EDUCATION DURING THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS
Suffer no lewdness or indecent speech
The apartment of tender youth to reach.--Juvenal.
Le cœur d'un homme vierge est un vase profond--
Lorsque la première eau qu'on y verse est impure,
La mer y passerait sans laver la souillure;
Car l'abîme est immense, et la tache est au fond.
--Alfred de Musset.
The State must begin the education of children before their birth;
indeed, before the marriage of their parents. It must see that only
persons of robust constitutions marry. Athletes are not suited for
marriage, neither are weaklings. The best age for marriage is
thirty-seven for a man, and eighteen for a woman. During their pregnancy
women must take special care of their health, living on light food, and
taking short walks. The State should make a law that they visit the
temples of certain gods every day, and offer up a prayer of thanksgiving
for the honor conferred upon them. They must carefully avoid all forms
of emotional excitement. When defective children are born, they must be
exposed or destroyed. The State must determine what number of children
each married couple may have, and, if more than this number are
begotten, they must be destroyed either before or after birth. "As soon
as children are born, it ought to be remembered that their future
strength will depend greatly upon the nourishment supplied to them." A
milk diet is best, and wine must be avoided. "It is likewise of great
importance that children should make those motions that are appropriate
to their stage of development.... Whatever it is possible to inure
children to, they ought to be subjected to from the very outset, and
gradual progress to be made. Children, on account of their high natural
warmth, are the proper subjects for inurement to cold. These and other
points of the same nature are what ought to be attended to in the first
years of the child's life. In the following years, up to the age of
five, while children ought not to be subjected to any instruction or
severe discipline, for fear of impeding their growth, they ought to take
such exercises as shall guard their bodies from sluggishness. This may
be secured by other forms of activity as well as by play. Care must be
taken that their games shall be neither unrefined, laborious, nor
languid. As to the conversation and stories which children are to hear,
that is a matter for the attention of those officers called Guardians of
Public Instruction. It ought to be seen to that all such things tend to
pave the way for future avocations. Hence all games ought to be types of
future studies. As to the screaming and crying of children, they are
things that ought not to be prohibited, as they are in some places. They
contribute to the growth of the body, by acting as a sort of gymnastics.
Just as persons engaged in hard work increase their strength by holding
their breath, so children increase theirs by screaming. It is the
business of the Guardians of Public Instruction to provide for their
amusement generally, as well as to see that these bring them as little
as possible in contact with slaves. It is, of course, natural that at
this age they should learn improprieties of speech and manner from what
they hear and see. As to foul language, it ought, of course, like
everything else that is foul, to be prohibited in all society (for
frivolous impurity of talk easily leads to impurity of action), but
above all, in the society of the young, so that they may neither hear
nor utter any such thing. If any child be caught uttering or doing
anything that is forbidden, if he be freeborn and under the age when
children are allowed to come to the public table, he ought to be
disgraced and subjected to corporal punishment; if he be older, it will
be sufficient to punish him with disgrace, like a slave, for having
behaved like one. And if we thus prohibit all mention of improper
things, with stronger reason shall we prohibit all looking at improper
pictures and listening to improper narratives. It ought to be made the
business of the Guardians of Public Instruction to see that there does
not exist a statue or a picture representing any such thing anywhere in
the State, except in the temples of those gods to whom ordinary belief
ascribes a certain wantonness.... There ought to be a regulation
forbidding young persons to be present at lampoons or comedies before
they reach the age when they are allowed to come to the public table and
partake of wine, and when education has fortified them against all
possible danger from them.... We all have a preference for what we first
know; for this reason everything that savors of meanness or ignobility
ought to be made alien to children. From the completion of their fifth
year to that of their seventh, children ought to be present at the
giving of the various kinds of instruction which they will afterwards
have to acquire."
In this brief sketch of primary education we see that Aristotle does not
depart far from the notions of Plato. It contains even the revolting
features of his scheme. It assumes that the citizens--men, women, and,
after a certain age, children--eat at public tables, and that education
is entirely managed by the State,--the family, in this respect, being
merely its agent. Some of its features, including the Guardians of
Public Instruction (παιδονόμοι, child-herds) are plainly borrowed from
Sparta.