[Notes for:] How to Attend: From Nursing to Teaching

(Full version coming soon)

Nurse:

• Wet Nurse: τιθήνη
  
  • Plato’s famous “receptacle and nurse of all becoming,” which he offers as a definition of Space or Matter in Timaeus («ὑποδοχὴ» καὶ ἔτι «ἡ τιθήνη»)
    
  • Plotinus comments on this passage and clarifies it somewhat in his Ennead: “For if it is receptacle and nurse, becoming is other than it, but that which is altered is in becoming, so matter would be existent before becoming, and before alteration; and the words “receptacle” and also “nurse” imply its maintenance in the state in which it is free from affections; and so does “that in which each thing appears on its entrance, and again goes out from it”3 and the statements that it is “space” and “seat.”4 And the statement which has been criticised as speaking of a “place of the forms”5 does not mean an affection of the substrate, but is trying to find another way [of participation].”
    
• One who waits on the sick: θεραπευτής
  
  • It can also be “one who attends on anything,” but is more commonly a “worshipper.”
    
  • There was a group of philosophers (an Alexandrian sect)  who went by this name, the “Therapeutae”
    
  • In Plato’s Republic, the word is synonymous with (translated as) “doctor,” “one who care for the sick.”
    
  • And in Galen, “one who treats the disease”
    
  • In Plutarch’s Moralia, in a section titled “That a Philosopher Ought to Converse Especially with Men in Power,” we find the adjective--θεραπευτικός—used to describe “an attendant”: “No, on the contrary, the man who is ambitious for himself and afraid of every whisper is just the one who avoids and fears being called a persistent and servile attendant on those in power. For what does a man say who is an attendant upon philosophy and stands in need of it?”
    
  • And then the verb--θεραπεύω—leads to many compelling sources:
    
    • Pseudo-Lucian, writing of the figure of the Cynic: “But I dance no attendance at the doors of the so-called fortunate, but consider their golden crowns and their purple robes mere pride, and I laugh at the fellows who wear them.”
      
    • Epictetus, considering the question “How ought we to bare ourselves toward tyrants,” plays with the verb throughout an entire paragraph. The translator explains: “The whole passage turns on the various meanings of θεραπεύω, which include serve, attend to, give medical care to, pay attention to, pay court to, flatter, etc.”
      
  • Thus the connection between the nurse and the philosopher: one attends to the sick of body, the other to the sick of soul
    

Nursing:

• When we get to the activity--Nursing—we encounter (variants of) both of the keywords above: τιθήνη and θεραπευτής. But we also encounter another word, one that is quite familiar to me but somewhat surprising to find in this search: παιδαγωγία. In that form, there aren’t too many entries in the Loeb library. It’s more common variant, however, παιδαγωγός, one who undertakes παιδαγωγία, shows up much more:
  
  • There is an entire character in Sophocles’ Electra named “Old Slave”
    
  • Pedagagos appears again in Euripides’ Medea, but there it is translated as “Tutor”
    
  • Also “tutor” in Menander’s Aspis
    
  • The translator of Plato’s Lysis explains, “The παιδαγωγός was a trusted slave who was appointed to attend on a boy out of school hours and to have a general control over his conduct and industry.”
    
  • Plutarch, pursuing the matter of how we ought to study poetry, shines some light on this role of “tutor” as explained above: “Now in all cases it is useful also to seek after the cause of each thing that is said. Cato, for example, used, even as a child, to do whatever the attendant in charge of him ordered, yet he also demanded to know the ground and reason for the order. And so the poets are not to be obeyed as though they were our keepers or law-givers, unless their subject matter be reasonable.”
    

Attending:

• So what is interesting thus far?
  
  • Connection between the nurse who cares for the sick, the therapist, and the philosopher who cares for the sick of soul
    
    
  • The nurse and the philosopher meet another figure, that of the pedagogue, who serves a similar function, namely to guide
    
  • But the figure of the pedagogue is not one we would necessarily want to emulate today:
    
    • Cite secondary sources (below): Close members of the family, but... 
      
  • This question leads to an important matter for all teachers: Do you care for your students like the nurse and philosopher, or do you watch over them like the slave who guides well-to-do children to school? 
    
  • What would it mean to “attend” to our students like the nurse and philosophical therapist?
    
