plato's child and the limit-points of educational theories

BERNADETTE BAKER

PLATO’S CHILD AND THE LIMIT-POINTS OF EDUCATIONALTHEORIES

ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes how the figure of the child has been used to authorizea series of boundaries that have constituted the limit-points of educational theories orphilosophies. Limit-points are the conceptual boundaries that educational theories produce,move within, respond to, and make use of because the perception is that they cannot beargued away or around at the time. A method of comparative historico-philosophy is usedto contrast limit-points in Platonic figurations of the child and education with childcenteredand eugenic theories of the late nineteenth and twentieth century West. The figuration of thechild in both periods is imbricated in forming boundaries around a power-motion-reasonnexus and in delineating what necessity and justice mean. The meaning-space that the childcan occupy in relation to such concepts has shifted with them and has been important todepicting Utopian and cosmological imaginings at different historical moments and forauthorizing in turn what counts as an appropriate and/or realistic educational philosophy.

KEY WORDS: child, eugenics, justice, necessity, Plato, power

INTRODUCTION

The alterity that marks the child in chains of Being and theories of develop-ment that have emerged within ‘the West’ has been frequently noted (e.g.,Burman, 1996; Egan, 1998; Morrs, 1990; Rose, 1989). Post-Darwin thefigure, child, was presumed to exist on a scale that ran from the inferiorityof plants and animals to a superior heavenly body. It has been conceived asa placeholder within such a cosmological order, marking a crossover pointbetween subhuman and genuinely or fully human forms. In late nineteenthcentury Western contexts, the indexing role of the child in an evolutionarychain of Being intersected with a variety of educational reforms includingchildcenteredness and eugenics. Such reforms were predicated on claimsof (and worries over) the child’s dependence on bigger, ‘fully human’others for its survival.

This paper reverses the assumption of childly dependence by illus-trating the ways in which ‘the child’ has been depended on as a literarydevice. The analysis will demonstrate how the figure of the child has beenused to authorize a series of boundaries that have constituted the limit-points of educational theories or philosophies. Specifically, it will contrast

Studies in Philosophy and Education 22: 439–474, 2003.© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

440 BERNADETTE BAKER

limit-points in Platonic figurations of the child and educational theory withthose of the late nineteenth and twentieth century West.

Limit-points refer to the conceptual boundaries that educationaltheories move within, respond to, or make use of because the perceptionis that they cannot be argued away or around at the time. In this analysis,the role of the child in forming boundaries around a power-motion-reasonnexus, necessity, and justice will be explored. The shifting meaning ofsuch concepts have been important to depicting Utopian and cosmologicalimaginings at different historical moments and for authorizing in turn whatcounts as an appropriate educational philosophy.

The significance of contrasting Platonic and more recent conceptuali-zations lies in the renewed interest in the conditions of possibility forchildcentered and eugenic philosophies of education. This interest hasemerged recently in both educational research and the new field of Disab-ility Studies. Questions about the association of eugenic discourse withseemingly ‘sensitive’ movements, such as childcenteredness or the form-ation of the welfare state, have been raised. The silence in educationalresearch around the popularity of a eugenics movement in particular andits perduring, transmogrified forms in the present, has been taken as some-thing to correct.1 While the comparison of texts in this paper springs fromthis larger concern its point is not to adjudicate if Plato was the classical‘father of eugenic educational philosophy’ or whether he was ‘truly’ child-centered. Rather, it is to understand how figurations of the child becameuseful to espousing educational theories that drew on complicated notionsof what it meant for something to be necessary or of necessity, to reason,and to be just.

In order to demonstrate how the child as a literary device has helpedestablish the boundaries that educational theories have operated within andacross, the paper deploys a comparative historico-philosophy in the spiritof Foucault’s ‘history of the present.’ I deliberately distinguish the meth-odology here from a genealogical project that moves in unspoken gesturesacross epochal comparison of epistemes. Rather, this analysis is a problem-atizing comparison insofar as it takes as its starting point some commonlyheld, and recently troubled, ideas about childcenteredness and child devel-opment theories that have interlaced educational philosophies. It positionsthese commonly expressed ideas as a springboard toward contrast. Thepaper then offers a reading of Platonic conceptions of the child that are inthe end drawn on to revisit the initial springboard.

1 For works on the significance of eugenics to educational history specifically see Lowe(1997) and Stoskopf (2002). For compilations that consider the broader significance ofeugenics in different Western settings see Crotty, Germov & Rodwell’s (2000) ‘A Race fora Place’ and Mitchell & Snyder’s Eugenics in America, 1890–1935 (in press).

PLATO’S CHILD AND THE LIMIT-POINTS OF EDUCATIONAL THEORIES 441

The purpose of such a strategy, that is, of beginning analytically withchild development theories and educational philosophies of the last cen-tury, shifting to a seemingly unrelated period of the fourth century B.C.E.,and returning to the more recent era is relativization and openings. Thestrategy enables new understandings around beliefs that became cementedas natural, just, and caring, while implicitly problematizing current ‘lawsof historical scholarship.’ Such laws, as Alun Munslow (1997) notesof ‘reconstructionist historiography’ especially, demand that everythingappear in a straight line of time and that documents be treated as objectiveholders of reality. The limiting aspect of this orientation is what the ‘philos-ophy’ part of historico-philosophical comparison brings to view: such ademand for comparison of documents across neat parcels of interlinkedstages in linear time can miss the entanglement of such an analytical struc-ture with existing theories of child development. That is, the nineteenthcentury saw a dovetailing of the narration of historical events with thenarration of child development theory – the child’s interior became thehistory of ‘the race’ (Steedman, 1995). A belief in the staggered unfoldingof human interior capacities as recapitulating phases of wider historicalhuman evolution took hold (‘phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny’). A notionof a straight line of time became linked to a notion of ‘development.’2

Today, that automatic linking has become something to reconsider andcritique, whether this be from postcolonial perspectives where scholarssuch as Dipesh Chakrabarty (2001) argue that the idea of ‘development’constitutes a key parameter of historiography that guarantees Eurocentrismeven in historical narratives not focused on Europe, or in interdisci-plinary work such as Michel Serres’, where time is metaphored throughweather, chimneys, and nonlinear folds rather than simply through a one-dimensional line. The notion of ‘developing’ whether it be mobilized indepictions of how an organism ‘grows,’ how an argument is ‘built,’ or howa society or economy ‘matures’ is a notion now under contention ratherthan given.

The idea of comparative historico-philosophical method deployed herethus plays in this space. The method does not imply ‘equal weight’ to

2 I have argued elsewhere how writers using tensed language and labeling a period,e.g., ‘nineteenth century’ as I have done here will find it difficult to stand outside thearguments that they are critiquing in regard to the strictures of imagining time linearly(Baker, 2001). I am aware, then, of the paradox of the discussion here while ‘at the sametime’ playing on it to move into a qualitatively different feel/field of method. The play doesnot allow the charge of ‘Contradiction!’ to reduce every ‘new’ insight back into an ‘old’one as though innovation is never ‘truly’ possible. For further discussion of this perceivedproblem of circularity in historiography especially as it relates to critiques of developmentand linear time see Dipesh Chakrabarty (2001) Provincializing Europe. In sociology, seeNiklas Luhmann’s (1985/1995) Social Systems.


periods/texts studied, nor progressive building in weight. The bulk ofthe analysis is a reading of Platonic conceptions of the child around theboundaries they help to authorize in regard to the meaning of the threekey concepts, power-motion-reason, necessity, and justice. This readingeventually incites observations about more recent periods, their refig-uring/redefinition of such limit-points, and the educational theories thatpay homage to them.

Two of Plato’s publications, the Timaeus (TT) and the Republic (TR),are the focus here in ways that may seem irregular for philosophers ofeducation. While the Republic holds an esteemed place as ‘the’ site inwhich educational philosophers would look for Plato’s educational philos-ophy, the Timaeus’ inclusion may seem somewhat odd. I suggest, however,that it is sometimes in texts where characters, such as the child or children,are least mentioned directly, such as in the Timaeus, that a figure’s qualitiescan be centrally comported in ways that help to make sense of the moredirect pronouncements made elsewhere.3

This line of argument is drawn from literary criticism, and is not subjectto ‘empirical’ demands for demonstrating that the one book being referredto is directly referenced in the other. The method I use here deliberatelybrackets traditional questions of ‘empirical’ relations between the Timaeusand the Republic and between the fourth century B.C. E Greece and thelate nineteenth and twentieth century ‘West’ as part of the problem. Thecomparative historico-philosophical method used holds within its under-standing of comparison how things that seem far removed can, in Serres’words, operate in similar neighborhoods without being reduced to a visionof the same. The argument proffered around a comparative approach toPlato’s child cannot be subsumed, then, within ‘strictly’ or exclusivelyphilosophical, historical, or literary criticism approaches to scholarship.

In sum, the paper overtly engages in a reading that is a crossreading ofthese two Platonic texts – and deliberately out of publication date order– to highlight the possibilities for rethinking how the child has/is usedas a literary device to authorize the boundaries of things that are takenseriously as limit-points in theories of education. Power-motion-reason,necessity, and justice are focus terms that are sutured in complicated waysto more recent uses and depictions of the child in educational philosophies.Thus the paper concludes by considering some implications of the analysis

3 The Timaeus is also a significant source to consider insofar as it was woven intoChristian theology by scholars such as Augustine in their melding of the narrative of Adamand Eve with neoplatonism. The Christian narrative of creation, while not atemporallystable in its interpretation across centuries undergirded the early anthropological theoriesof monogenism on which eugenic philosophies were predicated.


for understanding the formation of recent and popular educational theoriessuch as eugenic and childcentered ones.4

RECENT SPRINGBOARDS

In the emergence of late nineteenth developmental psychology in the US,Britain, and parts of Continental Europe a variety of reasonings was sedi-mented about what it meant to be young that had implications for whatschools were asked to do. These included the view that the mind and itsally, the soul, were the ultimate zone of human development (Morrs, 1990),that the ability to reason was implicitly demonstrative of the ability toself-govern the soul according to preferred moral norms (Kincaid, 1992;Popkewitz, 1998), that reasoning ability was viscerally located in thehead (Walkerdine, 1993), that there was an interiority to the human bodyversus an exteriority of the surrounding environment (Steedman, 1995),that the role of parents, tutors, guardians, or teachers was to managethe environment relative to what was perceived as interior (the nurture-nature nexus) (Burman, 1996), and that the most scientific and properform of that management was to take place through an approach calledchildcenteredness (Baker, 1998).

