Education Quote by Plato

Plato is doing something unfashionable: he’s refusing to flatter intelligence. The line lands like a rebuke to every culture that treats “smart” as a moral credential. Ignorance, he argues, is a manageable deficiency. It’s a lack. The real catastrophe is competence divorced from character - “great cleverness and much learning” yoked to “bad training.” In other words: a well-armed soul with no internal discipline is more dangerous than an unarmed one.

The subtext is political as much as personal. Plato lived through Athens’ civic whiplash: democracy’s volatility, the glamour of rhetoric, and the execution of Socrates at the hands of a city persuaded by confident talkers. He’s suspicious of the kind of education that produces verbal virtuosos without producing justice. “Training” here isn’t job prep; it’s ethical formation - habits, desires, and a sense of the good. Without that, learning becomes an accelerant: it sharpens the ability to rationalize, manipulate, win arguments, and launder self-interest in elegant language.

Notice the hierarchy of evils. Plato doesn’t pretend ignorance is cute. He just thinks it’s less “terrible” because it can be corrected by true education. The misfortune he fears is deeper: the person who has mastered techniques but not themselves. It’s a diagnosis that still bites - in an era of credentialism, weaponized expertise, and “smart” people building systems they can optimize but not justify.