Newcastle University is advertising for a Director of Academic Advising, which will offer guidance that is ‘inclusive, compassionate, and genuinely personalised to [student] goals’. Plato would have been appalled. Should not students be meeting the university’s goals?

In 361 BC Dionysius II, tyrant of Sicily, invited Plato to come to Sicily to educate him on the matter of ruling a country. Plato agreed, but had grave doubts whether Dionysius would respond well to his method, which was to ‘demonstrate the nature of the subject as a whole, and all the stages that must be gone through, and how much effort is needed’ in order to acquire ‘the daily routine which will best foster his powers of learning and remembering and conducting sober debate within his own mind’.

He went on: ‘For those who are not genuinely lovers of wisdom, such an education provides no more than a superficial veneer like the tan men get by exposing themselves to the sun. Once they see how much there is to learn, the commitment involved and the disciplined way of life required, they will realise that the task is too much for them and beyond their scope. That is the clearest and safest way to deal with those who like soft living and are incapable of hard work; it has the advantage that a man has only himself to blame if he cannot meet the demands of the subject, and his guide is absolved from responsibility.’

But so sure was Dionysius that he knew enough already, Plato did not give him the full exposition of what was required. Indeed, he said the tyrant had gone on to write a book of his own on the matter – using Plato’s material.

For Plato, real education was ‘not something that can be put into words… only after long partnership in a common life, devoted to that end, will truth flash upon the soul like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, which, once born, nourishes itself from then on’. The alternative is a suntan education: lying there in the lecture room, turning over now and again until lightly educated on both sides.