When I was growing up, [my father] ran a business out of our home [where] students — hundreds that I witnessed over the years — would pay a fee and come and sit with my father in the living room or kitchen, and he would, quite simply, improve their ability to reflect and reason. Most of the people who did this were teenagers trying to lift their G.P.A.s or SAT or Advanced Placement scores, but I have seen children as young as 5 and adults well into their 50s at his desk with pencil and paper.... [M]y father offered a modern poem or a passage of Confucius or Plutarch’s “Lives” to mull over. These were conversation starters. The students would soon be caught up in the thrust and parry of dialectic....
Raising his own daughter somehow led to "overly ambitious plans of turning the Greek capital into an open-air classroom." He doesn't explain at all how he got from parent-and-child sessions in the home to a big trip, and his "ambitious plans" didn't take into account the what you might think would be the first consideration when traveling, the weather. It was glaringly sunny and over 100°.
His wife solved the problem by hiring a babysitter to stay with the daughter (and another child, a 3-year-old) in the air-conditioned hotel room and at the hotel pool.
I had wanted to impress upon my daughter the feminist aspect of Athens, a city brought to life by the mythological victory of Athena, goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare, over Poseidon, ruler of the sea....
The feminist aspect?! Because there were goddesses? You're selling mythology now, not Plato. And you just let us see that you let your wife solve the childcare problem and you used money to acquire an additional female to bear the burden presented by the reality of children. And you never even noticed how that presented a feminist issue to be analyzed. You just got on with a trip that had turned the children into encumbrances.
Eventually, there's a scene where the author takes his daughter to the place that was the site of Plato’s Academy. There is not much to see there — "stones formed the outlines of rooms." It's meaningful only if you have ideas in your head about what happened there long ago. The author uses speech to put the ideas in her head. What was the value to the child?
You might think that a long piece about Plato would contain Socratic questions, but there is only one question mark in the entire article. It's in something the little girl said: “What are we doing?”Now I simply wanted her to understand what stores of hope and motivation [her grandfather] had drawn from this place that, I reflected, he had never set foot in but had nonetheless taught himself to yearn for....
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When I was seven it was four, water, salt, food coloring in the comfort of the family kitchen.
Daddy, I said Play-doh.
I would just help her see all the sophists everywhere that will tell you anything you like for a small fee.
When I was about 10, we had a family vacation in Williamsburg Va. I love history, so this was one of my favorite vacations. When my daughter was about 10, I thought, "hey, let's go to Williamsburg Va!" So we did. My memories resurrected my enthusiasm. Unfortunately, my daughter did not share my enthusiasm. Fortunately, we went from there to the beach. Vacation saved.
Tom Williams is a nut and the NYT celebrates his nuttiness.
A seven-year old should be reading Winnie the Pooh, Dr. Seuss and Curious George.
He lives in Paris so it's not halfway around the world to get to Athens. That said, most parents who want to make a superkid overthink it and/or design a complicated Rube Goldberg apparatus to impress their cocktail party friends. It's easy to make every waking moment immersed in ordinary everyday life a deep and meaningful teaching opportunity. No special equipment or environment required.
I've been to Athens, it is very hilly. The Parthenon is at the top of a very steep and narrow path. I would not take a 7 year old there and I would never go there in the summer, that's crazy. And I can't say I got much in the way of Socratic education, though my wife and I and two other couples did accidently wander into a hooker bar.
Are there three digits in the IQ of Thomas Chatterton Williams? Modern Athens is a modern city, albeit one where you can see the remnants of places and temples and homes from thousands of years ago preserved here and there. Except for ubiquitous graffiti, it is a very clean city when compared to the average American downtown.
I think the ruins might help an interested adult contemplate the world in which Plato lived, the environment which helped shape his philosophy. It was a society where slaves (white slaves, for the edification of BLM) did most of the work, buildings were small by modern standards, women had essentially no rights or responsibilities beyond childbearing, child raising, household management, and, for a small number, temple priestess. What of that is of interest to a seven year old girl?
You don’t teach children philosophy in rooms with mini fridgerators. This isn’t even the worst justification the NYT has used to buffer the return of their luxury travel section.
You sit them in a hard-backed chair and smack their knuckles if their attention drifts. Plato was a piker anyway.
"What are you doing?"
Showing you are a fallible human being desperately eager to share your passions with the persons you love most.
There's your question! Listen and start there. What are you doing?
