It’s highly unlikely that the Texas A&M regents read Plato before drafting their policy. If they had, they would have discovered that, far from “advocating gender ideology,” he challenges all of our 21st-century ways of thinking about sex and gender. He is neither “left” nor “right,” because he lived thousands of years before those labels were invented. That is one of the reasons studying Greek philosophy has never become obsolete: In every generation, it allows people to escape the binaries of their own time and think things through from the beginning.
The belief that every student is capable of this kind of thinking, and deserves to experience it, was one of the noblest ideals of democratic education. Now that both democracy and education are under threat in the United States, philosophers may have to relearn the “prudence” that once seemed like a relic of history. Peterson is already employing a classic technique of esoteric writing: calling attention to what he is forced to omit. In his revised syllabus, when the students were originally supposed to read Plato, they will now be assigned a New York Times article about why they can’t.
-Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic
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