phical discourse on art and science. Dewey's emphasis on recovering the ancient philosophical concern for the relation between education and a rational social order are worth looking at. Contemporary scholars would not benefit from reassessments of ancient physics but the reassessment of the metaphysics or ontology (the discourse on Being), politics, ethics, education, and art or art criticism would be of great benefit.
             Philosophical reassessment of education from Plato to Dewey has therefore naturally been directed to the education of rulers. Nowhere is the philosophy of education more important, and more important is education itself more crucial, and nowhere is it more neglected than in a liberal participatory democracy whose egalitarian commitments make every individual both legislator and subject.
             Plato and Aristotle take the education of citizen rulers as a primary aim of the polis, it pervades every aspect of civic activity and it never ends. Plato argued that rulers (men and women alike) should be selected for their capacities to engage, and to be guided by philosophic inquiry in which intellectual and moral education is fused.
             Aristotle thinks that the institutions of the polis, its laws and political structures, its customs and observances are its central education instruments, forming the mentality, the typical motives and habits of citizens. Plato and Aristotle agree that those who command should first have learned to obey; and this makes men good and virtuous by nature, habit and reason. Plato thinks that rulers should be distinguished by their philosophical abilities; Aristotle takes a different approach between the respective contributions of reason and habit to a life of practical virtue. There is no assurance that the highest and best life is directed to eternal truths but is embedded in disciplined well-formed habits of perception, emotion, thought and action. Should someone tell you anything that goes ...