The Children: Good/ Evil

In book II, Socrates talks about modifying the stories where the gods are portrayed as evil. He does this in order to protect the minds of their future guardians. I have a hard time agreeing with Socrates in this instance because this would effect everyone and not just the children. There is a good and evil in the world and choices that come with that, but also by seeing the evil, in most cases, it makes people want to do the good. I feel that if we hold back the differences from the children they will be sheltered and naive. It is kind of like Sunday school, they teach us the good and the bad, but of course it is a more watered down version they teach because they are not going to tell us straight off that if we do not accept Jesus that we will go straight to hell. However, they do tell us about the evil and give us a distinct difference of the good and bad. My point is that the Bible has bad characters as well, but the teachers still told us some version of the stories when we were younger (still molding our brains/knowledge). Those teachings did not make us want to be like them and idolize the bad characters we were learning about. I have never been in a place where there wasn’t evil in stories so I couldn’t imagine what this impact would look like. I believe that in Socrate’s society they should not shelter the children and they should always tell the protagonist and the antagonist in the stories so the children can distinctly see what lifestyle they should model.