"Now you know the beginning is always the chief thing in every process, especially for whatever is young and tender; for it then the most easily moulded and each takes the shape which you want to impress upon each."
"Exactly."
"Then shall we just carelessly allow the children to hear any chance fables moulded by chance persons, and to receive in their souls opinions which are generally contrary to those which we believe they ought to have when they grow up?"
Most certainly not."
"Then first, as it seems. we must set up a censorship over the fable-makers, and approve any good fable they make, and disapprove the bad; those which are approved we will persuade the mothers and nurses to tell the children, and to mould the souls of the children by the fables even more carefully than the bodies of their hands, most of those they tell now must be thrown away."*
And then in the ensuing dialogue immediately discounts the Greek classics of the time, Hesiod and Homer, for being spurious material for children and that children must not be taught about,
"the battles between the gods which Homer describes, we must not admit into our city, whether they are explained as allegory or not. For the young person is not able to judge what is allegory and what is not; but he will keep in his mind indelible and unchangeable whatever opinions he receives at that age. Therefore perhaps we must be specially careful that what they hear first are the noblest things told in the best fables for encouraging virtue. " *
