Abstract
Meno, the straight man to Socrates’ wit, asks one of the fundamental questions of education: “Can you tell me Socrates —is virtue something that can be taught? Or does it come by practice? Or is it neither teaching nor practice that gives it to a man but natural aptitude or something else?”
SOCRATES: What do you think, Meno? Has he answered with any opinions that were not his own?
MENO: NO, they were all his.
SOCRATES: Yet he did not know, as agreed, a few minutes ago.
MENO: True.
SOCRATES: But these opinions were somewhere in him, were they not? So a man who does not know has in himself true opinions on a subject without having knowledge. … if the same questions are put to him on many occasions and in different ways, you can see that in the end he will have a knowledge on the subject as accurate as anybody’s. … This knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning. He will recover it for himself.
— PLATO, THE MENO
“Fellowships of discourse” … function to preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it should circulate within a closed community, according to strict regulations, without those in possession being dispossessed by this very distribution. An archaic model of this would be those groups of Rhapsodists, possessing knowledge of poems to recite or, even, upon which to work variations and transformations. But though the ultimate object of this knowledge was ritual recitation, it was protected and preserved within a determinate group, by the, often extremely complex, exercises of memory implied by such a process. Apprenticeship gained access both to a group and to a secret which recitation made manifest, but did not divulge. The roles of speaking and listening were not interchangeable.
— MICHEL FOUCAULT, THE Discourse on Language
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Ball, C.C., Dice, L. (2005). Telling Secrets: Student Readers and Disciplinary Authorities. In: Writing on the Margins. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8439-5_7
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