When boys were seven years old, they were taken from their mothers and put in a school, which was more like a soldiers’ camp than a school, and they never lived anywhere else until they were sixty years old.
In this school they were not taught the things you are, but only the things that trained them to be good soldiers.
There were no such things as school-books then.
There were no spelling-books.
There were no arithmetics.
There were no geographies. No one knew enough about the world to write a geography.
There were no histories. No one knew much about things that had happened in the world before that time, and of course none of the history since then that you now study had taken place.
At certain times, the Spartan boy was whipped, not because he had done anything wrong, but just to teach him to suffer pain without whimpering. He would have been disgraced forever if he had cried, no matter how badly he was hurt.
He was exercised and drilled and worked until he was ready to drop. But still he was obliged to keep on, no matter how tired or hungry or sleepy or aching he might be, and he must never show by any sign how he felt.
He was made to eat the worst kind of food, to go hungry and thirsty for long periods of time, to go out in the bitter cold with little or no clothing, just to get used to such hardships and able to bear all sorts of discomforts. This kind of training, this kind of hardening, is therefore called “Spartan discipline.” How do you think you would have liked it?