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Plato's Academy: A Halting Step Toward Higher Learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Edward J. Power
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Extract

It is not, of course, for his work as a teacher in the Academy that Plato is remembered most in the history of education but rather for his Utopian plan for education, a plan which had a profound influence on the education of antiquity. This may explain why so little is known of the internal functioning of this famous school.

Type
Research Article
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , September 1964 , pp. 155 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © 1964, University of Pittsburgh Press 

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References

Notes

1. It would be unfair and unhistorical to attribute commercial motives as the principal ones dominating the schools of Aristotle and Isocrates, but it is impossible, especially in the case of Isocrates, to ignore the commercial dimension. This was criticism Isocrates himself had to contend with. See Antidosis, 3–5.Google Scholar

2. Jaeger, Werner, Aristoteles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (Berlin, 1923), 17–22.Google Scholar

3. On these points, see Marrou, H. I., A History of Education in Antiquity (New York, 1956), 67–8. See also the bibliographical notes, 373.Google Scholar

4. Freeman, Kenneth J., Schools of Hellas (New York, 1922), 230.Google Scholar

5. Epicrates, frg., 287, Kock.Google Scholar

6. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, III, 46; IV, 2.Google Scholar

7. Socrates' lack of interest in natural philosophy has been emphasized by Plato and Aristotle. See Jaeger, Paideia (Oxford, 1947), II, 31.Google Scholar

8. Plato, Laws, VII, 808d.Google Scholar

9. Power, Edward J., Main Currents in the History of Education, (New York, 1962), 59–60.Google Scholar

10. Plato, Republic, II, 376e; VII, 521de.Google Scholar

11. Plato, ibid., II, 377a; III, 392b; X 595a–608b; Laws, VII, 810c-811b.Google Scholar

12. Plato, Republic, III, 410c–412a.Google Scholar

13. Plato, Laws, VII, 794c; 802e; 813b.Google Scholar

14. Plato, Republic, V, 451d–457b; Laws, VII, 804d–805b; 813b.Google Scholar

15. Plato, Republic, II, 528b–530c.Google Scholar

16. From Plato's description of arithmetic we know how it was approached in traditional Greek education. See Republic, VII, 522c, and Laws, VII, 819c.Google Scholar

17. The most prominent was Eudoxes of Cnidus. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VIII, 87.Google Scholar

18. Plato, Republic, VII, 514a.Google Scholar

19. Aristotle, Physics, I, 191b.Google Scholar

20. See Power, op. cit., 70.Google Scholar

21. See Jaeger, Paideia, 107.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., 126.Google Scholar

23. For an examination of the relativism and nihilism of Protagorus and Gorgias, see Gomperz, H., Sophistik and Rhetorik (Berlin, 1912), 1–35.Google Scholar

24. Isocrates in Against the Sophists is really advertising his school and tells us how it will alter the conventional sophistic program of teaching.Google Scholar

25. This seems apparent from Isocrates' remarks in ibid., 9–11, and from Plato's general preference for scientific humanism.Google Scholar

26. Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium, I, 639a.Google Scholar

27. Euclid, Elements of Geometry, I, 5.Google Scholar

28. See Marrou, op. cit., 177–181.Google Scholar