Platos Rep and Limits of Theory

BERNADETTE BAKER
PLATOS CHILD AND THE LIMIT-POINTS OF EDUCATIONAL

THEORIES
ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes how the gure of the child has been used to authorize
a series of boundaries that have constituted the limit-points of educational theories or
philosophies. 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 be
argued away or around at the time. A method of comparative historico-philosophy is used
to contrast limit-points in Platonic gurations of the child and education with childcentered
and eugenic theories of the late nineteenth and twentieth century West. The guration of the
child in both periods is imbricated in forming boundaries around a power-motion-reason
nexus and in delineating what necessity and justice mean. The meaning-space that the child
can occupy in relation to such concepts has shifted with them and has been important to
depicting Utopian and cosmological imaginings at different historical moments and for
authorizing 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 the
gure, child, was presumed to exist on a scale that ran from the inferiority
of plants and animals to a superior heavenly body. It has been conceived as
a placeholder within such a cosmological order, marking a crossover point
between subhuman and genuinely or fully human forms. In late nineteenth
century Western contexts, the indexing role of the child in an evolutionary
chain of Being intersected with a variety of educational reforms including
childcenteredness and eugenics. Such reforms were predicated on claims
of (and worries over) the childs 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 literary
device. The analysis will demonstrate how the gure of the child has been
used to authorize a series of boundaries that have constituted the limit-
points of educational theories or philosophies. Specically, it will contrast
Studies in Philosophy and Education 22: 439474, 2003.
2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
440 BERNADETTE BAKER
limit-points in Platonic gurations of the child and educational theory with
those of the late nineteenth and twentieth century West.
Limit-points refer to the conceptual boundaries that educational
theories move within, respond to, or make use of because the perception
is 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-reason
nexus, necessity, and justice will be explored. The shifting meaning of
such concepts have been important to depicting Utopian and cosmological
imaginings at different historical moments and for authorizing in turn what
counts as an appropriate educational philosophy.
The signicance of contrasting Platonic and more recent conceptuali-
zations lies in the renewed interest in the conditions of possibility for
childcentered and eugenic philosophies of education. This interest has
emerged recently in both educational research and the new eld of Disab-
ility Studies. Questions about the association of eugenic discourse with
seemingly sensitive movements, such as childcenteredness or the form-
ation of the welfare state, have been raised. The silence in educational
research around the popularity of a eugenics movement in particular and
its perduring, transmogried forms in the present, has been taken as some-
thing to correct.
1
While the comparison of texts in this paper springs from
this 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 gurations of the child became
useful to espousing educational theories that drew on complicated notions
of 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 helped
establish the boundaries that educational theories have operated within and
across, the paper deploys a comparative historico-philosophy in the spirit
of Foucaults history of the present. I deliberately distinguish the meth-
odology here from a genealogical project that moves in unspoken gestures
across epochal comparison of epistemes. Rather, this analysis is a problem-
atizing comparison insofar as it takes as its starting point some commonly
held, and recently troubled, ideas about childcenteredness and child devel-
opment theories that have interlaced educational philosophies. It positions
these commonly expressed ideas as a springboard toward contrast. The
paper then offers a reading of Platonic conceptions of the child that are in
the end drawn on to revisit the initial springboard.
1
For works on the signicance of eugenics to educational history specically see Lowe
(1997) and Stoskopf (2002). For compilations that consider the broader signicance of
eugenics in different Western settings see Crotty, Germov & Rodwells (2000) A Race for
a Place and Mitchell & Snyders Eugenics in America, 18901935 (in press).
PLATOS CHILD AND THE LIMIT-POINTS OF EDUCATIONAL THEORIES 441
The purpose of such a strategy, that is, of beginning analytically with
child 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. The
strategy enables new understandings around beliefs that became cemented
as natural, just, and caring, while implicitly problematizing current laws
of historical scholarship. Such laws, as Alun Munslow (1997) notes
of reconstructionist historiography especially, demand that everything
appear in a straight line of time and that documents be treated as objective
holders of reality. The limiting aspect of this orientation is what the philos-
ophy part of historico-philosophical comparison brings to view: such a
demand for comparison of documents across neat parcels of interlinked
stages in linear time can miss the entanglement of such an analytical struc-
ture with existing theories of child development. That is, the nineteenth
century saw a dovetailing of the narration of historical events with the
narration of child development theory the childs interior became the
history of the race (Steedman, 1995). A belief in the staggered unfolding
of human interior capacities as recapitulating phases of wider historical
human evolution took hold (phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny). A notion
of a straight line of time became linked to a notion of development.
2
Today, that automatic linking has become something to reconsider and
critique, whether this be from postcolonial perspectives where scholars
such as Dipesh Chakrabarty (2001) argue that the idea of development
constitutes a key parameter of historiography that guarantees Eurocentrism
even in historical narratives not focused on Europe, or in interdisci-
plinary work such as Michel Serres, where time is metaphored through
weather, chimneys, and nonlinear folds rather than simply through a one-
dimensional line. The notion of developing whether it be mobilized in
depictions of how an organism grows, how an argument is built, or how
a society or economy matures is a notion now under contention rather
than given.
The idea of comparative historico-philosophical method deployed here
thus 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 nd it difcult to stand outside the
arguments 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 same
time playing on it to move into a qualitatively different feel/eld of method. The play does
not 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 perceived
problem of circularity in historiography especially as it relates to critiques of development
and linear time see Dipesh Chakrabarty (2001) Provincializing Europe. In sociology, see
Niklas Luhmanns (1985/1995) Social Systems.
periods/texts studied, nor progressive building in weight. The bulk of
the analysis is a reading of Platonic conceptions of the child around the
boundaries they help to authorize in regard to the meaning of the three
key concepts, power-motion-reason, necessity, and justice. This reading
eventually incites observations about more recent periods, their reg-
uring/redenition of such limit-points, and the educational theories that
pay homage to them.
Two of Platos publications, the Timaeus (TT) and the Republic (TR),
are the focus here in ways that may seem irregular for philosophers of
education. While the Republic holds an esteemed place as the site in
which educational philosophers would look for Platos 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 gures qualities
can be centrally comported in ways that help to make sense of the more
direct pronouncements made elsewhere.
3
This line of argument is drawn from literary criticism, and is not subject
to empirical demands for demonstrating that the one book being referred
to is directly referenced in the other. The method I use here deliberately
brackets traditional questions of empirical relations between the Timaeus
and the Republic and between the fourth century B.C. E Greece and the
late nineteenth and twentieth century West as part of the problem. The
comparative 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 vision
of the same. The argument proffered around a comparative approach to
Platos child cannot be subsumed, then, within strictly or exclusively
philosophical, historical, or literary criticism approaches to scholarship.
In sum, the paper overtly engages in a reading that is a crossreading of
these two Platonic texts and deliberately out of publication date order
to highlight the possibilities for rethinking how the child has/is used
as a literary device to authorize the boundaries of things that are taken
seriously as limit-points in theories of education. Power-motion-reason,
necessity, and justice are focus terms that are sutured in complicated ways
to 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 signicant source to consider insofar as it was woven into
Christian theology by scholars such as Augustine in their melding of the narrative of Adam
and Eve with neoplatonism. The Christian narrative of creation, while not atemporally
stable in its interpretation across centuries undergirded the early anthropological theories
of monogenism on which eugenic philosophies were predicated.
for understanding the formation of recent and popular educational theories
such 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 what
schools were asked to do. These included the view that the mind and its
ally, the soul, were the ultimate zone of human development (Morrs, 1990),
that the ability to reason was implicitly demonstrative of the ability to
self-govern the soul according to preferred moral norms (Kincaid, 1992;
Popkewitz, 1998), that reasoning ability was viscerally located in the
head (Walkerdine, 1993), that there was an interiority to the human body
versus an exteriority of the surrounding environment (Steedman, 1995),
that the role of parents, tutors, guardians, or teachers was to manage
the environment relative to what was perceived as interior (the nurture-
nature nexus) (Burman, 1996), and that the most scientic and proper
form of that management was to take place through an approach called
childcenteredness (Baker, 1998).