In the US, childcenteredness entered into curricula debate (Kliebard,1986). It entailed an explicit belief in redesigning public school curriculaaround ‘the nature and needs of childhood’ as opposed to around clas-sical content such as Latin and Greek (Hall, 1901, p. 24). The natureand needs of childhood were considered scientifically verifiable througha study of unfolding biophysiological powers in the young. In somespecific movements, such as the Child-study movement, these powers werenamed muscular, sexual, and psychic and were thought to appear in thatorder in ‘normal’ growth and development (Hall, 1904; Partridge, 1912).Without the emergence of such powers, the child could not move intothe next evolutionary stage of development and progress toward a moreindependent adult form of citizenship and responsible sexual reproductionwould be in jeopardy.

This conjuncture of beliefs is today somewhat familiar, having alreadybeen unpacked historico-philosophically (Baker, 2001; Burman, 1996;Cannella, 1997; Morrs, 1990; Rose, 1989; Walkerdine, 1984). The ideaof childcenteredness, of centering in or on the child as a discrete human

4 I use educational theory and educational philosophy synonymously for the purposesof this paper. For a discussion of the vexed question of what the term eugenics refers toprecisely see Baker (2002) and Garton (2000).


subject worthy of attention and consideration, as distinct in its own rightfrom adults, has been historicized, however, ever since Philippe Ariès’(1960) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Ariès’thesis, which has been debated back and forth, posited that it was notuntil relatively recently in Europe that the child became an overt focusof commentary in art, lithographs, diaries, theological pronouncements,reform movements, and family and community life. In the US, the termin-ology of centering in or on the child becomes used for the first time inthe late nineteenth century, for example, in the kindergarten, Froebelian,Herbartianist, and Child-study literature. The specific ethical commitmentsevident in this literature may have differed, but there was a visceral connec-tion; importance was given to matching ‘exterior’ or ‘environmental’teaching methods to the perceived ‘interior’ stage of a child’s unfoldingdevelopment (Baker, 2001). Such a matching was seen as justice in motion,as caring, sensitive, helpful, and socially efficient. What has been lesscommentated on is how in large measure such terminology was, within thework of high profile proponents of childcenteredness such as G. StanleyHall, a commitment to a eugenic philosophy of education.

If the rate of increase of the best children diminishes and that of the worst increases, thedestiny of our land is sealed and our people are doomed to inevitable decay and ultimateextinction. These three big D’s we deal with, the defectives, delinquents, and dependents,the great Biologos or spirit of life would designate or describe by another adjective bigD not fit to print or speak, for they are a fearful drag upon our civilization . . . . Fromthe standpoint of eugenic evolution alone considered, these classes are mostly fit only forextermination in the interests of the progress of the race. On the principle of selection andthe survival of the best, they should be treated as Burbank treats the huge pile of plants hehas cultivated and bred from what would not yield the best products and so burns. Theseare the tailings of the mine, the wastage and by-product of civilization (Hall, 1904, p. 77).

The depiction of children around binaries of interior/exterior, able/disable, generative/decaying and so forth illustrate how the child as aliterary device was depended on in the enunciation of wider ‘nationalist’narratives that exceeded concern for ‘children themselves.’ The centeringin or on the child was means to articulation of other ends, in the abovecase, to the production of a rarefied white supremacist society of ‘the able’and continuously evolving ideal citizen.

PLATO’S CHILD: POWER-MOTION-REASON, NECESSITY,AND EDUCATION

In similar yet different ways, Platonic Utopian and cosmological visionsrelied on qualities and limits attributed to the young in the enunciation


of narratives that exceeded concern for ‘children themselves.’ The child’salterity, and therefore its centrality, within Platonic cosmology occurs,however, less as a level within a fixed, linear chain of Being as in latenineteenth century imaginings and more as the required metonym of chaosor necessity in Platonic terms. Within this understanding, the child plays aconstitutive part as tool, problem, and possibility that sets limits on whatcan be imagined as the cosmology or what can reformed in a Utopia vianew educational arrangements. The Timaeus, which describes the originsof the universe and Plato’s educational/civic treatise, the Republic, whichdescribes how to re-create the polis through familial and educationalchange highlight the necessity of the child in its double sense; the necessityof the child to the structure of Platonic narratives and the role that thechild-as-necessity plays within such narratives where the mechanisms ofcreation and the means to civic re-creation are asserted respectively.

In order to discern how this might pertain to late nineteenth centuryeducational theories as well as to limit-points in ‘its own time,’ thedouble sense of the child’s necessity and the child-as-necessity needs tobe unpacked around the concepts it was in exchange with. Weight mustbe given to Platonic conceptions of power, motion, and reason on severalgrounds. Firstly, the relation between terms for power and motion needsto be attended to as a culturally peculiar and idiosyncratic obsession in‘Western’ thought. There have been continuities and ruptures in regard towhat these terms mean, but the vestiges of thinking about universes inrelation to motion and a source called power has generally had enormousramification for what Ingstad & Reynolds Whyte (1995) call in contem-porary anthropological terms ‘cosmologies of personhood.’ In Platonictexts as much as those of the late nineteenth century terms for power andmotion circulate in close proximity to each other and bear an importantrelation to the figuration of the child.

Secondly, these ‘structural’ similarities do not make meanings homo-geneous and the differences are important to explore. ‘Power’ had sucha different meaning in Platonic cosmology that it would be impossibleto conceive of the child in regard to inequality in today’s terms. Powerinhered in beings with soul but inherence did not mean possession, evenif conceived as being ‘within’ or inside a person. The child’s ‘differentialvalue’ relative to other characters that might be noted, lay in regard to itsdistance from knowing Truth in the Platonic sense, not in regard to laterWestern models of participation in liberal democracies or in regard to the(lack of) possession of power in a sovereign form. The Platonic theory ofpower did bear a relation to a conception of motion, though, and becausemotion so directly shaped the conceptualization of the child it is importantto explore the connections.


Thirdly, Greek terms for motion and power specifically relate to thedefinition of reason and to images of children in Platonic cosmology. Thetelescoped focus on the two Platonic texts thereby provides a concreteexample of how the depiction of order and disorder have relied on apower-motion-reason nexus that has been sutured to the young. This opensindirectly onto comparisons with late nineteenth and twentieth centuryassumptions about child development; that child development is about theunfolding of powers, that they unfold in a kind of ordered motion thatenables movement in some cases to the next level of reasoning ability, andthat educational theory and the very structure of schooling’s tiers ought toreflect that inner biophysiological unfolding of human powers.

Such comparisons cannot be exaggerated, however. While it is notuncommon to come across the view that nuggets of today’s wisdom aboutthe young inhere in Platonic conceptions of education (e.g., Wolfe, 2000),there is another sense in which it might be argued that Plato’s childrenare almost unrecognizable from late nineteenth century depictions or frommore recent analyses which ‘deconstruct’ child development theories. Forexample, as the discussion below will demonstrate, Plato’s children wereinscribed with a nature and a capacity to unfold, yet without the presump-tion of a discretely definable “organic” or ‘inner’ realm in which suchnatures and capacities resided.5 Further, Plato’s children were demarcatedin relation to ‘reason’ but without reason necessarily being ‘in the head.’Reason was not simply considered the product of linear and clear thoughtor exclusive to particular methods of analysis.

In order to appreciate what cognizance of these differences opens up,it is necessary to take a rather long route through Platonic cosmology. Inthe Timaeus, it is conceptions of Being and Becoming that help frame themeanings of a power-motion-reason nexus, that suggest the possibilitiesfor a different ‘kind’ of child, and the uses to which children could beput in wider arguments. In the Republic, it is around the question of justicerather than Being and Becoming that the analytics of power-motion-reasoncongeal and for which the child helps to establish boundaries that authorizethe theory of education.

As noted in the introduction, though, drawing the Timaeus and theRepublic together, and deliberately out of chronological order, is always

5 In the philosophy of mind it is taken as ‘standard’ that not all theories of mind arethe same and thus the belief that there is an organic home existing within the body for themind is only one particular version of mind. See Jaegwon Kim (1996) for an overview ofdifferent philosophies of mind. In education, see Selby Sheppard (2001) for an incisivesummary of the assumption that a philosophy of mind is connected implicitly or explicitlyto all theories of education. Sheppard argues that their are consequences to this nonrecog-nition of the connection; the perpetuation of educational debate that does not acknowledgeits underlying sources.


contentious. This is so not just because of dispute over whether theRepublic was authored by Plato but because there is considerable disagree-ment as to whether the conversation and exposition in the Timaeus aremaking direct reference to the earlier Republic or not. The ‘reality’ ofthe texts or their author(s) is not at issue here as much as how thetexts espoused particular kinds of realities. The creation of a universecomprised of particular matter and of Platonic reasonings as to whatmattered suggested the ontology of children and humans within the macro-cosm (Timaeus). The description of the ideal polis, if imagined as existingwithin such a macrocosm, might be said to suggest what could be donewith the elements as originally created by a divine source (Republic). Theview of creation in the Timaeus and the political science of the Republictogether bring the discursive space of the child into view. This child, likeother characters, is at times barely distinguishable from the universe orenvironment. The texts are understood here, then, not so much as creationmyth and political philosophy respectively, but as two creation narrativesthat are suggestive of a new, or at least crystallizing, moment in Greekthought; the possibility of seeing the world and the polis as deliberatelyconstructed for particular purposes. The Timaeus and the Republic canthus both be read as creation narratives where the modalities of ‘nature’are forced to meet the modalities of ‘political science’ and where the possi-bilities for and dependence on ‘the child’ are produced in the movementsbetween them as not-so-separate poles.

THE TIMAEUS: BECOMING, BEING, AND THE CHILD

We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and neverbecomes from that which is always becoming but never is. The one is apprehensible byintelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object ofopinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real. Inaddition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothingcan come to be without a cause (TT, 28, p. 40).

