Aristophane's Clouds Response Paper

In Aristophanes’ Clouds, Socrates represents the overly strict education in Athens, which does not emphasize honesty, morality and is separate from reality. Socrates is a person who’s eloquent but don’t make good use of his eloquence. And he convinces/argues with people with the wrong reason. From the text, Socrates is a pretty bad person for agreeing to teach Strepsiades and ended up teaching his son, Phiedippides, the way to deliver a speech that would let them escape his debt. As the text described that Strepsiades had trouble paying his debt, it is understandable that Socrates might had been pitying Strepsiades’ inability of paying off debt, but it’s still immoral to not give money back to people who lend the money when one’s desperate in need of money. Therefore, Socrates should not have agreed to teach such speech to make the creditors go away and he should have taught them how one should be appreciate and do mores things in return to repay the one who help them when they were in need.
Though Socrates didn’t handle the Strepsiades’ case well, he is still doing something useful with his life. Socrates founded a school to educate students, though it lacks education on morality and honesty. Education is important; in the case of Socrates, he at least disciplined his students despite the fact of being overly serious. Thus, Socrates is still doing something beneficial to the society by disciplining his students in school. Freedom might have been omitted, rules are needed to do anything and Socrates accomplished such by teaching his student to be serious in school.
Socrates’ initiative of starting his school should be embraced. Even though he’s not providing the proper and moral education to his students, including Strepsiades and his son, he organized a school and tried to teach them speech, which is a good thing since it involves logic thinking and eloquence. However, what Socrates is doing should not be admired, because he’s leading people the wrong way toward wrong argument that is rhetorically sounding but lacks moral values. Instead, Socrates should use his intellect to teach people how to present a right argument that is solid, honest, and righteous. In addition, Socrates should apply the teaching in school to real world along with implementing moral education.
Aristophanes’ Clouds is a comic play that ridicules the Athenian education that is overly strict, dishonest, apart from reality and lacking morality. Aristophanes’ purpose of presenting Socrates in this way to mock the rigid and unpractical the Athenian education is and to wake up the audience to be aware that wrong education can be dangerous. Additionally, Aristophanes is trying to tell the audience that people should have their judgment when receiving education; otherwise education can become dangerous and lead one to the wrong direction when one’s not even aware of like the character Phiedippides in Aristophanes’ Clouds.