In the US, childcenteredness entered into curricula debate (Kliebard,
1986). It entailed an explicit belief in redesigning public school curricula
around the nature and needs of childhood as opposed to around clas-
sical content such as Latin and Greek (Hall, 1901, p. 24). The nature
and needs of childhood were considered scientically veriable through
a study of unfolding biophysiological powers in the young. In some
specic movements, such as the Child-study movement, these powers were
named muscular, sexual, and psychic and were thought to appear in that
order in normal growth and development (Hall, 1904; Partridge, 1912).
Without the emergence of such powers, the child could not move into
the next evolutionary stage of development and progress toward a more
independent adult form of citizenship and responsible sexual reproduction
would be in jeopardy.
This conjuncture of beliefs is today somewhat familiar, having already
been unpacked historico-philosophically (Baker, 2001; Burman, 1996;
Cannella, 1997; Morrs, 1990; Rose, 1989; Walkerdine, 1984). The idea
of childcenteredness, of centering in or on the child as a discrete human
4
I use educational theory and educational philosophy synonymously for the purposes
of this paper. For a discussion of the vexed question of what the term eugenics refers to
precisely see Baker (2002) and Garton (2000).
subject worthy of attention and consideration, as distinct in its own right
from adults, has been historicized, however, ever since Philippe Aris
(1960) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Aris
thesis, which has been debated back and forth, posited that it was not
until relatively recently in Europe that the child became an overt focus
of 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 rst time in
the late nineteenth century, for example, in the kindergarten, Froebelian,
Herbartianist, and Child-study literature. The specic ethical commitments
evident 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 childs unfolding
development (Baker, 2001). Such a matching was seen as justice in motion,
as caring, sensitive, helpful, and socially efcient. What has been less
commentated on is how in large measure such terminology was, within the
work of high prole proponents of childcenteredness such as G. Stanley
Hall, a commitment to a eugenic philosophy of education.
If the rate of increase of the best children diminishes and that of the worst increases, the
destiny of our land is sealed and our people are doomed to inevitable decay and ultimate
extinction. These three big Ds we deal with, the defectives, delinquents, and dependents,
the great Biologos or spirit of life would designate or describe by another adjective big
D not t to print or speak, for they are a fearful drag upon our civilization . . . . From
the standpoint of eugenic evolution alone considered, these classes are mostly t only for
extermination in the interests of the progress of the race. On the principle of selection and
the survival of the best, they should be treated as Burbank treats the huge pile of plants he
has cultivated and bred from what would not yield the best products and so burns. These
are 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 a
literary device was depended on in the enunciation of wider nationalist
narratives that exceeded concern for children themselves. The centering
in or on the child was means to articulation of other ends, in the above
case, to the production of a rareed white supremacist society of the able
and continuously evolving ideal citizen.
PLATOS CHILD: POWER-MOTION-REASON, NECESSITY,
AND EDUCATION
In similar yet different ways, Platonic Utopian and cosmological visions
relied on qualities and limits attributed to the young in the enunciation
of narratives that exceeded concern for children themselves. The childs
alterity, and therefore its centrality, within Platonic cosmology occurs,
however, less as a level within a xed, linear chain of Being as in late
nineteenth century imaginings and more as the required metonym of chaos
or necessity in Platonic terms. Within this understanding, the child plays a
constitutive part as tool, problem, and possibility that sets limits on what
can be imagined as the cosmology or what can reformed in a Utopia via
new educational arrangements. The Timaeus, which describes the origins
of the universe and Platos educational/civic treatise, the Republic, which
describes how to re-create the polis through familial and educational
change highlight the necessity of the child in its double sense; the necessity
of the child to the structure of Platonic narratives and the role that the
child-as-necessity plays within such narratives where the mechanisms of
creation and the means to civic re-creation are asserted respectively.
In order to discern how this might pertain to late nineteenth century
educational theories as well as to limit-points in its own time, the
double sense of the childs necessity and the child-as-necessity needs to
be unpacked around the concepts it was in exchange with. Weight must
be given to Platonic conceptions of power, motion, and reason on several
grounds. Firstly, the relation between terms for power and motion needs
to be attended to as a culturally peculiar and idiosyncratic obsession in
Western thought. There have been continuities and ruptures in regard to
what these terms mean, but the vestiges of thinking about universes in
relation to motion and a source called power has generally had enormous
ramication for what Ingstad & Reynolds Whyte (1995) call in contem-
porary anthropological terms cosmologies of personhood. In Platonic
texts as much as those of the late nineteenth century terms for power and
motion circulate in close proximity to each other and bear an important
relation to the guration of the child.
Secondly, these structural similarities do not make meanings homo-
geneous and the differences are important to explore. Power had such
a different meaning in Platonic cosmology that it would be impossible
to conceive of the child in regard to inequality in todays terms. Power
inhered in beings with soul but inherence did not mean possession, even
if conceived as being within or inside a person. The childs differential
value relative to other characters that might be noted, lay in regard to its
distance from knowing Truth in the Platonic sense, not in regard to later
Western models of participation in liberal democracies or in regard to the
(lack of) possession of power in a sovereign form. The Platonic theory of
power did bear a relation to a conception of motion, though, and because
motion so directly shaped the conceptualization of the child it is important
to explore the connections.
Thirdly, Greek terms for motion and power specically relate to the
denition of reason and to images of children in Platonic cosmology. The
telescoped focus on the two Platonic texts thereby provides a concrete
example of how the depiction of order and disorder have relied on a
power-motion-reason nexus that has been sutured to the young. This opens
indirectly onto comparisons with late nineteenth and twentieth century
assumptions about child development; that child development is about the
unfolding of powers, that they unfold in a kind of ordered motion that
enables movement in some cases to the next level of reasoning ability, and
that educational theory and the very structure of schoolings tiers ought to
reect that inner biophysiological unfolding of human powers.
Such comparisons cannot be exaggerated, however. While it is not
uncommon to come across the view that nuggets of todays wisdom about
the young inhere in Platonic conceptions of education (e.g., Wolfe, 2000),
there is another sense in which it might be argued that Platos children
are almost unrecognizable from late nineteenth century depictions or from
more recent analyses which deconstruct child development theories. For
example, as the discussion below will demonstrate, Platos children were
inscribed with a nature and a capacity to unfold, yet without the presump-
tion of a discretely denable organic or inner realm in which such
natures and capacities resided.
5
Further, Platos children were demarcated
in relation to reason but without reason necessarily being in the head.
Reason was not simply considered the product of linear and clear thought
or 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. In
the Timaeus, it is conceptions of Being and Becoming that help frame the
meanings of a power-motion-reason nexus, that suggest the possibilities
for a different kind of child, and the uses to which children could be
put in wider arguments. In the Republic, it is around the question of justice
rather than Being and Becoming that the analytics of power-motion-reason
congeal and for which the child helps to establish boundaries that authorize
the theory of education.
As noted in the introduction, though, drawing the Timaeus and the
Republic 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 are
the same and thus the belief that there is an organic home existing within the body for the
mind is only one particular version of mind. See Jaegwon Kim (1996) for an overview of
different philosophies of mind. In education, see Selby Sheppard (2001) for an incisive
summary of the assumption that a philosophy of mind is connected implicitly or explicitly
to 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 acknowledge
its underlying sources.
contentious. This is so not just because of dispute over whether the
Republic was authored by Plato but because there is considerable disagree-
ment as to whether the conversation and exposition in the Timaeus are
making direct reference to the earlier Republic or not. The reality of
the texts or their author(s) is not at issue here as much as how the
texts espoused particular kinds of realities. The creation of a universe
comprised of particular matter and of Platonic reasonings as to what
mattered suggested the ontology of children and humans within the macro-
cosm (Timaeus). The description of the ideal polis, if imagined as existing
within such a macrocosm, might be said to suggest what could be done
with the elements as originally created by a divine source (Republic). The
view of creation in the Timaeus and the political science of the Republic
together bring the discursive space of the child into view. This child, like
other characters, is at times barely distinguishable from the universe or
environment. The texts are understood here, then, not so much as creation
myth and political philosophy respectively, but as two creation narratives
that are suggestive of a new, or at least crystallizing, moment in Greek
thought; the possibility of seeing the world and the polis as deliberately
constructed for particular purposes. The Timaeus and the Republic can
thus 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 movements
between 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 never
becomes from that which is always becoming but never is. The one is apprehensible by
intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of
opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real. In
addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothing
can come to be without a cause (TT, 28, p. 40).
