Sparta taught its children just enough reading to be obedient
Civic education is usually pictured as lessons in voting and rights. Sparta's version, as Plutarch tells it, gave children only as much literacy as they needed, and spent the rest of their upbringing training them to endure pain, win battles and merge their own interests completely with the state's.
Civics is the study of citizens' political and civil rights and their obligations. The word comes from the Latin civicus, relating to a citizen, and in Roman history it also recalls the Civic Crown, an oak-leaf garland given to someone who had saved a fellow citizen's life. Civic education covers the law, government and the role ordinary people play in running and overseeing the state.
According to Plutarch, the semi-legendary lawgiver Lycurgus made educating citizens his first priority when designing Sparta's constitution. Young Spartans were watched almost constantly and punished for neglecting their duties. Girls, too, wrestled, ran and threw the discus so they would bear healthy children for the state. The poet Simonides called Sparta the tamer of men, comparing its schooling to breaking in colts. Yet boys were also expected to speak forcefully and briefly and to reflect on what made a good citizen, a method the French essayist Michel de Montaigne later admired. When asked what boys should learn, King Agesilaus II reportedly answered: whatever they will need to do as men.
Athens offered the opposite ideal. In his Funeral Oration, Pericles boasted that Athenians lived as they pleased yet were just as brave as rivals raised on painful discipline from the cradle, making their city the school of Greece. Thomas Hobbes was sceptical, suggesting Athenians were taught to believe they were free precisely so they would not demand reform.
Philosophers argued about whose judgement citizens should trust. In the Socratic dialogue Crito, Socrates tells his friend that civic training should follow expert opinion rather than majority views, just as an athlete heeds a trainer rather than the crowd. He also argues that a citizen owes obedience to the city's laws partly because the city raised and educated him. Thucydides records the Spartan king Archidamus II praising his people's toughness, simplicity and preparedness, and their refusal to be too clever about theory.
Source: Civics
