my argument will connect democratic education closely to emotional and imaginative cultivation,
We know that in ancient Greece people who lived under monarchies, tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies had pretty much the same emotional and imaginative cultivation. There were some differences in education and training. In Periclean Athens, the common man received some instruction in the voting and other procedures of the Ecclesia. The Spartan received instruction on the working of the laws and institutions of his own State. But both the Athenian and the Spartan enjoyed the same literary paideia- i.e. the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Tyrtaeus etc.
let me begin my talk with an example from ancient Athenian tragedy, the ending of Euripides' The Trojan Women.
The Spartans loved Euripides. It is said that they decided not to destroy Athens after hearing his Elektra. In subsequent centuries, plenty of tyrants and God Emperors enjoyed Euripides. But there were also democratic Athenians who found his work boring or shmaltzy.
The towers of Troy are burning. All that is left of the once-proud city is a group of ragged women, bound for slavery, their husbands dead in battle, their sons murdered by the conquering Greeks, their daughters raped.
Sadly, the Greeks had not slit open the bellies of pregnant women, dragged out foetuses and then slit open the bellies of those foetuses to extract smaller foetuses. Martha believes that, under Narendra Modi, Hindu Gujaratis were given this type of democratic education. Probably, this had to do with 'rote learning' and Hindu Mummies & Daddies only getting naches if their kids get into IIT or IIM. Bengali Atheists are so nice. They encourage their sons and daughters to study useless shite. Why can't Gujju Hindus be more like them?
Hecuba their queen invokes the king of the gods, using, remarkably, the language of democratic citizenship: "Son of Kronus, Council-President of Troy,Euripides uses the word πρύτανις, "prytanis" an epithet of the supreme god Zeus- e.g. in Aeschylus' Prometheus- which means leader, ruler, or Lord. Zeus emphasises that he is supreme and can act tyrannically. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. What is permitted to the Divine, is denied to the bovine. Does this mean God is 'impassable'? Perhaps. Alternatively, God to must obey the stern decrees of Fate.
father who gave us birth, do you see these undeserved sufferings that your Trojan people bear?" The Chorus answers grimly, "He sees, and yet the great city is no city. It has perished, and Troy exists no longer."
The Romans would conquer the Greeks. They claimed descent from a Trojan prince.
A little later, Hecuba herself concludes that the gods are not worth calling on, and that the very name of her land has been wiped out. In one way, the ending of this drama is as bleak as any in the history of tragic drama.
Tragic dramas have tragic endings. D'uh.
Death, rape, slavery, fire destroying the towers, the city's very name effaced from the record of history by the acts of rapacious and murderous Greeks.
Romeo & Juliet kill themselves. Their legend lives on. But so does that of Robin Hood.
And yet, of course, it did not happen that way, not exactly. For the story of Troy's fall is being enacted, some six hundred years after the event, by a company of Greek actors, in the Greek language of a Greek poet, in the presence of all the adult citizens of Athens, most powerful of Greek cities.
That power didn't last. Democracy can be more than a bit shit. What matters is whether its citizens can kick ass on the battle-field. Athenian democratic education involved learning how to march long distances and kill lots of the enemy.
Hecuba's cry to the gods even imagines him as a peculiarly Athenian type of civic official,
No. She is using the word 'prytanis' in the archaic sense. The meaning is that God is impassable. A human King or Mayor may be swayed by an appeal to his emotions. God, it seems, is pitiless. But, it may be, God himself is bound by Fate which may itself be bound.
president of the city council. So the name of the land didn't get wiped out after all. The imaginations of the conquerors were haunted by it, transmitted it, and mourn it. Obsessively their arts repeat the events of long-ago destruction, typically inviting, as here, the audience's compassion for the women of Troy and blame for their assailants.
Greeks knew that if their city was conquered, they would meet the same fate as the Trojans. This didn't stop them fighting with each other. Guys watching Euripides' play may have participated in the sacking of Melos.
In its very structure the play makes a claim for the moral value of compassionate imagining,
It reminded its audience that losing a war would mean death, enslavement, and the sacking of your city. Being 'anti-war' means being able to fuck the fuck out of any aggressor. If you can't do that, you get war whether you like it or not.
as it asks its audience to partake in the terror of a burning city, of murder and rape and slavery.
It reminds them that it could happen to Athens or Melos or any other town.
