On the first day of class, I noticed him. He sat at the back, with his cowboy hat covering his face and
feet sprawled in front of him. He seemed rarely to pay attention and never took notes. He would
answer questions when asked, but never volunteered his own opinions. His first assignment,
outlining the argument of the various definitions of justice in Book One of theRepublic, was
competent, but formulaic. His second assignment, on Plato’s censorship of the poets, offered
typical critiques that it was authoritarian and violated freedom of expression. When he came to the
required meeting to discuss his term paper, I expected very little.
“What topic are you thinking of writing on?”I asked.
“Maybe something to do with the education of the guardians.”
“Okay,”I replied,“what do you find interesting about this topic?”
“It seems to me that Socrates thinks that education should really change people,”he said.“I think he takes education way more seriously than we do today. It is not about training for a job or
checking off what one learns. Most of my classes are about cramming all kinds of information in my
head–like memorizing definitions from textbooks or stats about stuff. Or repeating to professors
the opinions they want to hear. I don’t think that kind of teaching could ever change anyone.”
A bit surprised by his response, I follow up by asking,“So you think Plato shows us an example
of a kind of education that could change people?”
“Sure,”he said,“Plato is about how different types of people think and act. Some of the people
Socrates talks with are jerks, like Thrasymachus. I have a friend like him, who is only interested in
telling others what to think and not listening to what they think.”
He went on to write the best undergraduate essay I have ever received.
This student, whom I nicknamed Cowboy Plato (a genuine cowboy who earned money to pay
for college by breaking in horses),was enrolledinseveral courses I taught at asmall university in
the panhandle of Texas. In my current classes, I tell stories of this student and his questions and
ideas about theassigned readings, sometimes as a“foil”to engage students in offeringtheir ideas
about the material, but more often as an approachable contemporary interlocutor of historical
texts. In response, students tend to be more at liberty in offering their own ideas and personal
stories and such narrations often become crucial to class discussion of course content. Despite
what seems to be an obvious pedagogical approach to engage students in course material, many
contemporary proponents of what is called the“Socratic method”focus on a rationalized
method and pay little attention to the crucial role of storytelling in Plato’s dialogs. This chapter,
first, explores perspectives on the contemporary pedagogical“Socratic method,”including
elements typically deemed crucial for its use in the classroom. It then turns to the debate on
what we can extract from Plato’s example of the way in which Socrates“teaches.”Finally, it
turns to explore Plato’s use of narrative in two examples from theRepublic:theshipofstatein
Book Four and the allegory of the cave in Book Seven. As both examples highlight, Plato’suse
of narrative or“image-making”as part of the dialectical conversation, not only reinforces