Please to consider: Is there or is there not some one quality of which all
the citizens must be partakers, if there is to be a city at all? In the
answer to this question is contained the only solution of your difficulty;
there is no other. For if there be any such quality, and this quality or
unity is not the art of the carpenter, or the smith, or the potter, but
justice and temperance and holiness and, in a word, manly virtue--if this
is the quality of which all men must be partakers, and which is the very
condition of their learning or doing anything else, and if he who is
wanting in this, whether he be a child only or a grown-up man or woman,
must be taught and punished, until by punishment he becomes better, and he
who rebels against instruction and punishment is either exiled or condemned
to death under the idea that he is incurable--if what I am saying be true,
good men have their sons taught other things and not this, do consider how
extraordinary their conduct would appear to be. For we have shown that
they think virtue capable of being taught and cultivated both in private
and public; and, notwithstanding, they have their sons taught lesser
matters, ignorance of which does not involve the punishment of death: but
greater things, of which the ignorance may cause death and exile to those
who have no training or knowledge of them--aye, and confiscation as well as
death, and, in a word, may be the ruin of families--those things, I say,
they are supposed not to teach them,--not to take the utmost care that they
should learn. How improbable is this, Socrates!

Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last
to the very end of life. Mother and nurse and father and tutor are vying
with one another about the improvement of the child as soon as ever he is
able to understand what is being said to him: he cannot say or do anything
without their setting forth to him that this is just and that is unjust;
this is honourable, that is dishonourable; this is holy, that is unholy; do
this and abstain from that. And if he obeys, well and good; if not, he is