ABSTRACT
In a modern society most of childhood and adolescence is spent in schools; the costs, private and public, are substantial. Little wonder, therefore, that education is expected to yield commensurate rewards in personal success and public virtue. College graduates, by unspoken but common consent, "should know better" than to indulge in lower-class lapses from virtue. Socrates wanted to know why, if virtue can be taught, as Protagoras, the Sophist, claimed, so many eminently virtuous fathers are disappointed by the lack of virtue in their sons. To which Protagoras responded with an explanation that society as a whole is constantly teaching virtue - a thesis that has relieved the philosophy department of the responsibility to do so. 1
That neither the art nor science of pedagogy has been able to produce the anticipated benefits for large heterogeneous populations prompts the conjecture that the expectations were not formulated properly. Perhaps the question raised by Herbert Spencer, viz., what knowledge is of the most worth? and what pedagogical maneuvers will produce it, lends itself too readily to ambiguity. If we insist on the answer taking into account the range of individual differences, the question might almost as well remain unasked. The public wants a payoff on educational investment in the whole range of values: economic, health, citizenship, recreation, associational, intellectual, moral, religious, aesthetic, i.e., all the ingredients of the "good" life. With the exception of the economic values, it is general education that is supposed to supply the ideational and dispositional resources for their realization.