The most significant aspect of the Timaeus in regard to children is thatthey are barely mentioned. Given the book’s status as a creation narrativeand children’s often implicit linkage to creation narratives in Westernthought, this might seem a surprising omission. The Timaeus representsa concept of creation that was new in Greece at the time, however.6 Under

6 For a contrary view, i.e., that Plato’s theological conception of ‘God’ is evident inpre-Socratic natural theology and not necessarily that new, see Gerson (1990). Gersonargues that for the Greek philosophers a god frequently functions as a hypothetical entity,analogous to the hypothetical entities of black holes, neutrinos, and the unconscious andthat this conception becomes most notable beginning with Plato. He suggests that there is a


the different titles of God, Father, Maker, or Craftsman, a creator or demi-urge is inscribed with divine purpose that becomes written into the matterof nature. For Plato, the natural world cannot be accounted for in purelymaterial terms. The creator is in himself the assertion of the opposite view,that behind the universe is divine purpose. Earlier cosmogonists had usedmetaphors from human or animal reproduction; gods and goddesses begatand produced children, earth gave birth to mountains and sea, the Orphicworld egg was laid and hatched. Following these creation theories werethose of the natural philosophers who saw that the material substance ofnature, whatever that might be, grew, by some inherent but often ill-defined‘power,’ into the world we know (Lee, 1971, p. 7).

The analogy in the Timaeus represents an important break; it is nolonger that of reproduction or growth. It is not children who provide themetaphors for creation. It is not offspring that are used as justification forpolitical organization to which creation theories are then linked. The mainmetaphor is that of a craftsman engaging in deliberate constructive activitywith particular tools that are at his disposal. The creator-god needs materialto work on – the antecedent chaos, the ‘nurse of becoming’; he needs a planaccording to which to work – the model, the ‘eternal living creature’; heis not omnipotent, for his material limits his operations – ‘reason’ has topersuade ‘necessity,’ but within those limitations he produces the best hecan (Lee, 1971, p. 8). The universe, is made – not begotten, not grown, butconstructed.

The two orders of reality from which the Timaeus begins, Beingand Becoming, are the registers that signal the importance of limitation,distinction and struggle as structural features of Greek thought. Being andBecoming are enormously complex concepts in Platonic thought and theanalysis cannot here do justice to the debate that has arisen around theirinterpretation.7 In terms of the structure of the narrative, the separation ofBeing and Becoming precedes the entrance of the ‘difficult and obscure’receptacle, ‘the nurse of all becoming and change.’ The orders of realityand the receptacle itself reflected an earlier Greek concern with the trans-itoriness of life and this awareness partly shapes the Platonic dismissal ofevery day perception as not fully real. Transitoriness, becoming, sensationwere not reason ‘for being has to becoming the same relation as truth tobelief’ (TT, 29, p. 41).

continuity in the Platonic postulation of the Form of the Good and the pre-Socratic searchfor archai.

7 See Francis M. Cornford’s, (1941). The Republic of Plato, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, for an entrance into these debates.


The Being/Becoming distinction also had its base in what the preferred‘grounds for truth’ were in Platonic terms. The truths espoused throughlogic and mathematics on the one hand and those of ‘empiricism’or ‘sensation’ on the other sustain the distinction between Being andBecoming respectively. Sensation, which equates with the Greek for ‘rapidmovement,’ stood in opposition to the eternity of absolute knowledge thatthe world of Being contained.

The ultimately real world, the world of Being, contains the PlatonicForms, the objects of rational understanding, and the operations of math-ematics and logic which are conceived as pure, independent, abstract andineffectible by other operations. The world of Becoming contains all thingsperceived by senses about which no certain final knowledge is possible. Allhumans are of the order of Becoming because we are inhabited by a sense-perceiving part of the soul/mind/body complex that will eventually die andrelease the immortal part on its transmigratory route. The Being part ofhumanity, the ‘soul’ or ‘life’ part of the soul/mind/body complex that liveson, does so because of its perfection. Its harmony and balance needs noother support, just like the soul of the universe.

And he put soul in the centre and diffused it through the whole and enclosed the body init. So he established a single spherical universe in circular motion, alone but because of itsexcellence needing no company other than itself, and satisfied to be its own acquaintanceand friend. His creation for all these reasons was a blessed God (TT, 33–34, p. 45).

The world of Becoming and Being were thus value statements writteninto the creator’s constructive activity. The world of Being bespoke theeternal, the unchanging, the independent, circular motion, absolute truth,harmony, balance and self-sustenance. In light of the this, coming-to-be signified transitory irreality; finitude, change, dependence, outsidenessfrom truth, harmony, balance, and the ability to care for the self.

Power-Motion-Reason: Conflating Insides and Outsides in the Timaeus

God therefore, wishing that all things should be good and so far as possible nothing beimperfect, and finding the visible universe in a state not of rest but of inharmonious anddisorderly motion, reduced it to order from disorder, as he judged that order was in everyway better. It is impossible for the best to produce anything but the highest. When heconsidered, therefore, that in all the realm of visible nature, taking each thing as a whole,nothing without intelligence is to be found that is superior to anything with it, and thatintelligence is impossible without soul, in fashioning the universe he implanted reason intosoul and soul in body, and so ensured that his work should be by nature the highest andbest (TT, 30, p. 42).

The different registers of Being and Becoming establish a structure thatgives importance to soul or life and this in turn is articulated to the


importance of reason. Soul is endowed with reason. Soul has a tripartiteconfiguration – body/mind/soul – all of which can sometimes be referredto as soul alone. Soul is a kind of ingrained mathematical perfection andis the perfect abstraction: ‘The body of heaven is visible but the soul isinvisible and endowed with reason and harmony; being the best creationof the best of intelligible and eternal things’ (TT, 37, p. 49).

Reason’s final form is the ability to make judgments and distinguishproperties while harmony is a signifier of reason’s presence, the ability tokeep all parts of the soul in balance. Heaven and humans had soul, butwhere the soul of one ended and the soul of the other began was indis-tinguishable for soul had the same properties everywhere. On the basis ofsoul – and hence reason – it was very difficult to distinguish an inside andoutside in regard to humans; the world-soul and human-soul melded.

The significance of soul extends beyond its housing of reason and itstranscendence of ‘bodies’ or ‘flesh.’ It is motion’s relationship to reasonthat makes soul or life in the creation narrative identifiable. Soul is not justa condition or site of reason but also the source of self-movement. Theacquisition of intelligence and the ability to move without the operation ofan external force are thereby both attributed to soul.

Movement and self-movement, which in Plato’s usage are often syn-onymous with the term for ‘motion,’ are given a special place in thecosmology based on wider features of Greek thought at the time. Platonicastronomy gave rise to questions of what caused the regular movementof heavenly bodies. The response, that bodies in motion must either havethat motion imparted to them by another body or have within them a self-acting source of motion, reflected the Greek conception of dynamics inthe relative absence of machinery and of metals to build them. In a worldwhere things were pushed and pulled by humans or animals, that is, ina world dealing with the overcoming of inertia as a central concern ofdynamics, weight was given to those things that could move themselves(Lee, 1971). For Plato, the things capable of generating motion withoutan external impulse were those ‘living’ things he credited with soul orlife. Soul thus becomes the source of motion and is inscribed as the self-mover of natural things in a worldview already predicated on the beliefthat anything that moved must have a cause. Soul is consequently regardedas the force that keeps natural creatures like humans and the heavenlybodies like planets in motion. Again, soul blurs any modern conceptionof discrete inner/outer realms around a person; it is an ‘invisible’ mover ofall observable motion.

This dependence on a criterion of motion provided a discursive spacefor another concept. The conjoining of reason to movement and movementto decision-making provides for the existence of ‘power’ as an explanatory


device. The Timaeus is the embodiment of the possibility to write ‘power’into acts of construction, production, vision, judgment, and movement.It inscribes power in theological terms as inhabiting the act of creation(through soul), in logical terms (through reason), and in ‘material’ termsas that which lay behind the visibility of ‘nature’ and its movements.The powers of soul transgress modern disciplinary boundaries. Power isrequired at all points in the cosmology for explaining what Plato refers toas the ‘likely story’ regarding how things came to be in/as the cosmos.

The conceptualization of power and motion in the Timaeus took place,however, without the presence of a ‘void’: Movement was constituted asa system of substitutions and replacements. The universe was a ‘movingimage of eternity’; The finity that motion represented could only besuggestive of a purer original model that the universe imitated; It was thekind of motion that defined and distinguished reason, feelings, and appet-ites; It was the relationship between the motions present that suggestedorder or disorder; It was the movement of planets that begged the questionas to what initiated their observable regularities, and so on.

As noted above, such cosmological explanations were predicated on abroader Greek assumption that anything that moved had to have a cause.The entrance of power into Platonic cosmology feeds from this stipulation.The Platonic universe was, significantly, an intelligible one and it was thepresence of power in ‘spiritual’ and ‘natural’ terms that helped to explainits moving parts.8

The weight and role given to motion and power in the Timaeus is not,however, that which is reduced primarily to ‘physics’ today. The universeis created out of goodness under the assumption that where there is good-ness there is divine purpose. The universe is, therefore, underwritten by anintelligent force or an underlying purposive cause. In both ‘physical’ and‘spiritual’ terms, it is dunamis (potential, strength, force, or power) thatexplained human movement, the planetary trajectories, and the productivequality of the creator.

8 Whether or not this ‘power’ in ‘spiritual’ terms is the possession of the demiurge isanother question. For Francis Cornford (1937), the creator is in no way equivalent with aJudeo-Christian god and is more Reason (capital ‘R’) personified (or regarding Cornford,rather than personified, mythologized). For Stephen Menn (1995), however, the demiurgepossesses something; the demiurge possesses force and is the cause imposing limit onthe unlimited. The demiurge, as a possessing cause in Menn’s (1995, p. 11) view, mixestogether the elements of the world-soul, imposes harmonic proportions on the whole, andsubordinates its irrational to its rational motion. At one level, however, the debate overpossessions is immaterial for the analysis here, for whether it is owned by the demiurge,used by the demiurge, created by the demiurge, or works through the demiurge, powerfunctions in the narrative to create the distinctions that make the universe observable,intelligible, and divisible.


