Socrates On Music in Education
Throughout the Classical period and all the way up until the Age of Enlightenment, prerational knowledge was not only viewed as legitimate but essential to “the psychosomatic dimensions of the human being.”((James Taylor, Poetic Knowledge, 16)) This is why Plato, through his character Socrates, asserts the need to regulate the education of the guardians. Since character was the chief goal of education in Greek thought, it would be especially important to monitor the music (i.e., expressions of rhythm and harmony such as poetry). Says Socrates:
Our guardians may not be bred among symbols of evil, as it were in a pasturage of poisonous herbs, lest grazing freely and cropping from many such day by day they little by little and all unawares accumulate and build up a huge mass of evil in their own souls. But we must look for those craftsmen who by the happy gift of nature are capable of following the trail of true beauty and grace, that our young men, dwelling as it were in a salubrious region, may receive benefit from all things about them, whence the influence that emanates from works of beauty may waft itself to eye or ear like a breeze that brings from wholesome places health, and so from earliest childhood insensibly guide them to likeness, to friendship, to harmony with beautiful reason…education in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace, if one is rightly trained, and otherwise the contrary…further, because omissions and the failure of beauty in things badly made or grown would be most quickly perceived by one who was properly educated in music, and so, feeling distastea rightly, he would praise beautiful things and take delight in them and receive them into his soul to foster its growth and become himself beautiful and good. The ugly he would rightly disapprove of and hate while still young and yet unable to apprehend the reason, but when reason came the man thus nurtured would be the first to give her welcome, for by this affinity he would know her.”((Plato, The Republic: English Text, ed. T. E. Page et al., trans. Paul Shorey, vol. 1, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press; William Heinemann Ltd., 1937–1942), 257–259.))
