ABSTRACT
Considering how much political philosophy - and in modem times how many political philosophers - have been embedded in education, it is curious how little attention university political philosophers have paid to what is taught in schools. For it is here that all the practical implications of differing concepts of freedom and authority and their varying relationships ftrst come together. We note in passing, of course, the importance that Aristotle, Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill (even Hobbes, though coming to a perverse conclusion) attached to education, as the right schooling of the young, as the precondition for a just state - notice, but usually pass on. Perhaps one should also add the name of John Dewey, who saw a radically more democratic schooling as the essential precondition for (in his sense) a genuinely democratic society. But despite a magisterial effort at revival (Ryan, 1995), few thinkers in the United Kingdom outside schools of education see him as part of the canon of political thought.
