Review of Plato and intellectual development: A new theoretical framework emphasising the higher-order pedagogy of the Platonic Dialogues

by

Susanna Saracco, London, Palgrave, 2017

Why review a book on Plato in a journal dedicated to language and literacy education? Some answers come to hand: Almost all we know of Plato is due to his written products, so his contributions, and in a sense even his identity, are arch-literate constructions. It is also certain that Plato's teacher, Socrates, not only refused to read or write, but was also, at best, semi-literate (Harris, 1989). Plato's decision to render his teacher's dialogues into writing was based on the premise that these highly contextualised, dynamic exchanges could be reworked into texts--the hope being, accurately as it turned out, that these 'readings of talk' might prove instructive across time and place. Socrates had become a demi-god for many Athenians; how much of the records of the Socratic Dialogues was Plato's remodelling of the words of this demi-god into his own intellectual and moral likeness is impossible to determine, simply because there are no other documents to tell us (Griswold, 200 (1)).

But there are also practical reasons why literacy teachers might take some interest in a philosopher's expedition into Plato's take on the human intellect: Plato documented the arguments that Socrates had with a variety of initially articulate and self-assured--but eventually flummoxed--interlocutors, turning those arguments into written language. It is a commonplace to point out that teachers spend a lot of time talking with students back-and-forth about matters that reappear, or that have already appeared, in printed curricular texts, and that students are assessed in large part via their ability, in writing, to synthesise the written forms of these curriculum-related knowledge with the spoken interactions that frame and interpret that knowledge. We still acknowledge Socrates' take on productive exchange: 'Socratic teaching' generally is taken to mean posing, re-posing, and reworking the kinds of questions that push learners into uncertainty, and on toward more complex and coherent forms of thought, and into more precise ways of using words that better reflect the particular area of inquiry at hand. (It's an ironic title for Socrates, given that he insisted he was not a teacher, in Plato, Apology, 33a-b.)

The transformation of spoken interactions into writing raises questions that contemporary educators should be interested in: How much do we know about the relationship between spoken dialogue and written texts, a relationship that underpins much of what counts as teaching and learning in contemporary schooling? What are the different strengths and weaknesses of these two modes of communication? How are these strengths and weaknesses recognised and capitalised on in educational settings? How are they, and how should they be 'played off against' one another'? That is, how can--or should--educators know how to mix-and-match spoken and written forms to help novice learners? If we take seriously Olson's (1977) assertion of forty years ago that the printed word is the base on which modern education systems are built, then how it is that students might be productively alerted to, and worked into, the talk-text relationship as it is acted out in the variety of demands that make up the school curriculum areas (Freebody, Barton & Chan, 2014).

In her recent book Plato and intellectual development Susanna Saracco sets out to convince us that Plato's project was about the continual stimulation of engagement with the ways we produce and use knowledge, especially text-based knowledge, and how that engagement comes with active reading--inquisitive, sceptical, 'take-it-personally' reading. She starts with the idea that a genuine reader participates in an intellectual collaboration, and it is this 'interpretative effort' as she calls it, that needs to form both the basis, and the full potential of contemporary literacy-based education. At the outset Saracco makes it clear that she has no interest in claiming that Plato could foresee subsequent developments in inquiry and research; rather she argues, and demonstrates throughout the book, that Plato's message has powerful resonance for educators who want to confront more deeply the challenges they face in their work.

The chapters proceed to outline and illustrate the basic form of Plato's position: To read is to contribute; a text is to be recreated by a collaborating co-author, occasion by occasion; the role of readers 'is not flattened to that of students who can merely absorb the content proposed by the teacher' (p. 6). The 'epistemic game' (p. 25), as Socrates constructed it, sets out the rules of engagement for the exchange: The reader, like Socrates' interlocutor, accepts an invitation to enter a dialogue knowing that the chances of winning are pretty slim. The interlocutor's acceptance is sweetened partly by the apparent straight-forwardness of the initial ideas that open the exchanges--just simple, common-sense observations--even though the veteran Socratic knows that the more self-evident the beginning statements, the rougher the ride will be. The bases of this jointly-built 'game' consist of Socrates' probing questions and the initially confident but increasingly agreements and disagreements of the interlocutor to the point of 'perplexity', where the interlocutor's initial position is seen to be based on a mixture of myth and incoherence rather than on rational thought.

These kinds of sometimes 'stagey', often uncomfortable, and always risky exchanges between teacher and learner form the foundational setting for engagement. Plato (and Saracco) invest heavily on that setting's ability to foster a 'knowledge of the purely intelligible' that is fundamentally grounded on an intellectual and moral 'detachment from the tangible', an appreciation of, and skill in the deployment of, coherent abstract thought in the search for principled, rational solutions. Teachers who orchestrate sequences of challenging questions make a similar investment--that, from participating in these exchanges, students can read and write with more substance, with more at stake.

