[Theseus' palace in Athens.]

Theseus:

I must confess that I have heard so much,
And with Demetrius thought to have spoke thereof;
But, being over-full of self affairs,
My mind did lose it. But, Demetrius, come;
And come, Egeus. You shall go with me.
I have some private schooling for you both.

William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.111-116

  
Enstrom Foundation
Liberate Public Schools from Government by Lawsuit:
the 17-year pro bono defense of students' & parents' Constitutional rights
  

  
On Serafima Vitalievna, a young counterintelligence officer;
observer inside a technology-development compound in the Gulag:

She, and many other classmates with her, had carried away no knowledge when she left the institute. For a number of reasons. The girls had arrived from school knowing no mathematics and no physics (they had found out in the higher classes that teachers who gave low marks were upbraided by the headmaster at staff meetings, so that you could get your graduation certificate without studying at all). Then, in the institute, the girls sat sown to work at their math and radio technology as if they were lost in a bewildering, pathless, alien forest.

More often than not, there just wasn't time to study. For a month and more every autumn students were whisked off to collective farms to dig potatoes, so that for the rest of the year they had eight or even ten lectures a day, with no time to go over their notes. Monday was political education day, and there would be another compulsory meeting of some sort later in the week. Then "social work": wall newspapers, amateur concerts ... help out at home, do the shopping, wash, change your clothes ... an evening at the movies, the theater, the club. If you can't have fun, can't dance a bit in your student days, you may never get another chance. Young people aren't meant to work themselves to death.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
7. "A Woman's Heart"
In the First Circle
A Novel. The Restored Text.  (1968; 2009)
translated by Harry T. Willetts
  

  
[Socrates:]

What I don't advise is that we remain as we are. And if anyone laughs at us because we think it worthwhile to spend our time in school at our age, then I think we should confront him with the saying of Homer, "Modesty is not a good mate for a needy man."

Plato
Laches, 201b
translated by Rosamond Kent Sprague
Complete Works
edited by John M.Cooper
  

[Note by RWF:]

And yet — when we look at Socrates' reference to The Odyssey, given as XVII.347, what is the setting? Telemachus is urging his returned father Odysseus, incognito as a beggar in his own palace, to beg scraps of food from the assembled suitors of Penelope. Advised by Athena, Odysseus does so, putting himself forward as a refinement of the assumed modesty or bashfulness of his beggarly role.

Yet is not the wisest person at the feast actually Odysseus? Both inwardly, and as will soon be demonstrated, outwardly, Odysseus is the rightful King of Ithaca. Odysseus' modesty is feigned as is his needy begging; of worldly possessions he has been for a time bereft, but he is the man of knowledge.

Does Socrates here tell us something about himself?