Mairin Schuman’s Reviews > Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education > Status Update

“Unlike the scientific mode of learning that proposes methods and systems for acquiring knowledge, the tradition that has been thus far reviewed reveals rather a way of knowledge, like a path or winding road, with interesting detours off the road, more than the superhighway of modern education. It is a way more akin to the natural human response to discovery of the world” (31).

The words of Socrates noted earlier-"the object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful"-are, of course, informing Aristotle's entire position here. The beauty of "right judgments," the
"delight in good dispositions and noble actions," the "pleasure" of virtue itself, all form a portrait of ancient education that has unfairly been narrowed and isolated by modern audiences as solely rational. (21)

“How deeply poetic experience can achieve this first and quite profound, though obscure, knowledge of things, is seen by Socrates' minute sifting of the particular passages of poetry, music, and movements of physical exercise to be taught, so that only a balanced and refined character emerges to take up much later the rigor of those higher modes of knowledge contained in geometry, logic, and, finally, dialectic.”

“…such materialist ideas of knowledge are grossly disproportionate to the most vital needs for us to know, love, and most harmoniously serve a reality whose existence is far more wonderful and mysterious than mere mathematical measurement and quantification can reveal.”