Through an exegesis of the dramatic elements of Plato's Laches, Brandon Buck and Rachel Longa argue that it is an especially valuable text to read with practicing and preservice teachers. Buck and Longa show how the dialogue illustrates three essential aspects of what education means and involves. First, they show how the dialogue foregrounds the often‐obscured role of philosophical inquiry in addressing educational questions. Second, they show how the depiction of aporia in the Laches underscores the importance of uncertainty for the persistence of humanistic conversation, and thus for substantial engagement with core educational questions. Finally, they interpret Socrates to suggest that participation in humanistic conversation is not merely an incidental aspect of education as a profession, but rather precisely what it means to be an educator. In sum, Buck and Longa argue that the Laches illustrates the core idea that in order to educate at all, we must be deeply involved in the very questions that characterize humanistic conversation.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives its proof in turn.-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass If we are to imagine education as the practice of turning the soul, we must have some point of orientation in mind: it cannot be merely a turn for turning's sake. For Socrates, this point is the form of the good, which "gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower." 1 It is for this reason, perhaps, that Socrates found himself compelled (if begrudgingly) to banish poetry from the kallipolis: our engagement with the poetic rarely yields the kind of propositional knowledge that might be attained via the exercise of the faculty of reason through the practice of dialectic. This project, following humbly in the footsteps of Eduardo Duarte's Being and Learning, is an attempt to resist that compulsion by thinking about the role of the poetic in education, specifically in terms of its capacity to orient the soul in a different direction. I will argue that an encounter with the poetic can both incite and sustain an experience of puzzlement, which might engender a state of waiting, and can cultivate the practice of meditative thought. In doing so, I hope to free the poetic from the demands of reason and open up an educational space, external to the sphere of "truth-as-certainty," in which the poetic might dwell. In other words, it is an attempt to imagine what it might be like (and perhaps even suggest that, in our commodity-oriented world, increasingly fraught with a pervasive and pernicious anthropocentrism, it might indeed be time) to expand the purview of education such that it encompasses not only the practice of calculative thinking, but also the practice of meditative thinking as well. It is an attempt to welcome poetry back into the kallipolis with open arms.

Peter Roberts devotes the final pages of this ambitious and timely volume to drawing out the pedagogical implications of the philosophical work he undertakes in the preceding six chapters. He engages, in other words, in the painstaking, uncertain, and ever-necessary labor of "rethinking the role of education." Education, Roberts writes, "is anything but a smooth, easy process; it is difficult, messy, complex, and necessarily lifelong. Once the process has begun, it cannot be stopped. Kierkegaard's philosophical approach was, in Bykhovski's words, one of 'restlessness, agitation, passion.' Education is similar to this" (117). Kierkegaard's three forms of despair-"being unconscious in despair of having a self…, not wanting in despair to be oneself, and wanting in despair to be oneself" (12)can help us understand this restlessness, agitation, and passion as sustained by a particular set of tensions. In Kierkegaard's model, "our capacity for reflective consciousness" (117) might be seen as the basis of our relationship to despair. Reflective consciousness opens a clearing between the self and itself, establishing the relationship of the self as an other to itself. This clearing-this reflective space-opens onto the world, and, in turn, provides the space for despair to emerge.Roberts illustrates this in his reading of Dostoyevsky's "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" as a story that is, at least in part, about the acquisition of reflective consciousness. The inhabitants of the "other earth," to which the Ridiculous man travels in his reverie, come to "seek knowledge, where before they had been content to simply accept things as they found them" (75). But they also "suffer greatly" (75) as they begin to feel the weight that comes with this recognition of being a self, among others, in the world. This weight is the realization that we are both mortal and immortal-that there is a pull upward and a desire to leap toward the divine, but the gravity of humanity and the earth always draws us down again. It is precisely this realization that marks the shift from Kierkegaard's second form of despair ("not wanting in despair to be oneself") to the third ("wanting in despair to be oneself"). In the former, one does not recognize the impossible task that he or she * Rachel Longa

Daniel Cho opens this thought-provoking article by challenging "the causality that [Martha] Nussbaum posits between education and democracy" in her 2010 volume, Not for Profit. "Is it indeed the case," he asks, that, as Nussbaum suggests, "a crisis in education is causing a crisis in democracy? Or," he wonders, "could something else be responsible for the poor state of our democracy-something endemic to democracy itself, perhaps?" Cho goes on to suggest that there is a "weakness" in our very notion of democracy. This notion, he argues, is rooted in the ideal of equality, which is "incapable of generating

Drawing on the work of Simone Weil, this article argues that the human purpose of reading is the creation of meaning through interpretive activity. In the context of institutionalized schooling, however, the activity of reading has been alienated from this purpose. As a result, some contemporary pedagogies of reading might keep us from learning how to undertake the work necessary to hone and sharpen our interpretations, and thereby render our world increasingly lucid and coherent. Here, Rachel Longa proposes that the paradigm of spiritual practice might provide the theoretical resources for a corrective to this alienation. It could help us to reconfigure the dominant form of the activity of reading such that its human purpose is foregrounded and championed, rather than obscured. The concept of askēsis could thereby serve as a lifeline that tethers us to the forms of life from which we derive purpose and that orients us toward the ends of ethical self‐formation.