Friday, August 31, 2007
Old Athenian Education and Sophistic Revolution
This week we step back and sideways in time to examine other practices and conceptualizations of Greek education. This week, please do launch your own interests as you move through these readings. I'll do the same. For example, I'm reading Marrou now on the old Athenian education and would like to discuss sometime with someone these pre-Isocrates notions of virtue/morality (e.g., the line on Solon on p. 42) or the role of emotional bonding in pedagogy--lots of contrastive material available here. If you look carefully at the Greek words, you'll find "paideia" in chapter 3 of Marrou--so take a look at how it's defined there. I'll try to translate for you some of the other Greek terms with my trusty Liddell in hand. Don't anyone hold your breath. Note: you may also, of course, take up the suggested reponse paper prompts, which we will certainly attend to in class.
8 comments:
The problem with techniques that are so easily used to conduct activities we believe to be wrong as they are right is that it relies on the individual character of the person who is utilizing them (Protagoras.) What I think Socrates does not understand is that there is no feasible way to insure that anyone, whether watched by the deity of their choice or just by the people around them, will continue to use the ability to take advantage of the people and circumstances around them. This would be why the question of paideia becomes important, in terms of training character. However, anyone clever enough to grasp and skillfully use the techniques they were being taught to manipulate is likely clever enough to recognize the conditioning represented by paideia and must make their own choice about the merit of the virtue they have been trained in.
The individual makes the choice, and as such, takes the penalty (in this case, the overt penalty versus the penalty associated with being a bad person.) Or not, depending on the relative levels of their own skill versus the skills of the people around them.
I suppose that it is troublesome, in the terms of absolute good that Socrates was seeking (in response to the Sophists), but the argument that speech is so manipulative and mutable takes as a basic assumption that the good of a thing (especially in terms of argument) is equally mutable. I'm not sure you can have it both ways; if speech can be used to manipulate and therefore teach, can it also be used to nail down absolute meaning?
I don't think it can.
Marrou on pederasty:
He never says precisely what is required of the young male students, if anything at all is "required," or if it's a social pressure or the pressure of custom, or if it was ingrained in the culture and rarely questioned. As to the lack of detail he provides, I can't tell if it's decorum, squeamishness, or if such information simply isn't available. This is a very interesting subject, and I find Marrou's treatment unsatisfactory. Of course, there's the supercillious avoidance and disavowal of anything remotely near male homosexual sex—that, I guess, goes with the time in which he was writing. But he seems simultaneously nostalgic for and revolted by the homosexual aspects of pederasty, and he doesn't attend at all to the difference in age and station between the teachers and the students. Could the students refuse something that may have been distasteful to them, or was the pressure to comply too great? Marrou also takes for granted that the teacher's motivation in these practices was that he was emulated and idolized by the boys, and that a kind of ersatz father-son relationship was a motivation for both parties. Might there have been some other motivation for the teachers, like sex (if that's even what it was) with young boys? I haven't read much classical scholarship, but this kind of nostalgia seems common.
The (stated) motivation behind pederasty was for the boys to emulate the men, and that they would be more likely to emulate the men to whom they are closest. And the point of emulation is the inculcation of virtue. Marrou traces the history of Athenian education from its military origins, which strove toward valor, to its intellectual flourishing, which strove toward virtue, and pederasty, he claims, is "a survival of the feudal 'Middle Ages.'" If that's the case, did the practice change as education changed? He mentions the intense bond that homosexual love would place between soldiers, and how valuable that was on the field of battle; what equivalent utility does such a bond have in education? Marrou characterizes these practices as "love," which implies a genuine concern for the other's well-being. Especially because this is a relic of military culture, might it have been less than loving? The physical acts could've been offhand, grim, enjoyable to one party and torturous to the other. They could've taken on an aura of punishment—the lines between sex and violence, particularly in situations like these, in a "military culture," would be easily blurred.
Dan--I'm glad you mentioned the era in which Marrou writes, as we'll take this up in class. He certainly is determined to find some plausible explanation for erotics in pedagogy, and we can wonder what contemporary discourse on the social psychologoy of same-sex forced groupings he was drawing on. Can we think other kinds of explanations--or analogs that plot the student-tutor/teacher relationship as emotion- or love- or dependency based? Or, to pursue your query, Dan, how would we characterize the pedagogy of emulation then and now? Is sexual activity really just secondary or instrumental in this larger pedagogical agenda whose end is replication of the teacher or indoctrination into a particular culture?
All- I hope my pre-labor-day posting didn't imply that all we have to talk about is pederasty! I was out the door and wanting to get started--and that's where I was at that time. Please post covering whatever interests you in the readings--which we'll discuss fully.
