Learn throughout life with Aristotle!  Seriously, CDC Reeve, the author of this piece, is a great scholar of ancient philosophy; his Philosopher-Kings was hugely important for me in thinking through Plato's Republic in a way beyond all the clichés (trust me--read it), and it's an excellent model for expositing an intellectually-distant work to an unfairly and mistakenly jaded audience.  I think his Practices of Reason, on Aristotle, may also do something in that regard.  Plus he has translated many of Plato's dialogues, and Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, his Metaphysics, and his Politics, among others.  Reeve is one of the glories of this mortal life, though hidden to us by our ignorance and mistaken indifferences.

Anyway, in this piece he explores how to learn from what Aristotle says about education, and develops a picture of it that emphasizes the way that education develops, not so much expert-knowledge of a field of the sort that a specialist possesses, but rather knowledge about how to know what sort of thing just is knowledge in some field--how a field develops criteria that specify its field of study.  In other words, education is knowledge of how, in order to provide students 

with whatever is needed to access in the appropriate way the good things without which life is impoverished. Music (knowing how to read music, play an instrument, listen sensitively and perceptively), literature (knowing how to read with understanding, and be appropriately responsive to, the great poems and novels in one’s own language, and in that of others), and painting and film, similarly.

In the sciences, it is the same. Students need (and now I’m thinking about ourselves, not ancient Greeks) the kind of knowledge of mathematics that makes its nature and beauty accessible, and that provides the competencies needed, for example, to read a credit agreement, understand statistics and probability theory, so as to avoid being exploited. And they need the sort of understanding of physics, biology, psychology, sociology, economics and so on that will let them see how these sciences work, what their sensitivity to evidence entails, and in what way they reveal the wonders and complexities of the natural and the social world to the understanding eye.

In other words, there is an important difference between education and training.  While training may be a part of education, in a proper sense it is never training for training's sake, but for the sake of teaching us something beyond the training itself, something of the significance of that training.  There's a lot to say there, but let me just say that in a way this suggests that undergraduate "majors" should be more symbolic than real.  And I actually agree with that.

Then, after laying out this view, Reeve goes on to say something even more interesting: 

A part of Aristotle’s picture that has not yet been revealed, however, can come as a bit of a shock, and is too often ignored by contemporary ‘virtue ethicists’ who look only at the Nicomachean Ethics and not at its companion Politics. It is this: people do not develop practical wisdom until they reach the age of 50 or so, by which time their exposure to ‘theory’ has been leavened by their experience of the so-called ‘real world’. Aristotelian education, like its Platonic predecessor, is almost lifelong.

Reeve recognizes that the kind of leisure (in Greek, scholia--school!) that this kind of education entails, would only work if the community as a whole was able to exempt those being educated from the kind of time-consuming labor, manual or otherwise, that sustains the life of the community as a whole.  And Reeve notes that this sort of exemption was possible only for a few wealthy upper class Greek men, and only because large portions of the rest of the populace (women and also slaves) were kept in the most oppressive of forms of domination.  

The piece sort of peters out at the end with an unexceptional, and an unexceptionable, critique of "final solutions," which suggests we've reached a place (maybe especially about religion) where Reeve's own opinions are, well, suffering from a bit of premature "closure" themselves.  But before that, it's a very worthwhile piece.  Check it out. 

Happy Tuesday.  It was rainy and cooling off when I woke up this morning, before dawn, and now the sky is grey, and it's getting much cooler.  We should be downright chilly by tonight.  Stay warm everyone, wherever you are.