In the human realm, power was the potential to reason, to move, and tobecome. Like other living creatures who were living by virtue of being self-moving, power inhabited soul. The power of reason did not inhere in allliving creatures, however. Plants, for instance, while endowed with soul orlife, were only endowed with its lower parts, the appetites and feelings. Theupward growth of plants was not considered movement and their relativelack of horizontal movement from place to place suggested their relativelack of power in the form of reason. Trees, plants and seeds have:

the third sort of soul, which we have located between midriff and navel, and which iswithout belief or reason or understanding but has appetite and a sense of pleasure and pain.It is always entirely passive; its formation has not allowed it to perceive and reflect on itsown nature, by revolving in and about itself, rejecting motion from without and exercisinga motion of its own. So it is a creature with a life of its own, but it cannot move and is fixedand rooted because it has no self-motion (TT, 77, p. 103).

As for the demiurge, power’s conceptualization in regard to humanssuggested limitations. Different powers limited the play of any one power.Plato’s description of the robbing of the soul’s power and motion by thatof the Circle of the Different is indicative of how the conjuncture – power-motion-reason – was pivotal both to the creation narrative itself and thesetting of limits within it. Thus, as an explanatory device, power does notenter the narrative without some means of delimitation already being inplace, i.e., the advent of competing powers that tether each other.

It is here that the power-motion-reason relationship begins to suggestthe shape of the child in absentia. Those unvarying regularities in ‘nature,’tied particularly to the observation of movement of heavenly bodies, werein Platonic terms the proof of rational and purposive design. In the Sophist,for instance, Plato came to the conclusion that there were two basickinds of judgments, conjunction/affirmation on the one hand and disjunc-tion/negation on the other. Affirmation, where we assert that a thing hasa property and negation where we assert that it doesn’t, are the two basickinds of ‘mental’ processes that belong to the reasoning (immortal) partof the soul (not the appetitive or feeling parts). The two main kinds ofastronomical movements Plato observed, the daily rotation of heavenlybodies from east to west and the apparent movement of the sun, moon,and fixed stars from west to east, were to be found, then, in any soul– the world-soul or the human-soul. They are named the Circle of theSame (uniform circular motion) and the Circle of the Different (generallylinear motions like up, down, left, right, forward, backward, retrograda-tion). These different circles of movement account for the different kindsof astronomical observations as well as for the two basic kinds of judg-ments that are available to humans. It is thus the relationship between the


Circle of the Same and the Circle of the Different, between movements,that constitutes rational thought.

It is at this point that astronomy met logic. For Plato, reason wasspecifically rendered visible by the approximation that the presence ofuniform circular motion represented. Reason is not linear, it is not deduc-tion, nor the assertion of thought over appetite or emotion. It is identifiablethrough what uniform circular motion signifies, the Circle of the Same,that strives to maintain order and harmony amidst the chaotic and idiosyn-cratic movements in the Circle of the Different. The creator is pure reasonand best resembled by uniform circular motion that is unaffected by otherdynamics, by pure independence, a perpetual self-spinning ability. Theheavenly bodies like planets and earthly ones like humans have both souland ‘body,’ however, and are not therefore pure reason. They are flawedcopies of a pure original and their movements e.g., planetary or physical,are accounted for by an older Pythagorean view that it was combinationsof forces that produced movement effects. Humans must struggle, then,because of the presence of different kinds of motions which constantlyseek to detract from the uniform circular motion of reason and the makingof rational judgments about the empirical world. In other words, uniformcircular motion approximates reason; it resembles a creator’s independ-ence and inability to be effected by anything or anyone else and as suchsignifies pure, accurate, untainted judgment.

For instance, Plato describes the discombobulating effect that theentrance of the Circle of the Different had on the operation of pure reason.The children of Gods created mortal humans and in doing so different qual-ities and kinds of motions took over, signaling irrationality.9 The Circlesof the Same and Different structure the universe and from the first actof creation they took time to settle down. They are present as competingforces in humans, and from birth, take time to settle down also. The Circlesrepresent motions and they are the source of struggle that is definitional ofpersonhood. Being able to identify someone as a human or a child was

9 And into this body, subject to the flow of growth and decay, they fastened the orbitsof the immortal soul. Plunged into this strong stream, the orbits were unable to control it,nor were they controlled by it, and because of the consequent violent conflict of motions ofthe whole creature were irregular, fortuitous and irrational. It was subject to all six motionsand so strayed in all six directions . . . . The motions caused by all these [properties ofempirical objects] were transmitted through the body and impinged on the soul, and forthat reason were later called, as they still are, ‘sensations.’ At the time of which we arespeaking the disturbance was at its greatest, and these motions reinforced the perpetualflow of the body in upsetting the orbits of the soul, bringing that of the Same to a standstilland by their opposition robbing it of power and motion, disordering that of the Different(TT, 43, p. 59).


not dependent on what was ‘inside’ and unique, e.g., personality, thought,mind, etc as in the late nineteenth century. What made someone human wasthe motion that existed in the universe and the approximation or closenessof that motion to the perfect perpetuity of the creator. The older the person,the more time to settle the motions, the closer to pure reason, and the nearerto a Godly perfection.

To understand how ‘the child’ enters and does textual labor in theTimaeus, then, requires an understanding of the Being/Becoming registerand of the power-motion-reason nexus that shapes the qualities of thebook’s characters indirectly. When terms for children are used directlythey are primarily grouped with Gods, with fathers, and with men. Thestamp on the ‘visible’ child is a masculine one and is reinforced by theclosing of the narrative. In the final instance, the inharmonious life of aman will see his rebirth as a woman or lower animal, not as a child. Thechild’s absence from being a form of punishment suggests the significanceattached to the child’s maleness. Despite some feminist readings of thereceptacle as space, of space as lack, and of lack as mother (e.g., Irigaray,1985), however, children do not enter the account of the receptacle or theTimaeus at large as the responsibility of femaleness or even as products ofa mother.10 Children are the implicitly male offspring of Gods, fathers, andmen, the ‘populational’ groups who are the models, the first made mortals,who will impress upon the child. Children appear, as the ending indicates,in contrast to femaleness and animality and these are given meaning inregard to the distinctions that a power-motion-reason nexus helps establishbetween characters.

The child is not figured directly, then, in regard to ‘scientific studies ofthe child’ as in the late nineteenth century, because it is inescapably andalready a function of the joint theorization of power-motion-reason.11 Theclash of motions that is characteristic of childhood in Platonic terms signi-fies a bad relation between different powers. Power in both spiritual and

10 Sharon Larisch (1994) argues that the present-day tendency of feminist critiques ofPlato has been to see all of his dialgoues as seeking to establish binary hierarchies. Shecontests such readings of Plato insofar as she argues that they disallow the noticing ofthe role of combination and collection, and the importance of the process of spacing,not the product of spacing, to the dialectic. My reading of the inscription of the childmediates these views through appeal to the term ‘constitutive,’ taken from feminist philo-sophical notions of constitutive instability (see Deutscher, 1997). Binary hierarchies, ofthe Pythagorean kind that Larisch notes, can be ‘read into’ the dialogues, but these canonly be ‘noticed’ insofar as the character called child plays a significant constitutive rolein illustrating what ‘noticing,’ Other, or difference (heteron), could mean.

11 The relatively few mentions of the term dunamis has also been theorized as an estima-tion of how much Plato was implicitly dependent on a conception of power for articulatingthe cosmological view. See Baker (2001).


natural terms underwrites the Gods, humans, man, child, woman, animals,and plants because all are endowed with souls and souls self-move andhence have power. Power underpins the scale of Becoming/Being throughits articulation to a capacity to reason, to move harmoniously, and toknow or judge accurately why that might be important. In regard to theseconjoinings, the child is produced not as a becomingness that is withoutpower but as a becomingness that cannot yet interrelate and balance itsvarious powers well enough.

Child-as-Necessity: Limiting Power and Humanity

The Timaeus implicitly provides another discursive inscription of thechild besides it being a subject without a clear interior, a poor managerof powers, irrational, outside harmony and truth, and incapable of self-sustenance. This further role is achieved through the play of what is knownas ‘the necessary cause’ in Platonic cosmology. In the narrative, power isnot simply limited through the presence of other like powers. The pres-ence of another factor in creation, called necessity, takes up the role of adelimiting but different kind of power. The significance of necessity lies inregard to the metonym it provides for the child; it is through a concept ofnecessity that the child could act to delimit what was meant by ‘human’and be acted back on by that very category that it helps to authorize.

Necessity constitutes the inevitable but unpredictable side-effect ofcreation. If material of a certain kind, e.g., air, earth, fire and water, isnecessary for certain purposes to be achieved, then that material may havequalities outside what those purposes require and these qualities or side-effects may be random. Necessity, the indeterminate cause, chance, ormore literally from the Greek, the wandering cause, is a difficult conceptbut its importance lies in the job of delimitation. It is arbitrary and it isirreducible in the sense that it will never disappear; there will always besomething that cannot be explained (Lee, 1971, p. 10). It is the element ofuncertainty in the ‘empirical’ that Plato gives the name ‘necessity.’

Order is secured or brought into view through the presence of thewandering cause whose function is to establish limits in regard to whatcan be known. The limitations that the creator has on his powers of creationflow similarly through what humans can know of the universe. That is, inbuilding the universe reason had to persuade necessity. The two tools arealso known as the two causes – reason being divine and necessity beingthe material object of persuasion.

The child in the Timaeus parallels the function of the necessary causeas that which lies outside reason and also delimits it. The interpenetrationof ‘child’ and ‘necessity’ again confound a discrete interior/exterior realm


in regard to human existence. The problems of the ‘wider’ universe, arealso the problems of humans, and it is the child who is constituted as bothproblem and possibilities for humanity through its coded inscription as thewandering cause.

That is, the power that inheres in soul, the power of self-movement,and the capacity to judge (reason), is limited by that which lies outsidethe rational, necessity. Necessity is not simply a different kind of powerbecause it cannot be determined. It is an indeterminate cause of randomeffects. The power that inheres in or behind the act of creation is a rationalpower. It is the active force by which a creator can be known as a God12

and through which movement can be explained. This kind of power thusenters the cosmology in consonance with a notion of limits as ‘necessity.’It is not despite the presence of power that the wandering cause contourswhat can be achieved. It is because of the presence of power that otherlimits enter the narrative and take the form of the necessary cause. Thestruggles of various kinds that are typified by different movements, e.g., thestruggles of the tripartite soul/mind/body, are struggles between reason andnecessity on a wider scale. Necessity constitutes the limits of reason andtherefore limits the power of reason. Plato’s use of power as an explanatorydevice, as the concept behind, or at least inherent in, reason, movementand creation, was unthinkable without there being a field of delimitationalready in place. It is the play of necessity that inhibits the excess ofdifferent powers and which is the precondition to recognizing harmonyas balance.

