Plato Versus Play-Doh

Let’s do a quick recap. Plato is an absolute giant in the realm of Western reasoning. A student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, he wrote philosophy as dialogue rather than decree, allowing ideas to argue, falter, and refine themselves in full view. His work stretched across mathematics, the natural world, morality, and political theory, laying foundations that nearly every branch of Western thought still leans on today.

Play-Doh, by contrast, is a brightly colored modeling compound designed for small hands and short attention spans. It began life in 1930s Cincinnati as a wallpaper cleaner before being rebranded for school classrooms in the 1950s and eventually landing on department store shelves nationwide.

Plato, Play-Doh. Easy to confuse, apparently.

Officials at Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences seem to have done exactly that. In an effort that feels more like housekeeping than scholarship, they recently flagged and banned portions of Plato’s work that touch on gender and sexuality, as though philosophy were a toy aisle where inconvenient pieces can simply be removed. This is not just confounding; it misunderstands the purpose of critical thinking itself. You don’t get to keep the questions that feel safe and discard the ones that make you uneasy. That isn’t education. That’s shaping dough and calling it reason.

—Mitchell Hegman