The most signicant aspect of the Timaeus in regard to children is that
they are barely mentioned. Given the books status as a creation narrative
and childrens often implicit linkage to creation narratives in Western
thought, this might seem a surprising omission. The Timaeus represents
a concept of creation that was new in Greece at the time, however.
6
Under
6
For a contrary view, i.e., that Platos theological conception of God is evident in
pre-Socratic natural theology and not necessarily that new, see Gerson (1990). Gerson
argues 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 and
that 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 matter
of nature. For Plato, the natural world cannot be accounted for in purely
material terms. The creator is in himself the assertion of the opposite view,
that behind the universe is divine purpose. Earlier cosmogonists had used
metaphors from human or animal reproduction; gods and goddesses begat
and produced children, earth gave birth to mountains and sea, the Orphic
world egg was laid and hatched. Following these creation theories were
those of the natural philosophers who saw that the material substance of
nature, whatever that might be, grew, by some inherent but often ill-dened
power, into the world we know (Lee, 1971, p. 7).
The analogy in the Timaeus represents an important break; it is no
longer that of reproduction or growth. It is not children who provide the
metaphors for creation. It is not offspring that are used as justication for
political organization to which creation theories are then linked. The main
metaphor is that of a craftsman engaging in deliberate constructive activity
with particular tools that are at his disposal. The creator-god needs material
to work on the antecedent chaos, the nurse of becoming; he needs a plan
according to which to work the model, the eternal living creature; he
is not omnipotent, for his material limits his operations reason has to
persuade necessity, but within those limitations he produces the best he
can (Lee, 1971, p. 8). The universe, is made not begotten, not grown, but
constructed.
The two orders of reality from which the Timaeus begins, Being
and Becoming, are the registers that signal the importance of limitation,
distinction and struggle as structural features of Greek thought. Being and
Becoming are enormously complex concepts in Platonic thought and the
analysis cannot here do justice to the debate that has arisen around their
interpretation.
7
In terms of the structure of the narrative, the separation of
Being and Becoming precedes the entrance of the difcult and obscure
receptacle, the nurse of all becoming and change. The orders of reality
and the receptacle itself reected an earlier Greek concern with the trans-
itoriness of life and this awareness partly shapes the Platonic dismissal of
every day perception as not fully real. Transitoriness, becoming, sensation
were not reason for being has to becoming the same relation as truth to
belief (TT, 29, p. 41).
continuity in the Platonic postulation of the Form of the Good and the pre-Socratic search
for archai.
7
See Francis M. Cornfords, (1941). The Republic of Plato, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 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 through
logic and mathematics on the one hand and those of empiricism
or sensation on the other sustain the distinction between Being and
Becoming respectively. Sensation, which equates with the Greek for rapid
movement, stood in opposition to the eternity of absolute knowledge that
the world of Being contained.
The ultimately real world, the world of Being, contains the Platonic
Forms, the objects of rational understanding, and the operations of math-
ematics and logic which are conceived as pure, independent, abstract and
ineffectible by other operations. The world of Becoming contains all things
perceived by senses about which no certain nal knowledge is possible. All
humans 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 and
release the immortal part on its transmigratory route. The Being part of
humanity, the soul or life part of the soul/mind/body complex that lives
on, does so because of its perfection. Its harmony and balance needs no
other 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 in
it. So he established a single spherical universe in circular motion, alone but because of its
excellence needing no company other than itself, and satised to be its own acquaintance
and friend. His creation for all these reasons was a blessed God (TT, 3334, p. 45).
The world of Becoming and Being were thus value statements written
into the creators constructive activity. The world of Being bespoke the
eternal, the unchanging, the independent, circular motion, absolute truth,
harmony, balance and self-sustenance. In light of the this, coming-to-
be signied transitory irreality; nitude, change, dependence, outsideness
from truth, harmony, balance, and the ability to care for the self.
Power-Motion-Reason: Conating Insides and Outsides in the Timaeus
God therefore, wishing that all things should be good and so far as possible nothing be
imperfect, and nding the visible universe in a state not of rest but of inharmonious and
disorderly motion, reduced it to order from disorder, as he judged that order was in every
way better. It is impossible for the best to produce anything but the highest. When he
considered, 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 that
intelligence is impossible without soul, in fashioning the universe he implanted reason into
soul and soul in body, and so ensured that his work should be by nature the highest and
best (TT, 30, p. 42).
The different registers of Being and Becoming establish a structure that
gives importance to soul or life and this in turn is articulated to the
importance of reason. Soul is endowed with reason. Soul has a tripartite
conguration body/mind/soul all of which can sometimes be referred
to as soul alone. Soul is a kind of ingrained mathematical perfection and
is the perfect abstraction: The body of heaven is visible but the soul is
invisible and endowed with reason and harmony; being the best creation
of the best of intelligible and eternal things (TT, 37, p. 49).
Reasons nal form is the ability to make judgments and distinguish
properties while harmony is a signier of reasons presence, the ability to
keep all parts of the soul in balance. Heaven and humans had soul, but
where 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 of
soul and hence reason it was very difcult to distinguish an inside and
outside in regard to humans; the world-soul and human-soul melded.
The signicance of soul extends beyond its housing of reason and its
transcendence of bodies or esh. It is motions relationship to reason
that makes soul or life in the creation narrative identiable. Soul is not just
a condition or site of reason but also the source of self-movement. The
acquisition of intelligence and the ability to move without the operation of
an external force are thereby both attributed to soul.
Movement and self-movement, which in Platos usage are often syn-
onymous with the term for motion, are given a special place in the
cosmology based on wider features of Greek thought at the time. Platonic
astronomy gave rise to questions of what caused the regular movement
of heavenly bodies. The response, that bodies in motion must either have
that motion imparted to them by another body or have within them a self-
acting source of motion, reected the Greek conception of dynamics in
the relative absence of machinery and of metals to build them. In a world
where things were pushed and pulled by humans or animals, that is, in
a world dealing with the overcoming of inertia as a central concern of
dynamics, weight was given to those things that could move themselves
(Lee, 1971). For Plato, the things capable of generating motion without
an external impulse were those living things he credited with soul or
life. Soul thus becomes the source of motion and is inscribed as the self-
mover of natural things in a worldview already predicated on the belief
that anything that moved must have a cause. Soul is consequently regarded
as the force that keeps natural creatures like humans and the heavenly
bodies like planets in motion. Again, soul blurs any modern conception
of discrete inner/outer realms around a person; it is an invisible mover of
all observable motion.
This dependence on a criterion of motion provided a discursive space
for another concept. The conjoining of reason to movement and movement
to 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 terms
as that which lay behind the visibility of nature and its movements.
The powers of soul transgress modern disciplinary boundaries. Power is
required at all points in the cosmology for explaining what Plato refers to
as 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 as
a system of substitutions and replacements. The universe was a moving
image of eternity; The nity that motion represented could only be
suggestive of a purer original model that the universe imitated; It was the
kind of motion that dened and distinguished reason, feelings, and appet-
ites; It was the relationship between the motions present that suggested
order or disorder; It was the movement of planets that begged the question
as to what initiated their observable regularities, and so on.
As noted above, such cosmological explanations were predicated on a
broader 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, signicantly, an intelligible one and it was the
presence of power in spiritual and natural terms that helped to explain
its 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 universe
is created out of goodness under the assumption that where there is good-
ness there is divine purpose. The universe is, therefore, underwritten by an
intelligent force or an underlying purposive cause. In both physical and
spiritual terms, it is dunamis (potential, strength, force, or power) that
explained human movement, the planetary trajectories, and the productive
quality of the creator.
