2.03.2009

socrates and I may not have been friends (1)

After our class reading/discussion this morning, I was left with several Socratic statements that remain unsettled in my stomach. These quotes are taken directly from Joel Spring's text, Wheels in the Head (Chapter 1: Education and the Authoritarian State):

(1) "To know the good means that an individual also knows what is best for all people" (Spring, 5).

[While knowledge of what is good is desirable, it is not something that should claim supremacy over all persons!]

(2) "Rulers are allowed to lie, according to Socrates, because they know what is true and best for the people" (Spring, 5).

[I don't like this allowance at all. Socrates contradicts himself and is forgetting that falsehood and truth cannot co-exist in the manner in which he is suggesting.]

(3) "History continues to be a means of building national myths and winning patriotic allegiance from citizens" (Spring, 6).

[For many nations, this is a practiced belief; however, what these people do not realize is that those myths and allegiances eventually fade away...]

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