This chapter addresses itself to the first two of the three questions asked at the end of Book VII: (a) Should we have some system of education? And (b), should responsibility for education be public or private? The first hardly needs answering, and the second too is soon disposed of. The rearing and education of the children of citizens should indeed be a matter of public concern, since they are the future citizens, the future rulers of the state and one needs to learn to be a citizen, just as a craftsman needs to be trained in his particular skill. Moreover, the education of the potential citizen will depend largely on the type of state and on the kind of life which it is desired to lead; Aristotle himself has in mind especially the intellectual, artistic, cultivated life which the Greeks called scholē, usually translated ‘leisure’. No citizen, therefore, ‘belongs to himself’: he is part of the state, and is not entitled to be educated privately in private tastes and standards. All these remarks Aristotle makes very swiftly, and naturally does not pause over certain questions a modern critic may wish to ask: (i) Is the doctrine totalitarian, allowing nothing to private discretion? (ii) Does it allow for anything approaching a ‘mixed’ society? (iii) Is there to be no debate about the ends of education?
It is not until the second chapter that Aristotle turns to the actual subject-matter of education; and a great deal of the rest of this final book is concerned with no more than music and singing. But we do not know how much of the book is lost; it certainly now appears to be unfinished, as the thirteenth-century translator William of Moerbeke saw.
1337a11 No one would dispute the fact that it is a lawgiver’s prime duty to arrange for the education of the young. In states where this is not done the quality of the constitution suffers. Education must be related to the particular constitution in each case, for it is the special character1 appropriate to each constitution that set it up at the start and commonly maintains it, e.g. the democratic character preserves a democracy, the oligarchic an oligarchy. And in all circumstances the better character is a cause of a better constitution. And just as there must also be preparatory training for all skills and capacities, and a process of preliminary habituation to the work of each profession, it is obvious that there must also be training for the activities of virtue. But since there is but one aim for the entire state, it follows that education must be one and the same for all, and that the responsibility for it must be a public one, not the private affair which it now is, each man looking after his own children and teaching them privately whatever private curriculum he thinks they ought to study. In matters that belong to the public, training for them must be the public’s concern. And it is not right either that any of the citizens should think that he belongs just to himself; he must regard all citizens as belonging to the state, for each is a part of the state; and the responsibility for each part naturally has regard to the responsibility for the whole. In this respect the Lacedaemonians will earn our approval: the greatest possible attention is given to youth in Sparta, and all on a public basis.