plato

But which of our present governments do you think is suitable for philosophy? None whatever, I said, but the very ground of my complaint is that no polity of today is worthy of the philosophical nature. This is just the cause of its perversion and alteration; as a foreign seed sown in an alien soil is wont to be overcome and die out into the native growth, so this kind does not preserve its own quality but falls away and degenerates into the alien type.
- Plato, Republic 497 c

I. Introduction

In the sixth book of the Republic, Plato describes a philosophic soul as an exotic seed planted in strange soil. Because the soil is foreign to the seed, its growth is stunted, if not overwhelmed, by the forces alien to its nature. The context of this simile is not lost; this is a description of the societal and educational programs of his day and a noting of their inadequacy for cultivating philosophic souls. Nearly twenty-five centuries later,
John Dewey describes education as a process of cultivating experience and as a way of building up social intelligence in the individual: in a word, growth. Dewey also discussed the insufficiency of “traditional” and “progressive” educational systems of his day for their inability to cultivate experience in such a way that people would be more capable of dealing with future experiences. In what follows, I will discuss some philosophic overlap between Plato and Dewey, especially as relates to their theories of education.
I will not here be trying to convince the reader that one could read Plato and
Dewey as philosophic twins; such a statement would be inaccurate and misleading.
Rather, I will be detailing a similarity of intention and goal that exist between Plato and
Dewey: social change through educational reform. This will be done by discussing John
Anton’s work on the both of these thinkers as well as discussing Anton’s thoughts on each of these philosophers.

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II. Plato’s theory of education