ABSTRACT
The sphere of life in which authority is ripe for being rationalized is that of educational institutions. On the one side there is the activist who believes that educational institutions are necessarily coercive, authoritarian instruments of a reactionary establishment. On the other side there is the academic with the Black Paper type of mentality, who is convinced that the fabric of society is threatened by progressive methods in the primary school. Similarly the average type of student does not share the activist's hostility to the democratic state. Special educational institutions have proliferated in modern industrial societies because knowledge and skill are increasingly necessary for social survival and for individual development. Plato argued that the state exists to make the good life possible for its citizens and that only the wise, the philosopher kings, know in what the good life consists. Curtailment of freedom of thought, J. S. Mill argued counterproductive in relation to the purpose for which institutions exist.
