), and Gottesman (2016). 40 41

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Self-knowledge of the Educators and What Education Can Actually Achieve

The comparison between what educators promise and what educators actually accomplish raises two additional questions for Isocrates, one about educators and one about education, which structure his discussions of education in all of his works. The first question Isocrates’ Against the Sophists asks, and which this work and all his educational works seek to answer for us is not “What can education ideally do?” but rather the more realistic—and more moderate and honest—question, “What can education and educators actually do?” The second question is not primarily about education, but about educators. Isocrates asks, How accurate are educators’ self-knowledge; that is, how accurate are educators’ opinions about themselves, their own knowledge, and the efficacy of the various educational programs they offer? Any claim educators might make about their own “expertise” depends on how accurately these necessarily primary questions are answered. This is because these two questions are related in the sense that any educator’s lack of self-knowledge is one cause of their exaggerated claims for what they and their educational programs can achieve and have achieved. By answering these two questions, then, Isocrates will present himself as an educator whose self-knowledge is more accurate than that of other educators, as an educator who has attained the virtue of moderation, and consequently as an educator who offers a more realistic and demonstrably more successful program of education. In his view, the character and results of education is less a matter of curriculum or policy than of the virtues and realism of the self-appraisal of the educators themselves. Isocrates’ combination of critique and self-presentation43 has two distinct but inseparable parts: one part concerns the attributes of educators themselves, and the second part concerns the various curricula, teaching methods, and so on that constitute the competing programs of education offered by those educators. This two-part critique and self-presentation articulates and explicates what Isocrates believes to be deficient in too many educators and systems of education, but more importantly his critique reveals by implication what Isocrates believes educators and education ought to be, and which he will exemplify with the whole of his life. For Isocrates, being an educator is not his job or vocation, it is what he is, his entire life. I will examine his main claims about the attributes of educators themselves, and then turn to his claims about the systems of education offered by these educators, and the results we can reasonably expect of them. As my earlier discussion of Isocrates’ use of the term soklῶm would lead us to expect, his primary criticism of educators themselves is that they are too daring (soklῶmse1), in the sense that they have immoderate conceptions of their own capacities and consequently make immoderate promises about what they and their program of education can accomplish. Isocrates recognizes that there are some

43

See Too (1995) for a masterful articulation of this feature of Isocrates’ thought.

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dishonest educators who are well aware that their educational programs cannot deliver what they promise, but Isocrates (like Plato in the Gorgias) argues that most educators are not so much dishonest as self-deceived in the sense that that they lack a realistic self-knowledge of their own educational ideas and of what their own educational program—or any educational program—can actually achieve. To understand Isocrates’ claims about educators’ lack of self-knowledge, we must read the opening section of Against the Sophists with care, and without assuming a conventional, overly literal interpretation the Greek text. Isocrates asks44 if anyone would not hate and despise first and foremost those who spend their time in disputes, pretending to seek the truth but attempting from the beginning of their lessons to lie? [Ag. Soph. 1]

The word conventionally translated in English as “lie” here is wetdή, which can indeed mean lie but it can also mean untrue or false.45 Not every untrue or false statement is a lie: a person can make a false claim as a deliberate lie, but a person can also make a false claim as an honest error or as a result of ignorance or stupidity. The interpretive question, then, is whether Isocrates uses the word wetdή to denote intentional lying or to denote unintentional falsehood or both. In this passage, Isocrates is concerned with educators who claim “with too little caution”46 that their goal is to seek the truth, and yet who begin their lessons with wetdή. The truth that these educators claim to seek, and to teach students to attain, is specified by Isocrates as knowledge of the future, including knowledge of what will need to be done in the future in order to attain happiness [Ag. Soph. 2]. Isocrates argues that this claim is false (wetdή) because such knowledge of the future is not possible for a human being [Ag. Soph. 2]: what the educators claim is false, but it is not a lie because, as he has said, their claim is a result of incaution and ignorance of the limits of human knowledge.47 The problem Isocrates is concerned with is not dishonesty but rather the educator’s lack of knowledge of themselves and of the limits of human nature. This in turn implies that educators ought to have two characteristics which Isocrates believes he does have, but which many educators do not. The first characteristic of the best educator is knowledge of what their educational activities can reasonably be expected to achieve and knowledge of what their educational programs actually do achieve.48 In other words, the educator must make

The entire sentences is sί1 cὰq oὐj ἃm lirήreiem ἅla jaὶ jasauqomήreie pqῶsom lὲm sῶm peqὶ sὰ1 ἔqida1 diasqibόmsxm, oἳ pqorpoioῦmsai lὲm sὴm ἀkήheiam fηseῖm, eὐhὺ1 d᾽ ἐm ἀqvῇ sῶm ἐpacceklάsxm wetdῆ kέceim ἐpiveiqoῦrim. 45 See the Liddle-Scott entry for wetdή1. 46 Isocrates’ use of soklῶmse1 reminds us of his self-description in terms of tolman, or immoderate daring. See Chap. 2 above. 47 At Ad. Soph. 6 Isocrates is referring to people who have any skill that they can teach, as distinct from the rival educators in disputation he is discussing. 48 See Hudson (2019) for a sobering first-hand account of how some public schools avoid evaluating what they promise against the results they actually achieve. 44

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two distinctions: the first is between exaggerated and empirically false claims about what education could ideally achieve vs. what education can realistically be expected to achieve; the second is between what education can realistically be expected to achieve vs. what it actually does achieve. Even the most well intentioned and realistic program of instruction can sometimes fail to attain the expected results for a wide variety of (sometimes unforeseen) reasons. Educators must be able to recognize and be willing to acknowledge the fact of such failures and their causes.49 The second characteristic educators must have is the moral and intellectual attribute Isocrates argues teachers and other educators ought to strive for above all, namely rxuqorύmη (suphrosune), an untranslatable term and idea expressed in part as a mode of moderation-by-self-control that shuns the hubris50 of excessive self-confidence and the impositions on others that are so easily caused by it. It is the sobering implication of Isocrates’ argument that no educator or educational system can claim to possess enough knowledge or “expertise”51 to justify making their educational program and institutions compulsory for the whole of the citizenry. Indeed, advocacy of compulsion is too often the means to compensate for inadequate evidence and argumentation. Isocrates argues that the excessive promises made by educators are caused, in part, when rxuqorύmη plays less of a role than soklῶmse1a (or soklῶ) does in the educator’s self-evaluation of their own power and efficacy as educators, and consequently in the public promises they make about what education can supposedly accomplish. Isocrates argues that the second virtue of the effective educator is suphrosune expressed as a modest and realistic sense of what educators and education are able to achieve, and the honesty to promise parents, students, and the regime no more than that. This is a theme to which his subsequent arguments will repeatedly return.

A Canadian example is the edu-fad “Discovery Math”. It promised to improve students’ mathematical skills while reducing “math anxiety”, but actually caused a rapid decline in math scores on tests administered by several agencies, including the governmental Education Quality and Accountability Office. Despite its demonstrated failure, however, socio-politically doctrinaire educrats continued to insist that the “new” teaching method for mathematics was so politically sound that it “must” eventually succeed. Although the failure of the teaching method had been recognized for some time (e.g. Kirshner and Clark 2006), it took nearly a decade before a professional mathematician with no apparent political agenda was able to provide the evidence needed to finally demonstrate that the whole exercise was counter-productive and unsustainable (Stobbe 2015). Revealingly, there has been little interest in researching what the long-term effects of this pedagogical fad have been for the students on whom it was inflicted. 50 North (1966). 51 The claim that school teachers and administrators are somehow “experts” in all matters relating to education is preposterous in light of the facts that their training is limited to state schooling and their measured intellectual aptitudes and attainments are modest. See Gedye (2020), Nemko and Kwalwasser (2013), Sowell (2002), Ravitch (2002), Sowell (1993), and Kramer (1991). There is no evidence to support the claim that teachers have more expertise, and therefore ought to have more authority, in matters of education or state schooling than any other citizen. 49

