One of the world's oldest libraries is in Ephesus, on the Aegean coast of Turkey. Its 200,000 scrolls were in its time the largest collection of ideas and information, gathered by the Greek scholars who built a thriving metropolis based on agriculture and trade. All that's left is a classical stone facade surrounding four stately statues.

We still put statues in our libraries today. My elementary school library sported a bust of George Washington; in the high school stood plaster casts of Thomas Edison and John F. Kennedy; in college a wing-footed marble Mercury balanced on his plinth. The purpose of the ancient and modern sculpture is the same: to inspire patrons to worthy endeavors as they emulate the heroes.

Each school statue for me indicated a key idea. Washington was honesty and stoicism; Edison was technology and risk; Kennedy was leadership and courage; Mercury was communication and speed. A truly American pantheon of ideals. Constant exposure to those looming likenesses shaped my character in ways that I'll never understand.

What did the Greeks of old Ephesus wish us to emulate? What aspects of character were they looking to develop? Let's see if we can find a clue in the four statues.

Sophia Wisdom	Arété Virtue	Ennoia Thinking	Epistemé Knowledge

Interestingly, the Greek statues are all women; my American statues were all men. Gender issues aside, what were the Greeks after? As I contemplated the four females in the afternoon sunlight, I tried to put them in order: Knowledge comes first, mastery of facts and fundamentals; then through the act of Thinking you turn that knowledge into Wisdom; and the wise person may then go on to live a life of Virtue. This library at Ephesus, then, had a curriculum plan, a scope and sequence, a path toward learning and life, carved into its walls.

What does this all have to do with technology?

She's missing. Techné, the goddess of craft and technique, the artist of method and materials, of making and doing, finds no place to stand on these walls. The Greeks considered technicians, those masters of the mechanical arts, the sculptors who crafted the statues and the scribes who sorted the scrolls and the architects who erected the edifices, to be lesser men. Techné, wrote Plato in The Republic, in and of itself represented a threat to peace and good order. The rulers of the republic must be drawn from the philosophers, the thinkers, the people whose lives were devoted to ideas and virtue alone.

So too do some educators today see technology as a lower form of learning, a mechanical contrivance good only for keeping track of accounts and cataloging the books in the library. If they had their way they'd remove the statue of Edison, the practical technician, from the library. And Shakespeare's bust as well, since he was a mere actor and playwright, the master of theater technique; and while we're at it let's remove Beethoven and Mozart, mere manipulators of the emotions through the medium of music.

The Greeks who carved the statues at Ephesus 2500 years ago -- mechanics, artisans, craftsmen, perhaps slaves -- still speak to me today. It's their work that remains; it's the result of their mastery of the technology that inspired the ancient patrons and withstood the assaults of the ages to reach us today. Without the scribes and monks and printing presses to preserve them over the centuries, the ideas of Plato would have been lost. They may pooh-pooh it, but without solid technology the statues haven't got a leg to stand on.

And today, very little epistemé is accomplished without the aid of digital technology; new modes of ennoia enabled by technology underlie most of the sciences and many of the arts; sophia is incomplete without an understanding of the impact of digital information and communication tools on the human psyche; and arété is pointless without a consideration of the mechanical advantages and mesmerizing dangers offered by modern technology. For most of us teachers, technology is a means to an end: a valuable and necessary assistant in leading and guiding our students toward the goals represented by the four statues. Techné is there, embodied in the walls, plinths, supports and stonework that form the library and hold up the standing statues for the world to still admire.