Dear Eduardo,
Not joking at all. This was Plato's view.
Plato would have understood the university as an academy because the university curriclum resembled Plato's own curriculum. This is especially true of the medieval universities where the lower faculties taught the trivium and the quadrivium.
Plato would not have understood the art academies as academies in his sense of the word. The practical arts did not exist in Plato's academy or in any other Greek academies from the fifth century BCE through the disestablishment of the academies by Emperor Justinian a millennium later. In Plato's time, craftsmen, artists, and architects learned their skill by working in a studio, just as navigators or soldiers learned their skill through sailing or warfare. The academies dealt with philosophy and the specific range of knowledge embodied in episteme. The artisans, artists, and architects of the time -- and all other practitioners of an art -- learned their arts and skills at work in the practical setting. This was the range or knowledge embodied in techne.
Plato had little room in his Republic for poets, but he knew what poetry was. The making arts were so far off his conceptual map that he did deal with them in the academy, any more than he taught farming or agriculture. We all need to eat, but Plato treated growing food as something he assumed others would think about and manage. Philosophers, those who governed the academy, did something else and thought about something else.
This is not a reasonable approach to education in our world, but Plato lived and worked 2,500 years ago and he saw things differently. I did not state my views: I stated Plato's views, and Plato would not have recognized an art academy as an academy like how own. One may imagine Plato's response to the modern university of the 1500s or the contemporary university today if he arrived in a time machine and had a chance to think things through. Nevertheless, that is science fiction, and it is quite different to saying what the original Plato would have thought of an academy teaching art, architecture, craft, or design.
Yours,
Ken
Sent from my iPad
On Oct 14, 2011, at 12:47 AM, "Eduardo Corte Real <[log in to unmask]>" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> "Plato would have understood the university as academy. He would
> not have considered the curriculum in art academies academic, even though
> they used the word academic."
>
> You got to be joking
>
> Eduardo
|