The Educational Value of Plato's Early Socratic Dialogues

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The Educational Value of Plato's Early Socratic Dialogues

ABSTRACT: When contemplating the origins of philosophical paideia one is tempted to think of Socrates, perhaps because we feel that Socrates has been a philosophical educator to us all. But it is Plato and his literary genius that we have to thank as his dialogues preserve not just Socratic philosophy, but also the Socratic educational experience. Educators would do well to better understand Plato's pedagogical objectives in the Socratic dialogues so that we may appreciate and utilize them in our own educational endeavors, and so that we may adapt the Socratic experience to new interactive educational technologies. Plato designed his Socratic dialogues to arm students for real world challenges and temptations. First, in both form and function the dialogues attempt to replicate the Socratic experience for their audience. They demand from their readers what Socrates demanded from his students: active learning, self-examination, and an appreciation for the complexity and importance of wisdom. Second, the dialogues challenge the conflation of professional and personal excellence, best exemplified by sophists such as Hippias, and exhort their reader to pursue personal aretê separately from and alongside practical and professional skills or technai. Third, they aim not to transmit some prepackaged formula for success, but to teach students to learn for themselves; that is to love and pursue wisdom. The Socratic dialogues, and philosophic dialogue itself, are educationally important in that they teach us to be philosophers in the literal sense.

It is instructively ironic that scholars look immediately to the Republic when considering Plato's theory of education, yet most of...

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...oral sense from being good at a particular skill .

(3) I am here reminded of one of my own student's reaction to Socrates. A meek Vietnamese woman who said barely anything in class wrote, "Socrates gives me the courage to stand up for my belief and not to be afraid of others who tell me I'm wrong."

(4) For this description I am indebted to Prof. Kostas Michaelides of the University of Cyprus.

(5) This image is expressed eloquently in Socrates' elenchos of Agathon in Symposium [199c-201c] and of Menexenus in Lysis [216c-221d]

(6) See, for example, Laches 192e ff. and Charmides 164bc.

(7) I am indebted for this eloquent distinction to Prof. Gerhard A. Rauche, Professor Emeritus of the University of Durban-Westivile, South Africa.

(8) These characteristics of the Platonic telos are advocated by Prof. Apostolos Pierris of the University of Patras, Greece

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