The important point in this passage is that Plato here differentiates between education and training. To him, education was of the utmost importance in the upbringing of the citizen within the phratry of the polis, the city organized after the divine pattern which we ought to contemplate. He clearly explains that education, the one that deserves the name, aims first and foremost at the perfection of the soul. Because the soul is the only reality, it is her that we must polish and cultivate first of all. Education, in this sense, was to make the citizen of the polis as perfect as he ought to be in order to conduct the affairs of the city as justly and rightly as possible, so that it may ressemble as closly as possible the divine prototype, God. In the Republic, Plato develops an entire allegory of the human soul with the city: both achieve excellence only so far as they are patterned after the divine prototype. He who rules himself is also able to rule the city, because he conforms to the model of the supreme good. All of Plato’s ideas on education–what ought to be allowed or not, the manner in which it is to be taught, etc–are thus based upon this principle: its chief aim is the improvement of the soul, and whatever threatens to dirt it is to be discarded, so that it may as the result of this beautification attain to divine status, and its tangible result is the fraternity and perfection of the polis.
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