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Isocrates next argues that one consequence of unexamined and hence unjustified confidence in the efficacy of educators and systems of education is a belief that one no longer needs to apply oneself to the efforts that philosophy (uikorouίam52) requires. In other words, one result of any educator’s lack of self-knowledge is resistance to, or even sustained failure to, systematically evaluate the difference between the educator’s belief in what education can achieve and what their own educational activities actually do achieve. In part, Isocrates has in mind the understandable tendency to focus on—to the point of becoming intellectually limited by—the practical contingencies of day-to-day teaching in a particular educational system. When the architects of an educational system are (over-) confident about what it can achieve in the lives of students and in the regime, and when educators have settled into a customary routine of curricula, teaching methods and evaluations, it is understandable that they can become so focused on the routines of sustaining the system that they cease to think philosophically about the principles on which all of the educational system and its now familiar routines were grounded, and so cease to think empirically about whether those principles are practically successful. Confidence and routine militate against the motives for the continuous philosophical re-thinking to first principles that every educational system and every teacher requires as part of reflective educational design and practice. The necessity of this kind of sustained philosophical self-knowledge and self-criticism is a feature of educational practice that Dewey recognized early in his career, and which underlies his drive to encourage teachers themselves to continuously re-examine and re-articulate the philosophical principles of education and especially education in democracy. Dewey argued that It is, indeed, advisable that the teacher should understand, and even be able to criticize, the general principles upon which the whole educational system is formed and administered.53

Dewey is not referring to the specifics of classroom practice, or to the teacher’s knowledge of the subjects they are required to teach, or even to the goals and policies of the school system, important as these are, but to the philosophical principles which determined what those policies and practices are, what those subjects are, how they are taught, why it is believed that teaching such subjects in such a way is justified, and what benefit such education will actually have for the student and their regime. Isocrates turns, then, to the next question of Against the Sophists, namely, What do specific types of educators fail to think philosophically about and, consequently, what do they falsely promise about the results of education? From the answers to these questions, we can begin to infer in greater detail the nature and content of the education Isocrates offers.

52 53

Ag. Soph. 1. McLellan and Dewey (1895), pp. 14–15.

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4.5

The Heart of Eristic Argument: Knowing Words but not What the Words Refer to54

Isocrates turns first to a class of educators he calls the disputers, a group he and Plato both subject to severe and exasperated criticism.55 These are educators who claim to be seeking truth about the world, past, present, and future,56 and knowledge about how to best live in the world, but who actually seek only knowledge of how words relate to other words in a manner that allows their students to appear to win verbal disputes. These educators do not seek knowledge of how words relate to the world, and therefore do not seek knowledge of the world and how to live well in it as they claim. As the Stranger in Plato’s Sophist 225a explains, disputing can be divided into two parts, battling and contending, Stranger: “Then it’s fairly likely and proper for us to give the battling part that pits body against bodies some such name as the following and set it down as ‘doing violence’”. Theaetetus: Yes. Stranger: “And the part that pits words against words, Theaetetus, would one call it anything other than ‘disputing’”? Theaetetus: Nothing else.

There are two related criticisms of educators “who pit words against words”, and the instruction they offer. The first is that these educators provide instruction in eristic, a mode of disputation and argumentation in rhetoric and oratory intended to defeat rather than refute an opponent.57 The goal of such education is not to discover and communicate what is true, but merely to discover how to use words to persuade an audience that one’s opponent is wrong in what they say; it is, of course, a very common mode of political disputation found on every point along the political spectrum. As Isocrates observes, the objective of such instruction is to teach students to be vigilant about inconsistencies in word-usage rather than inconsistencies in the very actions the words are supposedly about [Ag. Soph.7]. For example, eristic disputation is likely to focus on media rhetoric and commentary about a proposed law rather than on detailed examination of the text of the law and in practical effects, precisely because the goal of the debate is to gain public support as a form of political power. I can illustrate the point with a pedagogical exercise some of my friends and I use when teaching. First, the instructor asks students what they think about a controversial proposed law, such as

54

An allusion to Ernest Gellner’s (1959) Words and Things, which provoked an extraordinary month-long eristic battle in The Times (Uschanov 2002). 55 Plato Euthedemus; Plato, Sophist 225–226; Phaedrus 267e ff. Isocrates Ag. Soph. 19 repeats the same criticisms of the teachers of technai for legal pleading. For an account of the debate between Plato, Gorgias, and Isocrates about the defects of rhetoric, see Barney (2010). 56 Ag. Soph. 1–2. 57 Norlin (1980) “General Introduction”, p. xxi; Irwin (1995), p. 595. Contrary to Norlin’s suggestion in his note to Antidosis 48, it is unlikely that Isocrates thought of Plato as an eristic or a disputer. See Lachance (2018).

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Canada’s proposed Bill C-21 and Bill C-71 gun control laws, or Canada’s Bill C-10 internet regulation (some believe censorship) laws. This provokes intense debate—or it used to, before students became fearful of expressing unauthorized opinions—as one might expect. After debate has proceeded in circles for a few minutes, the instructor asks the students a second question: is there any student who has actually read the text of the proposed Bills, rather than rely wholly on mass media, social media, or other modes of gossip? The response in almost every case is that not one student has read the Bill (and many do not even know if or how they could get a copy—a sort of weird internet Cartesianism, “If it’s not on Twitter, it doesn’t exist”). These students have been educated (in state schools) in eristic and habituated to trust in mediating authorities, that is, they have been habituated to rely on second (or third or fourth)-hand jargon and opinion about the proposed laws for the purposes of enthusiastic disputation rather than being educated to seek knowledge of what the proposed law actually is and what evidence has been presented for and against it in parliamentary (or any other) debate. It is not the claim that one has knowledge (episteme) that is important, but the fact that direct knowledge of political subjects is a pre-condition of having one’s own opinion (doxia) about the subject [Ag. Soph. 8]. There is a second and related feature of instruction that Isocrates, like Plato, understood to be a source of a serious deficiency in educational thought and practice. This is the use of artificial words or even fabricated jargon and an artificially complicated use of such words which allows a person to dispute the verbal consistency of artificial words and phrases without ever actually using the words to refer to practical reality or even to their own actions [Ag. Soph. 19].58 As Plato argues, the disputer or rhetorician can become so distracted by the pleasure of such yammering and polemics that they become careless of both their own affairs and any practical concern for justice in their community [Sophist 225c–226a].59 In political deliberation and decision making, attention to jargon replaces attention to one’s interests, and concern for definitions replaces concern for facts and argumentation. Plato reiterates the same criticism in the Phaedrus,60 where he notes again that instruction in artificial words and polemics cannot confer knowledge but can enable one to be treated as a king—the appearance of political authority without effective political power [Phaedrus 266c]. With some exasperation, Plato exposes the vacuity of fabricated terminology such as trust-proofing (pistosis) followed by pre-trust-proof (epipistosis) or covert implication-by-allusion (hypodelosis), and the ways in which such terminology enable the sophist or disputer to seem to deliberate and debate subjects about which they have no knowledge.61 The jargon is said to be needed to express complex ideas but in fact is a means to conceal ignorance.

