Frank Kogan

nor is it accidental that socrates's and plato's and aristotle's pupils were the scions of the rulers of athens and later all greece and macedonia

This seems to me a crucial sentence, because on its face it seems irrelevant, another red herring. That is, the modern-day argument for academia that plays best (and is hardest for the budget-cutters to counter) is "Equal opportunity is a sham without universal education." And the person who makes it is most-likely to be a liberal-leaning professional who doesn't identify with scions then or now, and the professional's base constituency is middle-class professionals left and right and the upwardly mobile urban poor. And his crucial antagonist is the anti-intellectual entrepreneur or business manager who doesn't want to pay property taxes.

(Also - to go off-topic - my guess is that for the democracy argument in relation to philosophy you're much better off reading Dewey and Veblen rather than Stone, though I've not read the Stone book myself, so I don't know this. But also, my experience reading Plato makes him and Socrates much more committed to inquiry than to transcendence. My reading of people of the past who make "transcendent" arguments is that those arguments can be used by someone who wants change as much as by someone who wants to bolster the status quo.)