So, when people talk about an equal opportunity for excellent education I always ask in relation to what? To past educational opportunities? To other countries' opportunities?
Excellence always is relative to something else. Making or saying
everybody is equal makes them, by definition, not excellent. Something has to suck for something else to be awesome.
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4 comments:
Like Aristotle's Golden Mean - wouldn't the mean actually be mediocrity?
I can't agree with this comment, since this is purely a semantic argument. The standard of living of a poor American is roughly equivalent to that of an ancient Pharaoh. (The poor in the Pharaoh's time were much, much worse off, of course.) It is true that the poor in America do not have an "excellent" standard of living by modern American standards while Pharaohs did by their own time's standards. Nevertheless, isn't modern America a clear improvement on ancient Egypt?
So, yes, I think the phrase "equal opportunity for excellent education" makes sense. And both of your possible answers (past educational opportunities or other countries' opportunities) are reasonable answers. Now, of course, if we actually get equal education, we will tend to view it as equally mediocre regardless of how good it is relative to the past or to other countries, but that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile goal.
However, I must object to the characterization of Aristotle's Golden Mean as mediocrity. The Golden Mean represents excellence since further in either direction leads one to vice. It was not a mean in the sense that it was the virtue the average person attained (Aristotle would have argued that very few people attained it in any given virtue). It was a mean in the sense that it was between deficiency and excess.
Eh, it's a problem discussed in many of the commentaries on Aristotle, including, especially, the ancient ones.
I wasn't aware of that. I'm much more familiar with the medieval commentaries on Aristotle than I am with ancient commentaries. Of course, the term Aristotle used for the Golden Mean can literally be translated as mediocrity (and is usually translated into Latin as "mediocritas"), but the word mediocrity did not, at that time, have its modern pejorative connotations as far as I am aware.
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