y. But
after greater individualization on one hand, and a broader community
of interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of
deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. Obviously a society to
which stratification into separate classes would be fatal, must see to
it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable
and easy terms. A society marked off into classes need he specially
attentive only to the education of its ruling elements. A society which
is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change
occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated
to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will
be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose
significance or connections they do not perceive. The result will be a
confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of
the blind and externally directed activities of others.

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 s