Abstract
The attention that political science has devoted to problems of education has a peculiar if not a puzzling history. Over two thousand years ago education occupied a prominent position in political thought; today, in political science as a whole, attention to problems of education has all but disappeared. It is not easy to account for this condition. From the very beginnings of political speculation, as we find it in Plato and Aristotle, political philosophers were sensitive to the role of education in political life, and they have continued their concern to the present day. But their steadfast awareness of, and interest in, education has not been sufficient to induce them to seek out the way in which education does in fact influence political life. As we shall see in a moment, their preoccupations have been of a different order. But if the very nature of the tasks that philosophers posed for themselves stifled a concern for the practical effects of education on political life, this did not need to be the case for empirical political science. If anywhere, it was here that the philosopher's ideas about education should have been converted into a practical program for research with regard to educational institutions. As the weight of knowledge began to press men into specialized research during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and as moral philosophy began to break up into today's many specialized social disciplines, political
Published Version
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