Insofar as members of the audience are engaged by this drama, feeling fear and grief for the conquered city, they demonstrate the ability of compassion to cross lines of time, place, and nation -
There's plenty of that in Homer. People show compassion to the shipwrecked sailor or political exile. But, at that period, wars war being fought for profit.
and also, in the case of many audience members, the line of sex, perhaps more difficult yet to cross. Nor was the play an aesthetic event cut off from political reality. The dramatic festivals of Athens were sacred festivals strongly connected to the idea of democratic deliberation,
No. The rich were forced to pay for these festivals. The 'choregos' could nominate someone he believed richer than themselves and offer to exchange estates with that person in return for transferring this 'liturgical duty'. This was called 'antidosis.' In return for paying for festivals, the rich got valuable contracts- e.g. the right to sell the enslaved population of a conquered city. This meant that there was an incentive for perpetual war. Essentially, if Athens wins then the rich guy gets richer while the poor guy gets to watch nicer plays. But both rich and poor have only one life. If defeated, the rich guy may get ransomed. The poor guy is killed on enslaved. This meant Athenian democracy was not 'incentive compatible'. It was bound to over-extend itself and face a come-uppance.
and the plays of Euripides were particularly well known for their engagement with contemporary events.
Smart Greeks were coming around to the view that Democracy sucked ass big time. They were right. Living in an empire made you richer and safer.
In this case, the audience that watched The Trojan Women had recently voted to put to death the men of the rebellious colony of Melos and to enslave the women and children.
Selling slaves made the expedition profitable.
Euripides invites them to contemplate the real human meaning of their actions.
Better it happen to Melos than to us. Also, if we make a profit on it, God must really love us.
Compassion for the women of Troy should at least cause moral unease, reminding Athenians of the full and equal humanity of people who live in distant places,
Martha has got it into her head that the mugger won't mug and the rapist won't rape if they accept the 'full and equal humanity' of their victims. This isn't the case. You want to mug or rape an equal human being not a plastic blow up doll.
their fully human capacity for suffering. But did those imaginations really cross those lines? Think again of that invocation of Zeus. Trojans, if they worshipped Zeus as king of gods at all, surely did not refer to him as the president of the city council.
They referred to him as the supreme leader of the gods. Nobody thought he was a Mayor.
The term prytanis is an Athenian legal term, completely unknown elsewhere.
This is completely false. The term was used for the Chief Magistrate in a number of cities- e.g. Rhodes, Lycia, Miletus etc.
So it would appear that Hecuba is not a Trojan but a Greek.
Similarly, Julius Caesar was English coz of Shakespeare.
Her imagination is a Greek democratic (and, we might add, mostly male) imagination.
No. It is a Greek theistic imagination. She appeals to the all High God. But Troy's doom is sealed. On the other hand it is true that the male imagination involves giving birth to babies.
The democratic imagination is powerful but flawed.
No. It is powerless even when flawless. It isn't really true that if only we all imagined a future where there would be no war and no dicks and no Donald Trump, then all our wishes would come true.
The imagination has a powerful capacity to imagine the sufferings and needs of people at a distance, and at least in principle it can usefully inform public debate about policy.
No. Stupid people like Nussbaum & Sen can't add value. Public debate is dominated by shitheads. Elected representatives with qualified staff can debate 'ways and means'. The big question is whether the proposal represents value for money.
But the Hecuba example shows that this imagination also has limits.
No. The imagination has no limits. No 'example' can 'show' what is impossible.
It can be self-serving, imagining one's own nation as the source of all human values
That is an affirmation or assumption. It is not an 'imagining'.
and dehumanizing other cultures in consequence.
Martha thinks that if we say she is a goat, she will turn into a goat. She hopes we will be imagine her as as a smart woman.
Democratic citizens can also fail to think critically about what they hear, putting anger, fear, and power ahead of reason. Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War shows many instances of this failing - not least in the debate about Mytilene, another defeated colony that, like Melos, had rebelled against Athens. Swayed by the powerful but highly irrational rhetoric of politician Cleon,
Cleon was rational and based his argument on the law.
the people voted to put to death all the men of the colony and to enslave the women and children. They sent a ship to execute the grim command. Then, after hearing a well-argued and persuasive speech by Diodotus,
he appealed to expediency. Kill everybody and, next time, the enemy won't surrender. They will fight to the death. That means some of the people sitting in the Assembly would die or lose loved ones.
they changed their mind, and sent a second ship to cancel the order of death. It was only by sheer chance, because the first ship was stalled at sea by a windless spell, that the second ship caught the first and lives were spared. So the democratic mind is also careless, prone to hasty and irrational thinking.
