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NPR is starting off a series titled "50 Great Teachers" and is starting with Socrates:
We're starting this celebration of teaching with Socrates, the superstar teacher of the ancient world. He was sentenced to death more than 2,400 years ago for "impiety" and "corrupting" the minds of the youth of Athens.
But Socrates' ideas helped form the foundation of Western philosophy and the scientific method of inquiry. And his question-and-dialogue-based teaching style lives on in many classrooms as the Socratic method.
Most of us have been influenced by our teachers, and some of them may have even been great ones even if, unlike Socrates, they toiled in anonymity. So, I ask this question: Who were (or are) your greatest teachers, why, and what did you learn from them that made them so great?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 30 2014, @08:14PM
Given all the "miracles" attributed to that character, you would think that legit historians who were his contemporaries would have mentioned some of that incredible stuff in their works.
Didn't happen. Logical conclusion: fictional accounts.
It wasn't until 94CE, some 60 years after his execution, that that individual got a passing mention by a legit historian. [google.com]
It should also be noted that "Jesus" was a common name at the time.
Reza Aslan, the same modern historian who cites that bit, has done interesting work about the generally-understood meaning of "messiah" and how the PR image of that guy was crafted.
You can hear a good bit of that in this webcast. [kpfk.org]
It's a 14MB MP3 and will be in that archive until Dec. 7, 2014.
(There is a 6-minute news segment early in the file and the last 20 minutes is fund drive stuff.)
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 31 2014, @02:12AM
Given all the "miracles" attributed to that character, you would think that legit historians who were his contemporaries would have mentioned some of that incredible stuff in their works.
There were lots of messiahs and cults during that time and I bet they all performed a growing list of miracles each time their story was retold. I think what made Jesus so famous was first his planning for after his death (real death not the "rose from the dead" crucifixion) which enabled his followers to stay organized, unified, and continue to grow, and the considerable efforts of Paul the Apostle, one of the most remarkable religious evangelists of history. Paul apparently was responsible for turning a local Jewish cult into an inclusive, cosmopolitan religion with reach throughout the Roman empire as well as organizing the first formal churches (particularly the Roman Catholic Church of the medieval age).