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Comment by resource_waste | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I'll take Plato over John Adams.

Not really sure why we are going out of our way to corrupt our children with fables and poems.

They can learn that stuff on their own time. Why codify it? Why does a child need to learn about Box Car Children rather than a biography of an actual person who lived such a life?

Anyway, seems normal to get push back for removing entertainment classes in K12. People are more conservative than they let on.

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Plato put all writing in the same category as poetry and believed that only person to person dialogue could transmit truth. He didn't have a special animosity toward poetry. He would say that a biography was as useless and dead as a novel.

plato is a bit slippery, but as i understand it, he was opposed to his students learning skills that would make them useful to others; he believed that the liberal arts, those befitting a free citizen rather than a slave, were things like music and literature

You do not understand it.

He specifically disdains these entertainments because they pretend to be what is real, obscuring what reality is.

Anyway, so you read something online and repeat it, and you think its going to contradict someone who actually read Plato.

I just don't get it.

i'm not sure you're right, but i'd be interested to find out. i've found a lot of stuff in plato that contradicts what you're saying, although you're partly correct. did you want to refer to any particular passage in support of your point?

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