Based upon lecture by John Baldacchino.
Greek philosophy on learning focuses on the soul and the body. The body in ‘contingent’ and the soul is ‘necessary’. The soul is said to be omniscient and knows the grand knowledge of the world. When we are born our soul holds this information. However the soul then comes limited by the body. So it can be said that the soul without the body would be an all-powerful entity. Socrates talks of this in Plato, Meno. Throughout our lives we are continually trying to remember what the soul already knows and unlock this information. Therefore making it unlimited. It is aid that if you move more towards bodily things then the soul becomes damaged but if you maintain spirituality and focus on spiritual ideas then the soul is revived. In order to not make the body forgetful we must employ ‘aporia’ which is simply letting people make mistakes so that they can learn from them.
In terms of education I think ancient Greek philosophy is telling us that we should never give up on children who are struggling to learn because they have the knowledge within them we just have to find the right way of unlocking it.
It is also encouraging us to allow children to make mistakes so that they learn from their experiences and therefore develop a better knowledge. This relates to the guest lecture from Brendan Knight on Plato’s Cave. If the world outside the cave had been bad and cruel they would have learned this through making the mistake of going outside and therefore would know not to do the same again. The same can be applied to a mathematics sum, if they did it wrong the first time they will not tackle it in the same way again.
Sometimes as teachers we may be wise to deliberately confuse children in order that they see even more clearly in the end. They would then have to look back through the steps in great detail to understand where they went wrong and then figure out how to do it right. They would then have more advanced knowledge of the specific steps involved in comparison to if they did it right the first time and never had to look at the steps again.