Protagoras taught that language, and therefore morality, are relative. But he also admired the governing system that was in place during his lifetime as a great achievement of mankind. Certainly, he was aware that people less scrupulous than himself might use his teachings to take "advantage" of others, but his own philosophies made it an imperative for him to teach them. He couldn't not teach those who would use his ideas morally because some others might use them for immoral gains. Perhaps he hoped that anyone smart enough to use his teachings effectively would also be smart enough to appreciate, as he did, the role of government in society, and to understand that acting morally according to the society in which we live is what protects us from each other and saves us from the chaos and violence of anarchy. Or maybe not, but accepting his philosophies of relativism, he could not have sat in judgment over his students and allowed some to learn from him while denying others.
I find it interesting that Protagoras was so concerned with the true meanings of words, or that he was interested in syntax. This seems to contradict his belief in relativism. How can one person have any certainty that his/her experience of a word is the same as anyone else's. The example of temperature is a good illustration but less relative because we now have the ability to measure it scientifically. But what about taste? My experience of the taste of a tomato (yuk!) may be completely different from your experience of the same tomato. So how can we expect that my experience of a word will be the same as your experience? The best we can do is draw similarities in our understanding of anything, but especially words.
I can see that trying to pinpoint the meanings of words has value, especially in the context of law and politics, even if you believe that meaning is relative, because techne in orthoepeia can be used to gain the advantage. Protagoras studied words because he could use them to make "the worse argument appear the better." But why study the true meanings of words used by poets? This would seem counterintuitive to relativism. Poetry is esoteric. How can we know the true meaning of the words as intended by the poet? Isn't part of the experience of poetry that it is subject to individual interpretation? The only answer I can surmise is that poetry was used to convey history, including political and liturgical speeches at the time, so it would have had some value in the study of rhetoric, but less value in the study of poetry as an art (in the modern sense, not as techne) form.
I am just throwing out ideas here for now—I am still trying to make sense of them. I feel as if there is much more for me to add, but time and the volume of information I am trying to process seem to be against me today! I will try to elaborate further later when I am able to analyze my thoughts clearer.
In my reading I saw Protagoras’ man-measure statement and the Dissoi Logoi argument as interesting contrasts to the idea of paideia. If a person’s perceptions determine good and bad, and a thing can be both good and bad depending on the observer, how can there be a teaching of ultimate good?
I think one answer, in the frame of Greek culture anyway, could be their idea of the community. Things were supposed to be acted upon for the good of the entire community, not just one person. This could then negate the problem with one individual’s morals being different from another’s. The virtuous or moral person was virtuous and moral for the benefit of all. Isocrates’ idea of rhetoric making people more inclined to be virtuous to appeal to the masses could come into play here as well. His theory has proved incorrect over time however, so I am not sure how it reflects here.
This “community wide good” could also be a reason why many sophists began to favor an “ends justify the means” attitude towards their teachings. If the result was good for the community, they might have been less inclined to look at how their methods actually impacted an individual.
I think that history and nostalgia are close cousins, because both rely on invention, that is looking at past events and reconstructing through subjectivity. That said, looking at pederasty as a contemporary American, I cannot help but view the practice through the bias of current taboos, unecessarily aided by the Catholic Church scandal in recent years. With objectivity as a relative term in this context, I don't want to avoid examining the topic either, although I don't know what to do with it.
I want clarity on a term Marrou repeats throughout chapter 3: "inversion," specifically "carnal inversion." And I hope to distinguish the Greek view of homosexuality as abnormal, while pedophilia was accepted. This view seems a juxtaposition of the values of any arguably tolerant, contemporary person, who may consider pederasty abnormal and pedophiles not a subset of the honosexual [gay] community.
I had to read Marrou against his grain, especially after his refusal to "deal with the ennobling effect which the consciousness of being admired might have on the older man." I think we can examine this ennobling effect without being reductive. To examine only the effects on the catamite is to consider only half the issue.
Yet again, I think I've approached more anthropology here than rhetoric. Hopefully I can make a better connection on Thursday.
Here is just a blurb from my response paper regarding Marrou and some of his thoughts on the sophists being classified only as teachers.
On page 48 he states “the truth is Sophists do not properly belong to either philosophy or science…..but strictly speaking they were not thinkers or seekers after truth, they were teachers.” The reason this comment interested me is because I thought if the Sophists would have wanted to be remembered as teachers and not as thinkers. It seems like the other readings we have done would suggest that the Sophists felt they were more than teachers, they were seeking truth and morality and if they weren’t they were questioning language and trying to understand if language held the key to truth, morality and virtue. I think the comment that they are teachers surprised me, I’m not sure I’d even describe the Sophists strictly as teachers. The Sophists asked many of the questions that educators and scholars are asking today and in my perspective that makes them more than merely teachers.
I thought the closeness in the mentor/student relationship in Ancient Greece was similar to the Indian tradition of learning an art, especially classical music or dance (even weaponry and war). In ancient times (actually up to a couple hundred years ago) the sisha (student) would go live with their guru (teacher). They would stay there for a number of year to learn the art in depth, but also the guru would be a surrogate parent much like the closeness in the mentor/student relation in Athenian education.
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