58

See Isocrates (2000), Vol. 1, p. 65, n. 13. I have used the translation in Plato (1996). 60 Phaedrus 266a–267a. 61 Some of these Greek terms are so weird that it very difficult to translate them into meaningful English. I have made some of my own, and used or modified those found in Isocrates, Vol. 1, p. 65, n. 13 and the ingenious Nehamas and Woodruff translation. 59

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As Isocrates’ (and Plato’s) arguments would lead us to predict,62 the use of elaborate and artificial vocabulary both as a substitute for competence, and as a means to debate subjects about which one is ignorant, is by no means limited to the classical world. This is all familiar to the audiences of John Lyly’s (1554–1606) modifications of the Commedia Erudita nearly two millennia later, in which authoritative personages are exposed as fools with much knowledge of artificial words but little knowledge of the world in which they cannot effectively act. This tradition evolved into the more subtle Commedia dell’arte that influenced Shakespeare.63 One thinks of the elaborate but vacuous rhetorical displays of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and of the ways in which the dramatic unity is attained by a musical structure which the content of the words alone cannot attain, all the arts of the trivium transcended by the first art of the quadrivium. The play, in part a critique of the universities, represents a group of young men who retreat into “a little academe”64 because they believe that the real sexual and social world of which they have little experience is too defective to find happiness in. They are guided by a schoolmaster, appropriately named Holofernes,65 who conceals his ignorance and practical ineffectiveness behind a web of words: Most barbarous intimation! Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were in via, in a way of explication; facere, as it were replication, or rather ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination — after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest, unconfirmed fashion — to insert again my hand credo for a deer. [Act 4, Scene 2, lns. 13-19]

Holofernes’ sneering polemic blames and ridicules an “uneducated” man for his own failure to understand straight-forward speech and his inability to distinguish between the age of a deer and the sex of the deer. Holofernes “the scholar”66 leads a band of young men with little experience of women (or anything else) who have learned to distain women from rhetorical representations in books. In the end they leave Holofernes’ and his linguistic substitutes for reality behind by being educated about the real nature and intellectual equality of women by their first sustained experience of women, who turn out to be less formally educated but much more intelligent and practically astute. Perhaps the closest Shakespeare comes to Isocrates’ and Plato’s critiques of artificial words and modes of disputation are the character Touchstone, in As You Like It. Jaques, himself educated by much experience of the world,67 is fascinated by Touchstone’s combination of elaborate academic vocabulary and utter ignorance of the world, and asks Touchstone to explain how he came to be involved in a quarrel. Touchstone’s explanation reveals

62

Barney (2010). See Ben Jonson (1623) “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr William Shakespeare”. 64 Act 1, Sc. 1, ln. 13. 65 Dante, Commedia, Purgatorio 12.58–60. 66 Act 1, Sc. 1, ln. 17. 67 Act 2, Sc. 7, lns. 136–166. 63

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that he knows artificial names of the parts of all debates but none of the content of the debate in which he had participated: Touchstone: O, sir, we quarrel in print by the book, as you have books for good manners. I will name you the degrees. The first, the Retort Courteous; the second, the Quip Modest; the third, the Reply Churlish; the fourth, the Reproof Valiant; the fifth, the Countercheck Quarrelsome; the sixth, the Lie with Circumstance; the seventh, the Lie Direct. All these you may avoid but the Lie Direct; and you may avoid that too with an If. I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel; but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an If, as: ‘If you said so, then I said so.' And they shook hands, and swore brothers. Your If is the only peace-maker; much virtue in If.68

As Shakespeare suggests, Touchstone’s formal education has provided him with an artificial vocabulary and mode of disputation, but not knowledge of the world to which they supposedly refer and are to be applied. His speech seems irrefutable because it has no relation to anything real. Touchstone and Holofernes are Shakespeare’s images of the tendency of educators to replace knowledge of the world with an ability to manipulate artificial terminology, a tendency Isocrates warned us of. This is the sort of eristic sophistry so effectively described in our own century by George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”,69 where he argues that contemporary political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

In these examples, phrases such as “elimination of unreliable elements” refer to and are justified by other words such as “the Replacement of Prodrazvyorstka by Prodnalog” in the glorious National Economic Policy of 1921,70 but none of these words are ever brought into relation with the actual decisions and events they

68

Act 5, Sc. 4, lns. 89–103. Cf. lns. 65–81. Orwell (1946), pp. 252–265, reprinted in Orwell (1968), pp. 156–170. I quote from the later edition. 70 See Lenin (1965a, b). Compare Richman (1981), p. 96; Conquest (1987). 69

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supposedly denote, namely the expansion of totalitarian control, the deliberate mass starvation of the peasants, and the executions of anyone who publically objected.71 A more recent example—found in contemporary educational theory—is the artificial jargon and misuse of words exposed by the Sokol Hoax72 and the hoaxes and jokes that have followed it,73 in which (then) fashionable words and phrases are strung together without any relation to the mathematical or empirical realms or practical judgment to which they are supposed to refer, in a manner intended to appear to secure victory in academic disputes which have no definite subject-matter and no criteria by which claims can be evaluated, and which provide no knowledge of the world or of justice.74 One thinks of Steven Weinberg’s puzzled discovery that “English professor Robert Markley calls quantum theory nonlinear, though it is the only known example of a precisely linear theory”.75 As Weinberg observed, … for some postmodern intellectuals, “linear” has come to mean unimaginative and old-fashioned, while “nonlinear” is understood to be somehow perceptive and avant garde. In arguing for the cultural importance of the quantum theory of gravitation, Sokal refers to the gravitational field in this theory as “a noncommuting (and hence nonlinear) operator.” Here “hence” is ridiculous; “noncommuting” does not imply “nonlinear,” and in fact quantum mechanics deals with things that are both noncommuting and linear.76

Thus the words “quantum theory” are semantically connected to the word “non-commuting”, and that word is then semiotically connected to the word “nonlinear” in a manner supposed to somehow dispute “traditional” knowledge without being distracted by the contemptable bourgeois habit of examining evidence and argumentation. In this manner discourse about mathematical and material objects is actually replaced by the appearance of disputation dependent on artificial word usages that do not refer to such objects and which the discoursers themselves do not understand; the fact that a person uses the words “quantum mechanics” does not mean that that person knows anything about the science to which those words refer. One searches in vain for evaluation of evidence or even mathematical statements of wavefunction probability density and wavefunction probability current in solutions for the Schrodinger Equation, or of how scaler fields can initiate an operational environment, in the then fashionable texts of Aronowitz, Lyotard, Lacan, Latour, or Derrida. The reason that discussion of these subjects is not found in works ostensibly about just these subjects is that the theorists “translated” precise mathematical statements, without their argument or even methods of demonstration, into vague academic jargon which cannot express argument of any kind, and then speculated about what the jargon hypothetically meant and implied about unrelated

71

This is before the advent of social media mobbing, which has made executions unnecessary. Sokal (1996) and Weinberg (1996). 73 E.g. “Sokol Squared”. See Lindsay, Boghossian and Pluckrose (2018). 74 See Nussbaum (1999). 75 Weinberg (1996), p. 6. 76 Weinberg 1996, p. 4. There is nothing new about this, as the writer of Ecclesiastes knew: ‫ ָלאָָדם‬,‫תר‬ ֵ ‫ ֹיּ‬-‫ ַמְר ִבּים ָהֶבל; ַמה‬,‫ ְדָּבִרים ַהְר ֵבּה‬-‫ ִכּי ֵישׁ‬. 72

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political and cultural subjects and claims they wished to seem to dispute. It is a mode of pseudo-education and discourse Isocrates describes quite clearly: these discussions were not about methods, facts, knowledge or effective political judgment, but rather they were about verbal disputation and the pursuit of eristic victory in ideological contests that rarely escape the confines of the sophistic schools of disputation, salons, cafés, or seminar rooms of transiently fashionable academia. None of this really matters, though, because so long as a person discourses about nothing real, they can never be wrong; it is, as Isocrates argued, an ideal strategy for a disputer and the instructor of disputers, in his day or in ours.77 When the perpetrators of these hoaxes against the disputers of today remind us that they are seeking to “separate knowledge-producing disciplines and scholars from those generating constructivist sophistry”,78 the relation between these ephemeral academic fads79 and the very sorts of faux-disputative sophistry that Isocrates found objectionable is clear. Isocrates is discussing an enduring feature of the educator’s self-knowledge and the particular mode of trans-historical sophistic educational thought and eristic practice which he seeks to understand and then critique.

