We discussed Milton’s “On Education” today, and both classes did a great job seeing the stark differences between Plato’s highly specialized/aristocratic society and Milton’s strongly democratic notion that everyone should learn to farm, to fight, to litigate, to heal, and to read and write verse.
I know it seems like all I do in my freshman English class is make my students doubt the goodness of democracy, but as I tell them over and over, I want them to be educated, not blind, advocates of democracy.? Today they realized that real democracy, in which everyone is genuinely equal, might not be what they want.
Because of scheduling blips in both classes (the person with the key to the computer showed up late in 8:00, and the representative from UGA’s Costa Rica study abroad program flaked out entirely in 11:00), I didn’t get to conduct my standard “what is your education all about” discussion as well as I would have liked, but I don’t suppose every class can be one’s best.