• That question leads to a confrontation with the word “attend”
  
  • When we look that word up in the Ancient Greek dictionary, we find a number of synonyms. One—Attend on (as a servant on a child)—is pedagogue. Another—to attend medically—is the variant of therapy that we’ve talked a bit about. 
    
  • But also this: ἐφέπω…
    
    • A look at the definitions paints an aggressive picture:
      
      • Molest, or follow a woman
        
      • Ply, or practice a pursuit
        
      • obey, attend to
        
    • Does this not set up a confrontation with the dialectic of power that teachers face in the classroom? [...]
      
• The compelling question to which I arrive is this: in what ways ought we, teachers, attend to/on our students? 
  
  • At the surface level of analysis, I think we all agree that we must avoid the violent role of overseer or stalker who, in the name of obeying existing ideologies, follows a student through a course of study like a stalker would follow a woman. 
    
  • Likewise, it seems obvious that an ethical pedagogue will steer clear of the Ancient role of “tutor” that sought to correct the conduct of the pupil through force or verbal harassment or anything of the sort
    
  • The only classical dimension of pedagogy that seems relevant is the thread that ties “teaching” to “attendance,” namely the kind of attendance that a nurse contributed to the sick. But here, the trap would be to liken students to the ill who are always necessarily coming to the classroom in need of repair or an antidote of some kind. The power dynamic there is unbalanced: teachers have the remedy of which students must partake. 
    
  • But my recent long stay in the hospital reveals a particular quality of nurses that point beyond this unhealthy power dynamic.
    
    • Nurses actually touch patients, whereas doctors seem more often to consult numbers and data gathered by nurses of the patients
      
    • Nurses resemble a medical generalist, one who knows a bit about each of the areas of medicine. By contrast, doctors specialize. The general knowledge of nurses feels much more comprehensive and starts to feel like the philosopher’s knowledge of “general” or “universal” truths (putting aside, for now, the challenge of those terms). 
      
    • It is easier to converse with a nurse than with a doctor, meaning that the close contact between patient and nurse (or patient’s parents and nurses) leads to conversations that reveal the connection between the medical world and the world beyond the hospital. This “dialogic” quality to the relationship is often lacking in the doctor-parent relationship
      
  • All of this is to say that “attending on” our students in the spirit of a nurse might lead to an intimate mode of teaching that is hands-on, that seeks to tie academic speciality to concerns of general knowledge, and that relies upon casual conversation as a genuine relationship-building tool.
    
  • More broadly, there is a “care” that nurses bring to their work that philosophers and teachers would do well to emulate. (Foucault and Hadot, of course, talked about this in great detail, at least in regard to philosophy.)
    

Secondary sources

Yannicopoulos, A. V. (1985). The pedagogue in antiquity. British Journal of Educational Studies, 33(2), 173–179. doi:10.1080/00071005.1985.9973708

• “While  the teacher's  function was to equip the  boy with useful knowledge and  skills, the tutor was to enforce decent  conduct. He also stayed continuously by the  side of his charge either inside or outside the school. According to Quintilian, Philostratus and Libanius, pedagogues,  holding their sticks in their hands ready for action, used to sit between the pupils in order to prevent them teasing  each other” (176).
  
• “What   is taught   to the child   by his teacher is supplemented by the pedagogue',  states Libanius, '...he coaxes the child, shouts at  him, produces the rod, shakes the lash, constructs the lessons  to be stored in his mind'” (176).
  

Christian Laes, “Pedagogues in Greek Inscriptions in Hellenistic and Roman Antiquity,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 171 (2009): 113-122.

• Other terms such as τροφός (feeder, rearer) and θρέψας (nourisher) may refer to pedagogues, but the terms are quite broad (114).
  
• “It was already common in ancient Greece for a child to be entrusted to a pedagogue. His  task encompassed an intellectual aspect (tutoring of the young child and language instruction) and a moral aspect (accompanying and protecting the child as it walked to school, further socialisation through, among other things, training in politeness). The moral and  the intellectual facet were, for that matter, not strictly separated. These educators could be either slaves either free persons [...]” (114).
  
• “Paidagogoi were usually discerned from paidonomoi, who were officials or supervisors in charge of education [...]. Other terms as paideutai or epistatai also refer to officials supervisors of children or instructors and teachers” (114).