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Schooling at Troynovant:
Classes and antitheses on School, College, Learning;
listed by Title
Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a School —not of a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems — and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity — but a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.
Jane Austen
Emma (1815)
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[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
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[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?
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