3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters
will be devoted to making explicit the implications of the
democratic ideas in education. In the remaining portions of this
chapter, we shall consider the educational theories which have
been evolved in three epochs when the social import of education
was especially conspicuous. The first one to be considered is
that of Plato. No one could better express than did he the fact
that a society is stably organized when each individual is doing
that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be
useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he
belongs); and that it is the business of education to discover
these aptitudes and progressively to train them for social use.
Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato first
consciously taught the world. But conditions which he could not
intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas in their
application. He never got any conception of the indefinite
plurality of activities which may characterize an individual and
a social group, and consequently limited his view to a limited
number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements.
Plato's starting point is that the organization of society
depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we
do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and
caprice. Unless we know the end, the good, we shall have no
criterion for rationally deciding what the possibilities are
which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements are to be
ordered.
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