TIME: 399 B.C.
PLACE: Athens.
COURT: Council of 500.
CHARGES: Impiety and Treason.
DEFENDANT: Socrates.

He was 70 years old -- squat, potbellied and baldheaded, with an absurd pug nose and an unkempt beard. Even in winter, he wore nothing but a cloak -- no shoes, no shirt, no underwear. He had the merriest of dispositions; no one had ever seen him angry or petty or unkind. He was very brave: he had served as a foot soldier in four battles.

He was a philosopher. He did nothing but talk -- talk to anyone who would listen to him, in the streets and harbor and marketplaces, discussing philosophy, which means everything under the sun, with students or sailors or tradesmen, questioning men about what they believed in, and why -- always why -- and how they could prove it. He punched holes in every argument; he dissected the big, grand words that come lightly to the tongue, words like justice, freedom, wisdom, reality. He met every answer with a new question, and each answer after that with another question, and yet another, and another, until a man's head was ready to burst. He made what seemed obvious seem preposterous because he demolished the comforting clichés by which most of us live. No subject, however hallowed, escaped his antiseptic analysis, or the withering fire of his cross-examination. He was brilliant, profound -- and infuriating.

Some Athenians called him a crackpot (he had once remained transfixed in thought for 24 hours), a dangerous idler who did nothing but engage "in irony and jest on mankind." The Oracle at Delphi had called him the wisest man alive, but Socrates, with his customary cool skepticism, sighed that his wisdom lay only in this: that unlike other men, he knew how great was his ignorance.

He refused to accept a penny for teaching. Indeed, he denied that he could ever teach anyone anything; he said he only exhorted men to think, to think so hard and so stubbornly that they could surmount illusion and falsity and glittering nonsense. Virtue, he said, is knowledge. Morals, he said, must be rooted in reason.

Athens was in the throes of adversity. Socrates' friend Alcibiades had betrayed the Athenians to the warrior-state of Sparta. Another friend, Critias, had led a brief reign of terror after Sparta's victory. And now Socrates' enemies cried that it was his endless, damnable hairsplitting and paradoxes that were under mining respect for democracy itself. They said he was so clever that "he made the weaker argument defeat the stronger," that he made young minds doubt, if not mock, everything from the sacred mysteries to the established order. This meddlesome, sardonic prattler was clearly subversive -- "denying the gods recognized by the state" and "corrupting the young." And these, in fact, were the exact charges for which he was now on trial.

How did he defend himself ? "I owe a greater obedience to God than to you, gentlemen," he said. "So long as I draw breath, I shall never stop elucidating the truth before everyone I meet, asking, 'Are you not ashamed to pursue money . . . and give no thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?' I shall not alter my conduct even if I must die a hundred deaths. For God has appointed me to act the gadfly. . . Death does not matter; what matters is that I should do no wrong."

They voted him guilty. The prosecutor demanded the death penalty. Under the law of Athens, it was now for the defendant to propose an alternative. Socrates could suggest that he be exiled; he knew the Council would leap to accept the compromise. Instead, he proposed that the government reward him -- for urging Athenians to search for truth. "Some of you will say, 'But surely, Socrates, you can mind your own business?' But I cannot. "Life unexamined is not worth living;"

Angered by his intractability, the Council condemned him to death. To which Socrates replied, "l have refused to address you in the way which would have flattered you, repenting, weeping, throwing myself on your sympathy, saying things I consider unworthy. For I would rather die as the result of the defense I made than live as the result of the other . . . Nothing can harm a good man, in life or in death . . . Now it is time to go -- I to die and you to live; which of us is the happier is not known to anyone but God."

His frantic friends arranged to smuggle him out of prison, but he refused to escape the price a man must pay for refusing to compromise his values. When his wife Xantippe broke into hysterics in the death cell, he sent her and his sons away. He spent his last hours discussing, with undiminished delight, the problems that had always intrigued him: good and evil; ethics and honor and duty; how the senses can deceive us; what ennobles man and what demeans him; how to test the truth of a proposition, or prove a point, or expose a lazy assumption or a pat conclusion. When his disciples saw the dignity with which he drank the cup of hemlock, they wept. . . The poison paralyzed his limbs and reached his heart.

This frog eyed, incorruptible man, this man who pestered everyone by asking, "Why?" "How do you know?" "What is the evidence?", this man who forced men to use their brains, this man who was obsessed with reason and driven by a passion for inquiry, this man who mocked hokum and annihilated platitudes, who fought ignorance and easy answers -- this Socrates launched a revolution in human history. He dared enthrone reason above tradition. He taught men the marvelous victories that can be won by the free mind alone. He preached that honor lies not in obedience to authority, but in the fearless pursuit of truth. And in propagating the idea that truth is above politics, and conscience beyond law, he paved the way for Christianity itself.

