What Leo Said to Ira

At the request of a fifth-grade teacher and former student teacher, Vivian Gussin Paley spends two mornings in her classroom to help address a problem, a seemingly garden-variety scene where a boy is excluded from a playground ball game. As discussion unfolds, deeper issues of friendship and unfairness for the individuals (the one who did the excluding and the one excluded) and for friend groups emerge. Mrs. Paley has brought her decades-old copy of Plato’s Republic along with her, a book that has provided her with invaluable reminders about how to think about fairness in one’s personal and public life. Socrates had a student, Thrasymachus, who appears in this fifth-grade class in the voice of one boy in particular but with echoes in several others. This essay portrays Mrs. Paley, the fifth-grade teacher, the full class of diverse children, Socrates, and Thrasymachus at work addressing the issues of friendship and fairness that this class tries to untangle and finally does so in a most unexpected moment.