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4 Education in Plato’s Laws John Russon ἀ e basic story of Book 2 of Plato’s Laws is easy enough to tell. ἀ e Athenian Stranger, who is discussing the establishment of a good state with Cleinias the Knossian and Megillus the Spartan, argues for the primary importance of education and discusses the importance of song and dance in this context.1 Specifically , he maintains that children will have their adult perspectives formed through their early experiences of pleasure and pain, and that good education primarily involves training children to align their experiences of pleasure and pain with what wise adults would in fact recognize to be noble and ignoble behaviors respectively. Since children are playful by nature, it is through controlling their play that this education will be accomplished. Games, songs, and dances in particular are the structured forms of play in which children will participate in order to become educated into good citizenship (2.659e).2 ἀ e communal experience of song and dance, which is the focus of Book 2, will primarily be enacted through three choruses—a children’s chorus, led by the muses, a young men’s chorus led by Apollo, and a Dionysian chorus of adults, including especially old men (2.664c–d). It is the oldest men who, being wisest, will appreciate what the children should learn, and it is their insights—which should be the equivalent of the needs of virtue—that will determine the implicit content of the songs, dances, and games learned by the children (2.659d; 7.797a). ἀ e message being communicated will mostly express the importance of maintaining the existing social order, and its central message (its “noble lie,” so to speak—2.663d–e) will be the unity of justice and happiness (2.664b; also, 660e). ἀ is manifest story produces an account of education that is in fact quite repressive. ἀ e story, however, has a variety of conflicts and tensions within it, and by pursuing some of the threads of these conflicts we can find another story of education lurking within the dialogue, another story, that is, that would elude our grasp (a common theme in the text) if we did not in our reading of Plato follow the method of “attending to the small” that is identified by the Education in Plato’s Laws 61 Athenian Stranger (10.902c–d) as the method of experts.3 I will follow out three conflicts that emerge in and from Book 2. First, I will look at a way in which the norms of victory and play are both distinguished and conflated by the Athenian Stranger; this (in conjunction with the hierarchy of the ten kinds of motion from 10.893–894) will allow us to develop from the conception of play that the Athenian Stranger introduces a more liberating conception than he himself develops . Second (drawing on the account of childhood education in Book 7 that is coordinated with the account in Book 2, and also on the argument for the importance of drunkenness in Book 1), I will look at the problematic way opposition is removed from the child’s education, and consider the implications of the educational embrace of opposition that the Athenian Stranger’s account elsewhere implies. ἀ ird, I will consider two ways in which the Athenian Stranger’s account of education seems to ignore the lesson of his own account of equality in Book 6 (775b). Specifically, his imposing of adult goals on children and his emphasis on the rigid mathematical uniformity of education ignore the proportional character of true equality. By highlighting these conflicts embedded in Book 2, we will see the potential for a more open conception of freedom and human development—a notion, I conclude, that is defined by openness to transformation through hospitality to the strange. I. Education and Play A. The Limits of Victory Early in Book 1, the Athenian Stranger introduces a challenge to the Cretan and Spartan legal systems. Cleinias has acknowledged that the entirety of the Cretan system is based on the goal of victory in war: “it appears,” he says, “that our lawgiver had this in mind in everything he did” (1.625e).4 Further, he acknowledges that this goal does not just pertain to relations between states (which we typically imagine to be the domain of war), but also in relations between villages, between households, between men, and, indeed, between man and himself (1.626b–d). ἀ e Athenian Stranger challenges this conception of the goal...

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