ABSTRACT
Throughout history, people have found only five ways to choose leaders: by inheritance, force, chance, political loyalty, or achievement. Only with the last—achievement—has there been an attempt to question how opportunity for participation might be equitably distributed. Broad access to schooling has been society’s way to ensure that future leaders might be drawn from the population at large, with a universal opportunity to participate. Plato might have been the first to propose that occupational preparation be renewed with each generation and based upon what each individual was able to achieve for himself. Thus, the social justice rationales (i.e., the equitable distribution of opportunity) for education are both radical and ancient.
