Texts:1968 Nettleship on Plato's Pedagogy: Difference between revisions

By Richard Lewis Nettleship. New York: Teachers College Press Classics in Education Series No. 36, 1968.</blockquote>  

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<p>"He loved great things, and thought little of himself: desiring neither fame nor influence, he won the devotion of men and was a power in their lives; and, seeking no disciples, he taught to many the greatness of the world and of man's mind." So reads the inscription in the Balliol College Chapel, memorializing Richard Lewis Nettleship's twenty-three years as a tutor there. Other estimations of his life confirm the sense of his character and teaching that this epitaph gives, and it is with a sense of his character and teaching that the virtues of his little book on The Theory of Education in the Republic of Plato can be best appreciated.</p>

<p>"I am sure," Nettleship averred in a letter to a friend in 1890, "the principles of all methods of acquiring mastery over anything are substantially the same. One has got to begin with the alphabet -- to become a little child. Instead of which it seems to me one is perpetually beginning with the hardest things -- solving the existence of God before one has ever seen what it means to exist at all." Having voiced his distrust of premature profundity, he stated his faith in fundamentals, which faith should be the ground of all sound pedagogy. "If I had to begin over again I should like today to master the elements of a few big things. Till I have done this the rest is all confusion, and talking about it is beating the air. And whenever I at all understand the elements, I seldom find much difficulty in finding 'applications' everywhere." Wherever students want to understand the elements of Plato's theory of education, there will be a demand for Nettleship's essay on education in the Republic; and whenever students master the elements of Plato's theory, they, too, will seldom find much difficulty in finding "applications" everywhere.</p>