In the past few weeks I've been trying to track Socrates'/Plato's ideas about the process of education/learning. Specifically, I am interested in the content and purpose of the paideia--the lessons.
In _Protagoras_ the title character makes a clear statement about both the content and purpose of the paideia should be. So, as I read _Phaderus_ I looked for similar statements by Socrates.
While Socrates does not make a specific statement about the purpose of education in _Phaderus_, he does make some comments about what education should not be. For example, on page 546, Socrates is discussing the teaching of preliminaries, specifically in relation to the teaching of rhetoric. He states:
"It is their ignorance that makes them think they have discovered what rhetoric is when they have mastered only what it is necessary to learn as preliminaries. So they teach these preliminaries and imagine their pupils have received a full course in rhetoric, thinking the task of using each of them persuasively ad putting them together into a whole speech is a minor matter."
Later, Socrates is discussing the teaching of writing and he says, "your invention will enable them to hear many thing without being properly taught, ad they will imagine they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing" (552).
I suppose what stood out to me in these two passages is Socrates insistence on a right way of teaching and learning. Although, Socrates never actually identifies what that right way is, he does tell us what it is not. For example, right teaching is not teaching preliminaries and believing that students will learn as they practice. Right teaching is not the teaching of writing things down, but is the privileging of memory and recitation as a teaching. At an earlier point, Socrates mentions that the using the dialectic is one of the only true ways show expertise.
What is most interesting to me in Socrates comments on education, is that Socrates seems convinced that the ways of traditionally teaching don't lead to real learning or truth. In fact, there are hints in _Phaderus_ that the learning of truth is only for those who have innate ability to learn. I can see that this attitude toward learning reflects Plato's anti-democratic attitude. That is, this narrow view of learning and teaching suggests that all teaching is worthless since only a few people actually have access to truth and useful learning anyway.
I'm still not sure what I make of all of this. I'm working on it.