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. We shall have no conception of
the proper limits and distribution of activities—what he called
justice—as a trait of both individual and social organization.
But how is the knowledge of the final and permanent good to be achieved?
In dealing with this question we come upon the seemingly insuperable
obstacle that such knowledge is not possible save in a just and
harmonious social order. Everywhere else the mind is distracted and
misled by false valuations and false perspectives. A disorganized and
factional society sets up a number of different models and standards.
Under such conditions it is impossible for the individual to attain
consistency of mind. Only a complete whole is fully self-consistent. A
society which rests upon the supremacy of some factor over another
irrespective of its rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads
thought astray. It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over
others, and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and distorted.
Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by
institutions, customs, and laws. Only in a just state will these be
such as to give the right education; and only those who have rightly
trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering principle
of things. We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle. However, Plato
suggested a way out. A few men, philosophers or lovers of
wisdom—or truth—may by study learn at least in outline the
proper patterns of true existence. 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. There being
no recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there
could be no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies
and combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable. There
were only three types of faculties or powers in the individual's
constitution. Hence education would soon reach a static limit in each
class, for only diversity makes change and progress.
In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned to
the laboring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human
wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites,
they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition.
They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its
internal guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of
reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess
this are capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time
the legislators of the state—for laws are the universals which
control the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that in
intent, Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it
is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every
individual, his incommensurability with others, and consequently not
recognizing that a society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine
of limited powers and classes came in net effect to the idea of the
subordination of individuality.
We cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is happy and
society well organized when each individual engages in those activities
for which he has a natural equipment, nor his conviction that it is the
primary office of education to discover this equipment to its possessor
and train him for its effective use. But progress in knowledge has made
us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and
their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has
taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and
variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the
degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means
utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not
stratification by classes. Although his educational philosophy was
revolutionary, it was none the less in bondage to static ideals. He
thought that change or alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that
true reality was unchangeable. Hence while he would radically change
the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state in which
change would subsequently have no place. The final end of life is
fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not even minor
details are to be altered. Though they might not be inherently
important, yet if permitted they would inure the minds of men to the
idea of change, and hence be dissolving and anarchic. The breakdown of
his philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to
gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which
should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct
education could not come into existence until an ideal state existed,
and after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation.
For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy
accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with
possession of ruling power in the state.
