“His name, Socrates, is Evenus, he comes from Paros, and his fee is five minas,” responds Callias when the gadfly of Athens asks who can cultivate excellence in the youth (Plato, The Apology, 20c). Two millennia later, students continue attempting to purchase excellence, as shown by the modern form of Callias’ reply: “its name is Dartmouth, based in Hanover, and its tuition is $51,468 USD.” Commodifying education, reducing it to an economic service bought for “so moderate a fee” as mere money (20c), produces a neoliberal pedagogy that converts our educational system into the mass-produced equivalent of the Greek sophists. This educational model treats schools as corporate assets and alienates students like Holden, who are more interested in authentic inquiry than the formulaic absorption of information. Plato’s conception of meaningful education (paideia) cannot be purchased and is harmed by treating education as a commodity, as shown by the inadequacy of the paid sophists in The Apology and the failure of 20th century American schools like Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye.
Socrates vs the Sophists
A core component of Socrates’ mentorship is his refusal of payment. In his final defense, he emphatically denies that he would ever “undertake to teach people and charge a fee for it” (Plato, 19e), and in fact admits he lives in “great poverty because of his service” (30d). This separates him from the sophists, wandering educators who accept payments for philosophical, rhetorical, or literary training, and purport to offer their students valuable knowledge and even wisdom. An analog to modern for-hire consultants, the sophists teach instrumental “arts of success” (where success is measured in fame, money, and performance), rather than encouraging progress towards excellence (Rowe; Deron). The sophists argue that their services foster excellence, implying that excellence can indeed be bought; a clear contrast to Plato’s argument that “wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men” (28). Due to their flawed methods and their role as paid tutors over philosophers, the sophists are a key enemy of the type of education advocated throughout Plato’s works.
Unlike sophists, Socrates does not vend his mental goods to the highest bidder or allow students to “mindlessly swallow the conclusions of their mentors” (Boutros). Rather, he questions them and uses this dialectic to lead them to aporia, a state of uncertain possibility which urges Socrates’ students to “discover within themselves a multitude of beautiful things, which they bring forth into the light” (Plato, Theaetetus, 150d). The sophists employ methods of rote learning rather than the dialectic. With Socrates, students learn valuable mental skills and perhaps even wisdom, instead of mere tokens of information “they can buy from time to time for a drachma” (25). Even if this is more painful – the student is often “distressed and annoyed at being so dragged…into the light of the sun” (Republic, 515) – it is infinitely more rewarding.
Treating education as a transaction encourages students to think of their teachers as vendors and themselves as consumers, a concept antithetical to Plato’s ideals of education. Even more fundamentally, the very nature of a transaction requires sophists to provide a good, as “in order to give people their ‘money’s worth,’” sophists must offer an answer their students can ‘get’ or utilize (Boyles). As Socrates does not request payment, he does not have to provide a good. This allows him to ask questions rather than offer answers. An emphasis on the ‘exchange value’ of education prevents Socrates’ dialectical route to excellence.
Catching Education in the Rye
This use of the methods of the sophists and focus on exchange value leads Holden to abandon formal schooling; he is relentlessly cynical about the education his parents attempt to purchase for him, despite its “good academic rating” (Salinger, 6). He rejects slogans claiming that prep schools mold exceptional people – “they don’t do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school,” and if anyone there is splendid and clear-thinking, “they probably came to Pencey that way” (Salinger, 4). Consistent with this premise, Holden’s formal education has little, if any, impact on his character.
Furthermore, when the wealthy alumnus Ossenburger gives a speech, Holden recognizes the influence of money in education: “he gave Pencey a pile of dough, and they named our wing after him…he made a speech that lasted about ten hours” (28). After all, if Pencey can produce wealthy students, the school is more likely to receive donations and tuition in the future. In the natural selection of education, schools that generate wealth survive; those that fail die. This requires schools to design policies and pedagogies that encourage monetary survival. As such, Holden sees that the school only celebrates the alumni for their success, not excellence or wisdom. By pretending to be wise, Ossenburger commits the fallacy of the craftsmen in The Apology: “each of them, because of his success at his craft, thought himself very wise in most other important pursuits” (Plato, 22e). While those around him assume Ossenburger’s achievements imply he must be wise, Holden refuses to accept what he calls ‘phony’ wisdom.
