The Radical Pedagogies of Socrates and Freire: Ancient Rhetoric/Radical Praxis

231 Pages·2012·1.731 MB·English

by  Brown, S. G.

The Radical Pedagogies of
Socrates and Freire
Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication
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2 Queer Temporalities in Gay
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3 The Rhetoric of Intellectual
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of Digital Culture
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4 Media Representations of
Gender and Torture Post-9/11
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5 Rhetoric, Remembrance, and
Visual Form
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Edited by Anne Teresa Demo and
Bradford Vivian
6 Reading, Writing, and the
Rhetorics of Whitenes
Ian Marshall and Wendy Ryden
7 Radical Pedagogies of Socrates
and Freire
Ancient Rhetoric/Radical Praxis
S.G. Brown
The Radical Pedagogies of
Socrates and Freire
Ancient Rhetoric/Radical Praxis
S.G. Brown
NEW YORK LONDON
First published 2012
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
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© 2012 Taylor & Francis
The right of S.G. Brown to be identified as author of this work has been
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and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, S. G.
The radical pedagogies of Socrates & Freire : ancient rhetoric/radical
praxis / by S. G. Brown.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in rhetoric and communication ; 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Rhetoric, Ancient. 2. Critical pedagogy. 3. Socrates—Criticism and
interpretation. 4. Freire, Paulo, 1921–1997—Criticism and interpretation.
5. Radicalism in literature. I. Title.
PA3265.B67 2011
370.1—dc23
2011018282
ISBN13: 978-0-415-89792-1 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-33412-6 (ebk)
To all those teachers who
by breaking down the walls
between classroom and community
free the self
into the public domain,
The Word into the World,
and knowledge bound in books
into a reality
forever changed by this communion.

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Socrates and Freire—The Origins of a Genealogy 1
1 The Radical Critique of Radical Pedagogy:
The Trial of Plato and Freire 6
2 The World, the Word, and the Wound: A Genealogy of Origins 20
3 A Radical Genealogy: Mapping Goals and Assumptions 44
4 The Dawn of Analysis: The Method of His Madness 61
5 The Signifying Hood: The Dialectics of Recantation 90
6 The Error of His Ways: Getting It Wrong to Get It Write 121
7 Plato and the Tyranny of the Transcendent:
A Radical Re-Reading 139
8 Love in a Time of War: The Ethos of Eros 163
9 Radical Pedagogy Reconfi gured: Toward a Neo-Humanist
Pragmatism 187
Conclusion: Ancient Rhetoric/Radical Praxis—
The Personal, the Political, and the Rhetorical 209
Works Cited 213
Index 217

Acknowledgments
A book, any book, is largely a labor of love enacted by an individual but
enabled by the helping hands of many others. The Radical Pedagogies of
Socrates and Freire is no exception. This book had a long gestation period,
insofar as its genesis is rooted in my M.A. thesis on Plato’s Phaedrus (1993)
and my dissertation on Freire (1997). The thought of reading one through
the lens of the other, however, did not occur until quite recently.
Like the two teachers whose work it celebrates, this book drew inspira-
tion from teacher/scholars whose work inspired my own. At the University
of California, Santa Barbara, they include Douwe Sturman and Frederick
Turner III. At the University of Hawai’i, Hilo, William Carse. At the Uni-
versity of South Florida, Gary A. Olson and Philip Sipiora, who height-
ened my appreciation and interest in the works of Paulo Freire and Plato,
as embodied in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Phaedrus, respectively. I
owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Olson, for directing my dis-
sertation, which drew deeply on the work of Paulo Freire. At the Univer-
sity of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), I want to express my gratitude for the
enabling encouragement of my colleagues and department chairs, and of
Chris Hudgins, Doug Unger, Richard Harp, Tim Erwin, and John Unrue,
in particular, all of whom offered guiding words along the way.
At UNLV, I also owe a special debt of gratitude to the students in my
graduate seminars, who sparked lively conversations on the works of Plato
and Freire: exchanges which were important in the development of this
comparative study and which enabled me to experiment and hone my own
ideas in “conversation” with theirs. Two, in particular, deserve special
mention: Homer Simms and Cara Minardi, whose dissertation, “Re-Mem-
bering Ancient Women: Hypatia of Alexandria and Her Communities,”
infl uenced my thinking regarding Plato’s mother, Perictione. At UNLV, I
also want to give special thanks for the skilled guidance of research librar-
ian, Priscilla Finley.
This brings me to that broader community of colleagues whose work
and careers have, in important ways, infl uenced and intersected my own.
This book, in many ways, is the offspring of a critical “conversation” with
these important works, by which it was infl uenced and without which