8
Whether or not this power in spiritual terms is the possession of the demiurge is
another question. For Francis Cornford (1937), the creator is in no way equivalent with a
Judeo-Christian god and is more Reason (capital R) personied (or regarding Cornford,
rather than personied, mythologized). For Stephen Menn (1995), however, the demiurge
possesses something; the demiurge possesses force and is the cause imposing limit on
the unlimited. The demiurge, as a possessing cause in Menns (1995, p. 11) view, mixes
together the elements of the world-soul, imposes harmonic proportions on the whole, and
subordinates its irrational to its rational motion. At one level, however, the debate over
possessions 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, power
functions 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 to
become. Like other living creatures who were living by virtue of being self-
moving, power inhabited soul. The power of reason did not inhere in all
living creatures, however. Plants, for instance, while endowed with soul or
life, were only endowed with its lower parts, the appetites and feelings. The
upward growth of plants was not considered movement and their relative
lack of horizontal movement from place to place suggested their relative
lack 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 is
without 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 reect on its
own nature, by revolving in and about itself, rejecting motion from without and exercising
a motion of its own. So it is a creature with a life of its own, but it cannot move and is xed
and rooted because it has no self-motion (TT, 77, p. 103).
As for the demiurge, powers conceptualization in regard to humans
suggested limitations. Different powers limited the play of any one power.
Platos description of the robbing of the souls power and motion by that
of the Circle of the Different is indicative of how the conjuncture power-
motion-reason was pivotal both to the creation narrative itself and the
setting of limits within it. Thus, as an explanatory device, power does not
enter the narrative without some means of delimitation already being in
place, i.e., the advent of competing powers that tether each other.
It is here that the power-motion-reason relationship begins to suggest
the shape of the child in absentia. Those unvarying regularities in nature,
tied particularly to the observation of movement of heavenly bodies, were
in Platonic terms the proof of rational and purposive design. In the Sophist,
for instance, Plato came to the conclusion that there were two basic
kinds of judgments, conjunction/afrmation on the one hand and disjunc-
tion/negation on the other. Afrmation, where we assert that a thing has
a property and negation where we assert that it doesnt, are the two basic
kinds of mental processes that belong to the reasoning (immortal) part
of the soul (not the appetitive or feeling parts). The two main kinds of
astronomical movements Plato observed, the daily rotation of heavenly
bodies from east to west and the apparent movement of the sun, moon,
and xed 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 the
Same (uniform circular motion) and the Circle of the Different (generally
linear motions like up, down, left, right, forward, backward, retrograda-
tion). These different circles of movement account for the different kinds
of 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 was
specically rendered visible by the approximation that the presence of
uniform circular motion represented. Reason is not linear, it is not deduc-
tion, nor the assertion of thought over appetite or emotion. It is identiable
through what uniform circular motion signies, 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 reason
and best resembled by uniform circular motion that is unaffected by other
dynamics, by pure independence, a perpetual self-spinning ability. The
heavenly bodies like planets and earthly ones like humans have both soul
and body, however, and are not therefore pure reason. They are awed
copies of a pure original and their movements e.g., planetary or physical,
are accounted for by an older Pythagorean view that it was combinations
of forces that produced movement effects. Humans must struggle, then,
because of the presence of different kinds of motions which constantly
seek to detract from the uniform circular motion of reason and the making
of rational judgments about the empirical world. In other words, uniform
circular motion approximates reason; it resembles a creators independ-
ence and inability to be effected by anything or anyone else and as such
signies pure, accurate, untainted judgment.
For instance, Plato describes the discombobulating effect that the
entrance 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 Circles
of the Same and Different structure the universe and from the rst act
of creation they took time to settle down. They are present as competing
forces in humans, and from birth, take time to settle down also. The Circles
represent motions and they are the source of struggle that is denitional of
personhood. Being able to identify someone as a human or a child was
9
And into this body, subject to the ow of growth and decay, they fastened the orbits
of 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 conict of motions of
the whole creature were irregular, fortuitous and irrational. It was subject to all six motions
and so strayed in all six directions . . . . The motions caused by all these [properties of
empirical objects] were transmitted through the body and impinged on the soul, and for
that reason were later called, as they still are, sensations. At the time of which we are
speaking the disturbance was at its greatest, and these motions reinforced the perpetual
ow of the body in upsetting the orbits of the soul, bringing that of the Same to a standstill
and 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 was
the motion that existed in the universe and the approximation or closeness
of 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 nearer
to a Godly perfection.
To understand how the child enters and does textual labor in the
Timaeus, then, requires an understanding of the Being/Becoming register
and of the power-motion-reason nexus that shapes the qualities of the
books characters indirectly. When terms for children are used directly
they are primarily grouped with Gods, with fathers, and with men. The
stamp on the visible child is a masculine one and is reinforced by the
closing of the narrative. In the nal instance, the inharmonious life of a
man will see his rebirth as a woman or lower animal, not as a child. The
childs absence from being a form of punishment suggests the signicance
attached to the childs maleness. Despite some feminist readings of the
receptacle 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 the
Timaeus at large as the responsibility of femaleness or even as products of
a mother.
10
Children are the implicitly male offspring of Gods, fathers, and
men, the populational groups who are the models, the rst 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 in
regard to the distinctions that a power-motion-reason nexus helps establish
between characters.
The child is not gured directly, then, in regard to scientic studies of
the child as in the late nineteenth century, because it is inescapably and
already a function of the joint theorization of power-motion-reason.
11
The
clash of motions that is characteristic of childhood in Platonic terms signi-
es a bad relation between different powers. Power in both spiritual and
10
Sharon Larisch (1994) argues that the present-day tendency of feminist critiques of
Plato has been to see all of his dialgoues as seeking to establish binary hierarchies. She
contests such readings of Plato insofar as she argues that they disallow the noticing of
the 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 child
mediates these views through appeal to the term constitutive, taken from feminist philo-
sophical notions of constitutive instability (see Deutscher, 1997). Binary hierarchies, of
the Pythagorean kind that Larisch notes, can be read into the dialogues, but these can
only be noticed insofar as the character called child plays a signicant constitutive role
in 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 articulating
the 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 and
hence have power. Power underpins the scale of Becoming/Being through
its articulation to a capacity to reason, to move harmoniously, and to
know or judge accurately why that might be important. In regard to these
conjoinings, the child is produced not as a becomingness that is without
power but as a becomingness that cannot yet interrelate and balance its
various powers well enough.
Child-as-Necessity: Limiting Power and Humanity
The Timaeus implicitly provides another discursive inscription of the
child besides it being a subject without a clear interior, a poor manager
of powers, irrational, outside harmony and truth, and incapable of self-
sustenance. This further role is achieved through the play of what is known
as the necessary cause in Platonic cosmology. In the narrative, power is
not simply limited through the presence of other like powers. The pres-
ence of another factor in creation, called necessity, takes up the role of a
delimiting but different kind of power. The signicance of necessity lies in
regard to the metonym it provides for the child; it is through a concept of
necessity 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 of
creation. If material of a certain kind, e.g., air, earth, re and water, is
necessary for certain purposes to be achieved, then that material may have
qualities outside what those purposes require and these qualities or side-
effects may be random. Necessity, the indeterminate cause, chance, or
more literally from the Greek, the wandering cause, is a difcult concept
but its importance lies in the job of delimitation. It is arbitrary and it is
irreducible in the sense that it will never disappear; there will always be
something that cannot be explained (Lee, 1971, p. 10). It is the element of
uncertainty in the empirical that Plato gives the name necessity.
Order is secured or brought into view through the presence of the
wandering cause whose function is to establish limits in regard to what
can be known. The limitations that the creator has on his powers of creation
ow similarly through what humans can know of the universe. That is, in
building the universe reason had to persuade necessity. The two tools are
also known as the two causes reason being divine and necessity being
the material object of persuasion.