When teachers manage to inspire Holden in substantial ways, they are almost never ‘on duty,’ exchanging information in exchange for tuition. Instead, they are simply conversing with him out of genuine interest. In these conversations, they employ the questioning dialectic of Socrates rather than the lectures of the sophists. For example, when Mr. Spencer lectures Holden on his failure to memorize Egyptian history, as he “knew absolutely nothing,” Holden can’t bring himself to care: he merely reflects “I had to sit there and listen to that crap” (Salinger, 13). Mr. Spencer tells Holden what a curious and aspiration-filled adolescent absolutely cannot bear to hear: “life is a game one plays by the rules” (12). Similarly, in his oral expression course, Holden’s teacher Mr. Vinson would not allow diversion from the curriculum, punishing a student who explored beyond the limit by “yelling ‘Digression!’ at him all the time” and flunking him in the course (102). The sophist-like emphasis of his teachers on rote knowledge drains Holden’s interest in education and encourages passivity.
On the other hand, Holden calls Mr. Antolini “about the best teacher I ever had,” as he showed genuine care for the students – he picked up James Castle, who committed suicide, and “didn’t even give a damn if his coat got all bloody” (125). And Antolini uses the Socratic dialectic rather than a one-sided speech: he begins his conversation with a complex question, requiring Holden to respond even though he “didn’t feel much like thinking and answering and all” (128). In fact, almost all the dialogue Antolini directs at Holden ends with a question mark. Instead of lecturing Holden for failing in school, he asks, “What was the trouble?” and instead of accepting Holden’s complaints about Mr. Vinson’s ‘digression’ rule, Antolini asks a “short, faintly stuffy, pedagogical question. Don’t you think there’s a time and place for everything?” (130). Antolini encourages Holden to keep pushing past the mindless, exchange-like forms of education:
“Once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you’re going to start getting closer and closer–that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it–to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart.”
Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 131.
Like Socrates, Antolini does not offer education as a good, but instead prompts Holden to seek learning as a form of self-actualization.
Achievement Orientation
Many students, especially at elite colleges, tend to commodify knowledge as a tool for career success rather than something that could transform living. David Brooks, a professor at Yale, said that “most spiritual institution I would go into is Whole Foods,” but he still noticed that his students had a “hunger for spiritual knowledge” (where spiritual is defined broadly). Prof. Brooks wrote that most universities and especially ‘elite’ colleges suffer from
“a combination of academic and career competitiveness and a lack of a moral and romantic vocabulary that has created a culture that is professional and not poetic, pragmatic and not romantic. The head is large, and the heart and soul are backstage.”
Brooks, The Cultural Value of a Christian Higher Education.
In many ways education has become a marketplace that treats students as consumers. Most students have internalized this framework. Just as our future employers would want us to, we students tend ask incessantly “how will we use this in the real world,” where sadly the “real world” is almost always used to refer to the workplace. In his groundbreaking Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl criticizes this same drive to commodify, measure, and mobilize every piece of knowledge for career achievement or economic value-creation. He calls it the achievement orientation:
“But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.”
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, pg. 152.
We see this paradigm everywhere in modern education. The standardized tests that almost all students condemn are a manifestation of achievement orientation. So is the tendency to ask “how will this be useful in real life?” As is the algorithmic drive to accumulate extracurriculars, maximize scores, and optimize GPAs. In college, you will likely see the way students commodify themselves, treating themselves as mere resumes or objects of future employment, taking classes only to add to their set of cashable knowledge and skills. These phenomena are not evil or execrable. They have positive value. But they cannot constitute value, and they are not education as paideia in the Platonic sense. They are not components of what Maeser often calls classical education.
