ABSTRACT
The enforcement of law, in the last resort, demands punishment, which acts on the mind, in Plato’s view, by the remedy of pain, and seeks by that remedy to counteract and evacuate those violent pleasures which are the incentives to crime. Punishment, as we have seen, is thus in a sense education; but it is the education of an unhealthy mind. It operates only through occasional shocks: it operates only on the worse elements of the mind: it operates only negatively, through the application of irritants. Education proper is constant: it is a training of the normal mind, and of every element in that mind: it operates positively, in the form of a guiding direction alike of pleasures and pains. There is indeed such a thing as a partial education: there is the technical education by which the young are trained to excellence in the special arts and crafts they will afterwards follow (643 B–C); but the only education which deserves the name is the general education of the young in the general art of citizenship. Here the object is civic excellence: the way is the way of instilling desire and love for a perfect citizenship: the product is the citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled in the way of justice (643 E). The ideal of such civic excellence is set forth in the laws. They are the rules by which magistrates govern and subjects render obedience. It is the aim of education, therefore, to initiate the young in the spirit of the laws (659 E); and it is its method so to train their affections, and so to form their habits, that they desire, through force of ingrained habit, what the law commands, and reject, with instinctive dislike, what the law forbids (653 B–C). Such habituation may be achieved directly or indirectly. It may be achieved directly, if the young are taught to respect and admire the actual law, and to acquire a perfect knowledge of all its rules (811 B): it may be achieved indirectly (and this is the only thorough way, and the only true education), if they are imbued with the inner spirit and tone of the law, and taught to acquire a habit of mind which we always issue in action according to the law.