The child in the Timaeus parallels the function of the necessary cause
as that which lies outside reason and also delimits it. The interpenetration
of child and necessity again confound a discrete interior/exterior realm
in regard to human existence. The problems of the wider universe, are
also the problems of humans, and it is the child who is constituted as both
problem and possibilities for humanity through its coded inscription as the
wandering 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 outside
the rational, necessity. Necessity is not simply a different kind of power
because it cannot be determined. It is an indeterminate cause of random
effects. The power that inheres in or behind the act of creation is a rational
power. It is the active force by which a creator can be known as a God
12
and through which movement can be explained. This kind of power thus
enters the cosmology in consonance with a notion of limits as necessity.
It is not despite the presence of power that the wandering cause contours
what can be achieved. It is because of the presence of power that other
limits enter the narrative and take the form of the necessary cause. The
struggles of various kinds that are typied by different movements, e.g., the
struggles of the tripartite soul/mind/body, are struggles between reason and
necessity on a wider scale. Necessity constitutes the limits of reason and
therefore limits the power of reason. Platos use of power as an explanatory
device, as the concept behind, or at least inherent in, reason, movement
and creation, was unthinkable without there being a eld of delimitation
already in place. It is the play of necessity that inhibits the excess of
different powers and which is the precondition to recognizing harmony
as balance.
Implications for Educational Theory
The implications for educational theory of these depictions that gure
the child are at least twofold: rst, 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 of
humanity 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 about
the best result, and it was by this subordination of necessity to reasonable persuasion that
the universe was originally constituted as it is (TT, 48, p. 67).
As for the cosmos at large, there is a randomness operating in regard
to the child. Chaotic motions inhabit the child and it may make incorrect
12
God is a difcult term regarding translation. Technically, God is not referred to as
Zeus in the Timaeus.
judgments. Sometimes it will distinguish accurately between things that
are the same and things that are different and sometimes it will not. The
randomness suggested by the childs ontological turmoil shadows neces-
sity in the universes construction. The Timaeus does not argue this link
directly. 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, the
children of the eternal creator who are held responsible for the construc-
tion of mortals like humans, for building into humans the indispensable
equipment which represents mortality.
13
The space for education and the signicance given to the passage of
time only make sense, then, in regard to the possibilities for randomness,
for disorder in the Platonic sense, to be the outcome in the childs matura-
tion. Thus, the child is gured as the material that the human creators work
with the parents and the educator. The child is the raw material that may
desist in the face of reasons power. The child-as-necessity lends validity
to a system of thought that suggests that education should intervene in a
persons life. The randomness that necessity represents cannot be trusted
to deliver the preferred order, the settled, reasoning adult, the harmonious
movement away from Hades. Necessity made being reborn a woman or
lower 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 child
represented the wandering cause that was necessary for the sake of the
divine. Without the child as necessity against which reason could rail, it
would be difcult to notice, to distinguish, and therefore to judge anything
at all.
Signicantly, it was not that the child provided contrast for the man
in a simplistic binary where any identity suggests its other and lends
meaning to it. Rather, without the childs relation to the creator, there could
have been no child/man opposition at all and nor could reason have come
into view. The difference between sameness and difference would have
been unrecognizable and would have expelled the possibility for reason
and judgment from the adult. Because reason meant distinguishing,
meant afrmation or negation and accurately judging sameness and differ-
13
He [the creator] made the divine with his own hands, but he ordered his own children
to make the generation of mortals. They took over from him an immortal principle of
soul, and, imitating him, encased it in a mortal physical globe, with the body as a whole
for vehicle. And they built onto it another mortal part, containing terrible and necessary
feelings: pleasure, the chief incitement to wrong, pain, which frightens us from good,
condence and fear, two foolish counsellors, obstinate passion and credulous hope. To
this mixture they added irrational sensation and desire which shrinks from nothing, and so
gave the mortal element its indispensable equipment (TT, 69, p. 95).
ence, the child was constitutive of what noticing or distinguishing
could mean.
The child gure did not simplistically sit in binary opposition with
reason either, then, because it was the child who suggested that reason
existed in other realms and what forms it took. After thereby presen-
cing reason and delimiting humanity, the child is evacuated of that which
it (textually) labored to presence. It moves furtively from its complex
underwriting of reasons meaning to poking its head up simply as a
subject without reason in full measure. The child had become, within the
narratives structure, that subject without which as Plato puts it we cannot
perceive, apprehend, or in any way attain our objective.
To this end, the Platonic conation of inner and outer realms around
humans serves an important purpose that bears itself in the encoding
between child and necessary cause. The often indistinguishable sense of
what is inner and what is outer in regard to humans does not simply
secure the interconnectedness of all things but establishes in the narrative
the ground on which one must learn to care for ones self as part of that
interconnectedness. The child, the necessary cause, cannot teach the man
to do this but the child can and does delimit any possibility of a man raising
himself 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 the
sake of the divine. The child worked to secure the special place reserved
for the creator and to frame the limits of what a man could or should think
was possible relative to such a creator. It is in regard to constituting the
limit-points, that of the power-motion-reason nexus and that of necessity,
then, that the child helps to establish boundaries around which education
thinks it must dance, entering into human life under certain conditions,
and comporting its direction. The more detailed and specic educational
theory and meanings of justice in the Republic can thus be read against
such a background.
THE REPUBLIC: JUSTICE, CIVIC REFORM, AND THE CHILD
In contrast to the opening of the Timaeus the Republic does not begin with
discussion of Being and Becoming but forms around the question of what
justice is. The Republic is also explicitly concerned with the question of
what should be done with children, with some of its books overtly focusing
on their rearing. The (in)famous prescription for organizing different forms
of education around people with presumably different natures and capa-
cities, gold, silver, and bronze, probably signies its most controversial
aspect if modern visions of education for social justice are taken as the
marker. Justice does not mean treating everyone the same. It may seem
odd from the present, then, that the Republic revolves explicitly around
the question of justice and offers differentiated education for differentiated
natures 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 the
Greek city-states. Against the backdrop of the anti-philosophic orientation
of 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 Republics dialogue was not
to secure a geopolitical space that would have enabled Socrates to live a
little longer but to secure a discursive space for philosophy itself as the
most universal concern. It is the concern with the private or particular that
must be overcome if individuals are to philosophize and cities are to be
ruled by philosophy. The guardian who is totally devoted to the common
good is the prototype philosopher who is devoted to knowing the good
(Bloom, 1968).
The blurring of human virtue with the greater good that the Republic
establishes suggests a similar methodological move as in the Timaeus the
whole bears through the parts. For the polis, this means that the just man
prots others, himself, and the whole. It means that there is a common
good; the community is bound together by justice, and no one sacrices
their own personal advantage to it. Human virtue, then, is the maximiza-
tion, the excellence, of all components that contribute to a greater whole
from which the parts cannot readily be isolated.
Within this conceptualization of justice, various reproductive, rearing,
and educational strategies are recommended. There is a hierarchical form
of governance, where philosopher-kings/queens rule, special warriors ght
to defend the city-state, and farmers and laborers work manually to
produce its commodities. Children of philosopher-kings/queens will never
know their biological parents and the biological parents will not know
their offspring, the baby being removed immediately from the mother after
birth. Children will thereby be raised in common and live in common with
the philosopher-kings/queens, undergoing a special form of education that
will prepare them for future leadership or as warriors.
This form of communal society cannot be achieved or sustained without
a radical interruption to the dominant traditions of the city-states, including
family traditions. Ancestry and age, the trajectories which structured
authority in Athens, are jettisoned by the symbolic departure of the father,
Cephalus, from the dialogues (Bloom, 1968). The departure of age and
ancestry as markers of traditional authority opens the radical space in
which children are regured. The discussion on justice can thus proceed
toward its unique meaning that would require a different kind of training
and organization of the young.
