Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece, Declassified.

Episode 11. Caves and Classrooms.

There are some who say, we don't need no education, we don't need no thought control.

And there are others who have argued that education is the foundation of a well-functioning society.

And this difference of opinion can be traced back all the way to antiquity, when on the one hand

you have the likes of Plato, who infamously compared education, or rather miseducation,

to being in a cave and watching shadows on a wall.

You think you're learning something, but all in all, it's just another

shade on the wall. On the other hand, you have the likes of Quintilian, the Roman orator who wrote

extensively on education. He claimed that public education was absolutely crucial for a society,

and he argued against homeschooling and expensive tutors.

So these debates about education can be traced all the way back to antiquity, but also the names

we use for our institutions derive from the ancient world. We refer to universities collectively

as the academy. Many places in the world call their high schools lyceums,

after the name of Aristotle's school,

and many countries call their middle schools gymnasia,

from the Greek gymnasion, which was an institution kind of like a gym,

but really a social hangout spot that had classes and events

and various cultural activities as well. And another connection between our education and the

ancients is that what we think of as the Greco-Roman classics, the stuff you'd read in a

classics course in college, these are the same books that kids in the Roman Empire read when they learned

their classics. Homer, Euribbides, Sophocles, Virgil, etc. Does that mean that education today

...