Plato's Views On Education

Page 193-194 is where Plato really begins to discuss education in detail. His main point on page 193 is that we must work in order to be a succesful scholar. He also points out that work is not easy “... Or do you expect anyone ever to sufficiently love something if he does what he does in pain and with difficulty accomplishes nothing? No...” What I think Plato is trying to say here is that if we really stick with something and not do a half-hearted job we will reap the benefits of our hard work. At the beginning of page 194 he begins to talk about how we should treat memorization. Plato agrees that memorization is vital to our education and our general knowledge but he also thinks that too much of memorization can lead to a bad thing. This only being the case because if we have memorized a whole bunch of useless information it would be more difficult to remember the important facts. A more condensed form of all of this would be memorization is good but not in excess.
A couple pages later in the book the philosophers Adeimantus and Socrates are back on the subject of education. This time Socrates is trying to convey the belief that education and philosophy must be more of a side hobby rather than a full time profession.
He believes that the only time we should fully devote our lives to philosophical studies is when we are to old and unable to serve in a military or political services. That, or when we are young and still having a malleable mind. But if we follow his method we will always pay attention to our physical fitness before our mental fitness. Therefore it will take longer for us to become not fit for military or political service. However a large majority of the philosophers there do not agree with Socrates.
On page 213 is where the philosophers really start getting into the more advance topics regarding education. One of the first things the discuss on page is how people normally pursue one of two things (at least in greek culture). Either intelligence or strength and if one person chooses one of those two they tend to ignore the other one.
But, if you go by what Socrates teaches we must balance the two of these. This is a major theme in education that is repeated multiple times in Book IV of The Republic. Another thing they talk about in this section of Book IV is about how not only should we be vitreous but we should also understand all the virtues that we are upholding or at least trying to.
There are also some very very basic teachings of education closer to the beginning of The Republic. What I would equate the teachings in pages 70-78 is probably what the Greeks learned in their version of elementary school. Of course to us, in our modern time this is considered more around the middle school level of teaching. This includes topics such as always telling the truth because we are nothing without our word. It kind of makes me sad to think that even though these people were not nearly as advanced as we are they still had much greater knowledge than a large majority of us. But, then again that's probably why we're studying the teachings of Plato thousands of years later.