Robin Barrow recommends suspending modern understandings of
justice as the same treatment of all in order to understand Platos unique
meaning. Barrow argues that criticism that Platos Republic is built around
treating unequals unequally (for example as a forerunner of modern
eugenic philosophy), has to be understood in reference to Platos principle
of impartiality, where the principle of impartiality is the principle that
people should be treated the same except where there are relevant grounds
for not doing so (Barrows, 1976, p. 29). Barrow argues that this principle
is a fundamental denition of justice for Plato and that what he provides in
the 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 Platos conception of justice
is the signicance of a power-motion-reason nexus for guring the child-
as-necessity, for dening justice, and for rationalizing the educational
theory.
Power-Motion-Reason and the Republics Children
The inscription of children in the Republic is not necessarily suggested by
what 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 of
religious poems and appropriate stories of heroes tells little, on their own,
about how children were inscribed. That is, the techniques and content of
education do not alone communicate the wider reasonings that gave the
child or children their shape. It is not enough to claim that practices
produce subjectivities to understand or unpack Platos children here.
The complexity of the relationship between content, technique, and
their wider framing of characters is revealed in the very structure of the
Republics dialogue. All of the pedagogical strategies for raising junior
philosopher-kings/queens in particular can enter only after lengthy discus-
sions as to what justice, human nature, and power are. Eventually, it is not
the child that guides the curriculum or the curriculum that guides the child,
but a complex interplay of ontological and epistemological assumptions
that 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 that
does not use the term, then in the Republic the curriculum has some of
its cornerstones in a Platonic power-motion-reason nexus that offsets what
counts as knowledge and truth. Pure knowledge is the maximization of
human potential to approach uniform circular motion, to develop the souls
capacity to reason. And for the child, this capacity cannot be understood
outside of its relationship to what power means in the text.
In the Republic, dunamis inhabits the human world as both a capability
and as political power. In the latter sense power becomes the to be
able of organized life in the polis and the political in political power
becomes synonymous with decision-making and its ally, rule-abidingness.
Socrates induces the observation that political power is something that
should be coincidental with philosophy and that that coincidence needs
to 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 dened as a capacity to know
what is. However, the distinction between political power and powers
inscription as an epistemological criterion is not a very discrete one. Both
rely 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 something
else. This spawns the restricted availability of consciousness to the adult
and opens the ground for philosophy as foundational to justice.
Power is thereby introduced in the Republic as a concept that helps
to distinguish between opinion and knowledge where opinion is between
being and not to be the same locale occupied by the young child in
the Timaeus. The literary function of power lies, then, in regard to making
distinctions between what is real or absolute truth.
Doesnt knowledge naturally depend on what is, to know of what is that it is and how it
is? However, in my opinion, its necessary to make this distinction rst
What distinction?
We will assert that powers are a certain class of beings by means of which we are capable
of what we are capable, and also everything else is capable of whatever it is capable. For
example, I say sight and hearing are powers, if perchance you understand the form of which
I wish to speak . . . . Now listen to how they look to me. In a power I see no colour or shape
or anything of the sort such as I see in many other things to which I look when I distinguish
one thing from another for myself. With a power I look only to this on what it depends
and what it accomplishes; and it is on this basis that I come to call each of the powers a
power, and that which depends on the same thing, and accomplishes the same thing, I call
the same power, and that which depends on something else and accomplishes something
else, I call a different power (TR, 477b477c, pp. 15758).
14
Unless the philosophers rule as kings or those now called kings and chiefs genuinely
and adequately philosophise, and political power and philosophy coincide in the same
place . . . there is no rest from ills for the cities . . . nor I think for human kind, nor will the
regime we have described . . . ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible and, see the
light of the sun (TR, 475d, p. 155).
The above indicates how power occupies a vast meta-physical locale in
the 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 and
hearing 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 are
available because of what it must do in the narrative. Its literary function
is simultaneously mobilization and delimitation as in the Timaeus. In the
Republic the theory of power specically performs an epistemological task
of expelling the lesser part of the soul as bodily, making sensory mechan-
isms secondary to the inherence of a primary power, and lending credence
to the immateriality of thought.
Power is not a visible, substantive, sensible quality authorizing this
distinction between opinion and knowledge, then. It is brought into the
making of distinctions and the judgment of truth not as color or shape
but as a transcendental principle of distinction. In being a transcendental
principle of distinction, it operates to distinguish between opinion and
knowledge which in turn structures the qualities of different characters
in the text, including the ability to reason justly as a philosopher-king
would.
15
For example, for the overly sensory child the lack of ability
to manage different powers well is again referred to and thereby suggests
a need for the childs education. As Kieran Egan (1984) also notes, it
is in relation to a conception of knowledge as absolute that eikasia and
pistis encapsulate the childs 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 conception
of justice under such sway of supercial opinion rather than deep knowl-
edge. Dianoia (like thinking) and noesis (like intelligence) mark the higher
activities of thought that supersede the lower forms of eikasia and pistis,
indicating the (golden) childs movement into the man, the attainment of
proper and enduring knowledge of the Forms. Such a shift in levels is
asserted, then, through the depiction of different kinds of power.
15
As Scolnicov (1988) notes, too, knowledge/opinion in the Republic V is rationalized
somewhat differently relative to the Meno. In TR, the power related to knowledge and
what can be done with it is not the power related to opinion and what it can accomplish: If
different powers are naturally dependent on different things and both are powers -opinion
and knowledge and each is, as we say, different, then on this basis its not admissible that
the knowable and the opinable be the same (TR, V, 478ab, pp. 15859).
As for the Timaeus, then, powers versatility across spiritual, political,
and epistemological assertions, provided the meaning-space that Platonic
children could occupy. The different powers that were available to the one
person such as those of knowledge and those of opinion were suggestive
of the different powers dominating adult and child respectively. If opinion
was 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 preserve
of those laboring adults and bronze-natured humans who would never
develop beyond opinion the terms signifying the child slide into the
description of some of the adults. Further, if opinion was synonymous with
what was taken in through sensation, then opinion was the main power
of the child that overly sensory creature whose motions were erratic
and whose mechanisms of visceral perception were working overtime. For
children as a category, and for their differentiation from each other, power
operates as a normative concept; its multiple textual inscriptions authorize
generalizations, recombinations, and distinctions between characters and
their 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 children
appear. It is the plural, children, that is the most common iteration and
perhaps this is so because men, women and children must be in common,
in the communal setting of childrearing. This does not suggest a wider
availability of models for stamping children, but a more overt dependence
on children for buttressing the argument for a different kind of governance.
For instance, the iterations in the Republic include groupings such as
father and child, children as gods sons, children as offspring, women and
children on their own, children grouped in a threesome with women and
slaves, children and freemen, men and children, and children mentioned
on their own.
The treatment of children as subjects with their own characteristics
takes place in regard to what the requirements for the ideal polis are. That
is, whatever is needed to construct the city-state is constructed as possible
because of the qualities attributed to the child. To this end, children entered
to constitute points regarding how to organize justice and education (in
Platonic terms). They enter after the discussions of justice and after the
curriculum, music and gymnastic especially, have been decided. They are
not the starting points for such discussion but the points and tool of its
application. Specic references to children include the following: Children
enter to explain men and Gods behavior; Children constitute a point of
passage in regard to inheritance of good fortune like feasting; They are
treated as objects to be dealt with, such as in advice over what to do with
women and children in particular circumstances; They enter as catamites,
as objects of ownership like slaves and women; They are mentioned in
regard to rewards for success in battle, such as the increased access to
procreation that good warriors will receive; They enter as sites of punish-
ment retribution for injustices done by a father will be allocated to his
children; They enter as synonyms for adult fear, like waking from sleep
with a fright like a child; They enter as synonyms for fondness, such as
the liking one has for something that is ones product; And nally, they
enter as counterpoints that need to be dealt with in policy discussions on
the topics of deliberation, democracy, resources, and the procurement of
loyalty all of which children can interrupt or destabilize.
