What educational reform can do

 I wonder if ancient Athens, the place we know through the voices of so many interesting people, would have been such an interesting place if it had not been in the middle of an educational revolution.

The social conservatives of the day liked to remind everyone that you could still get a traditional education in Athens — for boys, if not for girls. 

Traditional education meant leaning one’s letters. And once you’d learned to read, then there was Homer, a lot of Homer, to read and memorize. Traditional education meant learning by rote. No one really thought about why teachers were poorly paid and relegated to the lower social ranks. Perhaps everyone could see that it didn’t take much intelligence, imagination or talent to bully boys into memorizing their lessons and beating them when they didn’t.

And then, around 450 BCE, everything changed. People who used pay teachers a pittance and snub them in the market began to shell out fortunes to get their boys in with the stars. They paid money to move their sons up on the waiting list.

The change was the arrival of the sophists. The word “sophist,” thanks to Plato, now has negative connotations. Sophos was the Greek word for wisdom. When Protagoras arrived from Abdera, on the Thracian coast, claiming to be a sophist, he meant “expert.” Only later, after Socrates had examined the sophists’ claims to knowledge and found them wanting, did the word get the connotation that is so evident in the word “sophistry.”

Socrates abhorred arguments that simply sought to persuade without getting to the truth.

But when Protagoras and his colleagues opened shop, they were acting on an insight into democratic societies. They saw that the vital quality in such societies was influence.

You had to convince a jury to win a court case. You had to persuade the assembly to pass a law. You had to convince a board to get an exemption to a rule on your business. You had to convince the archon to grant you a chorus if you wanted to produce a play. You had to persuade the assembly again if you were a general and wanted to invade Sicily.

Influence was the thing, and so Protagoras taught rhetoric, the study of arguments and persuasion. Peitho, the word “to persuade,” is an important word in Greek literature.

For a while, you had arguments over whether boys should be memorizing Homer or studying arguments of great public interest. It’s obvious who won.

One of the side effects of that debate is that the arguments of great public interest were recorded, reported, analyzed. We know a lot about what the ancient Greeks were thinking.

I wonder to what extent that would have been possible if an educational reformer hadn’t arrived in Athens and created a stir.