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(A speech I wrote for an event I couldn't attend due to illness, but now you can read it)
What is a true education?
Today, Plato’s Republic is often celebrated as his greatest work, and for good reason. After presenting his famous Allegory of the Cave, Socrates turns to the very heart of education. He contrasts two radically different visions, writing:
“Education is not what some people boastfully claim it to be. They say they can pour knowledge into souls that lack it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes… But the sight is already there—only turned in the wrong direction.”
Education, for Socrates, is not the dumping of facts into an empty mind. The soul is not a blank slate. Education is the turning of the soul—its reorientation toward what is real and true. He compares it to an eye adjusting from darkness to light: the entire person must turn, until they can bear the brightness of “the good.”
Plato is sometimes accused of elitism, yet here he insists on something profoundly democratic: all possess the capacity to learn. What they lack is not ability, but direction. Education is the redirection of the whole person—away from the superficial and the fleeting, toward what is objectively good: truth, beauty, harmony, unity, and ultimately, the Good itself.
This is a far cry from what we call "education" today. We don’t even aspire to Plato’s vision. For us, education is often reduced to job training, the memorization of content, or the acquisition of marketable skills. But for Plato, education is nothing less than the formation of character. And notice that the formation of character isn’t something that you can measure with metrics and quantification. Almost all administrative efforts today are directed at these very things—what a waste of time, energy, and money.
Why does character matter?
Plato believed the purpose of life was not merely to live, but to live well. And the only way to live well is to become good—to develop a well‑formed character. His word for living well is eudaimonia—a term that blends the subjective feeling of happiness with the objective marker of success, the experience of flourishing with the achievement of one’s true aim. The central claim of the Republic is that a good life is impossible without a good soul. There is no shortcut to virtue.
This argument rests on Plato’s view of the human psyche. At our core, he says, we are driven by three kinds of motivation:
Appetite: desires for pleasure, wealth, and bodily satisfaction.
Spirit: hunger for honor, pride, and recognition.
Reason: aspiration for truth and understanding.
To help us visualize this, he likens each part to a creature:
Appetite: a many-headed beast, each head violently going in its own direction.
Spirit: a lion, brave and strong, but needing direction.
Reason: a little person, intelligent but physically weak.
A human life is chaotic when these parts clash (as they usually do). Plato argues that a tyrant may have political power and wealth, but their disordered soul ruins their happiness. In the Gorgias, he likens the tyrant’s soul to a jar with holes in it: an insatiable desire, leaving them empty and unsatisfied. But when reason leads, spirit supports it, and appetite follows—then the soul becomes ordered. Only then do we experience psychological harmony. In such a state, the soul is like a jar that doesn’t need refilling—it is stable and satisfied.
Freedom through discipline
Modern culture treats freedom as the absence of restraints. The freedom to do whatever you want. To pursue your own happiness however you believe it to be. Such a view no doubt supports the goal to acquire as much power as one can, since it is through this power that one can express one’s will. Plato disagrees. Freedom, for him, is the presence of inner order.
Imagine there were a piano in this room. If no one physically stops me, I am able to play it. I would have liberty—nothing external restricts me from doing what I want. But I’ve never learned how to play the piano, so in a deeper sense, I am not free, and actually, I lack power. Only through study, discipline, and self‑mastery could I gain the freedom to express myself through that instrument. This is the Platonic idea of freedom: rational discipline that enables us to pursue truth, beauty, and goodness. Freedom is autonomy shaped and directed toward the Good. And this, fundamentally, is what character education aims to produce.
It is this notion of freedom that informs the basic idea of a liberal arts education—an education that frees the mind. Now today we often justify learning a subject by tracing its usefulness forward: music helps with math, math helps with finance, finance helps with employment, and so on. In his Politics, Plato’s student Aristotle called this “slavish thinking.” He asserted that to be asking all the time what use something serves doesn’t befit those who are “great-souled and free.”
Free education refines us. It enlarges us. It cultivates a kind of dignity no marketplace can measure. This cannot be achieved by pursuing any random desire that pops into your head; rather, it aims at what is actually good and what actually fulfills us. These are not things that we determine arbitrarily; they are objective facts about the world and ourselves.
The individual and the community
So far I have spoken about individuals—their education, their happiness, and their freedom. But the ancients would have found this focus incomplete and narrow-minded.
Aristotle wrote that considering a human being apart from their community is like considering a chess piece apart from the game. A King sitting alone on a table is meaningless. Its identity emerges only within the larger structure that gives it purpose.
Plato thought the same. The soul is a microcosm of the city; the city a macrocosm of the soul. Individual character and communal harmony mirror one another.
Thus, true education is not a private affair: it is a public good, a social practice, and a communal calling. Returning to the powerful and wealthy tyrant. They may have subordinates or people who aspire to get things from them, but they have no real friends—they are alone in the truest sense. Aristotle said that without friends, without a real community, all other goods are worthless. It is only when these goods are embedded in relations with others that they get their meaning.
So, I ask again, what is education?
For Plato, education is the guiding of the soul toward truth, goodness, and beauty.
· It shapes character.
· It liberates from ignorance.
· It harmonizes the self.
It prepares one not only to live, but to live well. And it does not end with the individual. It culminates in a life devoted to community, responsibility, and the common good.
This is the education that Plato envisioned. And if we are willing to turn our gaze—to reorient our eyes from darkness to light—it can be the education today.