Plato requires that the young receive training in gymnastics and music before entering upon the study of philosophy. Certain kinds of music they may not be allowed to hear. Flute players are not to be admitted to Plato’s state. Those who are clever at pantomime are to be exiled. The theater is frowned upon, for the guardians must not be trained to be imitators. Certainly they may not learn to imitate any kind of illiberalism or baseness. In their acting they may not imitate slaves, nor bad men, nor madmen, nor the neighing of horses, the bellowing of bulls, nor the roll of thunder; nor may they represent smiths, boatswains, or other artificers. And they may not play the part of a woman old or young quarreling with her husband, or in conceit of her happiness or when she is in affliction or sorrow or weeping--“and certainly not one who is in sickness, love, or labor.” There must be temperance and order and not too much laughter. There must be no sensuality and coarseness. There will be no need of lawyers and physicians. “There can be no more disgraceful state of education than this; that not only artisans and the meaner sort of people need the skill of first-rate physicians and judges, but also those who profess to have had a liberal education.” Thus would Plato direct the early education of the guardians of the state. He has much more to say about protecting them from what he regards as dangerous influences than about the subject matter in which they are to be trained. His guardians are to become noble men; they are not to be imitators or trained animals or exploiters or traders. It is often said by those who believe in the materialist conception of history that education is an instrument for exploitation by the ruling class. In Plato’s state education is a mark of privilege, but his ideal nobleman is a communist. He must not touch silver or gold; he must live like a Spartan. He may call nothing his own, neither house nor wife nor child. The rulers are to be philosophers, and philosophers, kings. Hence the education of later life is the pursuit of philosophy. It is knowledge of the idea of the good. True knowledge is drawn from within, it is the turning of the eyes toward the light shed by the world of the Idea, the spiritual world. It is the awakening of memories of ideas seen by the soul of an earlier existence. Our world of concrete objects and of sense experience cannot give this knowledge. Education deals almost wholly with abstractions and with universals, and its method is dialectic.