Ignoring the thousands of citizens and green card holders Joe Biden purposely abandoned in Afghanistan and the thousands of women and girls and boys being sold to and raped by taliban soldiers.
Oh, good grief. All that little girl is going to remember is that it took a long time to get there, it was hot and they didn't have any decent pizza but she got to swim in the pool. But father will remind her when they are at home having "desk" sessions. I have in-laws who used to take their young children all over the U.S. to broaden their horizons. Ask them now as adults what they remember...not much at all.
Try looking under the sofa cushions.
Dad: "What is the best life for a child?"
Child: "Candy, toys, cartoons..."
I'd not heard of Thomas Chatterton Williams prior to reading your post. There are just too many people out there writing and speaking many things. And while many of them are junk thinkers, some of them are interesting and even brilliant. I try to read what I can but seriously- it's a big world and my time is short. Plus there are hours of football eating into that time now that it's autumn-like. Somewhere. Not here in Florida. But I digress.
Having not heard of Mr. Williams I looked him up. And read a long article about/with him. He does seem very interesting, bright, with a large amount of curiosity. And that is the secret ingredient that I find attracts me to others minds. Are they curious? Curious to know more about something, about a lot of things? He does seem to be one of those. I find I want to read more of his work.
I suspect it's a combination of his living abroad for part of his life (including today), and living among the Northeast academic class previously that led him to thinking that a discussion with his child about Plato in Athens was nothing unusual, and probably seemed the right thing to him. Obviously. I mean, can you discuss Plato sitting in a Parisian boulangerie? (Actually yes...yes you can).
"I wouldn't take a 7-year-old halfway around the world, spending time in airplanes, hotels, restaurants, and ruins and walking long distances through confusing, complicated environments."
Of course you wouldn't. Neither would any other hodophobic.
If you wanted to search for Plato with a 7-year old, what would you do?
I'm reading "Searching for Plato With My 7-Year-Old" by Thomas Chatterton Williams — in the NYT — and I see from the photo and the subheadline that he's not doing what I would do.
Well, of course not!
The point of this article is that the "freak out about 'climate change'" crowd has made it difficult to do simple "this is travel, isn't in wonderful!" articles. Because even leftists can occasionally see glaring hypocrisy.
So instead of writing a "my wonderful trip to the Greek Isles" story, he writes an "I educated my kid about Plato" story.
Because "for the children" and "education" are currently swords strong enough to beat back teh "climate change" crowd.
I'm pretty sure TCW lives in France so it's not quite the same trek as going to Athens from America.
I like TCW mostly, but he is pretentious. This article doesn't surprise me at all.
Now, this is not to say that the left wing press isn't filled with "look what an awesome person I am!" stories. So you could also fit Thomas Chatterton's story in that genre.
But I expect that, going forward, you will find very few stories in the NYT et al. glorifying travel as travel;. But you will find a lot of stories using some other hook to justify their "lifestyles of the upper class" travel".
Because "giving up travel to save the planet" is something the peasants are supposed to do, not our masters.
See: Greta Thunberg coming to NY on a "carbon neutral boat". With two crews: one that took the boat over, then flew back. The other that flew over, they took the boat back.
If she and her parents actually cared about "climate change", they'd never leave their home city. They'd do all teh remote talking via video conferencing. But that's only for the peasants
Well, he lives in Paris, so at least it wasn't halfway around the world. But Ann's basic point still applies. His substitution of the tourist experience of the Grove of Academe in Athens for his father's Newark living room classroom is ironically appropriate: the triumph of modern materialism over ancient idealism.
My husband got our 4-year-old through the museums we wanted to see in Italy by looking for "bottoms and doodles." Our kid thought it was hilarious and we (especially I) got to spend as much time as we wanted looking at great art. (This same kid was adequately entertained by repeatedly smacking my husband in the head with a stick from his perch in the baby backpack when he was about 18 months, in France. My husband is a great guy.)
We got our teen and tween through Greece by building an itinerary that was half historical, half hiking and climbing.
And finally... I have a tendency, when walking or hiking with the family, to do two things: be in front, and lecture on our surroundings (or whatever) as I walk. A few years ago, our daughter, then about 14, was my victim. She paused to look at a flower or something and my husband caught up to her. I, ahead, heard her muttering to him, "Fall back! Fall back!" So that's a thing now - they all say it to each other when I get going, which is my cue to zip it and let people enjoy the walk in peace.
