Education Quote by Plato

Plato is doing something unfashionable for an intellectual: defending the dim. Not because ignorance is noble, but because it can be cured. The real menace, he suggests, is the person who has been expertly trained in thinking but badly trained in living. In that mix, intelligence doesn’t illuminate; it weaponizes. “Too much cleverness and too much learning” reads less like anti-education and more like a warning about education unmoored from character - the kind that produces eloquent rationalizers, not honest seekers.

The line’s bite comes from its inversion of elite self-regard. Ignorance, for Plato, is a lack. “Ill bringing-up” is a deformation: a mis-formation of the soul. A foolish person may stumble into harm, but a brilliant person with crooked habits can justify harm, persuade others into it, and do so with a clean conscience. That’s why it’s “far more fatal”: cleverness scales.

Context matters: Plato is writing in the wreckage of Athens’ political turbulence and the trial of Socrates, where rhetorical skill and public opinion could overpower wisdom. Sophists - professional arguers - offered a model of learning as technique rather than truth. Plato’s broader project, from the Republic onward, is to fuse knowledge with virtue, insisting that an educated mind without ethical formation is not an upgrade but a threat.

Subtext: the academy is not the solution if it becomes a factory for status and verbal dominance. Education has to be moral training, or it’s just a sharper knife.