Implications for Educational Theory

The implications for educational theory of these depictions that ‘figure’the child are at least twofold: first, they suggest why education is a must.Second, they explain what it must achieve within the limit-points assumed.

The child enters the Timaeus indirectly to suggest what the limits ofhumanity shall be. The child is to the man what necessity is to reason –the object of persuasion, the cause requiring control, the uncertainty in‘nature’ that suggests a place for education.

For this world came into being from a mixture and combination of necessity and intelli-gence. Intelligence controlled necessity by persuading it for the most part to bring aboutthe best result, and it was by this subordination of necessity to reasonable persuasion thatthe universe was originally constituted as it is (TT, 48, p. 67).

As for the cosmos at large, there is a randomness operating in regardto the child. Chaotic motions inhabit the child and it may make incorrect

12 God is a difficult term regarding translation. Technically, God is not referred to asZeus in the Timaeus.


judgments. Sometimes it will distinguish accurately between things thatare the same and things that are different and sometimes it will not. Therandomness suggested by the child’s ontological turmoil shadows neces-sity in the universe’s construction. The Timaeus does not argue this linkdirectly. Rather, it is suggested in the weight given to the divine, to intel-ligence, and the problem that necessity poses for it. It is, for instance, thechildren of the eternal creator who are held responsible for the construc-tion of mortals like humans, for building into humans ‘the indispensableequipment’ which represents mortality.13

The space for education and the significance given to the passage oftime only make sense, then, in regard to the possibilities for randomness,for disorder in the Platonic sense, to be the outcome in the child’s matura-tion. Thus, the child is figured as the material that the human creators workwith – the parents and the educator. The child is the raw material that maydesist in the face of reason’s power. The child-as-necessity lends validityto a system of thought that suggests that education should intervene in aperson’s life. The randomness that necessity represents cannot be trustedto deliver the preferred order, the settled, reasoning adult, the harmoniousmovement away from Hades. Necessity made being reborn a woman orlower animal a real possibility, hence the need for education.

The child was, therefore, metonymically the tool, the material of con-struction, like the necessary cause itself. In the human realm, the childrepresented the wandering cause that was ‘necessary for the sake of thedivine.’ Without the child as necessity against which reason could rail, itwould be difficult to notice, to distinguish, and therefore to judge anythingat all.

Significantly, it was not that ‘the child’ provided contrast for ‘the man’in a simplistic binary where any identity suggests its other and lendsmeaning to it. Rather, without the child’s relation to the creator, there couldhave been no child/man opposition at all and nor could reason have comeinto view. The ‘difference’ between sameness and difference would havebeen unrecognizable and would have expelled the possibility for reasonand judgment from ‘the adult.’ Because reason meant distinguishing,meant affirmation or negation and accurately judging sameness and differ-

13 ‘He [the creator] made the divine with his own hands, but he ordered his own childrento make the generation of mortals. They took over from him an immortal principle ofsoul, and, imitating him, encased it in a mortal physical globe, with the body as a wholefor vehicle. And they built onto it another mortal part, containing terrible and necessaryfeelings: pleasure, the chief incitement to wrong, pain, which frightens us from good,confidence and fear, two foolish counsellors, obstinate passion and credulous hope. Tothis mixture they added irrational sensation and desire which shrinks from nothing, and sogave the mortal element its indispensable equipment’ (TT, 69, p. 95).


ence, ‘the child’ was constitutive of what ‘noticing’ or ‘distinguishing’could mean.

The child figure did not simplistically sit in binary opposition withreason either, then, because it was the child who suggested that reasonexisted in other realms and what forms it took. After thereby presen-cing reason and delimiting humanity, the child is evacuated of that whichit (textually) labored to presence. It moves furtively from its complexunderwriting of reason’s meaning to poking its head up simply as asubject without reason in full measure. The child had become, within thenarrative’s structure, that subject without which as Plato puts it ‘we cannotperceive, apprehend, or in any way attain our objective.’

To this end, the Platonic ‘conflation’ of inner and outer realms around‘humans’ serves an important purpose that bears itself in the encodingbetween child and necessary cause. The often indistinguishable sense ofwhat is inner and what is outer in regard to humans does not simplysecure the interconnectedness of all things but establishes in the narrativethe ground on which one must learn to care for one’s self as part of thatinterconnectedness. The child, the necessary cause, cannot teach the manto do this but the child can and does delimit any possibility of a man raisinghimself above the universe in which he exists. A man cannot conquer‘nature’ because he cannot predict the necessary cause. Hence the child,as the wandering cause to a man, truly was for Plato ‘necessary for thesake of the divine.’ The child worked to secure the special place reservedfor the creator and to frame the limits of what a man could or should thinkwas possible relative to such a creator. It is in regard to constituting thelimit-points, that of the power-motion-reason nexus and that of ‘necessity,’then, that the child helps to establish boundaries around which educationthinks it must dance, entering into human life under certain conditions,and comporting its direction. The more detailed and specific educationaltheory and meanings of justice in the Republic can thus be read againstsuch a background.

THE REPUBLIC: JUSTICE, CIVIC REFORM, AND THE CHILD

In contrast to the opening of the Timaeus the Republic does not begin withdiscussion of Being and Becoming but forms around the question of whatjustice is. The Republic is also explicitly concerned with the question ofwhat should be done with children, with some of its books overtly focusingon their rearing. The (in)famous prescription for organizing different formsof education around people with presumably different natures and capa-cities, gold, silver, and bronze, probably signifies its most controversial


aspect if modern visions of education for social justice are taken as themarker. Justice does not mean treating everyone the same. It may seemodd from the present, then, that the Republic revolves explicitly aroundthe question of justice and offers differentiated education for differentiatednatures as a just solution to reorganizing civic life.

The Republic provided a vision of the ideal polis and a version of‘political science’ that departed from that already under operation in theGreek city-states. Against the backdrop of the anti-philosophic orientationof the existing Athenian polis that eventually condemned Socrates to death,the arguments in the Republic propose a form of governance and organi-zation in which philosophers shall be the decision-makers (philosopher-kings/queens or guardians). The effect of the Republic’s dialogue was notto secure a geopolitical space that would have enabled Socrates to live alittle longer but to secure a discursive space for philosophy itself as themost universal concern. It is the concern with the private or particular thatmust be overcome if individuals are to philosophize and cities are to beruled by philosophy. The guardian who is totally devoted to the commongood is the prototype philosopher who is devoted to knowing the good(Bloom, 1968).

The blurring of human virtue with the greater good that the Republicestablishes suggests a similar methodological move as in the Timaeus – thewhole bears through the parts. For the polis, this means that the just ‘man’profits others, himself, and the whole. It means that there is a commongood; the community is bound together by justice, and no one sacrificestheir own personal advantage to it. Human virtue, then, is the maximiza-tion, the excellence, of all components that contribute to a greater wholefrom which the parts cannot readily be isolated.

Within this conceptualization of justice, various reproductive, rearing,and educational strategies are recommended. There is a hierarchical formof governance, where philosopher-kings/queens rule, special warriors fightto defend the city-state, and farmers and laborers work manually toproduce its commodities. Children of philosopher-kings/queens will neverknow their biological parents and the biological parents will not knowtheir offspring, the baby being removed immediately from the mother afterbirth. Children will thereby be raised in common and live in common withthe philosopher-kings/queens, undergoing a special form of education thatwill prepare them for future leadership or as warriors.

This form of communal society cannot be achieved or sustained withouta radical interruption to the dominant traditions of the city-states, includingfamily traditions. Ancestry and age, the trajectories which structuredauthority in Athens, are jettisoned by the symbolic departure of the father,


Cephalus, from the dialogues (Bloom, 1968). The departure of age andancestry as markers of traditional authority opens the radical space inwhich children are refigured. The discussion on justice can thus proceedtoward its unique meaning that would require a different kind of trainingand organization of the young.

Robin Barrow recommends suspending modern understandings ofjustice as the same treatment of all in order to understand Plato’s uniquemeaning. Barrow argues that criticism that Plato’s Republic is built around‘treating unequals unequally’ (for example as a forerunner of moderneugenic philosophy), has to be understood in reference to Plato’s principleof impartiality, where ‘the principle of impartiality is the principle thatpeople should be treated the same except where there are relevant groundsfor not doing so’ (Barrows, 1976, p. 29). Barrow argues that this principleis a fundamental definition of justice for Plato and that what he provides inthe Republic are the grounds for ‘different treatment’ of ‘different people.’While this is an ongoing debate around Platonic philosophy of education,what is rarely considered in such readings of Plato’s conception of justiceis the significance of a power-motion-reason nexus for figuring the child-as-necessity, for defining justice, and for rationalizing the educationaltheory.

Power-Motion-Reason and the Republic’s Children

The inscription of children in the Republic is not necessarily suggested bywhat the children learn and do not learn, or by what they eat, wear, practice,or recite. The performance of music and gymnastic and the learning ofreligious poems and appropriate stories of heroes tells little, on their own,about how children were inscribed. That is, the techniques and content ofeducation do not alone communicate the wider reasonings that gave ‘thechild’ or ‘children’ their shape. It is not enough to claim that ‘practicesproduce subjectivities’ to understand or unpack Plato’s children here.

The complexity of the relationship between content, technique, andtheir wider framing of characters is revealed in the very structure of theRepublic’s dialogue. All of the pedagogical strategies for raising juniorphilosopher-kings/queens in particular can enter only after lengthy discus-sions as to what justice, human nature, and power are. Eventually, it is notthe child that guides the curriculum or the curriculum that guides the child,but a complex interplay of ontological and epistemological assumptionsthat underpin the recognition of something as an educative act. If a discrete‘curriculum’ in the modern sense can be conceptualized at all in a text thatdoes not use the term, then in the Republic ‘the curriculum’ has some ofits cornerstones in a Platonic power-motion-reason nexus that offsets what


counts as knowledge and truth. Pure knowledge is the maximization ofhuman potential to approach uniform circular motion, to develop the soul’scapacity to reason. And for the child, this capacity cannot be understoodoutside of its relationship to what power means in the text.

