Plato: Images, Aims, and Practices of Education by Avi I. Mintz, Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018

Plato is a towering figure in the history of philosophy, both for his ideas themselves and for the legacy of influence that he has had on the tradition. Werner Jaeger goes as far as to claim that, “To this day, the character of any philosophy is determined by the relation it bears to Plato” (p. 2:77). One of the central themes throughout the Platonic corpus is education. While some have recognized the centrality of education in Plato’s thought and the importance of his contributions to philosophy of education (Rousseau, for example, describes the Republic as “the finest treatise on education ever written” (p. 8)), many have not. In his book Plato: Images, Aims, and Practices of Education, Avi Mintz correctly recognizes this fact, noting that, “While most scholars working in classics or philosophy would not deny that Plato addressed education in his works . . . too often scholars omit education when exploring the topics that Plato discusses” (p. 15). Mintz’s book, part of Springer’s Briefs in Education series, is an attempt to respond to that unfortunate reality. It is a compelling, albeit concise, apologetic for the truths that “Plato’s engagement with education was central to his life,” that “Among the most important reasons that people continue to read him is that Plato addressed the most pressing, perennial educational questions,” and that Plato’s ideas about education “have reverberated through millennia of educational theory and practice” (p. v). Mintz makes his case in three stages. He begins in Chapters 1 and 2 by providing historical background about Plato’s life and the ancient Greek approach to education. In Chapters 3 and 4, Mintz then turns to Plato’s engagement with educational ideas, examining both what the interactions between characters in the dialogues demonstrate about education as well as a series of images and metaphors that Plato uses to explain various aspects of his educational philosophy. Finally, in Chapters 5 and 6, Mintz examines Plato’s legacy in the history of education by addressing the Socratic method as a pedagogical technique and the parallels between Plato’s educational vision and contemporary institutions of higher education. In his overview of Plato’s life and historical context, Mintz is intentional about making explicit connections between important biographical details and their relevance to Plato’s educational thought. After examining Plato’s relationship with Socrates and providing an overview of Socrates’ trial and death, for example, Mintz notes: “It is not unreasonable to infer that the charge that Socrates corrupted the youth was the impetus for Plato returning so often to questions about the nature of teaching and learning, the purpose of education, and the role of education in society” (p. 2-3). A similar link is drawn between the political upheavals Plato experienced in 5^th-4^th-Century Athens and his view that the only remedy for badly governed states is for political power to be held by lovers of wisdom, i.e., philosophers. Mintz introduces education in classical Greece by describing the curriculum that students would have encountered in formal schooling: gymnastikē (gymnastics), mousikē (music, broadly understood), and grammata (reading and writing). He makes the important point, however, that this formal schooling was only one aspect of a Greek child’s education and that in Greek thought, “The most important educative forces were not thought to be the school at all” (p. 7). Mintz then examines the educational influences that were exercised by the city and its laws; by fathers and other citizens; by poets; and by sophists, orators, and philosophers. In his examination of the final group (sophists, orators, and philosophers), Mintz differentiates between them primarily based on the …