Spartan Education System

 Overview

• Successful completion of the agoge was a prerequisite for Spartan citizenship. Public education was provided for girls as well as boys
• Spartan education was famed for its exceptional harshness and emphasis on physical skills and endurance. It was also characterised, however, by an astonishing degree of self-government, freedom and responsibility
• Furthermore, literacy in Sparta was higher than in any other Greek city-state, because only in Sparta was there a high degree of literacy among women as well as men. Spartan ("laconic") rhetoric style was admired throughout the ancient world, attesting to its high quality - a product of the agoge
• Spartan public education was the subject of extensive, and controversial, discussion even in the ancient world
• No other contemporary state provided for, and in fact required, its citizens to go through the same "upbringing" or agoge
• Unfortunately, because we must rely on descriptions of the system provided by outsiders, we have a kind of "mirror image" of the Spartan agoge
• Observers reported that which struck them as unique or different from education in their own cities, rather than reporting systematically about Sparta's system of education
• Equally distorting for the modern historian interested in Classical Sparta is the fact that most of our existing ancient sources in fact describe a Spartan educational system that was reinstituted in the Hellenistic period after what may have been nearly a century in abeyance
• It is often very difficult to distinguish "traditional" from "innovative" features of the described schooling
• Nevertheless, a number of characteristics of this education can be surmised

First Point

• It is important to note that collective education was considered so important that the  agoge was not only a compulsory prerequisite for citizenship, but all adult males bore an equal responsibility for rearing good citizens
• This was manifest in the laws that required boys in school to address all older men as "father" and gave any citizen the right to discipline a boy or youth under age
• All citizens were directly involved in the education of the next generation in another respects as well: at the age of 20, before being awarded citizenship at 21 and serving in the army, young Spartans acted as instructors in the agoge for their younger classmates
• Last but not least, despite the emphasis on public education, it would be absurd to think that parents did not take a very personal and intense interest in the education of their own offspring
• Numerous quotes demonstrate the pride and sense of personal accomplishment that Spartan mothers felt with regard to their sons

Second Point

• The principal goal of public education was to raise good future citizens
• One aspect of this goal is obvious: future citizens were by definition professional soldiers, and so the educational system very clearly sought to create physically hardened men, capable of enduring hardship, pain, and deprivation
• The emphasis of education was thus on athletic activities and military skills
• Less obvious and often overlooked by modern observers is the fact that the goal of producing good future citizens was not fulfilled by producing good soldiers alone
• Ideal future citizens were democratic, self-sufficient and independent. Thus, despite the harsh discipline, Sparta did not seek to break her youth or make them subservient
• Instead, they were taught democracy from the very start of their schooling - not in theory but in practice. On starting school at the age of seven, the boys were organized into units, teams, or "herds" - and elected their own leaders. Some sources suggest that they also "elected" their instructors from among the eligible 20 year olds