No more so than the monarchic or oligarchic mind.
All modern democracies, like ancient Athens but even more so, are part of an interlocking world, a world that makes decisions not only about internal matters but also about the life and death of strangers.
No modern democracy is like ancient Athens. Boston doesn't keep trying to conquer New York.
It is a world of staggering inequalities. The life expectancy at birth of a child born in the United States is about 78 years.
It's about 74 for Bangladesh. The world is becoming more equal with respect to life expectancy.
In Sierra Leone, life expectancy at birth is about 38 years.
It has risen to about 60 since.
How can we educate democratic citizens
You can't. You are too stupid.
who think well about these inequalities, understanding the reality of distant lives without making the errors that Euripides and Thucydides so vividly depicted?
They did not depict errors. The reflected on life as it was lived and war as it was waged in their own age.
I shall now argue that the educational concepts of the ancient Greek philosophers, in particular Socrates and the Greek and Roman Stoics, give us a great deal of help in solving this problem.
They gave it long ago. Why did the problem persist? Is it because nobody in Christendom has ever been as smart as Martha?
What I am about to propose is a concept of what is often called "liberal education."
Which was discovered to be greatly inferior to STEM subject education. Countries where 'liberal education' was valorised weren't democracies. The transition to democracy downgraded 'liberal arts' in favour of STEM subjects and vocational training.
India had much lower literacy than South Korea in the Fifties. It remained a Democracy while South Korea became a military dictatorship.
The very term "liberal education"
i.e. education for the free-born, as opposed to slaves. A rich thicko needn't be gud at reeding, riting or rithmetic coz you can always hire slaves to take care of that kind of thing. But he should be able to quote a line or two of Homer.
derives from the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, who was also a leading politician, in an era of great anxiety and conflict.
No. There was already a paideia for the sons of the wealthy which featured being able to read or at least recite some poetry, etc. Cicero displayed it to advantage. Seneca, being a philosopher, thought all paideia should be philosophic. He was wrong. His student, Nero, ordered him to kill himself.
So let me begin with his reflections, which are continuous, as we'll soon see, with the practice of Socrates, as well as the ideas of the older Greek Stoics. In the letter that invents our modern concept of liberal education,
No. The modern concept of liberal education can only be traced back to the Renaissance. Moreover, it embraced modern (that is vernacular) languages and 'print capitalism'. Stoicism yielded to Christianity long ago. It was boring shite.
Seneca begins by describing the usual style of Roman education, noting that it is called "liberal" (liberalis, "connected to freedom"), because it is understood to be an education for well-brought-up young gentlemen, who were called the liberales, the "free-born."
Slaves received more thorough training. However, as mere military prowess and family connections became less important, Senecan shite was displaced by a return to proper Aristotelian study. After all, Alexander didn't kill his tutor. Also, he conquered half the world.
The notion of a 'liberal education' was associated with aristocratic or oligarchic government. It was aimed at the gentleman with a country estate and a town house of no modest proportions. Such a gentleman might sit in Parliament or discharge the duties of an Honorary Magistrate. He should have some knowledge of theology and the ability to check that sermons given by any Vicar he appointed were orthodox in points of doctrine.
Sadly, people of this stripe were stupid. They fucked up big time. The Great War was their graveyard. Power passed to engineers and economists. Smart people studied STEM subjects. Cretins like Martha studied the Classics.
We need Socratic teaching to fulfill the promise of democratic citizenship.
Democracy put Socrates to death. Sadly, American Democracy hasn't fed Martha some nice hemlock.
Schools that help young people speak in their own voice
are called nursery schools.
and to respect the voices of others
baby learns that before attending nursery school
will have done a great deal to produce thoughtful and potentially creative democratic citizens, citizens who can understand Hecuba's suffering without imposing on it their own schemes of domination.
Nobody does anything of the sort unless, obviously, they are fisting themselves vigorously while watching the play and shouting 'suffer, baby, suffer!'
Citizens who cultivate their humanity need, further, my second element, an ability to see themselves as not simply citizens of some local region or group but also, and above all, as human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern: as "citizens of the world," as the ancient Greco-Roman tradition that Seneca belonged to expressed the idea.
