The best discussion supporting the student/athlete approach to education that I have ever read is ironically from the Greek Philosopher, Plato. An old college professor encouraged me to get my own copy of Plato's Republic and this was the first section I happened to turned to. Another irony was that the professor wasn't familiar with the passage and told me I might have purchased the wrong book. What a crazy incident. Anyway, great quote, long but very well thought out.
"Now, the ordinary athlete undergoes the rigours of training for the sake of muscular strength; but ours will do so rather with a view to stimulating the spirited element in their nature. So perhaps the purpose of the two established branches of education is not, as some suppose, the improvement of the soul in one case and of the body in the other. Both, it may be, aim chiefly at improving the soul.
Have you noticed how a life-long devotion to either branch, to the exclusion of the other, affects the mind, resulting in an uncivilized hardness in the one case, and an over-civilized softness in the other?
I have certainly noticed that unmitigated athletics produce a sort of ferocity, and a merely literary and musical education makes men softer than is good for them.
Surely that ferocity is the outcome of the spirited element in our nature. A proper training would produce courage; but if that element is overstrained, it naturally becomes hard and savage. Gentleness, on the other hand, is characteristic of the philosophic disposition. Here again, too much relaxation will result in over-softness; the right training will produce gentleness that is steady and disciplined. Now we agree that our Guardians must combine both these dispositions; and they will have to be harmonized so that courage and steadfastness may be united in a soul that would otherwise be either unmanly or boorish.
When a man surrenders himself to music, allowing his soul to be flooded through the channels of his ears with those sweet and soft and mournful airs we spoke of, and gives up all his time to the delights of song and melody, then at first he tempers the high-spirited part of his nature, like iron whose brittle hardness is softened to make it serviceable; but if he persists in subduing it to such incantation, he will end by melting it away altogether. He will have cut the sinews of his soul and made himself what Homer calls a faint-hearted warrior. Moreover, this result follows quickly in a temperament that is naturally spiritless; while a high-spirited one is rendered weak and unstable, readily flaring up and dying down again on slight provocation. Such men become rather irritable, bad-tempered, and peevish.
On the other hand, there are the consequences of hard bodily exercise and high living, with no attempt to cultivate the mind or use the intellect in study. At first, the sense of physical fitness fills a man with self-confidence and energy and makes him twice the man he was. But suppose he does nothing else and holds aloof from any sort of culture; then, even if there was something in him capable of desiring knowledge, it is starved of instruction and never encouraged to think for itself by taking part in rational discussion or intellectual pursuits of any kind; and so it grows feeble for lack of stimulus and nourishment, and deaf and blind because the darkness that clouds perception is never cleared away. Such a man ends by being wholly uncultivated and a hater of reason. Having no more use for reasonable persuasion, he gains all his ends by savage violence, like a brute beast, and he lives in a dull stupor of ignorance with no touch of inward harmony or grace.
That is exactly what happens."
- Plato
The Republic of Plato: Translated with Introduction and Notes by Francis MacDonald Cornford, (Oxford University Press: New York & London, 1945), 100-101.
