Plutarcho De liberis educandis: kaip i ugdyti dor piliet ? | Plutarch‘s De liberis educandis: Educating the Virtuous Citizen

Education is an important topic in Plutarch’s corpus. Three first treatises of Moralia – De liberis educan-dis, De audiendis poetis and De audiendo – have the education of children as their main topic. In these works, education is presumed to be a key aspect in developing the character; good education promotes good behavior and a virtuous character; on the con-trary, poor or insufficient education gives corre-spondingly negative results. The author of the article focuses on the first treatise, De liberis educandis, which is commonly believed to be not of the Plu-tarch’s authorship, however, till now it is included in the Moralia corpus because of its high importance and influence it had under the name of Plutarch.Firstly, attention is drawn to the structure and the main ideas presented in the treatise. A special atten-tion is drawn to the role of the family in raising and educating children of the youngest age. The most vi-tal period for the formation of character is claimed to be in childhood: thus, the importance of good educa-tion in Plutarch’s, as well as in Platonic thought, is that the character of the child is molded by reason. Closely connected with the notion of training of the irrational is the distinction which Plutarch observes between nature (physis) and character (êthos). A per-son’s nature is what he is born with and is unchang-ing. A person’s character is related to his nature, but is produced and affected by the extent to which rea-son influences it through quality education, and by the of his life.Plutarch assumes that the character in earliest childhood or youth is in the process of formation. Nature provides the raw material, but education and childhood, and habits more generally, play a deter-mining role in the formation of thes adult character. By adulthood, a settled character has been attained, although the adult character may still be improved through continuing the application of reason and good habits.It should be noted that, although the lack of edu-cation and its effects are often being stated, Plutarch never points out what good education consists of, perhaps because he considered it to be obvious: mu-sic and literature, athletics and perhaps philosophy. Plutarch may be influenced by the Platonic tradi-tion: Plato in “the Republic” talks about education as working in two stages: the first stage consists of mu-sic or literature and athletics, the second stage con-sisting of philosophical education (Resp. 3.401d-e, 403c-d, 7.525b-c).Finally, the author of the article analyses in more detail the parallels of the treatise with