4.6

Human Nature and the Limits of Education

Isocrates’ argument against the education offered by the eristic disputers, and his implicit articulation of his own ideas about education, continues with an account of human nature and (to reiterate Dewey) “the general principles upon which the whole educational system is formed and administered”. Specifically, Isocrates’ critique of the teachers of disputation begins with a sober reminder of the limits that human nature places on what education can achieve, and of the ways in which educators can be driven to error and hypocrisy whenever they fail to recognize these limits and/or try to proceed as if they do not exist. These failings begin with a lack of self-knowledge. The teachers of disputation “pretend to seek the truth and yet from the beginning of their teaching are compelled to speak untrue things” [Ag. Soph. 1] because they know that it is true that Nature sets limits and yet they try to educate their students as if there were no natural limits. He has two natural limits in 77

E.g. Isocrates 13.7. These observations are not “conservative”, but made by those at the progressive and the Marxist ends of the political spectrum, e.g., respectively, Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose (2018), and Phelp (1995) or Parenti (2021). Parenti laments the “decoy radicalism of a politics fixated on language and manners” so popular with academics who extol the writings of Gramsci and “critical theory” without imperiling their well-paid, secure employment in capitalist economies, contrary to the real risks Gramsci undertook for “organic working-class intellectuals”. See Holst (2009). 79 These chunks of doctrinaire jargon dominated the humanities a few years ago, but they are now largely forgotten embarrassments one does not discuss in polite academic society; it is like reminding someone that they once treasured a Klaatu 8-track tape and thought it was “deep”. This old jargon has been replaced, however, by the equally ephemeral jargon of “intersectionality” and “contact zones”, and a Drake MP3. These too shall pass (Sowell 2002, p. 317; Muir 2018, pp. 5–6). 78

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mind. Isocrates argues, first, that human nature sets a limit on how much knowledge human beings80 (ἀmhqώpoi1) can really have, about the future especially: It is clear to all that it is not in our nature to know in advance what is going to happen [Ag. Soph. 2. Cf. Antidosis 271]

Isocrates argues that human history—the development of virtue, justice, and the right relation of humans to the gods—as recorded and interpreted in Homeric literature for example, provides us with evidence that human beings cannot know the future: we cannot know what will happen in the future generally, and we cannot entirely know the (especially unintended) consequences of our own ideas and actions specifically. The teachers of disputation, however, either lack selfknowledge of this limitation of our human nature, or they are aware of it and yet incautiously proceed as if they are not. Consequently, they claim that they know that in the future the education they offer will provide their students with knowledge of exactly what they need to do to attain the greatest goods in life: the disputers promise that their educational program will provide their students with knowledge of how to be successful, and they tell their students (and their parents, who pay the fees) that they will teach them the knowledge, wisdom, and virtues that will enable them to attain eὐdaίlome1 (happiness and fulfillment) [Ag. Soph. 3–6]. These educators claim to have knowledge of the future, and specifically knowledge of the future effects of the education they offer. Isocrates next turns to the question of whether these educators really do have such knowledge of the future, and really do believe that education can and will attain all these goals. It should be reiterated here, as I argued above, that Isocrates is not suggesting that all of these educators are liars or hypocrites, deliberately promising what they know they cannot deliver [Ag. Soph. 2]. For most educators, the problem is a more subtle matter of lack of self-knowledge: these ancient educators, like sincere and well-intended educators now, somehow idealistically believe that education can accomplish goals that they simultaneous know education cannot accomplish in practice. Isocrates explains this apparent contradiction and the lack of self-knowledge on which it rests by comparing what these educators believe and profess in words with what they believe and do in actions. On the one hand, educators claim that the education they offer can transform their students into happy, prosperous, wise, and virtuous citizens and persons who will benefit themselves and their regime. On the other hand, however, despite believing themselves to be “teachers and masters of such great goods” [Ag Soph 3] they are willing to be recompensed with very low pay and social status. Isocrates points out that teachers do not willingly sell their property or any other goods for a fraction of their fair price—a teacher would not sell their house or car for a fraction of what they believe its fair market value to be—and infers from this that their willingness to sell their labor as educators for such low prices is clear evidence that they know that the real value of their teaching is lower than the value of what they promise

80

Isocrates refers to human beings here, not only men as he usually does.

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their teaching can accomplish. Teachers sell education for the price they know it is worth rather than for the price of what they promise it is worth. To be sure, few educators are “in it for the money” as the phrase goes, but Isocrates’ point is that the pay and status teachers are willing to accept is disproportionately low given the immense value they claim education has,81 and that this implies that teachers are aware that their teaching can actually deliver much less than they promise it offers: the educators promise to teach life-transforming knowledge, wisdom, practical skills, moral and political virtues that will enable their students to attain a lifetime of happiness and fulfillment, but they know that they cannot fulfill that promise and so accept the recompense proportional to the actual results rather than the promised results. Their actions are evidence for Isocrates’ claim that teachers lack self-knowledge in the sense that they (and their fellow citizens and political leaders) simultaneously believe and speak as if the education they offer is very valuable and yet know and act as if the education they offer is not so valuable because it cannot deliver all that they promise. The fact that educators do not and cannot deliver all that they promise raises the questions of why teachers and administrators promise so much, and why they cannot fulfill those promises. Isocrates provides a series of answers to these two questions. He argues, first, that we know that educators can transmit to others only what they possess themselves,82 and that teachers cannot transmit the knowledge and achieve all of these outcomes they claim because they do not possess them themselves any more than anyone else. Isocrates’ evidence for this claim is the empirical lives that teachers and educators actually live: their actions are no more morally or politically virtuous, their decisions are no more practical and wiser, their lives no more fulfilled and happier than anyone else’s [Ag. Soph 4–5]. To express this more directly, Isocrates observes that those who are uneducated are no less (and no more) admirable or successful than their teachers are, and that those who attribute their material success in life to their education too often overlook that most of them have come from wealthy families who could afford such education and many other advantages. It is therefore not clear—then or now—whether their success is caused by familial wealth, or by an education familial wealth made possible, or by “networking” or by something else. All of this implies one of Isocrates’ strongest beliefs about his own activity as an educator, namely that an educator ought to be evaluated not only with reference to their educational ideas and practices, but with reference to their entire life. The educator must not only teach subjects to their students, the educator must also teach by example; if it is true that the teacher ought to be an exemplar of the virtues of moderation-byself-control, practical wisdom, material success so far as they seek it, and good 81 E.g. in the U.S.A. in recent years: https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/15/us/teacher-pay-mythmisconception/index.html; https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/14/the-5-highest-and-lowest-payingstates-for-teachers-in-the-us.html; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/04/teacherpay-study-dropped-last-decade-report; https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-are-toolow-americans-say-2018-5. 82 Muir (1996a, b), p. 212.

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citizenship they claim to teach, then every part of an educator’s life ought to be used to evaluate both themselves as a teacher and their educational program. Furthermore, Isocrates argues that if educators really did possess the knowledge and virtues they claim they do and really were able to teach such knowledge and virtues to anyone, then it would have to be true that they would possess such knowledge and virtues themselves as well and know how to act on them. In other words, Isocrates is arguing that educators lack self-knowledge: they do not model in their own lives and they cannot teach life-transforming knowledge, wisdom, practical skills, or moral and political virtues that will enable their students to attain a lifetime of happiness and fulfillment because they do not possess such knowledge, skills, and virtues themselves. There are two parts to this claim, one corresponding to Isocrates’ belief that educators must be exemplars of what they teach, and the other part corresponding to Isocrates’ related belief that educators cannot teach what they do not know. The first claim, then, is that educators cannot serve as examples or models of the wisdom, virtues, and success which their students could imitate and perhaps emulate because educators do not possess these characteristics any more than their uneducated students do. The second is that educators cannot teach wisdom, virtues, and success if the educators do not possess knowledge of what these are or how they can be attained any more than the uneducated do. These two facts cannot be evaded by claiming that it is possible that educators cannot always serve as exempla because they are not always able to act on what they know, or because they are not always able to effectively teach what they know. Educators cannot use these claims as excuses for their failure to attain what they claim they can teach because they have already claimed that they can teach these things to anyone: if they cannot do these things themselves then they are wrong to claim that anyone can learn to do them; if they have not learned these things themselves, then they are claiming to be able to teach knowledge and skills and virtues they do not possess. Either way, the educators are contradicting themselves: they cannot claim that anyone can learn and act on the wisdom, virtues, and skills necessary for a fulfilled life and then claim that they are unable to learn and act on them themselves. These claims are evidence that there are people—the educators themselves, in this case—who are unable to learn or unable to act on the wisdom, virtues, and skills necessary for a fulfilled life, which contradicts their claim that anyone can be taught these things. Or, it would be evidence for the claim that educators do not possess knowledge of wisdom, virtues, and skills, which contradicts their claim that they can teach them: they cannot teach what they do not know. Or, it would be evidence for the claim that educators are unable to teach wisdom, virtues, and skills even if they do know them, which contradicts their claim that they are able to teach these things. Taken together, these observations and arguments support Isocrates’ conclusion that educators lack self-knowledge of the disproportional relation between what they claim they can teach, either by exempla or by instruction, and what they are actually able to teach. Finally (Isocrates is nothing if not thorough), Isocrates examines one more feature of the behavior of eristic disputer educators which, he argues, exposes their lack of self-knowledge about the differences between what they promise they can