In the Republic, dunamis inhabits the human world as both a capabilityand as ‘political’ power. In the latter sense power becomes the ‘to beable’ of organized life in the polis and the ‘political’ in political powerbecomes synonymous with decision-making and its ally, rule-abidingness.Socrates induces the observation that political power is something thatshould be coincidental with philosophy and that that coincidence needsto be constructed. The coincidence will not spring forth from ‘nature,’ i.e.,as an endowment, but from what humans take on to organize differently –one of the central concerns of the Republic itself.14

Power in the former sense, as capability, is defined as a capacity to knowwhat is. However, the distinction between political power and power’sinscription as an epistemological criterion is not a very discrete one. Bothrely on the understanding of power as a potential ‘to be able’ to do some-thing better, to know what is, and to know why it is better than somethingelse. This spawns the restricted availability of consciousness to the adultand opens the ground for philosophy as foundational to justice.

Power is thereby introduced in the Republic as a concept that helpsto distinguish between opinion and knowledge where opinion is ‘betweenbeing and not to be’ – the same locale occupied by the young child inthe Timaeus. The literary function of power lies, then, in regard to makingdistinctions between what is real or absolute truth.

‘Doesn’t knowledge naturally depend on what is, to know of what is that it is and how itis? However, in my opinion, it’s necessary to make this distinction first’‘What distinction?’‘We will assert that powers are a certain class of beings by means of which we are capableof what we are capable, and also everything else is capable of whatever it is capable. Forexample, I say sight and hearing are powers, if perchance you understand the form of whichI wish to speak . . . . Now listen to how they look to me. In a power I see no colour or shapeor anything of the sort such as I see in many other things to which I look when I distinguishone thing from another for myself. With a power I look only to this – on what it dependsand what it accomplishes; and it is on this basis that I come to call each of the powers apower, and that which depends on the same thing, and accomplishes the same thing, I callthe same power, and that which depends on something else and accomplishes somethingelse, I call a different power’ (TR, 477b–477c, pp. 157–58).

14 “Unless the philosophers rule as kings or those now called kings and chiefs genuinelyand adequately philosophise, and political power and philosophy coincide in the sameplace . . . there is no rest from ills for the cities . . . nor I think for human kind, nor will theregime we have described . . . ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible and, see thelight of the sun” (TR, 475d, p. 155).


The above indicates how power occupies a vast ‘meta’-physical locale inthe assertion of truth. It is again the ‘unseen’ mover or enabler, the struc-tural requirement for asserting different ‘levels of cognition.’ Ignorance,opinion, and knowledge all have ‘powers’ that distinguish them. Sight andhearing are instances of power, of what we are capable of. They are not‘power’ itself but power of’s, the power of sight, the power of hearing.Power as a principle of distinction crosses the kinds of thoughts that areavailable because of what it must do in the narrative. Its literary functionis simultaneously mobilization and delimitation as in the Timaeus. In theRepublic the theory of power specifically performs an epistemological taskof expelling the lesser part of the soul as ‘bodily,’ making sensory mechan-isms secondary to the inherence of a primary ‘power,’ and lending credenceto the immateriality of thought.

Power is not a visible, substantive, sensible quality authorizing thisdistinction between opinion and knowledge, then. It is brought into themaking of distinctions and the judgment of truth not as color or shapebut as a transcendental principle of distinction. In being a transcendentalprinciple of distinction, it operates to distinguish between opinion andknowledge which in turn structures the qualities of different charactersin the text, including the ability to reason justly as a philosopher-kingwould.15 For example, for the overly sensory child the ‘lack’ of abilityto manage different powers well is again referred to and thereby suggestsa need for the child’s education. As Kieran Egan (1984) also notes, itis in relation to a conception of knowledge as absolute that eikasia andpistis encapsulate the child’s capabilities, which are referred to as opinion,as doxa. Eikasia can mean either likeness (representation) or likening(image) and pistis means belief. Young children are rooted in under-standing through concrete examples, not abstract Forms. The particular,the local, the immediate, and the unstable would guide the conceptionof justice under such sway of superficial opinion rather than deep knowl-edge. Dianoia (like thinking) and noesis (like intelligence) mark the higheractivities of thought that supersede the lower forms of eikasia and pistis,indicating the (golden) child’s movement into the man, the attainment ofproper and enduring knowledge of the Forms. Such a shift in levels isasserted, then, through the depiction of different kinds of power.

15 As Scolnicov (1988) notes, too, knowledge/opinion in the Republic V is rationalizedsomewhat differently relative to the Meno. In TR, the power related to knowledge andwhat can be done with it is not the power related to opinion and what it can accomplish: ‘Ifdifferent powers are naturally dependent on different things and both are powers – -opinionand knowledge – and each is, as we say, different, then on this basis it’s not admissible thatthe knowable and the opinable be the same’ (TR, V, 478a–b, pp. 158–59).


As for the Timaeus, then, power’s versatility across spiritual, political,and epistemological assertions, provided the meaning-space that Platonicchildren could occupy. The different powers that were available to the oneperson such as those of knowledge and those of opinion were suggestiveof the different powers dominating adult and child respectively. If opinionwas that power between being and not to be then opinion, not knowl-edge, was the major preserve of the child as well as the major preserveof those laboring adults and bronze-natured humans who would neverdevelop beyond opinion – the terms signifying the child ‘slide’ into thedescription of some of the adults. Further, if opinion was synonymous withwhat was taken in through sensation, then opinion was the main powerof the child – that overly sensory creature whose motions were erraticand whose mechanisms of visceral perception were working overtime. Forchildren as a category, and for their differentiation from each other, poweroperates as a normative concept; its multiple textual inscriptions authorizegeneralizations, recombinations, and distinctions between characters andtheir qualities within the same textual space.

What is different about the Republic relative to the Timaeus, though,is the larger number and kinds of groups with whom the child or childrenappear. It is the plural, children, that is the most common iteration andperhaps this is so because men, women and children ‘must be in common,’in the communal setting of childrearing. This does not suggest a wideravailability of models for stamping children, but a more overt dependenceon children for buttressing the argument for a different kind of governance.For instance, the iterations in the Republic include groupings such asfather and child, children as god’s sons, children as offspring, women andchildren on their own, children grouped in a threesome with women andslaves, children and freemen, men and children, and children mentionedon their own.

The treatment of children as subjects with their own characteristicstakes place in regard to what the requirements for the ideal polis are. Thatis, whatever is needed to construct the city-state is constructed as possiblebecause of the qualities attributed to the child. To this end, children enteredto constitute points regarding how to organize justice and education (inPlatonic terms). They enter after the discussions of justice and after ‘thecurriculum,’ music and gymnastic especially, have been decided. They arenot the starting points for such discussion but the points and tool of itsapplication. Specific references to children include the following: Childrenenter to explain men and Gods’ behavior; Children constitute a point ofpassage in regard to inheritance of good fortune like feasting; They aretreated as objects to be dealt with, such as in advice over what to do withwomen and children in particular circumstances; They enter as catamites,


as objects of ownership like slaves and women; They are mentioned inregard to rewards for success in battle, such as the increased access toprocreation that good warriors will receive; They enter as sites of punish-ment – retribution for injustices done by a father will be allocated to hischildren; They enter as synonyms for adult fear, like waking from sleepwith a fright ‘like a child;’ They enter as synonyms for fondness, such asthe liking one has for something that is one’s product; And finally, theyenter as counterpoints that need to be dealt with in ‘policy’ discussions onthe topics of deliberation, democracy, resources, and the procurement ofloyalty – all of which children can interrupt or destabilize.

The few times children appear in the text on their own, i.e., outsideof direct grouping with other characters, they are variously referred toas being as irrational ‘as a line’ (rather than reason’s uniform circularmotion), as imitative and teachable, e.g., children can be taught the rudi-ments of war by being present in battles and children are initially farfrom Truth. They enter as already differentiated, as of different kinds, likegold-, silver- or bronze-natured, and as changelings. They are describedas lacking in care of self, which had religious connotations in ancientGreece. Care has to be taught. These, then, constituted the ‘individual’characteristics of children as presented in the Republic and it was thesecharacteristics that suggested how children were to be used to illustrate the‘broader’ points above.

In sum, the broader points to which children became explicitly artic-ulated in the Republic concerned the construction metaphor. Childrenwere considered to have a literary utility in a worldview that saw that anideal could be made through human labor. When children are specific-ally mentioned in the Republic they enter, from a modern viewpoint, aspredominantly ‘negative’ examples to illustrate a more ideal polis. Theyoccupy a negative discursive space given the weight that eternity, perdur-ance, and knowledge hold. Simultaneously, though, children are figured onoccasion as ‘positive’ points of appeal in regard to conceptions of socialreconstruction. Through the analytical priorities of a power-motion-reasonnexus, the figure of the child can be made to constitute the raw material thatcan usher in Platonic preferences for reorganization of the polis. The idealpolis cannot be disarticulated from ideal rearing practices and thus it is thefigure of the child that enables intersection between Utopias and presentrealities. On the basis of a perfection that must be striven for, childrenfound their place as tool, problem, and possibility.

Implications for Educational Theory

The figuring of children within the reconstruction of the polis is suggestednot just by their relationship to an analytics of power-motion-reason that


structures the difference between opinion and knowledge and gives formto paideia, but by what is assumed their other predominant characteristic,plasticity or teachability.

[Socrates to Adeimantus] “Don’t you know that the beginning is the most important part ofevery work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stageit’s most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishesto give it.”“Quite so.”“Then shall we so easily let the children hear just any tales fashioned by just anyone andtake into their souls opinions for the most part opposite to those we’ll suppose they musthave when they are grown up?”“In no event will we permit it.” (TR, 376b, p. 54).

Without the plasticity attributed to the young the communal sharing ofchildren in the elite philosopher and warrior castes, of men and womenprocreating and not knowing whom their children were, could not havemade sense, for how would a reclamation and redesign of the young in acity-state signify anything new? The new form of governance pivoted onthe plasticity of the young.

