Education

one can distinguish three kinds of education: I. EDUCATION THROUGH EXAMPLE. This kind of education can proceed wholly unconsciously and is therefore the oldest and perhaps the most effective form of all.

Jung taxonomizes education into three modes — example, collective norm, and individual development — privileging the unconscious transmission through example as the oldest and most powerful, thereby grounding all pedagogy in depth-psychological process.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Development of Personality, 1954thesis

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Education in this sense concerns the drawing out of soul to conjoin with world soul… Education instead has become an institution whose purpose in the modern world is not to make culture, not to serve the living cosmos, but to harness humankind to the dead forces of materialism.

Sardello radically redefines education as the soul’s ongoing unfolding toward world soul, condemning modern institutional education as a betrayal of culture that serves materialist rather than psychic ends.

Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992thesis

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Shall we begin, then, with the acknowledgment that education is first given through Apollo and the Muses?… And the uneducated is he who has not been trained in the chorus, and the educated is he who has been well trained.

Plato grounds the very definition of education in divine rhythm and harmony, making aesthetic and musical formation — not intellectual instruction — the primary criterion of being educated.

Plato, Laws, -348thesis

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let me define the nature and power of education; for this is the way by which our argument must travel onwards to the God Dionysus… any one who would be good at anything must practise that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport

Plato positions the definition of education as architecturally prior to all legislation, insisting that virtue requires practice initiated from earliest youth.

Plato, Laws, -348thesis

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The education of the rational mind makes us less able with feeling, since feeling and thinking would seem, for the most part, to develop at the expense of each other… Inferior feeling cannot be corrected from above by superior thinking.

Von Franz argues that conventional rational education systematically suppresses feeling function, making psychotherapy necessary to compensate for what schooling actively damages.

Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis

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When virtue and vice are thus distinguished, education will be better understood, and in particular the relation of education to convivial intercourse.

Plato insists that education can only be properly understood after virtue and vice are distinguished, situating pedagogy within a comprehensive metaphysics of the soul’s governance by law and reason.

Plato, Laws, -348thesis

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these comprise, as a matter of fact, the education even of the educated; and then the lamp is extinguished ‘more truly than Heracleitus’ sun, never to be lighted again’… the education of after-life is of another kind, and must consist… rather in the improvement of character than in the acquirement of knowledge.

The commentator on the Laws observes that Plato’s critique of adult education in his own age applies universally, and that the education proper to maturity is moral character-formation rather than knowledge acquisition.

Plato, Laws, -348supporting

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the great aim of education is the cultivation of the habit of abstraction. This is to be acquired through the study of the mathematical sciences. They alone are capable of giving ideas of relation, and of arousing the dormant energies of thought.

Plato’s Republic identifies mathematics as the privileged instrument of education precisely because it turns the mind from particulars toward universal abstractions, awakening the philosophic capacity latent in every soul.

Plato, Republic, -380supporting

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the influence of pleasure in the beginning of education is fatal. A man should neither pursue pleasure nor wholly avoid pain. He should embrace the mean… It may sound ridiculous, but I affirm that a woman in her pregnancy should be carefully tended.

Plato extends the scope of education to prenatal formation, warning that excessive pleasure corrupts character from its very inception and that the mean must be cultivated even before birth.

Plato, Laws, -348supporting

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Plato seems to have reflected as deeply and earnestly on the importance of infancy as Rousseau, or Jean Paul… He would fix the amusements of children in the hope of fixing their characters in after-life.

The Platonic commentator notes that the Laws anticipates modern developmental psychology in treating the earliest play of infants as constitutive of adult character, making the regulation of childhood games a legislative imperative.

Plato, Laws, -348supporting

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no single instrument of youthful education has such mighty power, both as regards domestic economy and politics, and in the arts, as the study of arithmetic. Above all, arithmetic stirs up him who is by nature sleepy and dull.

Plato elevates arithmetic above all other educational instruments for its capacity to awaken dormant intelligence and to order the soul’s powers across domestic, political, and artistic life.

Plato, Laws, -348supporting

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of all animals the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated; he is the most insidious, sharp-witted, and insubordinate of animals. Wherefore he must be bound with many bridles.

Plato characterizes the child as constitutionally resistant to order precisely because reason is unformed in him, thereby justifying the elaborate structure of tutors, teachers, and civic oversight that constitutes formal education.

Plato, Laws, -348supporting

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The teacher, as a personality, is then faced with the delicate task of avoiding repressive authority, while at the same time exercising that just degree of authority which is appropriate to the adult in his dealings with childre

Jung identifies the teacher’s central pedagogical dilemma as calibrating authority: too much produces dependence or rebellion, too little deprives the child of the structural containment necessary for healthy development.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Development of Personality, 1954supporting

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I think that I am not wholly in want of a pattern… when I reflected upon all these words of ours, I naturally felt pleasure, for of all the discourses which I have ever learnt or heard, either in poetry or prose, this seemed to me to be the justest, and most suitable for young men to hear.

Plato proposes that the dialogue itself — the very words of the Laws — should serve as the curriculum for the guardian-director of education, making philosophical conversation the highest pedagogical model.

Plato, Laws, -348supporting

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he who has not contemplated the mind of nature which is said to exist in the stars, and gone through the previous training, and seen the connexion of music with these things, and harmonized them all with laws and institutions, is not able to give a reason of such things as have a reason.

Plato culminates his educational philosophy by insisting that true rulership requires a cosmological education — knowledge of nature, mathematics, music, and law unified — without which no genuine governance is possible.

Plato, Laws, -348supporting

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‘Such a lack of education, Stranger, is both unseemly and dangerous.’

Cleinias’s interjection marks the Platonic consensus that deficiencies in physical and martial education carry both moral and civic consequences, treating the uneducated body as a danger to the state.

Plato, Laws, -348aside

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