Читать книгу The Art of Foreign Language Teaching - Peter Lutzker - Страница 13

In both his goals and methods, Socrates presents a clear contrast to the Sophists. As opposed to the wide-ranging programs of the Sophists, Socrates saw the paramount aim of all education to be the attainment of a deeper knowledge of the soul and herein a realization of the highest possibilities of Self. His methods were based on his recognition of his own lack of knowledge, thus making possible a true questioning; a dialectical conversation in which the other had to draw conclusions on his own. In this sense he considered the teacher’s role as comparable to the art of the midwife (maieutikos) – assisting in the birth of productive thinking and self-discovery. Socrates says in Theaetetus,

For one thing I have in common with ordinary midwives is that I myself am barren of wisdom. The common reproach against me is that I am always asking questions of other people but never express my own ideas about anything, because there is no wisdom in me; and that is true enough. And of the reason of it is this, that God compels me to attend the travail of others, but has forbidden me to procreate.33

This dialectical approach contrasts strongly with the Sophist approach which was closely tied to their rhetorical skills. Lichtenstein sees the essential distinctions in the ways the Sophists and Socrates each perceived education as an art as originating in the highly disparate nature of their respective educational visions:

Socrates could be misunderstood as a Sophist, but he was far more radical in his much deeper understanding of education as an art, because he saw education as an ethical art. Art demands knowledge and ability. Art realises and moulds into a ‘work’ what had previously been an imaginative ‘draft’ and image, also clearly and objectively perceived as a ‘task’ to be accomplished. Thus, one must know what one wants. The Sophists who desired to be the arbiters of education, lacked exactly that essential concept underlying all education – ‘the knowledge of the Good’.34