We are, all of us, descended from him -- from Saint Paul to Martin Luther to Einstein. The questions he raised dominated philosophy for 2,000 years. The *Socratic* method of questioning and teaching has never been surpassed. And wherever men today pursue truth, or are ready to die for intellectual freedom, wherever men assert the holy right to think, to argue, to challenge, to debate -- in the conviction that life unexamined is in. deed not worth living -- they are following the example of that ugly saint who never wrote a word. His ideas were immortalized by Plato, who called him "the bravest, wisest, most just man of all we know."

-- Leo Rosten *

* By Leo Rosten from "They Made Our World" - LOOK Magazine series (1960)

LET TEEN-AGERS TRY ADULTHOOD

by Leon Botstein *

The New York Times - May 17, 1999

The national outpouring after the Littleton shootings has forced us to confront something we have suspected for a long time: the American high school is obsolete and should be abolished. In the last month, high school students present and past have come forward with stories about cliques and the artificial intensity of a world defined by insiders and outsiders, in which the insiders hold sway because of superficial definitions of good looks and attractiveness, popularity and sports prowess.

The team sports of high school dominate more than student culture. A community's loyalty to the high school system is often based on the extent to which varsity teams succeed. High school administrators and faculty members are often former coaches, and the coaches themselves are placed in a separate, untouchable category. The result is that the culture of the inside elite is not contested by the adults in the school. Individuality and dissent are discouraged.

But the rules of high school turn out not to be the rules of life. Often the high school outsider becomes the more successful and admired adult. The definitions of masculinity and femininity go through sufficient transformation to make the game of popularity in high school an embarrassment. No other group of adults young or old is confined to an age-segregated environment, much like a gang in which individuals of the same age group define each other's world. In no workplace, not even in colleges or universities, is there such a narrow segmentation by chronology.

Given the poor quality of recruitment and training for high school teachers, it is no wonder that the curriculum and the enterprise of learning hold so little sway over young people. When puberty meets education and learning in modern America, the victory of puberty masquerading as popular culture and the tyranny of peer groups based on ludicrous values meet little resistance.

By the time those who graduate from high school go on to college and realize what really is at stake in becoming an adult, too many opportunities have been lost and too much time has been wasted. Most thoughtful young people suffer the high school environment in silence and in their junior and senior years mark time waiting for college to begin. The Littleton killers, above and beyond the psychological demons that drove them to violence, felt trapped in the artificiality of the high school world and believed it to be real. They engineered their moment of undivided attention and importance in the absence of any confidence that life after high school could have a different meaning.

Adults should face the fact that they don't like adolescents and that they have used high school to isolate the pubescent and hormonally active adolescent away from both the picture-book idealized innocence of childhood and the more accountable world of adulthood. But the primary reason high school doesn't work anymore, if it ever did, is that young people mature substantially earlier in the late 20th century than they did when the high school was invented. For example, the age of first menstruation has dropped at least two years since the beginning of this century, and not surprisingly, the onset of sexual activity has dropped in proportion. An institution intended for children in transition now holds young adults back well beyond the developmental point for which high school was originally designed.

Furthermore, whatever constraints to the presumption of adulthood among young people may have existed decades ago have now fallen away. Information and images, as well as the real and virtual freedom of movement we associate with adulthood, are now accessible to every 15- and 16-year-old.

Secondary education must be rethought.

Elementary school should begin at age 4 or 5 and end with the sixth grade. We should entirely abandon the concept of the middle school and junior high school. Beginning with the seventh grade, there should be four years of secondary education that we may call high school. Young people should graduate at 16 rather than 18.

They could then enter the real world, the world of work or national service, in which they would take a place of responsibility alongside older adults in mixed company. They could stay at home and attend junior college, or they could go away to college. For all the faults of college, at least the adults who dominate the world of colleges, the faculty, were selected precisely because they were exceptional and different, not because they were popular. Despite the often cavalier attitude toward teaching in college, at least physicists know their physics, mathematicians know and love their mathematics, and music is taught by musicians, not by graduates of education schools, where the disciplines are subordinated to the study of classroom management.

For those 16-year-olds who do not want to do any of the above, we might construct new kinds of institutions, each dedicated to one activity, from science to dance, to which adolescents could devote their energies while working together with professionals in those fields.

At 16, young Americans are prepared to be taken seriously and to develop the motivations and interests that will serve them well in adult life. They need to enter a world where they are not in a lunchroom with only their peers, estranged from other age groups and cut off from the game of life as it is really played. There is nothing utopian about this idea; it is immensely practical and efficient, and its implementation is long overdue. We need to face biological and cultural facts and not prolong the life of a flawed institution that is out of date.

* Leon Botstein, is president of Bard College, and the author of "Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture."

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