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achieve compared to what they are actually able to achieve in the lives of their students [Ag. Soph. 5–6]. As we have seen, Isocrates claims that one effect of our human nature is that we can have only limited knowledge of the future, including especially knowledge of the actual consequences of our ideas and actions. His development of that argument here begins with the observation that this group of educators (the disputers) claims that they are able to teach (paideύomsa1) practical wisdom (uqomoῦmse1), soundness of mind, the virtue of moderation (rxuqorύmηm) and justice to their students,83 much like many educators today claim that they can teach social justice and all the attendant intellectual, social, political, cultural, and economic virtues to their students.84 On the basis of this claim, such educators predict that their students will be practical, just and virtuous persons and citizens in the future. This constitutes a claim that a teacher can know what the effects of their teaching is because they can know the future attitudes and behaviors of their students. Isocrates examines the self-knowledge of educators who predict the future in this way by asking if their actions are consistent with their prediction. This prediction depends on their pretense to two specific knowledge-claims: first that they have knowledge of the efficacy of their educational program, and second that they have knowledge of the future behavior of their students which is their only possible evidence of that efficacy. Isocrates claims that they do not have knowledge in either case, and they do not have self-knowledge of their ignorance in these matters. His evidence for these claims is, first, his empirical observation that it is common practice for these educators to demand that all of their students deposit their fees prior to instruction to ensure that they do not complete the course of instruction but then refuse to pay the fee. The demand for deposits from all students is based on the (unstated) belief that some students will complete the course but not acquire soundness of mind, virtue and just-dealing, which proves that the disputers do not know if or when their educational program will achieve the results they predict. Second, the fact that all students are required to deposit their fees also proves that the educators cannot predict the future, in the sense that they cannot predict which students might forfeit on their fees and which students are trustworthy. The fact that all students are required to deposit their fees is evidence of the fact that the educators do not know that their educational program will have the results that they promise it will, in part because they cannot know whether or not the future behavior of their students will be virtuous in the way that they promise. They claim to know that their educational program will produce students who will be just and virtuous in the future, but their actions demonstrate that they cannot and do not know whether the educational program will have any such effect and they cannot even

83

See Ag. Soph. 4 and 8, 6, and 5–6 respectively. A representative document from my own country is the Toronto District School Board’s Social Justice Action Plan, https://www.tdsb.on.ca/high-school/get-involved/social-justice. By my reading, it is compulsory for teachers to voluntarily accept and implement this plan. For the U.K. see Smith (2018). 84

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predict which of their students will succeed. These educators lack self-knowledge of their capacity as educators, and of the efficacy of their educational program, and consequently lose the esteem and trust of the public. This loss of the trust and esteem of the public is exacerbated by another difference between what educators promise and what they actually deliver.

4.7

The Teachers of Political Discourse: Speaking Power to Truth

Isocrates turns next to a second group of educators, the teachers and writers of pokisijoὺ1 kόcot1, a phrase which can be translated as civic discourse or less accurately as political speeches [Ag. Soph. 9–13.13], and which Isocrates understands to be a part of philosophy as he defines it [Ag. Soph. 11]. These are educators who claim to teach students how to prepare for and then participate effectively in dialogue and debate about the rights and obligations of republican citizenship especially, and about political policy generally. Isocrates agrees that political discourse and deliberation is a constitutive part of his philosophy and as such is a very valuable subject and set of skills to teach, but argues that this group of teachers do not understand it and consequently teach it badly. Once again, he uses his critique of these educators to explain both what he believes to be common errors made about the nature and effects of education, and then by implication to explain his own educational ideas and practices and how they avoid these common errors. His critique of the teachers of political discourse begins with a reiteration of the first unifying theme of Against the Sophists, namely that educators make exaggerated claims about what education can ideally achieve rather than telling the truth about what education really can achieve, and that they do so because they lack self-knowledge about their own educational ideas and practices [Ag. Soph. 9]. As he says, these educators fail to understand that … it is not those who make reckless (soklῶmse1) boasts about these arts (sέvma1) who make them great, but those who discover what the power (dtmηhῶrim) is in each art. [Ag. Soph. 10]

The term dtmηhῶrim (rendered here as power) is difficult to translate because there is no English equivalent. The word refers to the potency, capacity, or potential of a thing or an activity to attain a particular goal; that is, it refers to what a thing or art is capable of doing or becoming, including the limit of that capacity, potential, or capability. In the case of the teachers of pokisijoὺ1 kόcot1, Isocrates records the fact that they boast that they have discovered, and are able to teach, a sέvmη (techne) or systematic set of rhetorical techniques and rules of language usage which has the power (dtmηhῶrim) to transform any student into a politically effective citizen, and ultimately a wealthy public speaker, litigant, or politician, and a fulfilled human being.

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Isocrates responds to such boasting by claiming, first, that no evidence has been provided to demonstrate that this (or any) mode of philosophy (uikorouίam) and education has the powers or capacities (dtmηhῶrim) that these educators claim that it does. Specifically, he argues that there is no evidence to support the claim that teachers of political discourse can enable any student to become an informed citizen, to say nothing of becoming an effective political writer or speaker and a fulfilled human being. He also argues, second and more fundamentally, that it is not possible for teachers of political discourses to know whether their educational program has the power to enable their students to succeed in such terms because they have not enquired at all into the question of what does cause a person to acquire the knowledge and skills of successful political discourse and speech. [Ag. Soph.10] Their educational program is not an application of knowledge but rather an experimental test of their doctrines and claims using students as paying experimental subjects. These educators have not even considered the possibility that successful and effective deliberation, discourse and speech are not caused by education at all, but are caused by something else entirely. What, then, could be the cause or causes of the acquisition of effective discourse and speech? Isocrates argues that answering this question requires the investigation of at least two possible causes of effective deliberation and political discourse and speech, and the interaction (if any) of the two causes.85 The two potential causes are natural ability and formal instruction, each of which could have the power (dtmηhῶrim) to impart and improve the skills of effective political speech and discourse. Isocrates then proposes a three-part testable empirical hypothesis: that a person can attain the skills of effective political speech by the power of natural talent alone, that a person can attain the skills of effective speech by the power of instruction alone despite a lack of natural talent,86 and that a person can attain the skills of effective speech by the power of natural talent combined with the power of instruction. I will examine Isocrates’ arguments for each of these causes, as well as his suggestions about how they might work together. The teachers of discourse (like the teachers of disputation) claim that they possess a science of speech (kόcxm ἐpirsήlηm) which has the power to transform any student into an competent and effective political speaker87; in other words, they claim that application of a science of instructional methods and curricula can cause persons to become proficient and effective in political discourse, and thereby attain all the success that comes with that. If this claim is to be persuasive, then these educators must prove not only that they do possess such a science, they must also prove the more fundamental and logically prior claim that such a science of instruction is possible at all. These educators cannot claim that they are able to

85 There is no suggestion that there is one cause or the other. The question is, which cause contributes what proportion of effectiveness and in what circumstances. 86 A claim made by some of the educators he critiques here. 87 As the history of politics demonstrates, “competent” and “effective” are not the same things and not always found together.