I was walking with one of my much younger sisters, then aged about five or six, to the drug store for a Coke, and she said: "I have long wondered: what is a casket?" (These kids were read to every night.) So I gave her a short account of death, burial in a casket and the hope of resurrection. She was interested but she asked me how the pirates' jewels were fitted in. So I was also able to explain the evolution of language and then, later, to get into trouble for talking to a child about death and burial. She only remembers that we went on major adult-type expeditions together, such as walking to the store to get a Coke. You can't control what will be remembered out of all you do with children.
He did this during a pandemic? What a terrible idea to bring a 7 year old to Athens in order to teach her about Plato? Why not go to the local library and get some books? Then take a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC to see collections of Ancient Greece. Rent movies that are age appropriate. My husband and I visited Greece many years ago and Athens was our first stop. It is the only European capital city that I did not enjoy visiting and would never return (even if I won an all inclusive stay). It was hot, chaotic, the food…meh, and for some reason we could not hail a taxi. I was ready to cry but kept trudging to our hotel which I never left until we went to Mykonos. When my daughter was 7, we went to Italy. We were in Rome for one day and we took her to the Zoo which she still remembers. We then went South to enjoy the scenery, beaches, and food. In college she spent time studying in Europe and went to visit all the sites that interested her. It would have been cruel to drag her through Athens to see some ruins at the age of 7.
So... I've not read MUCH Plato, but I've read a little and I don't quite get the whole basis of the "Socratic Method". Yes, from what I've read, Socrates asks questions of his interlocutors to get their take on a question, but from what I can tell, his asking never seems to lead them to what he considers the "truth". There always seems to be a good bit of Socrates taking their answers and rebutting them and telling them his opinion. Maybe it's a device to show them as foils, or maybe there really is a benefit by helping him order and elucidate his own thoughts, but that's not really what we sell the "Socratic Method" on today is it? Does Plato really use what we call the Socratic method?
My dad took me on many adventures as a kid. I loved it.
This strikes me as akin to that guy who dragged his dying dog around the country so they could experience things together, things the dog had expressed no particular desire to do.
I'd like to see a lot of important places from the ancient and classical world, but there's only so much time, and a lot of those places are now in Islamia. No thanks.
I had a memorable European trip when I was 11, and it certainly influenced my interests, but I doubt that I would have been ready at age 7. Then again, I wasn't raised in Paris by intellectuals either. I couldn't even arrange that for my son.
My understanding of Socrates' "method" is that it wasn't meant to come to firm conclusions, but to test the limits of our understanding and ability to express what we think we know.
"When I was about 10, we had a family vacation in Williamsburg Va. I love history, so this was one of my favorite vacations. When my daughter was about 10, I thought, "hey, let's go to Williamsburg Va!" So we did. My memories resurrected my enthusiasm. Unfortunately, my daughter did not share my enthusiasm."
When I was a kid, our parents took us to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village and I thought it was great. When I was in my 20s, I eagerly took 2 young boys (in the grandnephew range of relationship) to the same place and they never got excited about it and were puzzled or annoyed that I'd brought them there.
"I'd not heard of Thomas Chatterton Williams prior to reading your post."
He's the main person who wrote that letter that Jonathan Franzen didn't want to sign (discussed in a blog post yesterday, though without mentioning TCW).
Rick Steves videos of Greece should be sufficient to the task.
I grew up in Dearborn and we had a family pass to the museum and village. We kids liked going there. It's still pretty good, and the Eagle Tavern in the village serves beer, so we got that going for us now. When I was in the Dearborn Bar Assoc. we would have our law day meetings there and have our speaker at the Lincoln courthouse.
"I'm pretty sure TCW lives in France so it's not quite the same trek as going to Athens from America."
You're right, according to Wikipedia. I will add a note.
I want to like TCdubs more than I do reading or hearing him, because he's a champion of increasingly outnumbered liberals standing up for liberal values in a doomed rear guard action at the once great liberal institutions now overrun by woke barbarism. Sounds romantic, but he hasn't said or written anything that's really struck me as interesting. Like this one, it's blah at best.
My eldest has been a good influence on my younger kids: she likes history, was always excited to go to a history or art museum from a young age. I remember watching her lose herself wandering through the great Egyptian stuff at the Met, reading the placards here and there--I thought of a phrase I read somewhere ages ago describing a child in a book, that I've never tracked down, "nature's aristocrat." My middle child was never that interested in museums, but tried to put on a show of it because of her, and the youngest seems to actually like them. But even these kids would mutiny if I tried to walk them around dusty ruins talk about the great things that happened there. They do like watching Rick Steves, though!
dare he publish this in any Francais les médias?
are they more or less pretentious?
