More from John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography…

James Mill’s influence on John Stuart’s education is indefatigable. Here John describes how Plato, and the Socratic method helped him create a mental tool-box for clear thinking.

There is no other author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own mental culture, than Plato, or whom he more frequently recommended to young students. I can bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting errors, and clearing up confusions incident to the intellectus sibi permissus, the understanding has made up all its bundles of associations under the guidance of popular phraseology.

James Mill was adamant about proper elocution. A lost oration skill today:

In going through Plato and Demosthenes, since I could now read these authors, as far as the language was concerned, with perfect ease, I was not required to construe them sentence by sentence, but to read them aloud to my father, answering questions when asked: but the particular attention which he paid to elocution (in which his own excellence was remarkable) made this reading aloud to him a most painful task. Of all things which he required me to do, there was none which I did so constantly ill, or in which he so perpetually lost his temper with me. He had thought much on the principles of the art of reading, especially the most neglected part of it, the inflections of the voice, or modulation as writers on elocution call it (in contrast with articulation on the one side, and expression on the other), and had reduced it to rules, grounded on the logical analysis of a sentence.

I sense James Mill would be furious with modern western educational curriculum. Outside of some particular schooling, or private tutors, elocution is an afterthought.

Extinct.

intellectus sibi permissus = the intellect left to itself

Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 1989.