Plato and Early Childhood Education

Ok, so, to me, the most amazing thing about Plato, especially when it comes to early childhood education, is just how much he emphasizes the importance of the beauty of our surroundings and our activities! In other words, it’s the character of the environment that matters most. For him, education, at its earliest, has very little to do with things like counting or reciting, or some such singular rote activity, but it has to do with, well, enveloping the child inside a world of beautiful music and literature and art and architecture and religious observances. It has to do with dwelling in a land of health amid all sorts of beautiful shapes, sights and sounds. As Plato says, education should be like a health giving breeze that comes from a purer region providing nourishment for the young soul. The idea is that education is really the process of getting the soul to take on the likeness of all the beautiful things it’s surrounded by. We're educated through imitating and growing more like the things around us. Unconsciously, we take on their harmony and proportions, their sweetness, their goodness. The beauty of our environment makes our soul beautiful. 

I don’t know, we might want to think about this a bit more. I mean, take a look at some of our school buildings, our architecture, our cities and what's happening to our environment. A lot of it is ugly or soulless or barren or inhuman. So think about the effect this ugliness has on us. How much of our own unhappiness and lack of inspiration reflects our immediate surroundings? Maybe Plato is right. Maybe the presence and cultivation of beauty around us is much more important than we think it is. Actually, it’s interesting, several studies have shown that happiness or well-being is most easily achieved, not by wealth or even by health, but by living in an authentically beautiful city. 

Anyway, let’s get back to Plato and education specifically. So notice a couple of very interesting things. First of all, notice that, for Plato, there’s a relation between beauty and morality, between harmony and virtue. That is, growing up around beautiful shapes, sights and sounds makes us more graceful, more restrained and more excellent in character. On the contrary, growing up around ugly and unharmonious things makes us unruly and nasty in character. Aesthetics and geometry shape us more than we think! 

The second thing to notice is this. What Plato is telling us is that the ultimate goal of education, at least with children, is the cultivation of moral character, and, more broadly, the art of living. So the goal isn’t a vocational one, nor is it specialized one, nor does it have to do with the acquisition of knowledge, something education’s mostly been about since the time of the Renaissance. No, again, the goal of education is the formation and shaping of character, to put it bluntly, it’s to become a better human being! 

And when you think about it, this seems like the right order of priority, what I mean is that it seems to make good sense that the first thing education should focus on is the cultivation of moral character and the capacity for wise judgement, and not something else. And the reason for this is because teaching someone, say, a skill or a profession without first teaching them how to be a decent and thoughtful person runs the risk that they’ll recklessly use what they’ve learned to some bad end. Actually this is partly why Plato disliked the Sophists, those self-professed teachers who travelled around Greece charging enormous fees with the promise of imparting the skills needed for success in the world. For Plato, that was sort of like teaching someone how to box, but without any guidance as to when doing so might be appropriate! 

But the bottom line for Plato is that mere skill or knowledge, or let’s say training for vocational purposes, just isn’t real education. And that’s because technical training doesn’t lead to the cultivation and the nourishment of the true nature of the whole person.  

Ok I wanted to mention one more thing. So earlier I talked about how important the beauty of the things we surround ourselves with is. Well, for Plato, one of the most useful instruments for education in this regard, maybe the most useful, is music. Now why is that? Well, it’s because more than anything else it’s through music that harmony and rhythm find their way into our soul. Beautiful melodies and harmonies order our soul and move it towards goodness, towards the highest and best in us. And that’s not so strange is it, I mean we do it all the time when we sing lullabies to our children, by doing so we make them feel the way they should - calm and balanced. Education begins right there!