Lack of teachers

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Often appears with: self-knowledge · self-education · memory and imagination · lifelong learning decline · education outside schools · education and the training of the young

Usually: reflection (1) · the fall of the great (1) · indignation (1) · lament (1)

The Republic primary

Plato · c. 380 BCE
BOOK I. > BOOK X. Many things pleased me in the order of our State, but there was nothing which I liked better than the regulation about poetry. The division of the soul throws a new light on our exclusion of imitation. (55/70)

It suggests Plato’s ideas can still elevate modern life, but argues self-education after youth is hard because people lack teachers and self-knowledge, leading to mental stagnation.

is really the ideal life of the philosopher or man of genius, interrupted, but only for a time, by practical duties,—a life not for the many, but for the few. Yet the thought of Plato may not be wholly incapable of application to our own times. Even if regarded as an ideal which can never be realized, it may have a great effect in elevating the characters of mankind, and raising them above the routine of their ordin…