  The development of the whole person was of paramount importance to Ficino, and it is for this reason that his “educational” mission must be fore-grounded. As we have seen, Ficino taught only once, and very briefly, at the Florentine studio (Davies 1992); and there would be no chair in any European university devoted to the teaching of Plato until later in the sixteenth century.  This absence of Plato and Platonism from university faculties is understandable: Aristotle’s more pedagogically suitable work had, since late antiquity and even among Platonists, been deemed basic to education; this fact is unsurprising, given that Aristotle’s work was preserved in the form of lecture notes. And the medieval university curriculum reflected a similar propensity to begin with Aristotelian texts in the arts faculties, before a student, having graduated with a bachelor of arts degree (baccalaureus artium), would move on to the higher faculties of medicine, law, or theology. This intense focus on Aristotelian texts, especially logic, was useful, providing medieval university students with a common vocabulary and similar approaches to argumentation.  Yet by Ficino’s era, the number of universities had risen dramatically, and unsurprisingly the Aristotelian curricula came under scrutiny (Celenza 2007). For some, earlier in the fifteenth century, it was the seemingly inelegant Latin of scholastic philosophers that was unappealing. But for Ficino, the problems had less to do with language and more to do with morality. Character needed to be developed before dialectic was taught. As Ficino wrote in his commentary on Plato’s dialogue Philebus, Plato “shows that [dialectic] must not be given to adolescents because they are led by it into three vices: pride, lewdness, impiety. For when they first taste the ingenious subtlety of arguing, it is as if they have come upon a tyrannous power of rebutting and refuting the rest of us” (Comm. In Philebum, ed. Ficino, in Allen 2000, 230; Hankins 1989, 272). The natural prideful ignorance of youth, when fueled by a capacity to win arguments, could be heightened and led into undesirable directions by the unrestrained power of dialectic.