If a powerful ruler should form a state after these patterns,
then its regulations could be preserved. An education could be
given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were
good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in
life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own part, and
never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be
maintained.
It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic
thought a more adequate recognition on one hand of the
educational significance of social arrangements and, on the
other, of the dependence of those arrangements upon the means
used to educate the young. It would be impossible to find a
deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and
developing personal capacities, and training them so that they
would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society in
which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato
could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he
clearly saw.
While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual
in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any
conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the
process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of
individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into
a very small number of classes at that. Consequently the testing
and sifting function of education only shows to which one of
three classes an individual belongs.
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