How to Use Plato for Online High School Courses
Plato's The Republic is a book taught in upper-level high school English classes, as well as college-level literature classes. You can teach Plato online using The Republic and your own online class. The Republic is a look at what Plato feels to be the important components of an ideal society. This book is widely used in curriculums today.
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Instructions
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Assign The Republic as required reading for the class. Make it one of your first reading assignments, so you can spend plenty of time discussing it. Post the assignment on your online class board, or send it out via email, however you are instructed to do for online courses.
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Lead your online class in a discussion of Plato. Emphasize that one of Plato's strongest teaching skills was a discussion of ideas. Have students meet for an online chat to discuss things that they have read in The Republic.
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Discuss the following points in your online discussion with your class: Which three classes make up Plato's idea of an ideal society? How are leaders in an ideal society educated? What is the theory of Forms, and the idea of appearance vs. reality? What does it mean to have knowledge through reason instead of knowledge through the senses experiences? What is the basic problem with art, as seen by Plato? Discovery Education cites these as the best examples of discussion points for a classroom.
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Ask students to complete a five-page paper on the topic of their choice, chosen from the above discussion points that the class has already participated in.
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Collect and grade the papers. Hand them back and then initiate another classroom discussion. Plato's logic, as Discovery Education points out, states that discourse is important to education, so follow through with that by having students participate in a discourse about their grades and answer questions that they might have about choices you have made.
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