Robin Barrow - Plato

Plato

Titles in the Bloomsbury Library of Educational Thought Series:

St Thomas Aquinas, Vivian Boland OP

Aristotle, Alexander Moseley

St Augustine, Ryan N. S. Topping

Pierre Bourdieu, Michael James Grenfell

Jerome Bruner, David R. Olson

Confucius, Charlene Tan

John Dewey, Richard Pring

Michel Foucault, Lynn Fendler

Paulo Freire, Daniel Schugurensky

John Holt, Roland Meighan

John Locke, Alexander Moseley

Loris Malaguzzi and the Reggio Emilia

Experience, Kathy Hall, Mary Horgan, Anna

Ridgway, Rosaleen Murphy, Maura Cunneen and Denice Cunningham

Maria Montessori, Marion ODonnell

A. S. Neill, Richard Bailey

John Henry Newman, James Arthur and Guy Nicholls

Robert Owen, Robert A. Davis and Frank OHagan

R. S. Peters, Stefaan E. Cuypers and Christopher Martin

Jean Piaget, Richard Kohler

Plato, Robin Barrow

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jrgen Oelkers

Rudolf Steiner, Heiner Ullrich

Leo Tolstoy, Daniel Moulin

Lev Vygotsky, Ren van der Veer

E. G. West, James Tooley

Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan Laird

Series Editor: Richard Bailey is a writer and researcher in education and sport. A former teacher in both primary and secondary schools and a teacher trainer, he has been Professor at a number of leading Universities in the UK. He now lives and works in Germany.

Members of the Advisory Board

Robin Barrow, Professor of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Peter Gronn, Professor of Education, Head of Faculty, University of Cambridge, UK.

Kathy Hall, Professor of Education and Head of the School of Education at University College Cork, Ireland.

Stephen Heyneman, Professor of International Educational Policy at the College of Education and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, USA.

Yung-Shi Lin, President Emeritus and Professor, Department of Education and Institute of Graduate Studies, Taipei Municipal University of Education, Republic of China, Taiwan.

Gary McCulloch, Head of Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK.

Jrgen Oelkers, Professor of Education at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Richard Pring, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Education, and Emeritus Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, UK.

Harvey Siegel, Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, USA.

Richard Smith, Professor of Education, University of Durham, UK.

Zhou Zuoyu, Professor, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Peoples Republic of China

Plato

ROBIN BARROW

Bloomsbury Library of Educational Thought
Series Editor: Richard Bailey

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

www.bloomsbury.com

First published 2007 by Continuum International Publishing Group Paperback edition first published 2014 by Bloomsbury Academic

Robin Barrow, 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Robin Barrow has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-4411-1509-6

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Barrow, Robin.

Plato/Robin Barrow.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-8408-6 (hardcover)

ISBN-10: 0-8264-8408-5 (hardcover)

1. Plato. 2. EducationPhilosophy. 3. Education, Greek. I. Title.

LB85.P7B367 2007

370.1dc22

2007018508

Typeset by Aptara Books Ltd

I should like to dedicate this book to Brigitte Kappel, Huw Lloyd, Jack Martin and Neill Ross each of whom played an important part in helping me write it.

Contents

I am indebted to the Series Editor, Richard Bailey, Anthony Haynes of Continuum, Philip Gaisford, David Mirhady and an anonymous publishers reader for helpful comments. I am particularly indebted to Devi Pabla, without whom the word-processing and practical organization would never have got off the ground. My thanks to all these generous-spirited people.

Education is sometimes presented as an essentially practical activity. It is, it seems, about teaching and learning, curriculum and what goes on in schools. It is about achieving certain ends, using certain methods, and these ends and methods are often prescribed for teachers, whose duty it is to deliver them with vigor and fidelity. With such a clear purpose, what is the value of theory?

Recent years have seen politicians and policy makers in different countries explicitly denying any value or need for educational theory. A clue to why this might be is offered by a remarkable comment by a British Secretary of State for Education in the 1990s: having any ideas about how children learn, or develop, or feel, should be seen as subversive activity. This pithy phrase captures the problem with theory: it subverts, challenges, and undermines the very assumptions on which the practice of education is based.