Showing papers by "Northrop Frye published in 1979"

The Teacher's Source of Authority.

Abstract: I want to consider the question of authority in education more particularly in connection with my own subject, the humanities. In the sciences, which deal primarily with man's relation to nature, the question of authority is more or less taken care of by such things as repeatable experiment and the possibility of prediction. If astronomers can predict an eclipse to within a second, the question of authority is inevitably bound up with their method, and there is no use arguing about the validity of observations that leads to such an impressive prediction. But the humanities belong to the world that man himself creates; consequently, some kind of fundamental questioning of postulates is built into the humanities from the beginning. Many of our ideas on education derive from Plato and the figure of Socrates, which is so important in Plato. What Plato writes is normally in a dialogue form that very frequently develops into what he calls the symposium, a group of people meeting together at a banquet and putting forward partial and individual views of a certain central theme (such as that of love in the dialogue called The Symposium), with the hope that this theme will manifest itself with all the vividness and impressiveness of a Platonic form or idea in the middle of society. In his last and most complicated work The Laws, Plato begins unexpectedly with the symposium that has a crucial importance in the actual regulating of society. He says that the symposium is an important element in education and is, to that extent, one of the ways of achieving the vision of authority that underlies The Laws. It seems extraordinary that the symposium should be used in this way in a work as serious and as comprehensive as The Laws, because elsewhere, Plato is quite clear about the limitations of the symposium in