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apply a science of instruction if they cannot first prove that a science of instruction exists or is even possible. Isocrates’ argument is concerned with this more fundamental problem: he argues that these educators do not have such a science of instruction because no such science is possible, and he argues that their belief that such a science is possible is a consequence of their failure to understand the very nature of political reasoning and discourse. Once again, educators lack self-knowledge of their own ignorance of the nature and conduct of teaching and education. The teachers of political discourse claim that there can be a science of teaching political discourse because the nature of discourse is the same as the nature of the alphabet [Ag. Soph. 10]: just as it can be scientifically established that it is the nature of the alphabet to be composed of a stable set of distinct parts, such as letters and a specific sound for each letter or combination of letters [Ag. Soph. 12], so too can it be scientifically established that political discourse is composed of distinct parts, such as the introduction, the proposition, the confirmation (or evidence), and the conclusion.88 The instructor needs only to teach the student these parts of discourse, and then teach them how to assemble the parts into an argument that can be written and spoken. This teaching method assumes that political discourse actually has a simple and mechanical structure analogous to that of an alphabet such that composite parts of discourse can be identified, separated, learned individually, and then assembled into a coherent and effective piece of argumentative writing or speech. There are thousands of students around the world writing essays and theses who would be ecstatic (and less sleep deprived) if this were true. Alas, Isocrates argues that the teacher of political discourse proposes such an implausibly simplistic teaching method because they do not understand the real nature of political discourse; in other words, the problem is not primarily that their scientific method is defective, but that they have tried to apply a scientific method to a phenomenon they do not understand, and to which such a scientific method cannot be applied. While Isocrates agrees that human speech is composed of the Forms89 (ἰdeῶm), understood as the parts of language that are used in all speech and writing, he also argues that political speech and discourse are not like Frankenstein’s monster, which can be assembled from the dead parts of once living wholes; one cannot analyze previous speeches as if they were simple composites that can be broken down into their composite parts, the parts exchanged and re-arranged, and then re-assembled to produce an effective and eloquent political discourse. Specifically, then, Isocrates argues that teachers who propose this simple, systematic teaching method fail to understand that they are using an ordered art (sesaclέmηm sέvmηm) as a model for a creative practice (poiηsijoῦ pqάclaso1) [Ag. Soph.12]

88

13.10. These terms are Ciceronian, though derived from Greek discourse and oratory. 13.16. The word and the concept are the same ones used by Plato, but Isocrates gives it much more limited meaning and pragmatic application. 89

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This clause is very difficult to translate, and the term “creative” is rather anachronistic. The term pqάclaso1 (pragmatos) can refer to a practical or expedient action or set of actions, but the term poiηsijoῦ (poietikon) is much less straight-forward. This term refers to non-mechanical making in the arts, or a mode of making suitable for a poet or musician, and is related to the terms for poetry and literary art.90 Isocrates is arguing, then, that composing political discourse, whether written or spoken, is much more like composing poetry than it is like composing declarative or argumentative prose. The words, phrases and arguments of political discourse are not like the letters of the alphabet as the teachers of political discourse claim, and therefore cannot be assembled in the same way that words are assembled from letters. On the contrary, the political speaker and the teacher of political discourse must recognize and respond to the subtle relations between the subject at issue and the expectations or prejudices of the audience: no one can persuade an audience to consider an alternative political idea or policy by calling half of them “deplorables”, or by insinuating that immigrants from a neighboring country are almost all violent criminals because such assertions are unfair and offensive and so merely distract from the important claims and arguments for one’s policies.91 Isocrates describes three specific features of political discourse that an effective educator must learn to teach, but which cannot be taught using the quasi-scientific methods used by these teachers of political discourse [Ag. Soph. 12–13]. Specifically, effective political discourse requires, first, that the speaker be educated to understand and adapt their speech appropriately to the specific circumstances and context in which the issues are embedded (jaiqῶm); for example, one does not discourse about the status and needs of aboriginal peoples without carefully considering the various and often subtle ways in which those peoples have been affected by historical events and trends that operate today but are not always easy to see at first sight. Second, effective political discourse requires that the speaker be educated to understand and adapt their arguments and modes of speech in accordance with their understanding of the informal sentiments and customs of propriety (pqepόmsx1) of their audience; for example, one is unlikely to be persuasive or effective speaking about the role of religion in contemporary public life if one begins by asserting that believers are all half-witted fools who need an invisible friend in the sky to get through the day, or by asserting that non-believers are all spawn of Satan throwing themselves and luring members of their community into the bowels of Hades, Hell, or Jahannam. Third, effective political discourse requires that the speaker be educated to provide argument and speech which is persuasive and memorable because it is original (jaimῶ1) and beautiful without being so novel that the audience is alienated. If we put these three together we see that Isocrates is arguing that education for political discourse must teach the political speaker to

90 91

See Aristotle Magna Moralia 1216b17; Politics1254a2; Metaphysics1046b3. These are obviously absurd examples which would surely never occur in real political discourse (?).

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speak artistically and artfully (dojeῖ sevmijώsaso1), taking due account of the subtle and sometimes intuitive aspects of context, propriety and originality in a manner that cannot be learned by disassembling and reassembling speeches as if they were composed of simple and discrete units, as the alphabet is composed of letters. Isocrates concludes that the teachers of political discourse do lack self-knowledge of their own ignorance of both the art of political discourse and the art of teaching it, and do not possess a science of instruction. The failure of arguments for the causal efficacy of education in producing students capable of effective political deliberation and discourse leads Isocrates to examine arguments for the alternative cause, namely natural ability. In contrast to the teachers of political discourse, Isocrates argues that the evidence supports his claim that natural ability is the primary cause of the successful acquisition of effective political discourse and speech. The first step of his argument is his refutation of the claim that the education provided by the teachers of political discourse is necessary for learning successful political speaking and discourse. As Isocrates observes, it is empirically true in both the history of politics and the politics of his day that there are many eminently successful litigators, public speakers, and political orators who have never received an education in political discourse, and yet who are more successful than the students of these schools92 [13.9]. It is reasonable to conclude, then, that the primary cause of excellence and effectiveness in political discourse is natural aptitude. There are more recent examples that illustrate and provide evidence for Isocrates’ claim that great political discourse originates in natural talent rather than education. The American statesman and president Abraham Lincoln is renowned for the power and effectiveness of his political speeches and debates—one thinks of his Cooper Union Address, his Gettysburg Address or his debates with Stephen Douglas—and yet he was formally educated for less than a year, and received no education at all in oratory, political debate, or civic discourse.93 Lincoln’s accomplishments in political discourse suggest that he possessed exceptional natural talent, developed by careful self-directed study of the best exemplars—in his case, the literary elegance of the King James Bible, the dialogue-debates of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the plays of Shakespeare—a suggestion Isocrates would heartily agree with, and develops in greater detail in his own way. Isocrates does indeed turn next to what is emerging as the second unifying theme of Against the Sophists, and of Isocrates’ educational thought generally, namely that success in education for philosophy and political discourse is primarily caused by natural ability and therefore that what education is able to accomplish is limited by human nature [Ag. Soph. 10]. In other words, education can develop and improve natural ability, but education cannot confer ability where there is no natural talent and it cannot improve ability beyond limits fixed by natural potential. Even if

92

An analogous case would be that most of our best literary writers were not educated in academic creative writing programs, and yet are better writers than so many of those who were. 93 Donald (1996).

