Avoid Fraud School, Find the School of Wisdom: Theages and Education

About now colleges start begging for attention as the business of higher education cranks up. For parents, the entire process is confusing, expensive, and can be discouraging. When you add the choices for education before college: homeschool? government school? private school? a religious based private school?

What to do? At that point, people ask experts for advice and when I am asked I think of Theages. He wasn’t my student, but in the book with his name on it, his father asks Socrates for advice on the best education. Of course, there is a problem with the book, but more after we hear the advice.

Some of the best Plato that Plato did not write is in the dialogue Theages. Socrates is asked about the best kind of education and he gives some advice, carefully, since as he says “advice is a divine thing.” The poor parent has a boy who “wants to be wise” and Dad knows that this quest is dangerous. There are frauds and want-to-be gurus around every corner. They will pretend to teach, but really want the cash to build educational empires or gain followers.

What is a parent to do?

We have to learn what we want from education. Wisdom is an easy answer, but wisdom to do or be what? Too often it amounts to money making, getting power, or the ability to fulfill our dreams. This is not wisdom, but forms of tyranny. Money will allow “freedom” from dependence and the ability to command. Power without virtue makes a man a local dictator and not all our dreams should be fulfilled.

Wisdom might be knowing which of our dreams are worthless, harmful, or unjust.

What is wisdom?

Wisdom begins, we are told, in the fear of God. This is not something that can come from a lecture or a platitude. This fear comes when we see how little we know. The fraudulent school of the left has a list of attitudes to inculcate, the conservative school (particularly in k-12 programs) has a list of right answers.

Everyone is afraid of the search for truth, especially if we believe we have found it. Why should each generation relearn what we know?

Part of growing up is learning skills and knowledge: there is no need to repeat past ignorance or learn to do things that earlier generations can teach us. But wisdom is not a skill or a fact. Like being born again, nobody can do this for us. Nobody can ask our questions or engage our desires. Truth is universal, but each student is particular. 

By all means, schools should teach crafts, practical wisdom, and train in good manners, but this is not enough. We must begin in the fear of the Lord and end in wisdom. Animals can be trained, but the human animal must be educated!

A grave mistake of the bad school is to think that if students are allowed to think for themselves, read for themselves, interpret for themselves, then authority will be lost. The authority in any classroom should be God, the teacher-the Holy Spirit, and the tutor/professor/teacher-a guide. To make the teacher the ultimate authority is to make the same mistake as those “progressive” schools that make the student the ultimate authority: idolatry.

Find a school where (Socrates suggests) God’s call is paramount. Schools that believe God cannot lead so the teacher must govern are functionally atheistic even if they claim to be Christian. Schools that believe that the student must rule descend into anarchy. Instead, the teacher uses his or her experience to govern the environment of the classroom to maximize the chance for all to hear the Divine Voice. We discuss waiting for the Pentecost of true education: the coming of Wisdom to give us Wisdom.

If there is no God, then this is hopeless, but there is a God so this method has worked for thousands of years.

The weakness of Theages, a reason to think Plato did not write it, is that it seems to confuse mere association with Socrates, hanging around the inspired guru, with discussion or true education. One suspects that sincere and pious teachers feared the dialectic, the discussion that is guided toward Wisdom, but cannot go forward if Wisdom does not come. Instead, these sincere teachers pass off the person of the teacher as enough. A good teacher is very good, but then so is a good student!

Theages, like so many classical and Christian schools, begins well, but ends in educational idolatry with the teacher and his charisma replacing the Uncreated Light of God. God, help us to create chances to pursue wisdom and wait patiently for Wisdom to come.