That's what organized Religion does. But this is stuff which kids learn before the age of 5. Martha is a College Professor. How fucking retarded are her students?
Students should begin very early to learn the rudiments of world history, and to gain a basic understanding of the major world religions.
That's what primary school is for.
It is easier to do this if one begins when children are young, so that they come to see the world - and their own nation itself -- as complex and heterogeneous rather than as local and homogeneous.
In other words, Martha is confessing that what she does is 'Remedial Education'. If you went to a good primary school, you don't need to bother with her shite.
But, now, let me turn to the third part of my proposal. Citizens cannot think well on the basis of factual knowledge alone.
Martha can't think well. That's a fucking fact right there.
The third ability of the citizen, closely related to the first two, can be called the narrative imagination. This means the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself...
Kids do that when they hear stories. Indeed, they make up very good ones for themselves. Once again, I am forced to ask- how fucking damaged are Martha's students?
The cultivation of sympathy, which I take to be the central public task of ancient Athenian tragedy,
its task was to bring about 'catharsis' or purgation of emotions through pity and terror.
has also been a key part of the best modern ideas of progressive education. The great John Dewey long ago argued that the arts were modes of intelligent perception and experience that should play a crucial role in education, forming the civic imagination.
People with training in arts and crafts were making good money. Design and Marketing requires creativity.
He protested against the usual sort of education, in which "Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can."
America could afford to set up a chain of High Schools across the country from about 1910 onward. But the deficiencies of 'Board School Education' featuring rote learning were well known in England in the mid Nineteenth Century.
Similarly, in India, the distinguished poet and educator Rabindranath Tagore
who didn't bother to get a degree. This meant he had to hire graduates to teach in his school
wrote, concerning the role of the arts in his school at Santiniketan, "We may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy…But we find that this education of sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed."
He needed rich-but-stupid kids to attend his school. Parents, too, wanted to send thickos to some rural place where they couldn't get into too much trouble.
The education of sympathy is being repressed once again today, as arts and humanities programs are increasingly being cut back in schools in many nations, in favor of a focus on technical and scientific education, which is seen as the key to a nation's financial success.
Parents don't want their kids to waste their time being taught stuff which they had already mastered when they were five years old. Why does Martha not offer a course in remedial potty training? Democratic citizens should be educated to have enough sympathy for each other that they don't incessantly shit themselves in public.
The arts are also crucial sources of both freedom and community.
No. They are merely ways to pass the time.
When people put on a play together, they have to learn to go beyond tradition and authority,
Not if they are kids. They have to learn to do what the director wants.
if they are going to express themselves well.
No. First you learn to do things the way teechur said. Then you study under a better teechur. Only after you have completed your apprenticeship can you start doing your own 'journeyman' work. If it clicks, you may yourself become a master.
And the sort of community created by the arts is non-hierarchical,
It is deeply hierarchical. The stage hand doesn't get to tell the Director what to do.
a valuable model of the responsiveness and interactivity that a good democracy will also foster in its political processes.
Theatre directors are famously dictatorial. There is nothing democratic about an orchestra or an opera or ballet troupe.
When I talked to the late Amita Sen, who danced in Rabindranath Tagore's dance-dramas,
because she was a kid attending the skool where her daddy taught
first in his progressive school in Santiniketan and then on the Kolkata stage,
as part of his troupe. Fortunately, Daddy was able to marry her off and so she didn't have to humiliate herself anymore.
I see the revolutionary nature of what Tagore had done for young women in particular, urging them to express themselves freely through their bodies and to join with him in a kind of profoundly egalitarian play.
But he married off his daughters as children. He wasn't really progressive at all. Women who were able to rise as dancers or dance teachers had cross-caste marriages- like Srimathi Hutheesingh or Rukmini Arundel.
The scandal of this freedom, as young women of good family suddenly turned up on the Kolkata stage, shook convention and tradition to their foundations.
No. Tagore was perfectly respectable. His own niece and grand-daughter were members of the troupe. Amita''s character was beyond reproach. She married within her caste. Her father in law had been a Judge and her husband had a PhD in Soil Science from London University. Her son was Amartya Sen whom Martha dated in the Eighties.
