Perspective: education is revolution (ft. Plato, Socrates, & a brief Latin lesson)
Detail from The School of Athens by Raphael, with Plato & Aristotle at the center
The University of Austin, founded recently by classically liberal scholars, has turned heads for being an alternative to narrow-minded Woke colleges (hear that, SJSU?). In a moving convocation speech to UATX's first class ('28), president Pano Kanelos unravels why we learn, how true “revolution” is education's grail, and what Plato's Akademy can offer the Bay Area's world of fast news and free speech antis.
Ours is a revolutionary institution—revolutionary in the proper sense. False revolutions propose only the tearing down of the established order; they are an exercise in nihilism. Yet the word revolution—in its original sense, revolvere—means to revolve, to turn back to a point of origin, with the purpose of renewing an original spirit or ideal.
To what are we returning? Not to some pallid vision of what universities looked like a decade or two or three ago, before their current malaise. Not to some nostalgic notion of ivy-covered quads and fusty dons. Our return is even more radical, radical in the sense of radix, roots, in that we are returning to the very roots of the Western intellectual tradition, to the very roots of the civilization that brought forward these extraordinary institutions called universities.
We are returning to a time when living the life of the mind was itself a bold adventure, when the world was afire with contending and clashing ideas, when everything under the sun was scrutinized, and measured, and queried, which gave birth to a civilization that was restless, and curious, and risk-taking, a Promethean civilization that sought the light of truth, even when that light was searing or sometimes even blinding.
Higher education is often referred to blandly as the “academy” or “academia.” This occludes how extraordinary the original Academy actually was. In 387 BC, Plato, very much like we are doing today, founded a school, which took its name from the place where it met, an olive grove on the fringes of Athens called the Akademia. Here, the great philosopher gathered students who were passionate about pursuing the fundamental human questions: What is justice? How do we acquire knowledge? What is the source of beauty?
There were other schools in Greece that coalesced around such figures as Empedocles, Epicurus, Thales, Democritus, and many others, all of whom believed that the world could be understood through sustained rational inquiry, and each of whom offered particular answers to the mysteries of the cosmos.
What distinguished Plato’s Academy, however, was doctrinal pluralism and a variety of intellectual approaches. There were no easy answers. Every discussion branched outward with ever-greater complexity. The Academy did not commit to a particular school of philosophy, but was a place where knowledge was comprehensively debated, analyzed, and advanced; it was, in the words of Shakespeare, the “quick forge and working house of thought.”
The range of topics was vast, the curiosity of the students ardent, their appetite for ideas voracious. From just a selection of the works of one of Plato’s students, Aristotle, we can come to understand how wide-ranging were the intellectual concerns of the age: On the Heavens, Meteorology, On the Soul, On Memory, On Sleep, History of Animals, Movement of Animals, On Colors, The Situations and Names of the Winds, Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, Economics, Rhetoric, Poetics. Plato and his students were not narrow specialists, not pedants, not ideologues; they were rather propelled to dispute, to discover, everything there was to know, and to test the boundaries of knowing itself.
The animating spirit of the Academy was Plato’s great teacher, Socrates. Socrates was famous, perhaps infamous, for engaging the citizens of Athens in frank conversations about philosophical topics. He was restless, persistent, infuriating. He cornered his fellow Athenians and pressed them to answer his questions: Is virtue taught or does it come to us by nature? What is the purpose of love? Is the soul immortal?
As each would offer a response, Socrates would push harder, “Is this truly the best answer?” His persistence did not make him popular, and he was ultimately put to death after trial by his fellow Athenian citizens. Yet his mode of inquiry, the Elenchus or Socratic Method, is the fountainhead of the entire Western intellectual tradition.
“Is this truly the best answer?” This turn of mind, this unalloyed commitment to truth-seeking, which takes both humanity’s passion for understanding along with the realization that, as individuals, our capacity to apprehend what is true is limited, this is the very reason we create these collective enterprises known as universities; it is why this university is dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.
Sacred institutions rest upon the revelation of settled truths, truths from the mouths of prophets and from the pages of hallowed texts. For human institutions engaged in human matters, however, given that, as Kant opined, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made,” our confidence in received opinion ought to be tempered. Our work is to stir up settled ideas, not as puerile exercises in contrarianism, but to see if, once they settle back into place, they have the same shape as before.
The term education derives from the Latin educare, and means “to lead out of.” To lead us out of what? Out of ignorance. A liberal education is one that presumes that human beings have freedom and agency, and that in liberating us from ignorance we will learn how to use our freedom well. Its purpose is not simply knowledge, but wisdom.
Read the whole transcript here.
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