Leading Children Towards the Light

Through a Socratic education

After graduating from St. John’s College, I happened to be on a plane sitting next to an education professor who was on his way to Las Vegas to gamble. It was the most shocking thing I could imagine - After having been steeped in Greek moral philosophy, it was a fundamental axiom to me that the purpose of education was the pursuit of the true, the good, and the noble. That an adult who held such an honor as to be a professor of the sacred field of education would glibly and without shame go gambling Vegas was beyond my ken.

Since, of course, I’ve discovered that professors of education, like professors more generally, have no particular focus on ethical behavior of whatever sort. Yet as an educator, the cultivation of virtuous behavior among our students has always been a core goal of every educational project I’ve ever been involved in.

Of course, in our society, which seems to have no shared moral perspectives at all, what does it mean to educate for virtue? How can one do it without a shared moral dogma, such as a religious belief?

In Plato’s allegory of the cave (see illustration above), people are born in a cave where all they see are shadows of reality because they have never seen the light directly. The role of the philosopher educator is to liberate these people so that gradually they are able to climb out of the cave and see reality and light directly. Socrates explains the allegory thus,

This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.

While vast amounts of ink have been spilled interpreting this allegory, as a Socratic educator the essential direction is relatively straightforward for me.

Because so this rhetoric and intellectual framework is so alien for most contemporary readers, I’ll start with a very simple, yet crucial, direction. As is often in the Platonic dialogues, Socrates juxtaposes the pursuit of the good from indulgence in sensual pleasures. Shortly after the passage above he makes it explicit that one form of turning from the shadows in the cave to seeing the light is pursuing the good rather than indulging in sensual pleasures. After describing how some are attracted to the “service of evil” he proposes,

But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days of their youth; they had been severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below --if, I say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now.

While choosing indulgence in sensual pleasures is not the only way that evil may win us over (I find the moral psychology of the Seven Deadly Sins to be fairly compelling), it is a common example and one that teens understand in a straightforward manner.

Socratic questioning is a matter of asking questions with the expectation that the responses be consistent and coherent - that is, rational. In the illustration at the top of this page, the straw coming out of the water appears to be broken. One could believe the naive evidence of our eyesight that the straw is discontinous. But if one pulls the straw out and puts it back in, and discovers that the portion under water is always straight and the portion above water is also always straight, then a more parsimonious explanation is that the straw is not broken, but that our eyes are deceiving us in this particular situation. Or are we to suppose that the straw consistently breaks into two at the point of water contact and then instantanously reconstructs itself when it is moved up and down? If we needed additional validating evidence for our notion that our eyes are being deceived, we could touch the straw with our hands along the interface with the water, and discover that it feels unbroken, and indeed that our fingers then will appear to be broken!

I use this simple and familiar example to illustrate the fact we all use reason to transcend initial judgements, even the judgements of our own eyes. One can consider this one of the simplest examples of how we use reason to understand truths that transcend sense perception. In the cave we may have thought that the straw was broken, but a modest bit of reason leads us to the deeper intellectual truth that it is straight.

Similarly, in engaging in dialogue with teens, almost all of them will acknowledge a tension between short term pleasures and long term well-being. Whether or not they will admit it in their own lives, they’ve all known people who have sacriced longer term well-being due to a lack of self-control over their short term impulses. This might be a matter of not getting exercise or homework done because of watching YouTube videos, or losing friendships due to gossiping, anger or sharp tongues, or knowing about others (perhaps adults) with addictions to drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc. Once they have acknowledged the tension between giving into short term impluses and long term consequences, it is not difficult to get them to understand the rational argument for cultivating the virtue of self-mastery on behalf of their own longer term wellbeing.

Over time we may discuss more complex issues, such as “Do you have a responsibility to bring your friends to justice when they have done wrong?” (an explicit issue from Plato’s Gorgias, where Socrates argues that we do, indeed, have such a responsibility). We can personalize this with older high school students by asking, “Would you report a student who was driving drunk to the police?” Such questions are fraught given the heavy peer pressure not to tell on a peer.

At the same time, by the light of day, in a classroom, it is frankly shocking for students to admit that they would let a peer drive drunk - given the risk of harming or killing another human being, it does not take an elaborate series of rational deductions to infer that one may be considered an accomplice to manslaughter if the worst came to pass and one had not acted. I recall one incident in which a dashing, attractive young man laughingly said, “Of course I’d never tell on my friends!” We had gotten far enough along on this chain of reasoning that most of the class, and especially the female students, were horrified at his cavalier attitude. This is how one begins to create a more moral culture - when an amoral young man becomes less attractive to young women because of his amorality.

Without any claims to any particular victories with respect to cultivating virtues, given the fact that our contemporary pop culture, social media, gaming, and porn tend to celebrated ego, hedonism, and the seven deadly sins, I count any orientation towards the good as a victory. This is especially the case insofar as we are able to create a peer culture at The Socratic Experience wherein moral issues are taken seriously. There are and will always be disagreements on key moral issues. We do live in a radically fragmented age where a serious virtue culture is almost unimaginable (see Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue). But nonetheless I find that once one has created a culture of dialogue in which moral conversations are the norm, and in which disagreements about moral issues are welcome, young people long to have these conversations. A few of them are completely attached to the shadows in the cave, but many long for the light. Thousands of hours of such conversations among their peers across the six years of secondary schooling is likely to have a long term impact on their intellectual, moral, and spiritual habits and attitudes.

Alfred North Whitehead famously described all of Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato. In reality it is all a response to the Socratic expectation of a consistent and coherent understanding of the true, the good, and the noble. Plato is a commentary on Socrates, Aristotle is a commentary on Plato, the various ancient ethical schools such as the Epicurians, the Stoics, the Cynics, etc. were all attempts to provide their own coherent responses to fundamental ethical questions. In modernity Kant’s deontological ethics and Bentham’s utilitarianism are more recent responses. Then in the 20th century a deep skepticism towards moral philosophy led to emotivism (moral beliefs are merely expressions of emotions), relativism (after anthropologists began documenting the extraordinary range of cultural norms), and the belief from Nietzsche that moral expressions were merely an expression of power, from Marx that they were merely an expression of class interest, and from Freud that they were merely an expression of psychological needs.

After WWII, and the horrors of the Holocaust and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, Elizabeth Anscombe began a revival of virtue ethics (along with Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch, all at Oxford). They, in turn, influenced Alasdair MacIntyre, whose neo-Aristotelian book After Virtue is one of the most influential academic works on moral theory of the late 20th century.

I don’t believe that any simple dogmatic preaching of morality will become influential going forward. At the same time, I believe that creating a social culture in which the rational discussion of moral principles is the norm, starting in adolescence, is crucial to individual and social well-being going forward. This is especially the case as the shadows on the wall become ever more addicting, as AI will appeal to our short-term impluses more seductively every time we are online (and insidious ways no doubt encroaching on the rest of our lives as well).

To that extent, I’m unapologetically in favor of educators dedicating themselves to turning young people’s minds away from the shadows in the cave, away from the temptations of sensual life and impulsivity, and towards the light. And then encouraging them to do so for others across the length of their lives.

Thus I hope to be seeding a culture in which the pursuit of the true, the good, and the noble is normalized in at least some sectors of the next generation.