Whether a nation is aspiring to a greater share of the market, like India, or struggling to protect jobs, like the U. S., the imagination and the critical faculties look like useless paraphernalia, and people even have increasing contempt for them.
No. If you want more market share or more high value adding jobs, you invest in Art & Craft education. This was thriving in mid-Victorian England. Kipling's dad was brought to Bombay to teach Art & Design. The Calcutta Government Art College had been set up even earlier.
Thus the humanities are turned into rapid exercises in rote learning, packaged, often, in state-approved textbooks, and the whole political debate comes to be focused on the content of these textbooks, rather than on the all-important issue of pedagogy.
Memorization is important. So is learning grammar and spelling and foreign languages. STEM subjects, however, are what really stretch the mind.
At this point I cannot resist introducing the great educator Rabindranath Tagore's short story, called "The Parrot's Training," which provides a very good picture of education in our time, as in his. (Tagore briefly went to 12 several schools, but he detested the school experience and left as soon as he could.)
His Mum made him go to school. After she died, he stayed home.
A certain Raja had a bird whom he loved. He wanted to educate it, because he thought ignorance was a bad thing. His pundits convinced him that the bird must go to school.
So, this is a story about a Raja who has shit for brains.
The first thing that had to be done was to give the bird a suitable edifice for his schooling: so they build a magnificent golden cage.
Raja's may well spend money on an ornamental cage. The thing is an asset.
The next thing was to get good textbooks.
Birds can't read. The British Political Agent will take guardianship of the Raja and his estate if he finds out that money is being spent on books for a bird.
The pundits said, “Textbooks can never be too many for our purpose.” Scribes worked day and night to produce the requisite manuscripts. Then, teachers were employed. Somehow or other they got quite a lot of money for themselves and built themselves good houses. When the Raja visited the school, the teachers showed him the methods used to instruct the parrot. “The method was so stupendous that the bird looked ridiculously unimportant in comparison. The Raja was satisfied that there was no flaw in the arrangements. As for any complaint from the bird itself, that simply could not be expected. Its throat was so completely choked with the leaves from the books that it could neither whistle nor whisper.” The lessons continued. One day, the bird died. Nobody had the least idea how long ago this had happened. The Rajah's nephews, who had been in charge of the education ministry, reported to the Raja: “'Sire, the bird's education has been completed.' 'Does it hop?' the Raja enquired. 'Never!' said the nephews. 'Does it fly?' 'No.' 'Bring me the bird,' said the Raja. The bird was brought to him, guarded by the kotwal and the sepoys and the sowars. The Raja poked its body with his finger. Only its inner stuffing of book-leaves rustled. 13 Outside the window, the murmur of the spring breeze amongst the newly budded asoka leaves made the April morning wistful.
The meaning of the story is 'Hindus are stupid. If the Brits fuck off, Muslims will slit our throats. You young cunts may have BA/MA but your education has made you stoooooopid. Look at me! I don't got no Collidge degree. But I've got a fucking Nobel prize, mate!'
This wonderful story hardly needs commentary.
Yes it does. Martha teaches worthless shite on a splendidly appointed campus. She herself has written a lot of books. Even if your little girl has the brain of a bird, don't send her to study under Martha. Learn from the story of the foolish Raja.
Martha ends her talk thus-
If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away, because they don't make money.
No. Good art has high income elasticity of demand. It adds value. But saying stuff is crucially important helps nobody. Thus, though I have spent the last sixty years saying it is crucially important that death be abolished, the thing hasn't happened- probably because of all the money corpses make for the funeral industry.
They only do what is much more precious than that, make a world that is worth living in,
i.e. one where people pretend you are smart rather than a smelly retard.
and democracies that are able to overcome fear and suspicion and to generate vital spaces for sympathetic and reasoned debate.
I suppose she means that parents and taxpayers should continue to pay for the sort of worthless courses Martha teaches. Look at Zelensky. He should have enrolled the Ukrainian Army in a nice liberal arts program. That way, Putin wouldn't have dared to invade. This is because being exposed to sympathetic and reasoned debate is a fate worse than death.
Nevertheless, a democracy which does not educate its people to a level where they can arm themselves and defend their nation is one which is not likely to endure. Education is about Productivity which is about what is useful- i.e. has utility. It may be that Martha's books are useful to some people who find in them a reason not to resume their careers as serial killers. If so, she deserves her place in the market. But there is no point subsidising such stupidity.
