Shackling the imagination: education for virtue in Plato and Rousseau.

• Author: Lines, Patricia M.
• Position: Essay

For most of human history, parents had the primary responsibility for educating their own children, usually with help from an extended family or members of a small community. Today, governments have assumed much of the task, compelling education, and in some cases compelling attendance only at government-operated schools. Constitutional democracies recognize private schools and homeschooling as legitimate ways to meet the requirements of compulsory education laws, but the record is not always perfect. (1) Moreover, even the most liberal democracies regulate private education. To the extent that they do so, elected representatives and bureaucrats decide how to educate other people's children. This decision to compel and regulate education has the honorable purpose of producing law-abiding and productive citizens or, in old-fashioned terms, virtuous citizens. When individuals disagree on how to achieve such a goal, however, public efforts to control education can create havoc. This is especially true when a government imposes educational reforms that abandon fundamental and time-tested practices and impose radically innovative and untested ideas.

Those who dissent from such sweeping changes may have good reason. This article explores some of the implications of radical new proposals for the education of an entire society, particularly those that usurp the traditional role of parents. To this end, the article examines the proposals of Plato (427 or 428-347 BC) and Rousseau (1712-1778).

In many ways, these two thinkers sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. Plato, the idealist, wishes to rise above base emotion to the highest realm of rationality. He envisions a strong aristocratic state, and his concept of virtue requires strict discipline among citizens. Rousseau, the romantic, places emotion and wonder above reason. He calls for a democratic state with expansive individual freedom. Despite such differences, both thinkers offer grand plans that require the abandonment of traditional, time-honored practices. Both thinkers favor the transfer of responsibility for education from families to a carefully selected paragon (Rousseau) or paragons (Plato), radical measures to capture and cultivate the imagination of the pupil, censorship, and cradle-to-grave supervision. As a result, both offer support for some form of totalitarian government.

Why do such divergent thinkers choose such similar strategies for their educational recommendations? Why do both seek such a high degree of control over the education of a child? Is there, perhaps, some shared flaw in the thinking of both? Is it a flaw that could trouble educational planners today? After reviewing the proposals of both, this article offers a simple and humble answer.

Plato

Plato set forth his ideas about education in The Republic and in The Laws. In The Republic Socrates asks "what is justice?" and then considers the virtues needed to support a just republic and the educational program needed to achieve those virtues. (2) He typically avoids a definite response to the issues raised. In Plato's last work, The Laws, Socrates disappears and in his place an Athenian stranger delivers long monologues with answers and solutions that reflect a certainty that Socrates refused to adopt. (3) Still, the recommendations for education in the two works are strikingly similar. The Republic provides the more imaginative and general view of the matter, while The Laws expands and clarifies the ideas in The Republic.

Many aspects of Plato's recommendations for education resemble those adopted by constitutional democracies. Education must be compulsory and free to all, with public control and public support. The state provides schools, compels attendance, and establishes ages for entry and progression. It mandates equal opportunity and standards for students and teachers. Trained professionals run the program, under the direction of lawmakers. In Plato's ideal state, what we today call preschool serves the youngest children, followed by what we would call elementary and high school. Plato favors the same education for boys and girls, although he would segregate students by gender, a practice still recommended by some in our day. We can also understand Plato's desire that the young learn eagerly and that academic learning "take the form of play," and his rejection of recital and memorization of poetry, popular in his day. (4) While subject matter differs, Plato's curriculum reflects the priorities of his day. Thus, he would emphasize archery and other athletic skills in the early years, then literature for three years, followed by three years on the lyre. Older students take military training. (5) In many respects, Plato appears to offer a harbinger of schools today.

However, Plato's educational scheme differs in critical ways from those of constitutional democracies. He would ban private education, whether at home, in a private school, in a library, or on the street. Parents play a subordinate role: "Children must not be allowed to attend or not attend school at the whim of their father; as far as possible, education must be compulsory for 'one and all' ... because they belong to the state first and their parents second." Neither parent nor child may delve more deeply into a subject or cut it short. (6)

Overarching state control begins before birth. Plato's ideal Republic regulates the number of marriages to keep a stable population. Only men between the ages of 25 and 55 may father children. Individuals who do well in war and other civic duties earn expanded opportunities to marry. (7) The city maintains a creche where nurses care for the youngest children. Mothers come there to nurse their babies, under supervision. Trained caretakers, supervised by twelve elected women, nurture the older children. (8) Selected individuals, the Guardians, oversee this entire system. These individuals undergo the most tightly regulated training of all. For this elite group, Plato recommends abolition of the family to eliminate the distractions of intimate relationships. The Platonic Guardians must devote themselves exclusively to the contemplation of the Good, and securing the interest of the state.

Each element in Plato's curriculum serves the Republic. The emphasis on universal physical and military skills aims at the inculcation of habits that produce compliant citizens. Tight control over the play of younger children assures that they will "always play the same games under the same rules" when they become adults. (9) Plato offers no flexibility for children with special needs or special interests. He insists that the prescribed progression from physical education to mathematics must not vary, regardless of ability or interest. At age 20 a chosen elite advance to the study of mathematics. At age 30 the creme de la creme advance to the study of philosophy. From age 35 to 50 this last group performs public service in subordinate posts. At age 50 the best devote their lives to the study of philosophy and take turns directing the state. (10)

Perhaps the most famous aspect of Plato's curriculum is his treatment of poetry--a term that encompasses Greek drama, the Homeric epics, music, the plastic arts and all the creative works of his day. He would censor it all. To understand why, it helps first to examine his highest aim in education: virtue. Plato, like most serious education theorists, sees virtue as the ultimate goal of education. Plato sees poetry as a threat to virtue. So what, we must ask, is virtue for Plato, and how does poetry erode virtue?

Platonic Virtues and the Imagination

Plato identified four interdependent virtues as essential to the ideal Republic. Wisdom guides the philosopher-ruler. Courage moves the auxiliaries (the soldiers and the bureaucrats). Discipline, sometimes translated as moderation, assures that each class carries out its assigned role and that the governed obey the governors. Justice--the supreme ordering principle--ensures harmony and balance within the individual and the state.

These virtues should lead to a full understanding of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, which for Plato represent the highest reality. He sees concrete experience--that which we see, hear, or touch--to be at best a second rate guide to comprehending these ultimate realties, while poetry is the antithesis of that reality. It fails to offer even a second-hand access to reality, as it is a mere representation or imitation of experience, and so thrice removed from those ultimate abstractions. It yields only shadows. That might be tolerable if the viewer understood that he was looking at shadows. To fail to move beyond the sensual world is to remain in chains in a cave, unable to face the sun. Plato thought poetry so dangerous that he repeated incantations against it when in its presence. (11) It undermines our ability to recognize and choose the True, the Good and the Beautiful, without which, all four essential civic virtues will whither and the republic will fail.

Wisdom, for example, is the ability to see the truth clearly and to distinguish between good and evil. One finds wisdom, Plato believes, by leaving the world of concrete particulars through philosophy and following an ascending path that begins with the study of the abstract principles of mathematics. But poetry--So beguiling! So subversive!--clouds the understanding, appeals to base emotions, and overrides reason. It compromises our ability to understand universal reality, that abstract truth underlying all things.

Courage is a single-minded loyalty to the state that endures even in the face of death. Thus, children should never know that Homer's Priam, although closely related to the gods, can "grovel in the dung and implore them all. ..." Likewise Plato would ban dramatic laments on misery and the awful realm of Hades, along with any reminder that death may sever sentimental attachments. The thought of losing a son...