The few times children appear in the text on their own, i.e., outside
of direct grouping with other characters, they are variously referred to
as being as irrational as a line (rather than reasons uniform circular
motion), as imitative and teachable, e.g., children can be taught the rudi-
ments of war by being present in battles and children are initially far
from Truth. They enter as already differentiated, as of different kinds, like
gold-, silver- or bronze-natured, and as changelings. They are described
as lacking in care of self, which had religious connotations in ancient
Greece. Care has to be taught. These, then, constituted the individual
characteristics of children as presented in the Republic and it was these
characteristics 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. Children
were considered to have a literary utility in a worldview that saw that an
ideal could be made through human labor. When children are specic-
ally mentioned in the Republic they enter, from a modern viewpoint, as
predominantly negative examples to illustrate a more ideal polis. They
occupy a negative discursive space given the weight that eternity, perdur-
ance, and knowledge hold. Simultaneously, though, children are gured on
occasion as positive points of appeal in regard to conceptions of social
reconstruction. Through the analytical priorities of a power-motion-reason
nexus, the gure of the child can be made to constitute the raw material that
can usher in Platonic preferences for reorganization of the polis. The ideal
polis cannot be disarticulated from ideal rearing practices and thus it is the
gure of the child that enables intersection between Utopias and present
realities. On the basis of a perfection that must be striven for, children
found their place as tool, problem, and possibility.
Implications for Educational Theory
The guring of children within the reconstruction of the polis is suggested
not just by their relationship to an analytics of power-motion-reason that
structures the difference between opinion and knowledge and gives form
to paideia, but by what is assumed their other predominant characteristic,
plasticity or teachability.
[Socrates to Adeimantus] Dont you know that the beginning is the most important part of
every work and that this is especially so with anything young and tender? For at that stage
its most plastic, and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes
to give it.
Quite so.
Then shall we so easily let the children hear just any tales fashioned by just anyone and
take into their souls opinions for the most part opposite to those well suppose they must
have 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 of
children in the elite philosopher and warrior castes, of men and women
procreating and not knowing whom their children were, could not have
made sense, for how would a reclamation and redesign of the young in a
city-state signify anything new? The new form of governance pivoted on
the plasticity of the young.
It is not an open-ended plasticity, however, and it is here that similar
neighborhoods begin to appear relative to late nineteenth century reason-
ings on which eugenics was predicated. The relative weight of the two
registers, Being and Becoming, which also appear in the Republic places
limits on the kinds of humans who are to philosophize and hence to have
consciousness in Platonic terms. The reality of Being, inscribed as the
eternity of the incontestable Forms, can become evident only to those
golden-natured humans who have an inborn capacity for coming to know
the Forms. The distinction between Becoming and Being conjoined full
knowledge of Being to a capacity which is tted for it. This conjoining
acted back on the young; only some of them would ever see the Forms.
A belief in the limited availability of knowing the Forms enables
the argument to proceed around how to best educate different kinds of
children. The Circles of Same and Different that interpenetrate macro- and
microcosm, that inhabit every body/soul/mind and structure the universe
in the Timaeus, nd expression in the hierarchical conceptions of human
nature in the Republic. Only some humans will have their motions settle
down enough to maximize reason and nd harmony and balance. Those
involved in manual work, in the overuse of the esh, signify those who
have 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 places
available for becoming a philosopher-king/queen.
And here appears an oft-noted tension in the Platonic Republic, for
if childrens 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 thought
they are not mutually exclusive or oppositional concepts. It is not a matter
of nature versus nurture. For Plato, the nature of humans was simultan-
eously an anti-nature in the polis as it currently existed. Further, nature, or
the pre-determined capacity, could go different ways given the presence of
the indeterminate cause. The natural limitations to human capacity that
the Timaeus establishes in the very act of the universes creation (belatedly)
authorized the building of a different kind of city-state in the Republic. To
appear as a plausible strategy, that is, the possibility for contouring the
environment in ways that the Republic recommends suggests a preexisting
dissatisfaction with how the environment had already been contoured
away from what was perceived as natural. What was natural in regard
to children was inseparable from what was natural in the universe. As
such, the educational theory espoused in the Republic did not to take the
form of nature versus nurture. Rather, education was presenced at the level
of preserving natural interconnections that current city-states had drifted
from; the Platonic argument for reconstructing the social environment
could not take place outside an appeal to natural order as justice and justice
as what is tting.
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 that
are thought suited to the maximization of that inherited capacity. One
cannot stand without the other and it becomes extremely difcult 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 factor
in educational prescriptions. Knowledge of the Forms isnt put into the
child by training. The capacity must already be there. On the other hand,
the capacity is, in pragmatic terms, useless unless it is maximized. The
actualization of that capacity is not already there. It must be brought about.
Neither external action nor internal potential override the educational
prescription as its foundational explanatory concept. The interdependence
of Platonic notions of Becoming, Being, Knowing Thyself, and Knowing
the Forms undermines any neat summaries of a central plank in regard to
the educational theory.
As for the comportment of humans in the Timaeus, then, the perceived
potential for undesirable (unnatural, unjust) outcomes gave construc-
tion metaphors the ground to operate. An educational theory could emerge
but the range of its imaginings was restricted to the limit-points that the
gure of the child helped to provide. In the case of the Republic, the
construction of something as educational was dependent on the anticipa-
tion of failure in the midst of pre-determination. While paideia did not just
refer 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 writ
small 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 upon
by boundaries it helped to establish. In the series of exchanges, zones
are marked for how an educational theory could appear as educational
and what it could work with and on. Limit-points are set, structuring
the rationale for educations entrance and the specicity 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 qualities
being given different characters or populational groupings. It is here
that the child is gured and in return helps gure a power-motion-reason
nexus that distinguishes between characters. The distinction that such a
nexus provides shapes the characters qualities, giving further meaning
to Being/Becoming in the Timaeus and to justice in the Republic. The
other form of entrance of the child is as a requirement for illustrating
broader points once such qualities are accepted. The gure of child-
as-necessity demonstrates this. Without this encoding in both narratives
education would have little to work against, with, or on as a practice, for
what exactly was it that was thought to need contouring, control, manage-
ment, engineering, tempering, or balance? The distinction between the two
kinds of literary entrances are ultimately not sustainable, however, but are
suggestive of how the child could be thought of and of what could be done
through the child once it was presenced as pre-determined yet chaotic and
plastic.
These considerations give over onto rethinking late nineteenth and
twentieth century theories of child development as they were espoused
through educational philosophies such as eugenics, childcenteredness,
and Child-study. That is, how might the limit-points constructed around
notions of power-motion-reason, necessity, and justice through guration
of the child inform more contemporary understandings of educational
theory?
In regard to a power-motion-reason nexus what becomes noticeable via
comparison is the similarity of analytical structures or props and yet the
specicity of differences in the precision of their enactment. For example,
the use of a power-motion-reason nexus in Platonic thought indicates how
in the Timaeus and the Republic the most important distinction in regard
to the child was not its opposition to adults but to the eternal Being and to
lesser Gods. The child/adult relation is decentered in so far as reproduction
analogies are not the source of the visible world. Creating the universe
in the Timaeus is not analogous to adults having children. Creating the
ideal polis in the Republic requires the breaking of what conjugal relations
signify 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 to
create them but from humanitys wider imperfection in regard to eternal
Being.
In dominant late nineteenth century educational theories in the West,
a power-motion-reason nexus can still be discerned as a limit-point in
how the string of characters are produced as objects of discourse but the
texture of those characters and their positions are different. For example, in
the Child-study movements version of the developing children, an other-
worldly God is somewhat backgrounded and it is the competent adult
citizen who constitutes the key foil. Nonetheless, there were still inescap-
able, multiple references to the ways in which something called power
could never be outside of such characters. The child-as-unfolding-in-set-
stages is produced, for instance, as an unquestionable character: Here as
everywhere the rule holds that powers themselves must be unfolded before
the ability to check or even to use them can develop.
