Teaching Forgetfulness: How a Greek Statue Has Led Us Back into the Cave

Abstract:Teachers are well aware of the deterioration that some half a century of market ideology has inflicted on both the subject matter and the method of teaching art. The commodification of education has been fought on different fronts, yet without the recognition that the remedies themselves may promulgate and recirculate the existential threat they try to remove from our schools. That the battle is already lost at a level one order more complex than generally thought is showcased by examining here how we teach a particular work, a specimen of Greek statuary. Heidegger claimed that there must be some art through which all art is intelligible and pointed to the Greek statue. The return to neoclassicism and the Romantics, from where aesthetics draws its self-proclaimed potentiality to counter neoliberalism, is somehow in tune with Heidegger’s dictum. However, both the aesthetic approach and Heidegger, who fought aestheticism, are shown here to have failed before the higher demand that the statue exacts on our epistemology both on its conclusions and on its method. We have grappled with the Greek statue since the dawn of Western thought, and we now think we know what this thing is, yet all we teach is our ignorance compiled with the ignorance of our ignorance. The projections of this elucidation suggest that the alienation that in our day poses as education will not end, unless we gain access to that art which determines both what art is and how we should teach it.