Why a teacher should be an Aristotelian, not a Platonist

Someone once said that we are all either Platonists or Aristotelians. What does this mean, and why should it matter to those of us involved in education?

Perhaps the best way to explain is to use a famous painting. In “The School of Athens,” Raphael portrays Plato and Aristotle walking toward the viewer. Plato is pointing up, while Aristotle is gesturing down. Raphael did this very intentionally to show us, in a picture, the different way the two men thought.

Plato thought that the things that were most real were ideas, while Aristotle thought that the most real things were things. Plato taught that everything has an essence or nature: every man shares a human nature; every dog shares a dog nature; every tree shares a tree nature; and so on. The natures or essences themselves were not in the things, but existed in a sort of heavenly realm, and every example of these natures in this world—every man, or dog, or tree—is an imperfect representation of the nature that exists apart from any actual thing in this heavenly realm.

It is this heavenly realm that Plato is pointing to in Raphael’s painting.

Aristotle, on the other hand, while he believed in natures and essences too, believed they resided in the things themselves. Human nature was not in some heavenly realm, but in each and every man; dog nature was in each and every dog, and tree nature was in each and every tree.

This is why Raphael has Aristotle gesturing down, toward the Earth.

In the Christian way of looking at things, which involves the idea of the Incarnation of God in the flesh, the essences, the natures (what have been called the “transcendent ideas”) are not completely transcendent: they are incarnated in the world.

There are a lot of implications to the thinking of these two great philosophers, but one of them has to do with how we teach. One of the great insights of classical education is that we often mistakenly try to teach from the top down rather than the bottom up. We start with abstractions and work downward toward the concrete rather than the other way around. This is one of the most egregious mistakes a teacher can make.

There is an order of knowledge and an order of learning—and they are different. In the order of knowledge, the most important things come first. In the order of learning, they often come last. Teaching commonly involves a very counter-intuitive principle: that you begin with the least important thing and work toward the most important.

This is what we do when we teach reading: we start with the least important thing—sounding out words—and work toward the most important thing: understanding what we read. In math, we begin with mere calculation, which, in the total scheme of things, is really not very important, and we work toward the mathematical concepts and principles.

The educational landscape is littered with the corpses of educational reform efforts that ignored this proper sequence. The whole language movement attempted to bypass the seemingly trivial skill of sounding out words in favor of the more important goal of “understanding.” The New Math committed the equally egregious sin of teaching children mathematical concepts before they grasped the less glamorous procedures of math. The result has been several generations who can neither read nor understand, and who can neither understand concepts nor calculate.

When it comes to teaching, we should be Aristotelians, not Platonists.

Paying the nation's worst teachers--to go away

The Center for Union Facts is offering $10,000 a piece to the ten worst union-protected teachers in America to get out of the classroom. Richard Day at Kentucky School News and Views calls the move "a cynical gimmick designed to ramp up anti-public school sentiment."

Well, with all due respect to Richard, public schools seem to be doing a pretty good job of ramping up that sentiment all by themselves. Besides, some of us fail to see what is cynical about pointing out inefficiency and corruption in institutions that claim to be serving children, but instead routinely let self-serving and dishonest teachers unions have their way with them.

Lessons from the Masters: George Steiner on teaching

This is the first part of an ongoing series of "Lessons from the Masters," based on the writings of the Modern Wise Men I have listed in a earlier post. We begin with an outline of the introductory chapter of George Steiner's Lessons of the Masters. Steiner, an emeritus professor at the University of Geneva, is the quintessential modern wise man: he has succeeded in incorporating the best of modernist and postmodernist thinking into an essentially traditional world view. In Lessons of the Masters, Steiner discusses how wisdom is and should be passed on--as well as how it isn't and shouldn't be, bringing his incredible abilities as perhaps the worlds greatest polymath to bear on the subject.

Introduction:

"What empowers a man or a woman to teach another human being, where lies the wellspring of authority?"

I. The three scenarios or "structures of authority" between master and student.

A. Dominance of or Destruction by the Master of the Student: "Masters have destroyed their disciples both psychologically and, in rarer cases physically."

B. Subversion or Betrayal of the Master by the Student: "In counterpoint, disciples, pupils, apprentices have subverted, betrayed, and ruined their masters."

C. The Reciprocal Trust between Master and Student: "By a process of interaction, of osmosis, the Master learns from his disciple as he teaches him."

II. What is real teaching?

A. Teaching as Imitation: "an imitatio of a transcendent or, more precisely divine, act of disclosure." (incorporating Hiedegger's concept of alethia--that truth is an unveiling of a thing's being)

B. Teaching as Example: "only the actual life of the the Master has demonstrative proof." (incorporating Wittgenstein's denial of the possibility of textual instruction--that truth cannot be passed on through purely pedagogical means)

C. Teaching a Power Relation: "The Master possesses psychological, social, physical power...sustained by promise or menace" (incorporating Foucault's theory of power relations)

D. Refusals to Teach:

1. The master finds no disciples: Moses, Nietzsche--Zarathustra's tragedy.
2. Doctrine too dangerous to be passed on: alchemical and Kabbalistic lore.
3. Lost wisdom: solution to Fermat's theorem, Stonehenge, the Alexandrian library.

III. Teaching is dialectical: "I am most I when I am you" (Paul Celan)