“Is it not, then, on these accounts that we attach such supreme importance to a musical education, because rhythm and harmony sink most deeply into the recesses of the soul, bringing gracefulness in their train, and making a man graceful if he be rightly nurtured; but if not, the reverse? and also because he that has been duly nurtured therein will have the keenest eye for defects, whether in the failures of art, or in the misgrowths of nature; and feeling a most just disdain for them, will commend beautiful objects, and gladly receive them into his soul, and feed upon them, and grow to be noble and good; whereas he will rightly censure and hate all repulsive objects, even in his childhood, before he is able to be reasoned with; and when reason comes, he will welcome her most cordially who can recognize her by the instinct of relationship, and because he has been thus nurtured?”[32]
31. High Intellectual Education.—In the Republic of Plato the intellectual education of the warrior class remains exclusively literary and æsthetic. In addition to this, the education of the ruling class is to be scientific and philosophic. The future magistrate, after having received the ordinary instruction up to the age of twenty, is to be initiated into the abstract sciences, mathematics, geometry, and astronomy. To this scientific education, which is to continue for ten years, there will succeed for five years the study of dialectics,[33] or philosophy, which develops the highest faculty of man, the reason, and teaches him to discover, through and beyond the fleeting appearances of the world of sense, the eternal verities and the essence of things. But Plato prolongs the education of his magistrates still further. After having given them the nurture of reason and intellectual insight, he sends them back to the cavern[34] at the age of thirty-five, that is, calls them back to public life, and makes them pass through all kinds of civil and military employments, until finally, at the age of fifty, in possession of all the endowments assured by consummate experience superadded to profound knowledge, they are fitted to be charged with the burdens of office. In the Republic of Plato statesmen are not improvised. And yet in this elaborate system of instruction Plato omits two subjects of great importance. On the one hand, he entirely omits the physical and natural sciences, because, in his mystic idealism, things of sense are delusive and unreal images, and so did not appear to him worthy of arresting the attention of the mind; and on the other, though coming after Herodotus, and though a contemporary of Thucydides, he makes no mention of history, doubtless through a contempt for tradition and the past.
32. The Laws.—In the Laws, the work of his old age, Plato disavows in part the chimeras of the Republic, and qualifies the radicalism of that earlier work. The philosopher descends to the earth and really condescends to the actual state of humanity. He renounces the distinction of social castes, and his very practical and very minute precepts are applied without distinction to children of all classes.[35]
First note this excellent definition of the end of education: “A good education is that which gives to the body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable.” As to methods, it seems that Plato hesitates between the doctrine of effort and the doctrine of attractive toil. In fact, he says on the one hand that education is a very skilful discipline which, by way of amusement,[36] leads the mind of the child to love that which is to make it finished. On the other hand, he protests against the weakness of those parents who seek to spare their children every trouble and every pain. “I am persuaded,” he says, “that the inclination to humor the likings of children is the surest of all ways to spoil them. We should not make too much haste in our search after what is pleasurable, especially as we shall never be wholly exempt from what is painful.”
Let us add this definition of a good education: “I call education the virtue which is shown by children when the feelings of joy or of sorrow, of love or of hate, which arise in their souls, are made conformable to order.”
With the statement of these principles, Plato enters into details. For children up to the age of six, he recommends the use of swaddling-clothes. The habit of rocking, the natural plays which children find out for themselves, the separation of the sexes; swimming, the bow, and the javelin, for boys; wrestling for giving bodily vigor, and dancing, for graceful movement; reading and writing reserved till the tenth year and learned for three years.
It would require too much time to follow the philosopher to the end. In the rules he proposes, he makes a near approach to the practices followed by the Athenians of his day. The Republic was a work of pure imagination. The Laws are scarcely more than a commentary on the actual state of practice. But here we still find what was nearest the soul of Plato, the constant search for a higher morality.
33. Xenophon.—As an educator, Xenophon obeyed two different influences. His master, Socrates, was his good genius. That graceful and charming book, the Economics, was written under the benign and tempered inspiration of the great Athenian sage. But Xenophon also had his evil genius,—the immoderate enthusiasm which he felt for Sparta, her institutions and her laws. The first book of the Cyropædia, which relates the rules of Persian education, is an unfortunate imitation of the laws of Lycurgus.
34. The Economics, and the Education of Woman.—All should read the Economics, that charming sketch of the education of woman. We may say of this little work what Renan has said of the writings of Plutarch on the same subject: “Where shall we find a more charming ideal of family life? What good nature! What sweetness of manners! What chaste and lovable simplicity!” Before her marriage, the Athenian maiden has learned only to spin wool, to be discreet, and to ask no questions,—virtues purely negative. Xenophon assigns to her husband the duty of training her mind and of teaching her the positive duties of family life,—order, economy, kindness to slaves, and tender care of children. As a matter of fact, the Athenian woman was still held in a position of inferiority. Shut up in her own apartments, it was an exception that she learned to read and write; it was very rare that she was instructed in the arts and sciences. The idea of human dignity and of the value of the human person had not yet appeared. Man had value only in proportion to the services which he could render the State, or commonwealth, and woman formed no part of the commonwealth. Xenophon has the merit of rising above the prejudices of his time, and of approaching the ideal of the modern family, in calling woman to participate more intimately in the affairs of the house and in the occupations of the husband.[37]