The Greek idea of beauty must be touched in passing. The wise life was a beautiful life. The Beautiful was an attribute of the Deity. They had the love of Beauty which Goethe possessed when he had become fascinated with the study of Greek art, and exclaimed, “The Beautiful is greater than the Good, for it includes the Good, and adds something to it.” Plato calls the Beautiful the splendor of the True. The youth should learn to love beautiful forms, first a single form, then all beautiful forms and beauty wherever found; then he will turn to beauty of mind, of institutions and laws, and sciences, and he will gradually draw toward the great sea of beauty, and create and contemplate many fair thoughts, and he will become conscious of absolute beauty, and come near to God, who is transcendent beauty and goodness.
Plato’s philosophy makes education a process of developing the power and knowledge latent in the mind, rather than a process of teaching. The Socratic method of drawing out is one of time-honored use among pedagogues. Plato defines a good education as “That which gives to the body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable.” The ideal aim is the harmonious or symmetrical development of the physical, mental, and moral powers. Physical training is for the health of the soul, as well as for the strength and grace of the body. The training of the reason is of first importance. The æsthetic emotions are to be cultivated as a means of moral and religious education. Memory is little emphasized.
The artisans and laborers were simply to learn a trade; the warrior class were to be trained in gymnastics and music. The complete education of the highest class, or the magistrates, was to include music and literature, gymnastics, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, and finally philosophy. All this was to be supplemented by practical acquaintance with the details of civil and military functions.
Education is the foundation of the state, and in the “Laws” he would make it compulsory. The women are to receive the same training as the men. Children are to be taught to honor their parents and respect their elders. The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life. In early childhood education is to be made attractive, although to unduly honor the likings of children is to spoil them. The tales which children are permitted to hear must be models of virtuous thought. Harmful tales concerning the gods and heroes are prohibited, but noble traits and deeds of endurance are to be emphasized. Youth should imitate no baseness, but what is temperate, holy, free, and courageous; for “imitations, beginning in early youth, at last sink into the constitution and become a second nature.” Children must not be frightened with ghost stories and reference to the infernal world.
Excessive athletics makes men stupid and subject to disease. The kinds of music employed in education must inspire courage, reverence, freedom, and temperance. Art should present true beauty and grace, to draw the soul of childhood into harmony with the beauty of reason. “Rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul, making the soul graceful of him who is rightly educated.” Good language and music and grace and rhythm depend on simplicity.
Arithmetic cultivates quickness, and teaches abstract number and necessary truth. Geometry deals with axiomatic knowledge and will draw the soul toward truth. Astronomy compels the mind to look upward. It is to be studied not so much for practical use, as in navigation, but because the mind is purified and illumined thereby. In this connection Plato maintains his position against those who carp at the so-called useless studies.
Plato’s ideal state offends the thought of conservative men more than all else in his writings, but it was conceived in view of the highest ideas of virtue and justice. It was simply bad psychology. He enumerates and describes five kinds of states and the corresponding five types of individual character. Indeed he studies justice first in the ideal state, and then in the individual. The three impulses of the soul are compared with the three classes of citizens in the state, and to each he ascribes its excellence, thus forming his list of virtues. But we cannot dwell upon this phase of Plato’s teachings. We may, however, refer to his caricature of extreme democracy; it has a useful modern application.
In this state the father descends to his son and fears him, and the son is on a level with his father and does not fear him. The alien is equal to the citizen, and the slave to the master. The master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters. The young man is on a level with the old, and old men, for fear of seeming morose and authoritative, condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gayety. Even the animals in the democracy show the spirit of equality, and the horses and asses march along the streets with all the rights and dignities of freemen, and will run at you if you do not get out of their way, and everything is just ready to burst with liberty. The citizens become sensitive and chafe at authority, and cease to care for the laws. Surely the statesman can turn to Plato for wisdom, for out of this condition grows tyranny.
And, correspondingly, the democratical young man, a kind of fin de siècle type, is described. Insolence he terms breeding, and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage.