In order fully to understand the method of Plato's political education, we must revert to Chapter III of Book I. There we saw that, according to the Greeks, a complete education demanded three things, (1) a noble nature, (2) training through habit, (3) instruction. For the first Plato would do what can be done by artificial selection of parents; for the second, he would depend upon music and gymnastics; for the third, upon philosophy. In these last two divisions we have the root of the mediæval trivium and quadrivium. The Platonic pedagogical system seeks to separate the ignoble from the noble natures, and to place the former in the lowest class. It then trains the noble natures in music and gymnastics, and, while this is going on, it tries to distinguish those natures which are capable of rising above mere training to reflective or philosophic thought, from those which are not. The latter it assigns to the military class, which always remains at the stage of training, while the former are instructed in philosophy, and, if they prove themselves adepts, are finally admitted to the ruling class, as sages. Any member of either of the higher classes who proves himself unworthy of that class, may at any time be degraded into the next below.
As soon as the children are accepted by the State, their education under State nurses begins. The chief efforts of these for some time are directed to the bodies of the children, to seeing that they are healthy and strong. As soon as the young creatures can stand and walk, they are taught to exert themselves in an orderly way and to play little games; and as soon as they understand what is said to them, they are told stories and sung to. Such is their first introduction to gymnastics and music. What games are to be taught, what stories told, and what airs sung to the children, the State determines, and indeed, since the character of human beings depends, in great measure, upon the first impression made upon them, this is one of its most sacred duties. Plato altogether disapproves of leaving children without guidance to seek exercise and amusement in their own way, and demands that their games shall be such as call forth, in a gentle and harmonious way, all the latent powers of body and mind, and develop the sense of order, beauty, and fitness. He is still more earnest in insisting that the stories told to children shall be exemplifications of the loftiest morality, and the airs sung to them such as settle, strengthen, and solemnize the soul. He follows Heraclitus in demanding that the Homeric poems, so long the storehouse for children's stories, shall be entirely proscribed, on account of the false ideals which they hold up both of gods and heroes, and the intimidating descriptions which they give of the other world. Virtue, he holds, cannot be furthered by fear, which is characteristic only of slaves. He thinks that all early intellectual training should be a sort of play. The truth is, the infant-school of Plato's Republic comes as near as can well be imagined to the ideal of the modern kindergarten.
While this elementary education is going on, the officers of the State have abundant opportunity for observing the different characters of the children, and distinguishing the noble from the ignoble. As soon as a child shows plainly that it belongs by nature to the lowest class, they consign it to that class, and its education by the State practically ceases. Of course these officers know from what class each child came, and they make use of this knowledge in determining its future destiny. At the same time, they are not to be entirely guided by it, but to act impartially. The education of the lowest class after childhood the State leaves to take care of itself, persuaded that appetite will always find means for its own satisfaction. The nobler natures it continues to educate, without any break, until they reach the age of twenty. And this education is distinctly a military training. As time goes on, the gymnastic exercises become more violent, more complex, and more sustained, but always have for their subject the soul, rather than the body, and never degenerate into mere athletic brutality. Special attention is directed to the musical and literary exercises, as the means whereby the soul is directly trained and harmonized. Plato holds that no change can be made in the "music" of a State, without a corresponding change in the whole organization; in other words, that the social and political condition of a people is determined by the literature and music which it produces and enjoys. He virtually says, Let me make the songs of a people, and he who will may make their laws. Of the character of the music which he recommends we have already spoken. From literature he would exclude all that we are in the habit of calling by that name, all that is mimetic, poetic, or creative, and confine the term to what is scientific, didactic, and edifying. He sends the poets out of the State with mock-reverent politeness, as creatures too divine for human use. He is particularly severe upon the dramatists, not sparing even the sublime Æschylus. In fact, he would banish from his State all art not directly edifying. The literature which he recommends is plainly of the nature of Æsop's Fables, the Pythagorean Golden Words, and the Parmenidean or Heraclitean work On Nature. If we wished to express his intent in strictly modern language, we should have to say that he desired to replace literary training by ethical and scientific, and the poetical mode of presenting ideals by the prosaic. The true music, he held, is in the human being. "If we find," he says, "a man who perfectly combines gymnastics with music, and in exact proportion applies them to the soul, we shall be entirely justified in calling him the perfect musician and the perfect trainer, far superior to the man who arranges strings alongside each other."
There are many matters of detail in Plato's scheme of military training that well deserve consideration, but cannot be even touched upon here. Before we leave it, however, we may give the dates at which the different branches of education are to begin. Care of the body begins at birth, story-telling with the third year, gymnastics with the seventh, writing and reading with the tenth, letters and music with the fourteenth, mathematics with the sixteenth, military drill, which for the time supplants all other training, with the eighteenth. When the young people reach the age of twenty, those who show no great capacity for science, but are manly and courageous, are assigned to the soldier class, and start on a course of higher education in military training, while those who evince great intellectual ability become novices in the ruling class, and begin a curriculum in science, which lasts till the close of their thirtieth year. This course includes arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, the only sciences at that time cultivated, and aims at impressing upon the youthful mind the unity and harmony of the physical or phenomenal universe. At the age of thirty, those students who do not show any particular aptitude for higher studies are drafted off into the lower public offices, while those who do, pass five years in the study of dialectics, whereby they rise to pure ideas. They are then, from their thirty-fifth to their fiftieth year, made to fill the higher public offices, in which they take their orders directly from the sages. During this period they put their acquirements to a practical test, and so come really and fully into possession of them. At the end of their fiftieth year, after half a century of continuous education of body, mind, and will, they are reckoned to have reached the vision of the supreme good, and therefore to be fit to enter the contemplative ruling class. They are now free men; they have reached the goal of existence; their life is hidden with God; they are free from the prison of the body, and only remain in it voluntarily, and out of gratitude to the State which has educated them, in order to direct it, in accordance with absolute truth and right, toward the Supreme Good.
Such, in its outlines, is Plato's theory of education, as set forth in the Republic. It is easy to point out its defects and its errors, which are neither small nor few, but fundamental and all-pervasive. But it is equally easy to see how it came to have these defects and errors, since they are simply those of every æsthetic social scheme which ignores the nature of the material with which it presumes to deal, and takes no account of the actual history of social institutions or of the forces by which they are evolved. It is emphatically the product of a youthful intellect, carried away by an artistic ideal. It was, however, the intellect of a Plato, who, when he became more mature, saw, without "irreverence for the dreams of youth," the feebleness of ideas for the conflict with human frailties, and strove to correct his exaggerated estimate of their power.
This he did in the Laws, whose very title suggests, in a way almost obtrusive, the change of attitude and allegiance. While in the Republic the State is governed by sages, almost entirely without laws, in the later work, the sages almost disappear and the laws assume an all-important place. In writing the Laws, moreover, he exchanges allegiance to Socrates and ideas for allegiance to Pythagoras and the gods. In saying this, I have marked the fundamental difference between the Republic and the Laws. While in the former Plato finds the moral sanctions, in the last resort, in the ideas of the pure intellect, trained in mathematics, astronomy, and dialectics, in the latter he derives them from the content of the popular consciousness, with its gods, its ethical notions, its traditions. In these, as embodied in institutions, he finds the most serviceable, if not the most exalted, revelation of divine truth. Trusting to this, he no longer seeks to abolish the family and private property, but merely to have them regulated; he no longer banishes strangers and poets from his State, but merely subjects them to State supervision; he no longer demands a philosophical training for the rulers, but only practical insight; he no longer divides his citizens into sages, soldiers, and wealth-producers, but into freemen (corresponding to his previous military class) and slaves. His government is no longer an aristocracy of intellect, but a compound of aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, representing, respectively, worth, wealth, and will. His plan of education is modified to suit these altered conditions. The children, as in Sparta, do not begin the State course of education until about their seventh year, after which their training is very much the same as that demanded in the Republic, with the omission, of course, of dialectics. Though women are no longer to be relieved of their home duties, they are still to share in the education and occupations of men, an arrangement which is facilitated by the law ordaining that both men and women shall eat at public tables. In making these changes, Plato believed that he was falling from a lofty, but unrealizable, ideal, and making concessions to human weakness; in reality, he was approaching truth and right.
BOOK III
ARISTOTLE (b.c. 384-322)