Homer’s Odyssey and the Future of Education

Commentary

What is education for?

Modern education has become remarkably good at answering secondary questions. What skills do students need? What information should they acquire? How should their performance be measured? A curriculum built around standardized testing can tell you whether a student can solve a quadratic equation or identify a topic sentence. It has little to say about what that student should love, or what kind of life is worth living.

The ancient world began with a more fundamental question: What kind of person should education produce?

The Greek word paideia described this larger task: the formation of the human person through intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and civic education. At the center of Greek paideia stood not a textbook or technical manual, but a poet: Homer.

This should make us reconsider what stories do.

A lecture can tell students that courage is good. A story can make them admire courage. A teacher can define fidelity; Homer makes us wait 20 years with Penelope. A philosopher can explain the dangers of uncontrolled appetite; the Odyssey shows Odysseus’s companions slaughtering the cattle of Helios despite knowing the deadly consequences. Propositions instruct the intellect. Stories educate our loves.

This is why Plato famously called Homer the educator of Greece. Greek children encountered language, religion, honor, courage, hospitality, family, and civic responsibility through the Iliad and Odyssey. Homer provided a gallery of human possibilities. Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, and the suitors allowed generations of readers to ask which kinds of lives deserved admiration.

Plato’s Warning

That extraordinary formative power troubled Plato.

In the Republic, Plato challenges the poets precisely because poetry can shape the soul before philosophical reason has learned to govern it. Poetry is mimesis, imitation, and can encourage audiences to mistake appearances for reality. Worse, it moves the emotions. We can learn to sympathize with grief, rage, lust, and injustice before reason has judged whether these responses are appropriate.

Plato’s objection is an educational insight: if stories form our loves, we had better be careful which stories we tell. In an age that has reduced art to entertainment it is worth taking his worry far more seriously.

Homer is also the poet who makes the wrath of Achilles compelling, who lingers over the glamour of battle, who lets the suitors’ appetite for feasting and courtship look, for long stretches, like simple vitality. A story that can teach a reader to admire courage can just as easily teach a reader to admire domination, so long as domination is described with enough appeal. Plato’s fear was not that poetry fail to move us. It was that poetry move us before we are equipped to judge whether we should be moved.

Aristotle agreed about poetry’s power but disagreed with Plato’s conclusion. In the Poetics, he argues that imitation is natural to human beings and fundamental to learning. More importantly, poetry can reveal universals. History tells us what a particular person actually did; poetry reveals what a certain kind of person might characteristically do according to probability or necessity. The poet and philosopher can therefore address the same realities through different modes.

This does not dismiss Plato’s worry so much as sharpen it. If poetry can form loves in either direction, then the case for reading Homer cannot rest merely on the claim that stories are formative. The case has to rest on a further claim: that the Odyssey, read well, exposes disordered love rather than simply modeling it.

Odysseus dissembles, but in order to disguise and discern. We do not admire Odysseus’s companions for eating the cattle of Helios; the poem shows the wreck that follows. The suitors are not held up as models of appetite well spent; they die for it. Homer’s poetry survives Plato’s challenge not because his poetry is safe, but because it largely makes disorder visible as disorder rather than dressing it up as glory. It still depends on how capably his text is read and taught, it is not a guarantee built into the form of his story.

The Odyssey remains educational because we are not merely learning what supposedly happened to one Greek king. We encounter permanent patterns of human existence: temptation, suffering, fidelity, pride, hospitality, fatherhood, marriage, mortality, recognition, and homecoming.

From Paideia to Humanitas

Rome inherited the Greek educational tradition and translated it into the ideal of humanitas, particularly associated with Cicero. Humanitas incorporated Greek paideia—cultivation through literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and the liberal arts—but joined education to philanthrōpia: humane conduct, generosity, and concern for others.

This connection is crucial. The educated person was not simply the person who knew things. Learning was supposed to produce a particular kind of human being. Christianity inherited this classical tradition and further honed it. The classical world had identified four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. Christianity did not discard them. The Christian tradition incorporated them within a different understanding of the human person’s ultimate end. The natural virtues of man were now ordered toward the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity—virtues whose final object is God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

Courage, therefore, could no longer mean merely heroic prowess or contempt for death. It could mean martyrdom, long-suffering, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. Justice could not be confined to giving fellow citizens their due; Christ’s command to love one’s neighbor extended even to the stranger and enemy. Temperance became more than mastery of appetite; desire itself had to be reordered. Prudence was no longer merely successful practical calculation but wisdom directed toward humanity’s ultimate good.

Augustine and the Education of Love

Augustine gave this synthesis one of its most powerful formulations through the ordo amoris—the order of love.

For Augustine, the moral problem is not simply that human beings desire evil things. Frequently we desire genuine goods—pleasure, knowledge, honor, wealth, friendship, family—but love them disproportionately or place lesser goods above greater ones. Virtue consequently requires rightly ordered love.

This provides a remarkable bridge back to Homer. Odysseus encounters precisely this problem throughout his journey. The Sirens offer knowledge and glory; Calypso offers pleasure and immortality; his companions desire food; the suitors desire wealth, power, and Penelope. Many of these objects are not intrinsically evil. The disorder arises because they are desired without proper measure or outside their proper relationships.

Augustine universalizes Homer’s insight. Education must teach not merely how to think but how to love. The theological virtues provide the final orientation of that love: faith identifies the highest reality, hope directs desire toward its ultimate fulfillment, and charity orders every lesser love toward God and neighbor.

The Moral Imagination

This is what literature contributes to education: the formation of the moral imagination. Stories allow us to inhabit consequences before experiencing them ourselves. We watch Paris choose Aphrodite rather than Athena. We see Odysseus reject immortality with Calypso for a mortal life with Penelope.

Literature makes moral order visible—when the reader has been taught to see disorder as disorder rather than mistake it for glamour. That qualification is not incidental. It is what separates Homer taught as a means of forming virtue from Homer the way he has recently been depicted in Christopher Nolan’s film, as violent entertainment and disordered guilt, and it is why the teaching of these texts is the real site of paideia.

What Contemporary Education Has Lost

This exposes a weakness at the heart of contemporary education. Schools and universities justify themselves through superficial marks of competence like “measurable outcomes”: literacy, numeracy, technical competence, credentials, employability, and economic productivity. But even competence cannot tell us what competence is for.

We can teach students genetic engineering without determining when it should be used. We can teach persuasive communication without asking whether the cause being advocated is true. We can teach artificial intelligence without asking what human intelligence is for. Our civilization has strengthened our capacity even while sabotaging the humanities as the ends toward which those means should be directed. That is the difference between skills and wisdom.

Homer still belongs in liberal education because he asks questions technological progress cannot render obsolete. I have asked these questions throughout this series. What should we love? What do parents owe children and children their parents? What makes a marriage faithful? What does the host owe the stranger? When must desire be restrained? What is honor? What distinguishes justice from vengeance? How should we face mortality? What does it mean to come home?

Paideia and our Age of Artificial Intelligence

The future of education will possess technologies Homer could never have imagined. Artificial intelligence may provide information, translation, explanation, and technical competence almost instantaneously. That makes the slow road of paideia more necessary, not less.

Consider a student learning to write with the help of an AI system that can draft, revise, and polish prose on request. A purely skills-based education can teach that student how to prompt the system effectively, how to evaluate its output for accuracy, how to integrate it into a workflow. None of that requires asking what the writing is for—whether the student is using the tool to think more clearly or to avoid thinking at all, whether the essay serves truth or mere persuasion. And it never considers whether the ease of using AI is sharpening or blunting the student’s own judgment.

Ordo amoris supplies exactly the missing question: not “can I do this?” but “what am I coming to love, and is it rightly ordered?” A student who has read Odysseus resist the Sirens’ offer of effortless, total knowledge is better equipped to resist a tool that offers something similar.

The same holds for genetic engineering, persuasive AI, and other such technologies. In each case the technical competence can be transmitted in a semester; but the capacity to ask what the competence is for is what a literary and moral formation is meant to cultivate, and that takes years, not weeks.

A curriculum is literally a racecourse. It is not meant to punctuate a degree; it is meant to last for the run of one’s life. Human nature has not changed, and the teacher of Greece is still the base of a well-ordered humanities curriculum.

Homer belongs in everyone’s curriculum: literature like his belongs before—not after—technical and professional training, it should be taught not as cultural decoration for humanities majors but as the place where students practice asking what their skills are for before they have full power to use them; it should be taught with its difficulty intact rather than smoothed into simple moral lessons. Any education claiming to prepare students for an AI-saturated world has failed at something essential if its graduating students are more capable but no more discerning.

While machines can increasingly tell us how to do things, a humanities education must still teach us to ask why. As information abounds, the value of wisdom intensifies.

The purpose of liberal education has always been the cultivation of persons capable of affirming what is true, loving what is good, and delighting in what is beautiful. That is why, nearly 3,000 years after Homer first sang his epic of a wandering king seeking his way home, the Odyssey still belongs at the heart of an education worthy of free human beings.

For more information about Paideia Today, go to my website or my YouTube channel. If you would like a free copy of my Visual Guide to Homer’s Odyssey, click here.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.