The deep message is about the need to model active collaborative engagement with texts, and, directly and indirectly, with the writer's intellectual and moral reasoning practices, to rework and refit those reasoning practices into the reader's time and place via dialogic work with a teacher that is forceful but that has clear rules of engagement. The critique, extension, aggregation, and redesign of authors' arguments together constitute the base of Saracco's line in this book and, she would argue, of Plato's overall project:

Plato's written words are stimulations which help the readers to develop an awareness of their rational capacity. This awareness has to be used to reach the highest phase of rational development (p. 5)

Driving Saracco's argument is a specifically literacy-related view of what she calls 'theoretical adulthood', of the intellectual, cognitive, and moral features that constitute this adulthood, and of the intensive work that needs to be done to attain it, when we engage in serious exchanges with teachers, learners, and authors. For Saracco this 'theoretical adulthood' is facilitated but not guaranteed--by the ability to read and write (Thomas, 2009); it is earned only through a particular kind of high-engagement, collaborative, risk-taking reading and a form of writing that invites and encourages such intensive collaboration. Plato, and two-and-a-half millennia later Sarocco, name these as the essential features of learning to read and write. This view puts pressure on educators to make the content really matter to students (as shown, for example, in Hynd, Holschuh, and Hubbard, 2004, in the case of History).

Saracco's own engagement in this work is evident on every page: We encounter a combination of complex technical argument and downright exuberance; she finds Plato's insights, his respect for the intellect of the reader, and the range of implications for education even today 'astonishing'. Her own reading of Plato, and in turn of his reading of his teacher Socrates, embodies the enthusiastic engagement that she espouses. She delivers, in the writing, on the sense of intense intellectual and moral collaboration that the written word offers us. She points out that Plato regularly reminded his readers there was 'more to discover on this subject, and this is something that they have to do' (p. 3). One unique feature of this book is that the author provides an addendum in which she outlines an online dialogic program, developed by Saracco and colleagues, entitled Journey to critical inquiry. The program has been developed for upper primary years school students and is based on high levels of engagement in important topics, and focused questioning skills, all based on the Platonic dialogues.

Detracting from this book are occasional clumsy expressions or wordings that are not native to academic English, as well as an alarmingly skimpy index. But Saracco shows us how the inclination to seek solutions to contemporary problems in the ideas and words of ancient thinkers is as old as modernity itself; that it can indeed be thought of as one of the characteristics of modernity that, while the past is, by definition, 'out of date', it is the responsibility of genuinely modern thinkers to retrieve those elements that provide direction to the construction of thought, morality, and daily practice. Saracco's book shows us that this need be neither a retreat from the tangles of the present into the nostalgia of simpler days or a simpleminded reliance on some best-of, 'timeless nuggets of wisdom' from the past. The project, as she demonstrates, is both crucial and necessarily ongoing. Its preoccupations with thought, logic, and the talk-text relationship connect with philosophers', social scientists', and psychologists' inquiries into the nature of science and human cognition (e.g., Deutsch, 2011) and in the nature of human judgement (e.g., Kahneman, 2011).

Maybe in the end, the real interest in Plato and the potential value for literacy educators of his and his mentor's work is that, as Sarocco outlines, Socrates was sceptical about the benefits of these new-fangled printed texts--their reckless tendency to find their way into contexts where they would almost certainly be misunderstood and misused, their ominous trick of luring people into believing they have understood the message just because they have read the words, and their false promise that writing offers us, even from a competent but shallow reading, the status of public authority, the 'appearance of wisdom'. The near-omnipresence of digital, online, and mobile communication technologies shows no signs of easing his anxieties. Almost two and a half millennia later, as we, and our students, swim through oceans of 'news' (both fake, and only partly fake), politicians' daily twitters, and globally-syndicated two-line summaries of lengthy scientific reports on such complexities as economic well being and climate deterioration, we have not yet proven Socrates wrong in his complaint that literacy can actively help people to become, in his words via Plato, more 'ill-informed' and therefore 'even harder to get on with'. Seems it's still down to literacy educators themselves to be intense, collaborative readers, and, through their patient daily work, to help produce a literate, thoughtful, and informed citizenry that is up to the challenges of democracy.

Note

(1) The first sentence of the book asserts: 'What you are going to read is a non-standard work in Ancient Philosophy.' By the end of the book, it has become clear that this is a colossal understatement. It is also too modest; the book would be 'non-standard' in every conventional domain of inquiry.

References

Deutsch, D. (2011). The Beginning of infinity: Explanations that transform the world. New York NY: Allan Lane.

Freebody, P., Barton, G. & Chan, E. (2014). Literacy Education: 'about being in the world'. In C. Leung & B.V. Street (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to English Studies, (pp. 419-434). London: Routledge.

Griswold, C., (Ed.) (2001). Platonic Writings/Platonic Readings. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1987). Spoken and written modes of meaning. In R. Horowitz and S.J. Samuels (Eds.), Comprehending oral and written language, (pp. 55-82). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Harris, W.V. (1989). Ancient literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hynd, C., Holschuh, J. & Hubbard, B. (2004). Thinking like a historian: College students' reading of multiple historical documents. Journal of Literacy Research, 36, 141-176.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York NY: Macmillan.

Olson, D.R. (1977). The languages of instruction: The literate bias of schooling In RC Anderson R. Spiro & W Montague (Eds.) Schooling and the acquisition of knowledge, (pp. 65-89). Hillsdale: Erlbaum.

Plato Apology (translated B. Jowett). Retrieved 16/01/18 from http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

Thomas, R. (2009). 'Writing, Reading, Public and Private Literacies: Functional Literacy and Democratic Literacy in Greece,' in W.A. Johnson and H.N. Parker (Eds.) Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome, (pp. 13-45). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reviewed by Peter Freebody

The University of Wollongong