Michael Steinhof
Essay #1
Question 5 from Syllabus
The pursuit of knowledge is one of the largest driving forces for growth in a society.
Today, knowledge is universally distributed in the form of an education system. Widespread
education is a contemporary innovation though. For most of history, formal schooling was
reserved for the elite and informal training was reserved for the masses. Regardless, the process
of passing information from one generation to the next, or educating, is fundamental for any
truly great civilization to arise. Plato argues this in Republic extensively through a lecture given
by his mentor Socrates about education for guardians, elite members of a fictitious utopian
society. Through comparison between the different facets of society and lengthy, descriptive
accounts of education, Plato argues that a strong education system based on freedom is the only
viable means of approaching a utopian society.
To demonstrate the necessity of education, Socrates speaks briefly about most aspects of
his utopian society but speaks at great lengths about the education system. While Socrates only
passingly mentions the radical idea that women and children are communal, which Polemarchus
and Adeimantus are shocked by, books II and III (and more) are dominated by the education
system and curriculum for guardians. In assigning a miniscule amount of discussion time to
family but vast amounts to education, Plato highlights their relative significance; family is
meaningless in comparison to the importance of proper education. This process is repeated many
times, another context being the description of the “producers” in his utopia. Though the
producers make up most of the population, Socrates only provides a cursory description of their
lives, as they receive no proper education beyond the training for their designated craft. In this
choice, Plato argues that the people without an advanced education are not worth providing
lengthy descriptions of because their lives are simple; only the people who are trained in high
culture are worth real discussion.
In addition to dedicating many pages to the subject of education for guardians, Socrates is
significantly more detail-oriented in these pages than any other. To decide which texts should
and shouldn’t be included in formal education, Socrates cites “Homer and the other poets” as
examples of writers that should be restricted heavily from “men who are supposed to be free and
to fear slavery more than death” (387b). Plato demonstrates that teaching freedom from typical
earthly fears is one of the central tenets of his utopia, and if that requires censoring historic
writers, then so be it because education ranks above all else. Socrates directly explains that the
discussion of education only “ought to end in the love of the fine and beautiful” (403c). Once
society achieves a true understanding of beauty through rigorous education, only then can
Socrates continue to provide his analysis of his utopian city.
According to Plato, educating [the upper class of] society is the only way for an
“utopian” state to be reached. Socrates directly says that only through “education of the young”
can the guardians “be as god-fearing and godlike as human beings can be” (383c). While the
goal of Socrates’s lecture was to provide a way to quantify “justice,” Plato uses this as a chance
to underscore the importance of laying a strong educational foundation for any advanced society
to develop, not just the utopian thought experiment outlined here.