问答题
In Plato’s Utopia, here are three classes: the common people,
the soldiers, and the guardians chosen by the legislator. The main problem, as
Plato perceives, is to insure that the guardians shall carry out the intention
of the legislator. For this purpose the first thing he proposes is
education.
Education is divided into two parts, music and
gymnastics. (46){{U}}Each has a wider meaning than at present: “music” means
everything that is in the province of the muses, and “gymnastics” means
everything concerned with physical training fitness. {{/U}}“Music” is almost as
wide as what is now called “culture”, and “gymnastics” is somewhat wider than
what “athletics” mean in the modern sense.
Culture is to be
devoted to making men gentlemen, in the sense which, largely owing to Plato, is
familiar in England. The Athens of his day was, in one respect, analogous to
England in the nineteenth century: (47) {{U}}there was in each an aristocracy
enjoying wealth and social prestige, but having no monopoly of political power;
and in each the aristocracy had to secure as much power as it could by means of
impressive behavior. {{/U}}In Plato’s Utopia, however, the aristocracy rules
unchecked.
Gravity, decorum and courage seem to be the qualities
mainly to be cultivated in education. (48){{U}}There is to be a rigid censorship
from very early years over the literature to which the young have access and the
music they are allowed to hear.{{/U}} Mothers and nurses are to tell their
children only authorized stories. Also, there is a censorship of music. The
Lydian and Ionian harmonies are to be forbidden, the first because it expresses
sorrow, the second because it is relaxed. (49){{U}}Only the Dorian (for courage)
and the Phrygian (for temperance) are to be allowed, and permissible rhythms
must be simple, and such as are expressive of a courageous and harmonious
life.{{/U}}
As for gymnastics, the training of the body is to be
very austere. No one is to eat fish, or meat cooked otherwise than roasted, and
there must be no sauces or candies. People brought up on his regimen, he says,
will have no need of doctors. Gymnastics applies to the training of mind as
well. Up to a certain age, the young are to see no ugliness or vice. (50){{U}}But
at a suitable moment, they must be exposed to “enchantments”, both in the shape
of terrors that must not terrify, and of bad pleasures that must not seduce the
will. {{/U}}Only after they have withstood these tests will they be judged fit to
be guardians.