It is not an open-ended plasticity, however, and it is here that similarneighborhoods begin to appear relative to late nineteenth century reason-ings on which eugenics was predicated. The relative weight of the tworegisters, Being and Becoming, which also appear in the Republic placeslimits on the kinds of humans who are to philosophize and hence to haveconsciousness in Platonic terms. The reality of Being, inscribed as theeternity of the incontestable Forms, can become evident only to thosegolden-natured humans who have an inborn capacity for coming to knowthe Forms. The distinction between Becoming and Being conjoined fullknowledge of Being to a capacity which is fitted for it. This conjoiningacted back on the young; only some of them would ever see the Forms.

A belief in the limited availability of knowing the Forms enablesthe argument to proceed around how to best educate different kinds ofchildren. The Circles of Same and Different that interpenetrate macro- andmicrocosm, that inhabit every body/soul/mind and structure the universein the Timaeus, find expression in the hierarchical conceptions of humannature in the Republic. Only some humans will have their motions settledown enough to maximize reason and find harmony and balance. Thoseinvolved in manual work, in the overuse of the flesh, signify those whohave not found balance. The already visible scale of labor in Greek city-states is the ground of proof appealed to in the assertion of gold-, silver-and bronze-natured children and hence in the restricted number of placesavailable for becoming a philosopher-king/queen.

And here appears an oft-noted ‘tension’ in the Platonic Republic, forif children’s capacities are set or pre-determined, then why engage in


educational activity at all? How can plasticity on the one hand and pre-determination on the other both inhere in the child? In Platonic thoughtthey are not mutually exclusive or oppositional concepts. It is not a matterof nature versus nurture. For Plato, the nature of humans was simultan-eously an anti-nature in the polis as it currently existed. Further, nature, orthe pre-determined capacity, could go different ways given the presence ofthe indeterminate cause. The ‘natural’ limitations to human capacity thatthe Timaeus establishes in the very act of the universe’s creation (belatedly)authorized the building of a different kind of city-state in the Republic. Toappear as a plausible strategy, that is, the possibility for contouring ‘theenvironment’ in ways that the Republic recommends suggests a preexistingdissatisfaction with how the environment had already been contoured‘away’ from what was perceived as ‘natural.’ What was natural in regardto children was inseparable from what was natural in the universe. Assuch, the educational theory espoused in the Republic did not to take theform of nature versus nurture. Rather, education was presenced at the levelof preserving natural interconnections that current city-states had driftedfrom; the Platonic argument for reconstructing the ‘social’ environmentcould not take place outside an appeal to natural order as justice and justiceas what is fitting.

What ‘the educative process’ entails (e.g., for philosopher-queens),then, is not reducible to what is going on ‘around the child’ (i.e., is not‘external’ to the child), then. What is going on as education is a conver-gence or conjuncture; pre-determined capacities meet up with tales thatare thought suited to the maximization of that inherited capacity. Onecannot stand without the other and it becomes extremely difficult to assert a‘foundation’ as to what matters most in ‘learning.’ It is not possible to priv-ilege either an ‘internal’ capacity or ‘external’ action as the deciding factorin educational prescriptions. Knowledge of the Forms isn’t put into thechild by training. The capacity must already be there. On the other hand,the capacity is, in pragmatic terms, useless unless it is maximized. Theactualization of that capacity is not already there. It must be brought about.Neither ‘external action’ nor ‘internal potential’ override the educationalprescription as its foundational explanatory concept. The interdependenceof Platonic notions of Becoming, Being, Knowing Thyself, and Knowingthe Forms undermines any neat summaries of a central plank in regard tothe educational theory.

As for the comportment of humans in the Timaeus, then, the perceivedpotential for undesirable (‘unnatural,’ ‘unjust’) outcomes gave construc-tion metaphors the ground to operate. An educational theory could emergebut the range of its imaginings was restricted to the limit-points that the


figure of the child helped to provide. In the case of the Republic, theconstruction of something as ‘educational’ was dependent on the anticipa-tion of failure in the midst of pre-determination. While paideia did not justrefer to the education of children and incorporated a sense in which ‘adults’still had to engage in active learning, it was overtly the child who ‘became’the metaphorical site of the necessary, wandering, uncertain cause writsmall and thus the focus for articulating the limits of an educational theory.

REVISITING THE SPRINGBOARD

The above reading has indicated how an economy of images has oper-ated in Platonic texts where the child impacted and was impacted uponby boundaries it helped to establish. In the series of exchanges, zonesare marked for how an educational theory could appear as educationaland what it could work with and on. Limit-points are set, structuringthe rationale for education’s entrance and the specificity of its enactment.Children are mentioned directly in both texts to achieve this and are pres-enced through two common strategies. One lay in regard to the qualitiesbeing given different characters or ‘populational groupings.’ It is herethat the child is figured and in return helps figure a power-motion-reasonnexus that distinguishes between characters. The distinction that such anexus provides shapes the characters’ qualities, giving further meaningto Being/Becoming in the Timaeus and to justice in the Republic. Theother form of entrance of the child is as a requirement for illustrating‘broader’ points once such qualities are accepted. The figure of child-as-necessity demonstrates this. Without this encoding in both narrativeseducation would have little to work against, with, or on as a practice, forwhat exactly was it that was thought to need contouring, control, manage-ment, engineering, tempering, or balance? The distinction between the twokinds of ‘literary’ entrances are ultimately not sustainable, however, but aresuggestive of how the child could be thought of and of what could be donethrough the child once it was presenced as pre-determined yet chaotic andplastic.

These considerations give over onto rethinking late nineteenth andtwentieth century theories of child development as they were espousedthrough educational philosophies such as eugenics, childcenteredness,and Child-study. That is, how might the limit-points constructed aroundnotions of power-motion-reason, necessity, and justice through figurationof the child inform more contemporary understandings of educationaltheory?


In regard to a power-motion-reason nexus what becomes noticeable viacomparison is the similarity of analytical structures or props and yet thespecificity of differences in the precision of their enactment. For example,the use of a power-motion-reason nexus in Platonic thought indicates howin the Timaeus and the Republic the most important distinction in regardto the child was not its opposition to adults but to the eternal Being and tolesser Gods. The child/adult relation is decentered in so far as reproductionanalogies are not the source of the visible world. Creating the universein the Timaeus is not analogous to adults having children. Creating theideal polis in the Republic requires the breaking of what conjugal relationssignify in regard to rearing the young. Children do not draw their distinc-tion so much from what adults can do or from what adults have done tocreate them but from humanity’s wider imperfection in regard to eternalBeing.

In dominant late nineteenth century educational theories in the West,a power-motion-reason nexus can still be discerned as a limit-point inhow the string of characters are produced as objects of discourse but thetexture of those characters and their positions are different. For example, inthe Child-study movement’s version of the developing children, an other-worldly God is somewhat backgrounded and it is the competent adultcitizen who constitutes the key foil. Nonetheless, there were still inescap-able, multiple references to the ways in which something called powercould never be outside of such characters. The child-as-unfolding-in-set-stages is produced, for instance, as an unquestionable character: ‘Here aseverywhere the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded beforethe ability to check or even to use them can develop.’16 The reason fortesting and studying the child directly and for reforming (newly invented)public schools was to ensure a balanced unfoldment of powers: ‘To fit thenormal stages of growth of interest and capacity in childhood, most tradi-tional branches of school work need, some more and some less, radicalreconstruction to fit and mould body, mind, and heart, and to bring allpowers to fullest health and unfoldment.’17 A power-motion-reason nexusis thus similarly used to demarcate characters but how such characters arebrought into relation (as binaries of each other or not, etc) differs.

Such a nexus is drawn on in further variegated form. In the late nine-teenth century theories it is not used to conflate inner and outer realmsaround the child, but to mobilize such realms as binary. While the objectiveis still a kind of engineering based on a construction metaphor at some

16 G. Stanley Hall, Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, 1906, p. 18, emphasisadded.

17 G. Stanley Hall, “Moral Education and Will-Training,” 1892, p. 189.


level it takes place through a different strategy. For example, in regard toevolution and environment: ‘It would also seem to be probable that theenvironment, the influence of which is augmented somewhat in proportionas maturity is attained, would be felt by advancing the species, infinitesim-ally though it be in each generation, toward a more perfect development ofits higher and later acquired powers.”18

New characters such as the feebleminded, the idiot, and the intelligentemerged through the combined availability of the nexus and structuraldescriptors such as inside/outside: “In idiots arrest of higher powers oftengoes with hypertrophy of these movements [automatisms], as seen in head-beaters (as if, just as nature impels those partially blind to rub the eyesfor “light hunger,” so it prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head forcerebrations), rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc.”19 and “it is those whohave been trained to put forth mental power that come to the front later,while it is only those whose acquisitions are not transpeciated into powerwho are in danger of early collapse.”20

Thus, even though terms such as power, motion, and reason (i.e., wherereason is now understood as ‘higher powers’ or ‘intelligence’) operate inanalytical proximity in figurations of the child and are observable in thelate nineteenth century educational theories, there are ‘local’ differencesthat their framing within a Darwinian rather than Platonic cosmologyprovides. In recasting the child as a placeholder between subhuman andfully human forms on an evolutionary chain of Being, the hierarchybetween characters is obviously not sustained via appeal to Circles of Sameand Different, to an overt astro-theology. Rather, it is through a centeringof Man within humanist discourse that a sublated Christian theology canarise to distinguish characters and assume limit-points in what can be donewith different kinds. The more noticeable but not complete this-worldlyorientation is made overt through an emphasis on the analysis of interiorbiophysiological powers that were/are thought to separate races, genders,and abilities into castes. This fundamentally reorients the kind of educa-tional theory possible; the engineering effort to control the wanderingcause has its limits directly in the flesh. Not all children can be contouredas bronze, silver, and gold-natured children can in the Republic. Accordingto Hall at least (as quoted earlier), certain castes are good only for exterm-ination in systematic ways. Mortality takes on new meaning and thelimit-point is confronted with a brute force that today is referred to as‘hard eugenics’ as opposed to a ‘soft’ kind (e.g., sterilization policy or

18 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. I., 1904, p. 50.19 G. Stanley Hall, Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, 1906, p. 16.20 G. Stanley Hall, “Moral Education and Will-Training,” 1892, p. 87.


special education structures). In this scenario, nature can be risen above orconquered by Man and as such the special place reserved for the Platoniccreator has shifted; the creator creates Man to work toward a perfectionthat is now thought achievable on earth and amenable to measurement.

