Ah, your comments get ahead of your question! By that I mean, it may not be necessary or desirable to apply Plato's ideas on education directly, even assuming we can identify them clearly. By that I mean, take something like his stance on poetry. He banned poetry from his ideal state, but the characters in his dialogues are clearly familiar with it. Similar observations could be made about rhetoric and the use of writing. How, then, can we be clear what Plato specifically argues for regarding education?  That said, we can and should apply the many ideas of Plato regarding education…but not necessarily completely or literally, just as they would not be applied that way in his own time. He provides an ideal, like the realm of the forms; he knows we will produce pale and distant echoes of that ideal. We can apply his ideas on education by asking the sort of questions Socrates asked. Examine our premises and our base of knowledge. Examine social assumptions. Seek truth rather than gain, and so on.