l period would be drawn to a philosophy such as Plato's which emphasizes the moral, or good conduct, aspect of behavior as a result of formal instruction.
Plato was an idealist--an ardent advocate of the aesthetic and the moral in education. Idealism, that branch of philosophy related to metaphysics (the nature of reality), is defined as the position that reality is ultimately non-matter. Relative to epistemology (that which investigates the nature, sources, limitations, and validity of knowledge), idealism is defined as "the position that all we know are our ideas" (Barry, 1980, p. 510). Barry (1980) offers a more comprehensive description of idealism:
Although idealists differ, let us define idealism as the belief that reality is essentially idea, thought, or mind, rather than matter. Whether idealists believe that there is a single, absolute mind or many minds, they invariably emphasize the mental or spiritual, not the material, presenting it as the creative force or active agent behind all things ... Individual entities (forms or ideas) come and go, but the "Forms" are immortal and indestructible. (p. 367)
Again, such thinking fit in well with the Christian thought that was to develop later. In St. Augustine's (354-430) The City of God, he warns us to beware of the world of the flesh, because it is temporary. What is real is the spiritual world, the world without matter. Education in Europe was to be dominated by idealism for over a thousand years. As Anthony Kenny (1994) explains,
Although unprecedentedly skilled in law and administration, Roman civilization was derivative in political thought. Its collapse was the occasion for Augustine's City of God, the first major attempt to deal with political topics from a Christian point of view. This introduced a period of 1200 years during which political thinking was embedded with religion and preoccupied with the problem of the relations between church and state. ...