Second, the late nineteenth century idea of childcenteredness asfollowing the ‘nature and needs of childhood’ demonstrates a slippage inthe idea of necessity, of what is considered necessary, or even a ‘need’ inregard to demarcation of human being.

[T]he motor superfluities of awkwardness, embarrassment, extreme effort, excitement,fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the forms in which we receive the full momentum ofheredity and mark a natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and especiallyof will. Hence they must be abundant, all parts should act in all possible ways at firstuntrammeled by the activity of all other parts and functions. Some of these activities aremore essential for growth in size than are later and more conscious movements.21

A whole schema of reasonings were applied to the observation of a youngchild’s movements that the above represents. This turned such movementsinto evidence of recapitulation theory. The child’s motions spoke to araw material that had not yet been worked and ordered and as such theymeant for proponents of childcenteredness an intrinsic ignorance, a lack ofmindfulness.

In what was referred to as the kindergarten stage of development, forinstance, a child was thought to have virtually no recognizable intelligence,a kind of unconsciousness attributable to the raw material that had not yetbeen processed and that excluded it from being considered fully human.Kindergartners, who were perceived as constantly on the move due tosuch motor superfluities that marked the full momentum of heredity andits natural richness, were also therefore described as ‘human larvae.’22

This liminal state suggested what ought to be expected of a kindergartner.While for enthusiasts such as Hall, Herbartianists and Froebelians didsome things well when it came to kindergartner education, they needed‘more loyalty to genetic psychology’ and ‘a truer conception of the child,not as trailing clouds of glory and faintly understanding everything, but asa lovely little animal, full of helplessness, incapacity, and ignorance, butalso of boundless potentialities.’23

The ‘nature and needs of the child’ was thus a statement made relativeto supposition of other laws; laws that some contemporaries, such as MissBlow, didn’t quite believe in.

[N]othing is better established in a broad and general way than the recapitulation theory,manifold are its gaps and exceptions . . . . No one who knows modern biology, or the

21 G. Stanley Hall, Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, 1906, p. 17.22 G. Stanley Hall “Ideal School as based on Child Study,” 1901, p. 25.23 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. I, 1904, p. 26.


laws of inheritance, or criminology, or psychopathology, in all of which these principlesare cardinal, has ever dreamed of denying this basal truth . . . . To argue as Miss Blowdoes so earnestly, that to admit that children pass through lower stages in reappearing thehistory of the race is a plea for allowing positive immorality in them, is too preposterousfor consideration.24

The double-sense of the child’s necessity and the child-as-necessity isthus reworked through such educational theories. The figure child is stillrequired in the narrative structure, in this case, as a recapitulated past thatopens up some possibilities for reorganizing the future. But the child-as-necessity, as the random element, as the Platonic wandering cause thatdelimits other powers and that is indeterminate cannot be allowed to fullybreathe. The child instead must be investigable, knowable, open to admin-istration and organized in such a way that any randomness of a negativekind that nature might spawn is proactively guarded against rather thanactively utilized.

Third, the analysis points to the divergent meanings of justice in educa-tional theories. It exposes problems in claiming a moral high groundin current assertions of ‘education for social justice’ or in the name ofthe child as though such meanings are commonly understood. For earlytwentieth century enthusiasts of childcenteredness, discrimination meantjustice. That is, distinguishing between what children were ‘fit for,’ some-thing akin to figuring out and adjusting to different ‘learning styles’ in thepresent, constituted justice and care.

[T]here are many who ought not be educated, and who would be better in mind, body andmorals if they knew no school. What shall it profit a child to gain the world of knowledgeand lose his own health? Cramming and over-schooling have impaired many a feeble mind,for which, as the proverb says, nothing is so dangerous as ideas too large for it . . . . Thus,while I would abate no whit from the praise of learning and education for all who are fit forthem, I would bring discrimination down to the very basis of our educational pyramid.25

Reverberations from the Republic seem to echo loudly here, but whatsuch a comparison brings more significantly into view is not the by-now banal observation that words like justice have different meanings indifferent places or how vestiges of older reasoning might inhabit modern‘innovations.’ Rather, what is exposed is how appeals to educationaltheories in the name of justice and through the figuration of the child havebeen unable to assert their imaginaries outside attributing a cast of charac-ters qualities, properties, and ontologies that must not be questioned withinthe domain of that theory. A series of inscriptions and distinctions mustbe taken-for-granted, must be taken to constitute the limit-points of theimagining. This realization points to the structural limitations of proposing

24 Ibidem, pp. 29–30.25 G. Stanley Hall, “Ideal School,” 1901, p. 25.


educational theories as theories, as universals, and reinforces what GeorgesCanguilhem has already noted, i.e., that a pedagogical theory that does notnormalize and pathologize is almost impossible to conceive.

CONCLUSION

The above method of comparative historico-philosophy has providedanalytical leverage on recently emerged, and critiqued, philosophies ofeducation. Since the late nineteenth century, educational theories aremost commonly predicated on particular notions of child development.Stages of unfolding biophysiological powers appear as givens and arebuilt into the organizational structure of schooling. They also appear asthe obstacle to schooling’s reform. The emergence of new educationaltheories, for instance, is militated against by what are posited as harshrealities; that some children are simply better at things than others and thatany new educational theory must realistically take into account ‘existingdevelopmental differences.’

As such, the analysis holds implication for understanding exactly whatmore recent or contemporary educational theories or philosophies areclaiming as limit-points in their assertions or the strategies proffered forreform. It has provided several examples of this: how meanings of what isnecessary or of necessity in education are not fixed, how a power-motion-reason nexus has been in common in the assertion of different characterswithin educational theories while still taking on different meanings at thelocal level, that strategies for justice and reform via educational renovationare argued in multiple directions relative to distinctions presumed betweencharacters, that those distinctions are asserted in light of wider Utopianor cosmological visions that authorize them, and last, that the figuringof the child, even if seemingly ‘decentered’ in one set of texts relativeto another where it is claimed they are ‘centered’ is still required as amarker of alterity. As a character that helps to comport the limit-pointsof educational philosophies from ‘within’ the child provides boundariesto what such theories presuppose they must deal with in order to changeanything. As tool, problem, and possibility, the child has therefore operatedwithin different economies of images to compose the edges of what can beimagined as an appropriate and ‘realistic’ educational philosophy.

REFERENCES

Baker, B. (2001). In Perpetual Motion: Theories of power, educational history, and thechild. New York: Peter Lang.


Baker, B. (2002). The hunt for disability: The new eugenics and the normalization ofschoolchildren. Teachers College Record, 104, 663–703.

Baker, B. (1998). Child-centered teaching, redemption and educational identities: A historyof the present. Educational Theory, 48(2), 155–174.

Barrow, R. (1976). Plato and education. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Bloom, A. (1968). Introduction. In The republic. New York: Basic Books.Burman, E. (1996). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London: Routledge.Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical

difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Cornford, F.M. (1941). Introduction. In The Timaeus of Plato. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.Crotty, M., Germov, J. & Rodwell, G. (Eds) (2000). “A race for a place”: Eugenics,

Darwinism, and social thought and practice in Australia. Newcastle: The Universityof Newcastle Press.

Despland, M. (1985). The education of desire: Plato and the philosophy of religion.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Deutscher, P. (1997). Yielding gender: Feminism, deconstruction and the history ofphilosophy. London: Routledge.

Egan, K. (1998). Conceptions of development in education. In PES yearbook.Egan, K. (1983). Education and psychology: Plato, Piaget, and scientific psychology. New

York: Teachers College Press.Garton, S. (2000). Writing eugenics: a history of classifying practices. In M. Crotty, J.

Germov & G. Rodwell (Eds), “A race for a place”: Eugenics, Darwinism, and socialthought and practice in Australia (pp. 9–18). Newcastle: The University of NewcastlePress.

Gerson, L. (1990). God and Greek philosophy. London: Routledge.Hall, G.S. (1906). Youth; its education, regimen, and hygiene. New York: D. Appleton and

company.Hall, G.S. (1904). Adolescence: Its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropo-

logy, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education, Vol. 1 and 2. New York: D. Appletonand Company.

Hall, G.S. (1901). The ideal school as based on child study. The Forum, 32(1), 24–29.Hall, G.S. (1892). Moral education and will-training. Pedagogical Seminary, 2(1), 72–89.Ingstad, B. & Reynolds Whyte, S. (Eds) (1995). Disability and culture. Berkeley:

University of California Press.Irigaray, L. (1974/1985). Speculum of the other woman. Translated by G.C. Gill. Ithaca:

New York University Press.Kim, J. (1996). Philosophy of mind. Boulder: Westeview Press.Larisch, S. (1994). Plato’s practice: genealogy and mathematics. In Steve Shankman (Ed),

Plato and postmodernism (pp. 161–171). Glenside: The Aldine Press.Lee, D. (1971). Introduction. In The Timaeus and Critias. New York: Penguin.Lowe, R. (1997). Schooling and social change, 1964–1990. London: Routledge.Luhmann, N. (1995). Social systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Menn, S. (1995). Plato on God as Nous. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Mitchell, D. & Snyder, S. (Eds) (in press). Eugenics in America, 1890–1935. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press.Morss, J. (1990). The biologizing of childhood: Developmental psychology and the

Darwinian myth. Hove, East Sussex: Erlbaum.Plato (1937). Plato’s cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. Translated with a running

commentary by F.M. Cornford. London: K. Paul, Trubner & Co. Ltd.


Plato. (1968). The Republic. Translated with notes and interpretive essay by Allan Bloom.New York: Basic Books.

Rose, N. (1989). Governing the soul. London: Routledge.Scolnicov, S. (1988). Plato’s metaphysics of education. London: Routledge.Seth, B. (2000). Plato’s “laws”: The discovery of being. Chicago: Chicago University

Press.Sheppard, S. (2001). Does mind matter? Education and conceptions of mind. Educational

Theory, 51(1), 243–258.Stoskopf, A. (2002). Echoes of a forgotten past: Eugenics, testing, and education reform.

Educational Forum, 66(2), 126–133.Wolfe, J. (2000). Learning from the past: Historical voices in early childhood education.

Mayerthorpe: Piney Branch Press.

Department of Curriculum and InstructionUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison225 N. Mills St.Madison, WI 53706USAE-mail: [email protected]

plato's child and the limit-points of educational theories

Documents