First of all, the general view promoted both by Sparta and her enemies was that it was a state education. Thucydides has Pericles say in his funeral speech to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War that the Spartans train up their children to harden themselves and live for the state. In contrast, he says, the Athenians are just as strong and brave on a very different educational system. In fact, he claims that they are better than the Spartans, for the Spartans, when they go to war, always bring along their allies, whereas the Athenians, often as not, fight alone. He claims that no force from another Greek city has ever defeated a full Athenian force in fair battle.
Leaving aside the question of whether the Athenians were the great fighters that they said, what was the Athenian education? Initially, there was nothing formal, with children staying in the household until they were seven. Plato recommended training them from birth, but his description of a boy child as being wild and unruly as an animal indicates that his fellow citizens did the opposite with their young children.
In a world of high infant mortality, this made sense, as the mortality rate did not really begin to drop until that age when children were old enough to fight off (or to have survived) the usual childhood diseases. By age seven, however, boys were expected to be taught, either in a school or privately at home, until the age of fourteen. Since the parents had to pay for this and schooling was not enforced by law, they did not always educate their children, or they kept them out of school much of the time to keep down tutoring fees, or took them out early. The tutors, who were either slaves or lowborn non-citizens, were poorly paid and had little recourse against parents who did not pay them or removed children from their tutelage.
Thus, the vaunted high literacy rate of even Athenian citizens (as opposed to non-citizens, slaves and women) was possibly not that high. Historians have noted that, according to literary sources, most Athenian citizens could at least scratch out their names, but this does not indicate a greater overall literacy rate than that of Sparta.
After age fourteen, a boy could get further education, but the likelihood that he would increased only if his parents were rich. That said, Athens produced far more literature than other Greek states, at least, among its men. Athenian girls, on the other hand, stayed at home and learned domestic chores, particularly the important aristocratic craft of weaving cloth.
At birth, Spartan babies were examined for physical defects. If they were not healthy, they were cast into a nearby chasm and left to die. Like the Athenians, Spartans sent their boys off to school at age seven. They also sent their girls, making them unique in the Greek city-states in educating women. The current etymology of the terms "Spartan" and "laconic" came from the methods of Spartan schooling.
From seven to twelve, the boys lived in a state-run barracks called an agogê where they learned their letters much like the Athenian boys. The main difference, however, was that the Spartans favoured plain speech over rhetoric and deliberately taught the boys to speak as "laconically" as possibly. The term derives from the alternate word for Sparta: "Laconia".
Spartan boys also engaged in a strict, physical regimen that not all of them survived. Hence, the term "spartan accommodations" for the basic necessities for life. The boys were deliberately starved and just as deliberately encouraged to steal what they needed from the food stores of their schools. They were only punished if caught, but then the punishment was severe.
The legend that Plutarch tells of the boy who, having been caught stealing a fox, refused to confess to it even as the fox gnawed him to death, reflects the boys' fears of these punishments. It also reflects the distinct possibility that lack of food was not so much deliberate, as Xenophon says, as it was a fact of life in Sparta.
The boys were also encouraged to steal offerings from the altar of Ortheia Artemis and underwent floggings in front of the temple, not infrequently to death. Normal discipline frequently consisted of severe beatings. If the boys uttered a sound, they were called weak and beaten harder.
For Spartan youths, every day was a test of survival. Older boys had to break off river reeds with their bare hands for bedding and wear a single tunic, winter and summer. From age twelve to eighteen, the boys came under the tutelage of single young men in the groups above them. This appears to have been a sort of institutionalised pederasty, though Plutarch tries to soften it to reduce the moral censure of it. He also treated, with some embarrassment, the story that young women were expected to dance in public displays before the boys in short tunics, or possibly even nude. There is also the Euripidian story from the tragedy Andromache (probably apocryphal) that boys and girls wrestled naked.
At the age of eighteen, the boys became young adults, at a crossroads between boyhood and adulthood. At one point, they were set loose in nearby Messenia, which had been conquered by the Spartans and whose inhabitants now served the Spartans as "helots" (Spartan peasants/slaves). Each young man was given a knife and instructed to survive on his own for a period of time. Part of this involved roaming the countryside at night and killing any helot he encountered.