16
The reason for
testing and studying the child directly and for reforming (newly invented)
public schools was to ensure a balanced unfoldment of powers: To t the
normal stages of growth of interest and capacity in childhood, most tradi-
tional branches of school work need, some more and some less, radical
reconstruction to t and mould body, mind, and heart, and to bring all
powers to fullest health and unfoldment.
17
A power-motion-reason nexus
is thus similarly used to demarcate characters but how such characters are
brought 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 conate inner and outer realms
around the child, but to mobilize such realms as binary. While the objective
is 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, emphasis
added.
17
G. Stanley Hall, Moral Education and Will-Training, 1892, p. 189.
level it takes place through a different strategy. For example, in regard to
evolution and environment: It would also seem to be probable that the
environment, the inuence of which is augmented somewhat in proportion
as maturity is attained, would be felt by advancing the species, innitesim-
ally though it be in each generation, toward a more perfect development of
its higher and later acquired powers.
18
New characters such as the feebleminded, the idiot, and the intelligent
emerged through the combined availability of the nexus and structural
descriptors such as inside/outside: In idiots arrest of higher powers often
goes with hypertrophy of these movements [automatisms], as seen in head-
beaters (as if, just as nature impels those partially blind to rub the eyes
for light hunger, so it prompts the feeble-minded to strike the head for
cerebrations), rockers, rackers, shakers, biters, etc.
19
and it is those who
have been trained to put forth mental power that come to the front later,
while it is only those whose acquisitions are not transpeciated into power
who are in danger of early collapse.
20
Thus, even though terms such as power, motion, and reason (i.e., where
reason is now understood as higher powers or intelligence) operate in
analytical proximity in gurations of the child and are observable in the
late nineteenth century educational theories, there are local differences
that their framing within a Darwinian rather than Platonic cosmology
provides. In recasting the child as a placeholder between subhuman and
fully human forms on an evolutionary chain of Being, the hierarchy
between characters is obviously not sustained via appeal to Circles of Same
and Different, to an overt astro-theology. Rather, it is through a centering
of Man within humanist discourse that a sublated Christian theology can
arise to distinguish characters and assume limit-points in what can be done
with different kinds. The more noticeable but not complete this-worldly
orientation is made overt through an emphasis on the analysis of interior
biophysiological 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 wandering
cause has its limits directly in the esh. Not all children can be contoured
as bronze, silver, and gold-natured children can in the Republic. According
to Hall at least (as quoted earlier), certain castes are good only for exterm-
ination in systematic ways. Mortality takes on new meaning and the
limit-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 or
conquered by Man and as such the special place reserved for the Platonic
creator has shifted; the creator creates Man to work toward a perfection
that is now thought achievable on earth and amenable to measurement.
Second, the late nineteenth century idea of childcenteredness as
following the nature and needs of childhood demonstrates a slippage in
the idea of necessity, of what is considered necessary, or even a need in
regard to demarcation of human being.
[T]he motor superuities of awkwardness, embarrassment, extreme effort, excitement,
fatigue, sleepiness, etc., are simply the forms in which we receive the full momentum of
heredity and mark a natural richness of the raw material of intellect, feeling, and especially
of will. Hence they must be abundant, all parts should act in all possible ways at rst
untrammeled by the activity of all other parts and functions. Some of these activities are
more 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 young
childs movements that the above represents. This turned such movements
into evidence of recapitulation theory. The childs motions spoke to a
raw material that had not yet been worked and ordered and as such they
meant for proponents of childcenteredness an intrinsic ignorance, a lack of
mindfulness.
In what was referred to as the kindergarten stage of development, for
instance, a child was thought to have virtually no recognizable intelligence,
a kind of unconsciousness attributable to the raw material that had not yet
been processed and that excluded it from being considered fully human.
Kindergartners, who were perceived as constantly on the move due to
such motor superuities that marked the full momentum of heredity and
its 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 did
some 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 as
a lovely little animal, full of helplessness, incapacity, and ignorance, but
also of boundless potentialities.
23
The nature and needs of the child was thus a statement made relative
to supposition of other laws; laws that some contemporaries, such as Miss
Blow, didnt 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 principles
are cardinal, has ever dreamed of denying this basal truth . . . . To argue as Miss Blow
does so earnestly, that to admit that children pass through lower stages in reappearing the
history of the race is a plea for allowing positive immorality in them, is too preposterous
for consideration.
24
The double-sense of the childs necessity and the child-as-necessity is
thus reworked through such educational theories. The gure child is still
required in the narrative structure, in this case, as a recapitulated past that
opens up some possibilities for reorganizing the future. But the child-as-
necessity, as the random element, as the Platonic wandering cause that
delimits other powers and that is indeterminate cannot be allowed to fully
breathe. The child instead must be investigable, knowable, open to admin-
istration and organized in such a way that any randomness of a negative
kind that nature might spawn is proactively guarded against rather than
actively utilized.
Third, the analysis points to the divergent meanings of justice in educa-
tional theories. It exposes problems in claiming a moral high ground
in current assertions of education for social justice or in the name of
the child as though such meanings are commonly understood. For early
twentieth century enthusiasts of childcenteredness, discrimination meant
justice. That is, distinguishing between what children were t for, some-
thing akin to guring out and adjusting to different learning styles in the
present, constituted justice and care.
[T]here are many who ought not be educated, and who would be better in mind, body and
morals if they knew no school. What shall it prot a child to gain the world of knowledge
and 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 t for
them, I would bring discrimination down to the very basis of our educational pyramid.
25
Reverberations from the Republic seem to echo loudly here, but what
such a comparison brings more signicantly into view is not the by-
now banal observation that words like justice have different meanings in
different places or how vestiges of older reasoning might inhabit modern
innovations. Rather, what is exposed is how appeals to educational
theories in the name of justice and through the guration of the child have
been unable to assert their imaginaries outside attributing a cast of charac-
ters qualities, properties, and ontologies that must not be questioned within
the domain of that theory. A series of inscriptions and distinctions must
be taken-for-granted, must be taken to constitute the limit-points of the
imagining. This realization points to the structural limitations of proposing
24
Ibidem, pp. 2930.
25
G. Stanley Hall, Ideal School, 1901, p. 25.
educational theories as theories, as universals, and reinforces what Georges
Canguilhem has already noted, i.e., that a pedagogical theory that does not
normalize and pathologize is almost impossible to conceive.
CONCLUSION
The above method of comparative historico-philosophy has provided
analytical leverage on recently emerged, and critiqued, philosophies of
education. Since the late nineteenth century, educational theories are
most commonly predicated on particular notions of child development.
Stages of unfolding biophysiological powers appear as givens and are
built into the organizational structure of schooling. They also appear as
the obstacle to schoolings reform. The emergence of new educational
theories, for instance, is militated against by what are posited as harsh
realities; that some children are simply better at things than others and that
any new educational theory must realistically take into account existing
developmental differences.
As such, the analysis holds implication for understanding exactly what
more recent or contemporary educational theories or philosophies are
claiming as limit-points in their assertions or the strategies proffered for
reform. It has provided several examples of this: how meanings of what is
necessary or of necessity in education are not xed, how a power-motion-
reason nexus has been in common in the assertion of different characters
within educational theories while still taking on different meanings at the
local level, that strategies for justice and reform via educational renovation
are argued in multiple directions relative to distinctions presumed between
characters, that those distinctions are asserted in light of wider Utopian
or cosmological visions that authorize them, and last, that the guring
of the child, even if seemingly decentered in one set of texts relative
to another where it is claimed they are centered is still required as a
marker of alterity. As a character that helps to comport the limit-points
of educational philosophies from within the child provides boundaries
to what such theories presuppose they must deal with in order to change
anything. As tool, problem, and possibility, the child has therefore operated
within different economies of images to compose the edges of what can be
imagined as an appropriate and realistic educational philosophy.
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Department of Curriculum and Instruction
University of Wisconsin-Madison
225 N. Mills St.
Madison, WI 53706
USA
E-mail: bbaker@education.wisc.edu

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BERNADETTE BAKER

PLATOS CHILD AND THE LIMIT-POINTS OF EDUCATIONAL

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