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educators were to be granted unlimited resources and unlimited control over the upbringing and education of every child, from infancy to adulthood, they could not transform every—or even one—student into a first-class physicist, a world-class athlete, a great writer, an effective political speaker and leader, or anything else where there is no natural talent, and there is no evidence or argument to support the claim that they could. Perhaps more importantly for Isocrates, the consequences of the dogmatic belief in the unlimited potential of every student and the unlimited power of education are not merely the futile pursuit of goals educators cannot attain, as he has already discussed. As Isocrates observes about teachers of disputation and teachers of political discourse, and as he will argue about other educators too, the failure (or refusal) to recognize that human nature limits what education can achieve can cause educators to drift toward ever increasing authoritarianism (even totalitarianism) in the form of ever increasing and expanding demands for control over the children of their fellow citizens,94 including demands for monopoly power over educational institutions, compulsory attendance at those institutions, and experimental curricula imposed on fellow citizens. This drift occurs because education does not succeed in attaining its stated goals, which were never possible in the first place, and consequently educators must attempt to determine the causes of the failures of their curricula and teaching methods. If educators refuse to consider natural limits, then the only remaining possibility is that the failures of education are caused by some deficiency in the educational system, or in the cultural background of the students, in the opinions and practices of parents, or in the wider society and political order in which the educational system is embedded. For example, educators can claim that they fail to attain their own goals because they do not receive enough money from government, or that they cannot attain equality because they can teach only those students who do not have sufficient wealth to attend private schools, or that they cannot enable students to fulfill their potential because they do not have control of students early enough or completely enough, or that education fails to attain it goals because educators do not have enough power over parents and other non-“experts” who may be subverting education, and so on. One practical response to such rhetorical claims about the causes of the failure of education to attain the promised goals is that educators demand an increasing monopoly of power over the expanding compulsory schooling of ever more and ever younger students without regard to parental (or any other) opinions, and without public deliberation (since anyone with an opinion contrary to the authoritative doctrine is by definition incompetent and/or morally defective).95 These demands can be rhetorically supplemented by “prima fascia” critiques of any 94

Compare Peters and Dwyer (2019) to Koganzon (2021a, b). Kynaston (2014), Levinson (2004), p. 231 and Kynaston and Green (2019). Private schools are no doubt “engines of privilege” in some sense, but given the enormous qualitative differences between state schools in a wealthy area of any major city compared to state schools in poor areas the same city—say, state schools in the Fenway or Harbor Islands areas of Boston compared to state schools in South Boston Waterfront—it would seem that state schools are also engines of privilege. For systematic data see Groeger (2021). 95

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alternative modes of education, such as home education, which quite literally ignore the actual practice and the measured results of all such alternative education96; these critiques do not maintain the distinction between prima fascia and a priori. Consequently, the guiding hypothesis of educators becomes “The more control we have over the lives of children, and the more control we have over every aspect of education, the fewer alternatives modes of education there are, and the less educational debate and diversity there is, the better state schools will be for everyone”, but no actual experience or results could ever verify or falsify that hypothesis because all failures of the educational system can be attributed to some remaining lack of control. If, as Popper argued “… the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability”,97 and if the educational hypothesis that educators must have more power cannot be falsified by any result, then those “hypotheses” are nothing more than political dogma rationalizing increasing power over the education and, eventually, the lives of children and students, and their parents-citizens. What are correspondingly reduced are the permitted subjects of educational debate, and the proportion of citizens permitted to participate in educational debate: there can be no increase in the power of educators without a decrease in the power of citizens, especially in democracies.98 Once again, Isocrates argues that educators must promise only what their education can be shown to achieve and not more than it really can achieve, and therefore must attract and retain students with realistic promises supported by clear explanation and evidence of practical results rather than coercion or compulsion or monopoly powers that restrict debate and impose practices. Above all educators must limit their immoderate claims about what their teaching can achieve and their hubristic demands for power and control over the children of fellow citizens derived from those claims. These are sobering claims to make about the limited power of education and the authoritarian tendency of some educators, which educators from Isocrates’ day to our own are loath to even consider let alone accept; indeed, Isocrates repeatedly laments that the history of education is so often a futile war between the limits imposed by nature and the limitless aspirations of modestly accomplished professional teachers. It might be useful to emphasize from the outset, then, two features of Isocrates’ claim that human nature sets limits on what education can

96 E.g. Arnstine (1973), Curren and Blokhuis (2011), and Bartholet (2019). Curren and Blokhius explicitly refer to their critique as prima fascia. Compare to the data on the actual conduct and results of home schooling found in https://gaither.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/a-philosophicalargument-against-homeschooling-part-2/#more-2139; Farris (2013), Ray (2017), Medlin (2013), and Ray (2013). As for the (ironically) prima fascia but highly improbable claim that graduates of teacher training schools are well educated and expert educators, see Sowell (1993), p. 23–27; Kramer (1991), and Nemko and Kwalwasser (2013). This claim is an appeal to the authority of “credentials”, not evidence. 97 Popper (2002), p. 36. 98 See the historically sophisticated analysis and detailed evidence provided by Wolf and Macedo (2004), Glenn (2011), Glenn and De Groof (2012), Berner (2016), and Hanson (2021).

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achieve. First, to say that the effects of education are limited by human nature is not to say that the effects of education are wholly determined by nature. The relation between natural talent and achievement is not absolute or describable by a simple linear equation on a Cartesian graph. On the contrary, Isocrates argues that education can develop and improve any degree of natural talent, but that the degree of such improvement is not limitless [Ag. Soph. 14–15]. For example, any one of us can improve our understanding of and abilities in political discourse through education, but no amount of education will ever transform all or even most of us into political orators as eloquent and effective as Abraham Lincoln, Rev. Martin Luther King, Margaret Thatcher or Barak Obama. In the same way, Isocrates argues that experience shows that if a person has a greater natural talent but is less willing to work hard to develop that talent, while another person has less natural talent but is more willing to work hard developing the talent they do have, then the less talented person can surpass the achievements of the more talented person: achievement is the result of the combination of natural talent and willingness to work hard: education and diligence together are in the highest degree potent to improve our nature. 99

Isocrates does insist that a person with less talent and hard work cannot surpass the person with greater natural talent who also works hard to realize the potential of their talent. The implication is that every person should receive all the education they are capable of benefiting from and willing to work for [Ag. Soph. 14–16], and that while such educational provision can sometimes ameliorate the practical consequences of natural inequalities it can never eliminate them. The second feature of Isocrates’ claim that there are natural limits to what education can achieve should not be confused with similar-sounding arguments made in our own time that can sound similar to Isocrates’ but are in fact quite different. Isocrates is not saying anything so crude as a claim like “I.Q. is genetically determined”, or that “natural intelligence determines one’s social and political role”100; indeed, he is not making any claims about natural differences in intelligence per se. On the contrary, Isocrates recognizes that intelligence and practical abilities, and the relations between them, are subtle and diverse phenomenon about which no simple statements can be credibly made101: a person may be highly intelligent and exceptionally well educated in history or biology or mathematics, and yet have little understanding or intuitive sense of the political demands of the

To Nicocles 12: … ἀkk᾽ ὡ1 jaὶ sῆ1 paideύrex1 jaὶ sῆ1 ἐpilekeίa1 lάkirsa dtmalέmη1 sὴm ἡlesέqam uύrim eὐeqceseῖm, oὕsx diάjeiro sὴm cmώlηm … 100 For a discussion of the genuine complexity of these questions see Harden (2021). See also Jewett (2014) and especially Leonard (2017) for a much needed reminder of the enthusiastic willingness of progressives to embrace genetic determinism as a coercive means to implement a conception of the collective good that political persuasion had failed to make attractive to the citizenry. 101 Ag. Soph. 12. 99

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moment, and no ability to speak effectively about those demands.102 The duty of the educator, then, is to ascertain as accurately as possible what the natural intellectual, artistic, moral, political, and other capacities of each student are, and then to develop and actualize those capacities as fully as possible and in a manner which contributes to fulfillment of the student′s natural and therefore limited potential as a human being and citizen.

