Thanks for learning the Inartime podcast. For more details about Inartime and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, Plato made his priorities in education plane when he inscribed over the entrance to the academy, let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here.

He prized learning that revealed what he called, quote, eternal reality, the realm unaffected by the vicissitudes of change and decay, unquote.

And this became the objective of educating Europe for thousands of years, vocational education, concrete skills were hardly dreamed of.

But was he right? What's education for? Is it real to teach us the nature of reality or to give us the tools to deal with it?

With me is Mary Warnock, the philosopher and educationalist and author of many publications on the subject of learning, and Ted Rack, professor of education at the University of Exeter, an author of several books including The Cubic Curriculum.

Briefly to begin, Mary, what was the philosophy behind Plato's emphasis on abstract ideas in education?

Plato, I think, believed that you couldn't really know anything except changeless truths.

And this was represented by mathematics and astronomy and music up to a point.

But what he was totally uninterested in was the actual world we live in.

For instance, he had no idea what ever of history or historical studies, they were completely absent from his idea of education.

So you had to work away from being quite a young child through to the aim of education, which was to understand the nature of number and the reality that lay behind the world.

The world itself was really beneath contempt. So of course you didn't want to stick on learning how to be a carpenter or something with real objects, because it was not worth anything.

So no mechanical education would be most mechanical at that time. No particular concrete education, used concrete skills, entered his academy at all.

Well, nobody entered the academy who was interested in that kind of thing, but there was a very, very small elite who were capable of doing mathematics.

And the rest of the people just got on doing our carpenter and so on as apprentices, and they learned that way. But that wasn't education, really.

Broadly speaking, would you say this is a distinction between abstract and applied education?

And if so, do you think it continued for literally about a couple more than a couple of thousand years until the 19th century?

I think that is right. I mean, there was in the middle the church, of course, had a tremendous influence on education in the Middle Ages.

But that was ready to teach people to write and to read. So that came into it.

But I think its place to us had the most terrible effect on Western education, actually, because it meant that even if you did learn history or modern languages or something, that was despised, compared with learning mathematics and things that didn't change or were abstract.

What I think I am learning in this program over the years is that people who sit in studies and do things seemingly quietly have the most devastating effects on the world.

...