@Chris-2-4: I don't quite get the whole basis of the "Socratic Method".
It's from Meno. It wasn't something Socrates did in every dialogue. It's also not quite how "Socratic method" is practiced today.
"Socrates demonstrates his method of questioning and recollection by interrogating a slave who is ignorant of geometry.
Socrates begins one of the most influential dialogues of Western philosophy regarding the argument for inborn knowledge. By drawing geometric figures in the ground Socrates demonstrates that the slave is initially unaware of the length that a side must be in order to double the area of a square with 2-foot sides. The slave guesses first that the original side must be doubled in length (4 feet), and when this proves too much, that it must be 3 feet. This is still too much, and the slave is at a loss.
Socrates claims that before he got hold of him the slave (who has been picked at random from Meno's entourage) might have thought he could speak "well and fluently" on the subject of a square double the size of a given square. Socrates comments that this "numbing" he caused in the slave has done him no harm and has even benefited him.
Socrates then adds three more squares to the original square, to form a larger square four times the size. He draws four diagonal lines which bisect each of the smaller squares. Through questioning, Socrates leads the slave to the discovery that the square formed by these diagonals has an area of eight square feet, double that of the original. He says that the slave has "spontaneously recovered" knowledge he knew from a past life without having been taught. Socrates is satisfied that new beliefs were "newly aroused" in the slave."
maybe the allegory of the caves, would be helpful
My father actually took me to Athens and the Acropolis when I was seven.
He provided no instruction on Plato or any other Greek philosopher.
I was not terribly impressed with Greek ruins, however. They are mostly eroded lumps of limestone. Rome impressed me at that age, but not Athens.
I was seven, for Chrissake.
Leaving aside the absurdity of dragging a young child to Athens to "study Plato," my larger objection is to using his daughter as fodder for his column. Leave her alone to play with her Play-doh, as suggested above.
If you live in Paris, take the kid to the Louvre, Invalides, Rodin museum, Luxembourg, Montmartre, there are enough philosophical bastards there to last a lifetime, don't go on the road for it.
Then take a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC to see collections of Ancient Greece.
The Greece collection is heavy on jewelry and similar objets and amphorae. Lots and lots and lots of amphorae. A sadistic junior high school teacher once gave us an assignment on a field trip to locate a particular amphora, or maybe it was even the amphorae room of a certain stylistic amphora. It was like the amphorae grew amphorae as the trip drew to a close.
It's touching to me that he wants to share these things with his children. I'll forgive him for overestimating a child's interest in old rocks under a hot sun. I've never had any children to share anything with. It's also surprising how devoted he is to Western culture because that's so unusual today. The photography in the article is striking too.
"In Athens with his daughter, Thomas Chatterton Williams could finally pay homage in person to the classical education his own father gave him."
This guy needs to be cancelled immediately. Doesn’t he know that “classical education” was built on slavery, and Plato never said boo about it? Quoting Wikipedia:
Dialogue with Meno's slave[edit]. Socrates demonstrates his method of questioning and recollection by interrogating a slave who is ignorant of geometry.
Socrates begins one of the most influential dialogues of Western philosophy regarding the argument for inborn knowledge. By drawing geometric figures in the ground Socrates demonstrates that the slave is initially unaware of the length that a side must be in order to double the area of a square with 2-foot sides. The slave guesses first that the original side must be doubled in length (4 feet), and when this proves too much, that it must be 3 feet. This is still too much, and the slave is at a loss.
One small note of dissent here. Without defending all of TCW's choices, at bottom I see a father seeking to invest in his daughter and bring her into something that is important to and has meaning for him. Even if she does not remember this specific incident, if that is the overall approach he takes to fatherhood I suspect that will benefit his daughter in the long run.
Temujin, nice comment.
I can't say as I'd do this with a kid, but I am sorry to say I sympathize much more than others here do with TC Williams' plight. That is, considering what his kid is likely to learn someday from our supposed "educators" about classical Greece, Western civilization, and the sins of our fathers visited now upon all our heads. That is, crow caws (apologies to the crows) about Eurocentric heteronormative patriarchal, racist oppression, and aren't we all so much smarter now. Perhaps the kid will think, "you know, my old man thought so much of all that he dragged me all the way over there to traipse around a bunch of ruins. He was really determine and I could never quite get why. But maybe I should stick with him against the tide."
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