Just outside the walls of Athens on the northwest side of the city is the Public Cemetery (Dēmosion Sēma), where stately tombs line a broad avenue that extends toward the northwest leading to the sacred ground of Hecademus or Academus, a local hero, graced by a sacred grove of olive trees. In the grounds, known as the Academy, was built a gymnasium of the same name in the sixth century BC, surrounded by a wall built by Hipparchus. In the early fifth century BC, Cimon “took the Academy from being unwatered and parched to being an irrigated grove adorned with open trails and shady lanes.”[26]
In this precinct Plato purchased a property adjoining the gymnasium in the 380s BC, and constructed a Museion (in Latin rendering, museum), a study center dedicated to the Muses. This marked the beginning of his school as a permanent institution endowed with land, a building, and religious rites. It appears that Socrates was honored on the site as a hero in an annual commemoration of his death.[27]
Archaeological excavations have revealed buildings in the area of a section of the perimeter wall. Foundations of a building identified as the palaestra (wrestling building) and the gymnasium have been found. Recently, however, archaeologists have argued that the so-called gymnasium was not like other gymnasia, but rather like a library.[28] It appears that archaeologists have discovered Plato’s library, which housed a generous collection of books—in the form of papyrus rolls—and could house up to forty study tables for reading and copying books.
The library took the form of a large hall surrounded by walls and porticoes, with four study rooms. Plato’s library was perhaps the first quasi-public library in the Greek world, with its holdings available at least to students and fellows of Plato’s school. This was an important step forward as literacy became widespread and books began to proliferate. Plato himself was a prolific author, and presumably his own writings made up a significant collection in the library. It is likely that Plato ensured that the writings of philosophers from the sixth and fifth centuries were preserved for study and analysis.
There is much we do not know about Plato’s Academy. Was there a curriculum? Were there regular lectures and seminars? What kind of teaching went on? How did Plato interact with his students and with the senior scholars who came to join his school? We have no detailed accounts of what went on.
For Aristotle, who started out as a seventeen-year-old student in the Academy and stayed there for twenty years, becoming a fellow and lecturer, we have treatises that are likely to be his lectures, some of them probably composed while he was in the Academy. But for Plato we have only dialogues (and a few letters that may be genuine), but no obvious teaching material. How did Plato teach? Plato’s Socrates offered a model of how teaching, or rather philosophical communication that was not directly teaching, should occur. But was Plato gifted with the personality to examine and cross-examine others?
We do not know. But perhaps the most important think that happened in the shady suburbs of Athens was not some set curriculum or educational program. It was the fact that, apparently for the first time in the Greek world, Plato founded a permanent institution of advanced learning with a mission, a legal status, and an endowment. Near a public gathering place. With a library. With a critical mass of eager students and competent experts.
Communication happened. Education happened. Collaboration happened. Research happened.
But, Isocrates and his compatriots would object, what went on in the Academy was just hair-splitting logic and airy philosophical theory with no connection to the real world and its problems and needs. In modern terms, Platonic education was “irrelevant.” It was the sophists (that is, the people we, following Plato, called sophists) who made education relevant. Sophistic addressed the needs and wants of students: how to get ahead in the rat race of civilization. How to win friends and influence people. How to win an argument, give a stirring speech, become a civic leader, manage finances, consolidate power.
But what are we talking about here?, the Platonist asks, in the spirit of Socrates. Are you proposing to teach people how to get ahead within a framework of moral behavior, or without such a framework? If the object is to get ahead no holds barred, you sophists are offering a shortcut to success based on lying, cheating, bamboozling, and otherwise taking advantage of others. Perhaps you are assuming that everyone you are educating already is grounded in morality and you are offering the tools for superior productivity.[29] But is your goal just to get ahead, or to make the world a better place? If the latter, how will you do that without considering what the good is for an individual, an organization, a state? And how do you determine that without examining value theory, psychology, political science, and, above all, ethics?
If this debate begins to sound like a contemporary one in higher education, it should. Is education meant to be driven by the needs of the marketplace or by the ideals of a utopia in which equality, justice, and benevolence transcend the pressure to get a good-paying job? It is perhaps not an accident that the dialectic of economic motivations vs. timeless truths has never really been resolved. But we can say that it is the combination of the timely and the timeless that has driven the world to apply scientific discoveries to practical problems and create ever more powerful technologies that create new opportunities and new wealth. By many measures, human life has never been better; but the blessings of civilization remain unevenly distributed and unfairly denied to many. People are still dying of starvation and preventable diseases in war-torn and weather-ravaged parts of the world. The work of achieving the good life remains incomplete at best.
[26] Plutarch Cimon 13.8.
[27] White 2000.
[28] Lygouri-Tolia 2020.
[29] Plato Gorgias 456c-457c; 459d-460a.