Parenting & Family Quote by Plato

Plato sounds almost quaint here, like a worried parent vetting bedtime stories. But the line is doing something far more severe: it’s a blueprint for moral engineering. “Fictions” aren’t harmless play in his view; they’re the first software installed in the psyche. Get the code wrong early, and you don’t just raise a mischievous kid - you end up with a corrupt citizen and, eventually, a sick city.

The intent is explicitly political. In the Republic, Plato treats education as the state’s deepest infrastructure, and myth as its stealthiest tool. Children can’t yet argue with premises, but they can absorb images, heroes, and emotional reflexes. So he wants the culture’s narrative bloodstream cleaned: no gods behaving badly, no heroes rewarded for vice, no stories that make cruelty exciting or cowardice sympathetic. The subtext is a distrust of art’s wildness. Poetry’s power to charm is exactly why it’s dangerous; it bypasses reason and smuggles values in under the cover of entertainment.

Context matters: Athens had recently burned through democracy’s glamour and watched it produce catastrophe, faction, and the execution of Socrates. Plato’s suspicion of the crowd is inseparable from his suspicion of the stories the crowd loves. This is why the sentence lands with that cool, administrative clarity - “adapted,” “promotion,” “virtue” - language that treats imagination as a resource to be managed.

Read now, it’s unnerving because it still maps onto modern fights over curriculum, kids’ media, and “harmful narratives.” Plato isn’t asking whether stories shape us; he’s insisting the state should decide how.