Questions of education are frequently discussed as if they bore no relation to the social system in which and for which the education is carried on. This is one of the most common reasons for the unsatisfactoriness of the answers. It is only within a particular social system that a system of education has any meaning. If education today seems to deteriorate, if it seems to become more and more chaotic and meaningless, it is primarily because we have no settled and satisfactory arrangement of society, and because we have both vague and diverse opinions about the kind of society we want. Education is a subject which cannot be discussed in a void: our questions raise other questions, social, economic, financial, and political. And the bearings are on more ultimate problems even than these: to know what we want in education, we must know what we want in general, we must derive our theory of education from our philosophy of life.