Sparta's rise and fall

Marrou's history of Sparta's education makes me wonder what the current research shows about the city state's rise and fall. The way that he describes it, Sparta was a place of balance and cultural achievement in the pre-classical period (before the sixth century BC). 

After that, though, when the state tried to solidify what made it great in an educational system, that greatness was choked off. Sparta is Marrou's example (no doubt the first of many) of a society that is too quick to develop and conservatively keep to an overly restrictive educational system. Not that Spartan education was just restrictive, but that it was enforced in a way that refused to change and so collapsed.

The chapter on this subject comes in under twenty pages, and though Marrou's references to his sources and endnotes are at a level that is not distracting, it seems like a breezy few pages to read. The conversational tone is definitely a grand help, but it's also something that betray's the author's assumption that his audience has a basic knowledge of events and figures from the periods of which he writes. 

Marrou doesn't press his references to the point of making his arguments and positions incomprehensible by the uninitiated, but I do feel like I'm getting a little less out of the book than I otherwise would be.