The Commodification of Learning
To put this literary theory in concrete modern terms, education in America is increasingly conceived merely as an economic service. This perspective was endorsed by the Department of Education, which emphasized measuring educational outcomes by their market value:
The commission envisions higher education as “an industry” that produces a commodity, a product that is exchangeable in a market of goods and services and so measurable by a quantifiable universal equivalent that permits of exchange and fungibility (my iron is worth x amount of your cotton; my increased skill in manipulating mathematical, verbal, or computer languages is worth x amount of purchasing power).
(Miller)
Put most cynically, the primary objective of our modern educational system is to manufacture “passive worker/citizens with just enough skills to render themselves useful to the demands of capital” (Hill). Since The Catcher in the Rye was published, the education industry, composed of for-profit colleges, learning websites, and giants like Pearson, has skyrocketed: it is worth approximately $1.9 trillion and grows by almost 8% each year (2U Inc). This makes it the second-largest industry by total worth in the United States, surpassed only by healthcare (“Industry Overview”). Much of this industry is characterized by a “gold rush” to capitalize the $500 billion of government assets being redistributed from public schooling to the marketplace (Hill). Modern education seems to be a form of neoliberal, industrialized sophism.
These powerful market forces are writing our curriculums. Increasingly, our educational policy is dictated by economic interests. In the US, many schools are evaluated by a set of educational assessments called PARCC, developed by the for-profit Pearson company, which are meant to evaluate career readiness and ensure student knowledge has market value (Sanchez). The focus on unquantifiable critical thinking that makes Socrates and Mr. Antolini effective mentors is also precisely what makes them “abject failures” by modern standards, with their emphasis on “formalizable, repeatable data points representing operational knowledge, skill sets, and material mastery” (Miller). The trend of commodifying education, which started with the profitable Greek sophistry of Plato’s time, has no end in sight – a miserable prospect for alienated students like Holden.
Works Cited
Plato. The Apology. Trans. John Cooper. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997. Print.
Plato. Theaetetus. Trans. John Cooper. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997. Print.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Brown and Company, 1951. Print.
Boutros, Victor. “Spelunking with Socrates: A Study of Socratic Pedagogy in Plato’s Republic.” Paideia: Journal of the 20th World Philosophy Congress. 10 Aug 1998. Web. 2 Feb 2018.
Miller, Paul Allen. “The Repeatable and the Unrepeatable: Žižek and the Future of the Humanities, or: Assessing Socrates.” Symplokē, vol. 17, no. 1-2, 2009, pp. 7–25. JSTOR. N.d. Web. 5 Feb 2018.
Boyles, Deron. “Sophistry, Dialectic, and Teacher Education: A Reinterpretation of Plato’s Meno.” George State University Press: Philosophy of Education Archive. N.d. Web. 6 Feb 2018.
Rowe, C.J. “Plato on the Sophists as Teachers of Virtue.” History of Political Thought, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Winter 1983), pp. 409-427. N.d. Web. 6 Feb 2018.
Sanchez, Claudio. “Obama’s Impact on America’s Schools. Npr.org. National Public Radio: Education. 13 Jan 2017. Web. 6 Feb 2018.
“2U Inc. To Acquire GetSmarter.” 2U.com. 2 May 2017. Web. 6 Feb 2018.
“Industry Overview: Education.” Wetfeet.com. 3 Dec 2012. Web. 6 Feb 2018.
Hill, Dave. “Revolutionizing Pedagogy; education for social justice within and beyond global neoliberalism: Class, Capital, and Education in this Neoliberal and Neoconservative Period.” Social Policy Research Centre. 2009. Web. 6 Feb 2018.
Brooks, David. “The cultural value of Christian higher education.” CCCU Advance 7, no. 1 (2016): 47-52.
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