Political Doctrine, Philosophy, and the Value of Education: The Legacy of Isocrates and the Socratic Alternative

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the question, How ought the value of education be decided and defined? There are, in Western educational thought and practice, two answers to this question, the Isocratic and the Socratic. Contrary to most textbooks in the history of education, the Isocratic tradition of educational thought has most influenced Western education, and now constitutes the accepted view even among those who seek to critique the Western tradition. In the dominant Isocratic tradition, education is regarded as a political enterprise, and the value of education is defined relative to political doctrine. In the Socratic view, education is defined as a philosophic enterprise, and the value of education is defined as autonomous and internal to it. The structure of these two modes of examining educational value is outlined. The paper concludes that the question of how we decide what the value of education ought to be must once be asked from the perspective of these two alternatives, and that a recovery of the neglected history of educational philosophy and ideas will be a necessary part of this.