Political Doctrine, Philosophy, and the Value of Education: The Legacy of Isocrates and the Socratic Alternative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is concerned with the question, How ought the value of education be decided and defined? There are, in Western educational thought and practice, two answers to this question, the Isocratic and the Socratic. Contrary to most textbooks in the history of education, the Isocratic tradition of educational thought has most influenced Western education, and now constitutes the accepted view even among those who seek to critique the Western tradition. In the dominant Isocratic tradition, education is regarded as a political enterprise, and the value of education is defined relative to political doctrine. In the Socratic view, education is defined as a philosophic enterprise, and the value of education is defined as autonomous and internal to it. The structure of these two modes of examining educational value is outlined. The paper concludes that the question of how we decide what the value of education ought to be must once be asked from the perspective of these two alternatives, and that a recovery of the neglected history of educational philosophy and ideas will be a necessary part of this.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.091 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".