Young single men also became mentors (and lovers) of the younger boys and competed as groups in great, stylised, public performances of song and "unarmed" dance. Some historians have seen these dances and rituals (both killing and stealing) as evidence of an Archaic, even Neolithic, cultural survival of rites of passage. If this were true, it would be an indication that Sparta's reputation for changelessness had a basis in fact. Others have noted sceptically that modern anthropological analogies for cultural timelessness, such as the common allusion to "primitive" tribes in Africa, no longer seem to predate even the colonial period. In fact, this rituals might be a reaction to colonialism. In that case, Sparta's so-called prehistoric rites are likely to be neither unique (the cheese stealing ritual, for example, can be found elsewhere in Greece) nor prehistoric.
Nor were the Spartans unique in the ritualistic priority that they gave to song and dance in maintaining their cultural values. Plato, too, extolled the educational and civic value of song, dance and poetry in his Laws and Poetics. It was a common cultural motif among the ancient Greeks.
By age twenty-five, the men had married, but remained in barracks life and under the will of the state. It was not until they passed the age of 60 that they were allowed to live as they pleased, or participate in running the government.
The women, as has been said, also went to school. They appear to have been taught letters like the boys (not something that women learned in Athens), but the main focus of their education was physical. The point of this was two-fold, to make them fit mothers and to ensure that they had the strength and skills to run the farms and defend Sparta when the men were away. The Spartans felt that making the mother as healthy as possible reduced deaths in childbirth, but that this could only be accomplished by a regime of good feeding and strenuous physical exercise.
Noble women were especially prized and needed in Sparta as the ongoing program of infanticide and eugenics ensured a high child mortality rate. This did not improve once the men grew up and went off to war. To make matters worse, the Spartans were always outnumbered by the peasant helots whom they ruled. It was therefore the state-imposed duty of every Spartan woman to bear strong children who would grow up to become warriors.
The women were also married off much later than other Greek women, at age eighteen. The ceremony itself was cast in the form of a kidnapping and rape, with the new husband groping after his wife in the dark, consummating the marriage and then going back to the barracks to sleep with his mates. This was not surprising, as the raising up of women was not for their own benefit, but so that they could bear children for the polis, which was a patriarchal military machine. Some historians have compared them to women in fascist states in this respect.
On the other hand, women had more freedom in Sparta than elsewhere. Their husbands were scarcely home and spent most of their time in the barracks when they were. The women, meanwhile, ran their households in their husbands' absence and some prided themselves on their learning, which indicates that they were not stopped from reading or even writing.
Clearly, not all of the differences between Athens and Sparta were exaggerated. Athens was a democracy of citizens with votes (at least, when the city was not being dominated by an oligarchy); Sparta was governed by two kings and an oligarchy of elders. Athens had an unruly political and philosophical climate that produced an extensive written record of debate. Sparta had an obedient populace, half of which it kept in military discipline on a perpetual war footing, the other half (which did have leisure time but was disenfranchised) concentrating on running farms and households, and having babies. Athens did not have a formal, state-run education for its children; Sparta had a universal (and harsh) educational system for its citizens' children. In Athens, the women stayed at home. In Sparta (or so Xenophon and Plutarch claimed), the women ruled the men, or at any rate, they spoke their minds and lived broader, more literate lives.
But it is too easy to polarise the two cities. Being in frequent conflict put them all too often on opposite sides, but as the Persian invasion made clear, Athens and Sparta were still members of the same culture. It is unwise to cast Athens and Sparta in such harsh relief compared to the rest of Greece. They did not exist in isolation, but in relation to a complex web of city-states, some of whom resembled one model or the other in different respects. Sparta was not very literate in respect to Athens, on the face of the evidence, but then, Athens seems to have been unusually literate compared to other Greek states.
According to Plato, the Cretans, like the Spartans, raised their children in a strict regimen. And the Athenians were not necessarily unique in their political system. Nor is it entirely fair to classify Athens as strictly a "democracy" and Sparta as strictly an "oligarchy". The citizens of Athens may not have been any higher a percentage of the Athenian population than the Spartans were compared to the helots.
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