He clearly saw that education was more than the acquiring of basic facts & ideas in one's childhood & adolescence, & was the ist to propose an elaborate system & education.
He expresses in Republic that the whole function of education is not to put knowledge into the soul, & to do so by directing it to the right objects. Education in the case of Plato means bringing of the soul into that environment, which in each stage of its growth is best suited for its development. There he describes human soul as living organism, & says that, just as a plant when sown in the ground develops according to the soul & the atmosphere it lives in, so its with the soul. The problem of education, then, is to give it the right type of environment which the human soul demands for its proper development. The environment should, however, be provided according to the stages of the human soul. .
He does not talk of the steps by which an object of knowledge is to be presented to the mind. The active spiritual force, the teacher never tries to touch-at any rate directly. The true business of the teacher, in fact, is to bring out what is best in his pupil : more truly, it causes of itself in response to the right objects, & it is in sitting them before his pupils that the true art of the teacher lies. In this there is something of the theory of "Reminiscence" which was propounded by Plato in his dialogue, the Meno. The theory of Reminiscence which is expounded by Plato, says that our soul has seen in a former life all things which it learns in this world, & are learning is a mere remembrance of that life, which flashes to the mind when some fact of an object stares what we may call an association of ideas. The object only gives a clue, the soul itself responds to its suggestion. But everything depends on the clue. The environment makes the soul, in the sense that the soul determines itself by its environment. He who would make the soul beautiful must set her in a fair posture.