4.8

Isocrates on the Good Educator: Self-knowledge and Moderation

As Isocrates approaches the end of Against the Sophists, he begins to articulate his own educational ideas and practices [Ag. Soph. 14–15]. His articulation of those ideas, and especially those practices, cannot be understood unless we contextualize them in relation to the educational ideas he has stated or implied by his critiques of other educators. Isocrates’ first and primary claim about the nature of education and teaching is that a good educator must have a sober and realistic understanding of the limits of any form of education. This understanding can only be acquired by study of contemporary educational practice and the history of educational practice, focused especially on the honest and empirical comparison between what education is believed to be able to achieve and what it does in fact achieve. Above all, educators must know their own intellectual and pedagogical limits, and therefore refrain from teaching subjects they do not really understand, promising more than they can deliver, and especially from striving for more power over the children of their fellow citizens than is merited by their actual knowledge and accomplishments. No educator knows enough about education to demand that their ideas and practices be universally compulsory. As long as educators (and professors of education) ignore the vast gulf between the expertise and knowledge they confidently claim to have on the one hand, and their empirically much more modest knowledge and achievements on the other, they succeed merely in bringing educators and education into disrepute with their fellow citizens. Isocrates’ demand for the primacy of the rare virtue of pedagogical and political humility raises the question of just what the limits of the effectiveness of education are, and how we can know what they are. Isocrates answers this question by arguing that human nature sets two limits which no teacher and no system of education can transcend, however much we may wish (and sometimes believe) we ought to be able to transcend them. The first natural limit to all education, and especially education for political discourse, is that human beings cannot have definite and comprehensive knowledge of the future; education, like politics, is an art of

102 One thinks of the case of Nobel Laureate James Watson’s comments on race and political success, which I will not repeat. See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-pioneerjames-watson-loses-honorary-titles-over-racist-comments-180971266/

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probabilities and unforeseen consequences, and cannot ever be—and never has been—a science which can truthfully promise definite results. The second natural limit to all education is the natural potential of each student to attain knowledge, practical skills, and the virtues of family, economic, and political life. There is no pedagogical science and no educational program (and therefore no educator) able to predict all the future effects on—and failures to effect—any specific student or all students; there is no pedagogical science that can guarantee that it can increase the probability that any student or group of students will attain knowledge, or be just, or be autonomous, or attain any or all of the practical skills, knowledge, and moral dispositions that citizenship or happiness require [Ag. Soph. 21]. Isocrates deduces his educational program and goals from these two natural limits and promises his students that he can attain no more. Specifically, Isocrates argues that if human nature is limited in these ways, then the good and self-knowing educator must seek knowledge of how to contribute as much as possible to the fulfillment of the natural potentials each student brings with them. The good educators will strive for self-knowledge about their own effectiveness as teachers, and about the limited goals the educational program they offer really can attain for the students and for the regime. If the educator is to do these things, they must cultivate the difficult and rare virtues of moderation-by-self-control and practical wisdom that ought to guide any pedagogical activity and program of education. Isocrates exhibits his own possession of such self-knowledge and virtues by carefully describing his educational program and the objectives it can prove it is able to attain. After articulating the founding principles of his educational ideas and the limited goals that are deduced from them, Isocrates turns next to articulate some of the principles that guide his pedagogical practice [Ag. Soph. 16, 21. Cf. Ag. Soph. 10– 12]. He reiterates that education for effective political discourse begins with the easy task of acquiring knowledge of the Forms103 (ἰdeῶm, eἴdη) that are used in written and spoken political discourse and, indeed, in all speech and writing. The art of teaching political discourse is ensuring that students do not merely learn to assemble the Forms of speech grammatically, although that is necessary, but that they also learn the poetic and even musical art [Ag. Soph. 16] of arranging the Forms so that the resulting political discourse that is created is suitable to the moral tone and importance of the subject and occasion (jaiqῶm). This can only be accomplished by students who are naturally able to articulate reasonable conjectures from the shared opinions of their fellow citizens (donarsijῆ1), and who have a naturally courageous and imaginative soul [Ag. Soph. 17]. Isocrates argues that The teacher must go through these aspects as precisely as possible, so that nothing teachable is left out. As for what remains, however, the teacher must offer himself as a model so that those who are molded by him and can imitate him (ἐjstpxhέmsa1 jaὶ lilήrarhai) will be more charming and graceful as soon as they begin to speak. [Ag. Soph. 17–18]

103

The word is the same one used by Plato, but Isocrates gives it a more limited application.

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Isocrates concludes with the claim that this education in philosophy (uikorouoῦmse1) can succeed only if all these pedagogical conditions and prescriptions are met together [Ag. Soph. 18; Ag. Soph. 21]. Isocrates argues that if he educates his students in these “prescriptions of philosophy (uikorouίa1)”, then they will acquire and act on a sense of fairness (ἐpieίjeiam) in their dealing with others, rather than only some skill in speaking (ῥηsoqeίam); Isocrates explicitly emphasizes again that he is a teacher of political discourse (kόcxm sῶm pokisijῶm) suitable for a responsible citizen in deliberative debate with fellow citizens, not a teacher of rhetoric. He emphasizes that he does not claim that his students will be just or moderate (rxuqorύmηm), because the virtues of justice, moderation, and acting fairly toward others is a natural attribute which no system of education can cause in a person lacking that nature.

4.9

An Ending and a Beginning

There is some scholarly controversy about whether Against the Sophists is complete. On the one hand, Norlin argues that only the part of the text which criticizes the educational ideas of rival educators survives, but that the text appears to end quite abruptly and is missing the part in which Isocrates describes his own philosophia and education.104 On the other hand, there are scholars who argue that the text is complete, and that Isocrates did not intend to explain his educational ideas and practices any further.105 Yun Lee Too argues that although Against the Sophists does indeed seem to end abruptly, and gives the impression that Isocrates is about to continue his argument, Isocrates’ Epistles 1, 6, and 9 end in the same way and yet are clearly complete. It is possible, then, that such apparently abrupt endings, and the intimation that the work is about to continue but does not, may be a deliberate technique of Isocrates which he uses to direct the reader to some of his other works in which the argument is continued.106 Too suggests that the ending of Against the Sophists directs the reader to his Antidosis (and other works) which continues and completes the argument in just this way. This is supported by the fact that Against the Sophists [Ag. Soph. 17] states that when teaching ends, emulation or imitation begins—hence when the overt teaching of Against the Sophists ends, the reader is directed to Isocrates’ other works which exemplify political discourses or imitation rather than teaching it. We can add evidence for Too’s conclusion: at the beginning of Against the Sophists Isocrates notes the importance of the difference between a moderate and a daring educator, and the difference between what educators promise to do and what they empirically do. An educator’s character is revealed, he emphasizes, by their actions and the results they attain rather than by their words

104

Norlin Vol. II, p. 160. Cahn (1989), Papillon (1995), and Noël (2010). 106 Too (1995), p. 199 and p. 194. 105

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and the results they promise. Against the Sophists is very similar to Antidosis 15— evidence not only of consistency, but of Isocrates’ insistence that he be judged at the end of his career by the criteria he identified at its beginning. Similarly, the results and efficacy of an educational system are revealed empirically and over time by what it has actually accomplished at the end, not what it promised at the beginning. In other words, Isocrates has argued that the empirical evidence of an educator’s character and effectiveness is revealed historically by an account of their speech, their actions, and the results of those speeches and actions. It follows that if Isocrates’ arguments in Against the Sophists are true, then his life as a citizen and as an educator will provide the evidence of this. So Against the Sophists ends by directing us to the only two sources of knowledge we have about his education, namely his writings and the whole of his life (which, for Isocrates, are essentially the same thing). Isocrates’ Antidosis, written near the end of his life as a retrospective account and defense of his life, is explicitly presented as fulfilling the criteria of Against the Sophists: to judge an educator by their self-knowledge and their results and not by their doctrinal promises, acta non verba.

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