education in Plato`s Republic

Education in the Republic by Plato

Socrates : I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon , son of Ariston , to pray to the goddess , and at the same time , I wanted to observe how they would put on the festival , since they were now holding it for the first time . In this scenario , Plato depicts Socrates to be descending from the prestige of Athens towards the Piraeus , a port city adjacent to the ocean . The Republic revolves around the question of justice , the downward movement reiterating the fact that justice , in its

truest form , can only be studied amidst the people of a certain city-state where inter-personal interactions take place . This reality embodies Plato 's message that theorizing about human life is not about the privatizing of knowledge , rather everything political is social , is public . Through the course of this , I shall follow Plato 's example and contemplate within the sphere of daily living and interaction of the Athenian society . Only in this manner may we unlock the education that Plato attempts to propagate within the Republic

The Republic was authored by Plato as a commemoration of Athens , the place he revered to be the perfect city . Nostalgia may be seen as one of the roots of his passionate writing , nostalgia for the Athens he witnessed as a young boy , now an Athens devastated by inter-Greek wars More known to people as the Peloponnesian war , Athens went against Sparta and was defeated . In this spirit , Plato began to join the company of other young aristocrats who associated with Socrates in the marketplace , an action that unfolded to reveal his future in the academe as he struggled to define justice in a post-war era fraught with dis

For thoughtful Athenians of this time , the task was to make sense of the changes they had seen in Athens and Greek at large . The polis literally coined city , was for the Greeks , a self-sufficient political unit , one that at present did not seem to be working anymore Athens has wasted its power in the war with Sparta . In 371 , Sparta 's own loss to Thebe 's in battle showed that no polis was invincible

It is in my firmest belief that this quote was necessary in establishing the necessity of exploring a new form of government , of undergoing , in a sense , political reorganization . Given the immensity of the change that had to be made , Plato began interacting with the key personalities of that society , all of which held to their own whims and ideologies . In Book I of the Republic , it immediately became apparent that the way Plato intended to educate through the use of Platonic Dialogue , an elusive attack , taking one argument , listening to the objections people have against it and digressing from the argument and trying to formulate an agreeable inference

Although Plato 's Republic is best known for its definitive defense of justice , it also includes an equally powerful defense of philosophical education . In this process of education , Plato...