Because of the heavy concentration of low ethnic status minorities dwelling in cities, urban education has been equated with the problems of low status persons. However, there are problems that are peculiar to education as it is influenced by urban development that go beyond the problems of special ethnic, low status minority groups. The problems and opportunities of urban education, then, are not simply those related to education in the cities and directed toward minorities, but increasingly, the field of education must be defined as including education for an urban nation. One of the issues that has surfaced in this movement toward "urbanicity" is that of interactions endemic to urban communities. The great concentration of people, resources, etc., provides for kinds of interactions which form the core of the developmental process in man. Another issue that can be added is that of critical mass, i.e., the mass of human, technological, monetary, and value resources in cities. Identifying the level of magnitude of the mass necessary to particular processes and the ways in which that mass may be manipulated to produce effective services is another critical concern for an urban nation. Another issue is that of adaptation, the capacity to adapt and readapt and use one's self in creative ways in response to a variety of inputs. There are central features of urbanicity which have particular implications for education. They are: (1) the diversity of human characteristics, (2) the pluralism characteristic of urban society in which many values exist simultaneously, (3) mobility, or the capacity of society to put people in a variety of settings, and the requirements of those settings to which people make their adaptations, (4) social immobility, and (5) bureaucratic rigidity. In conclusion, what happens in education over the next few years may be more greatly influenced by things that happen in our own particular setting (for example, manipulating and using the political economy in the society), than the things that are done in education itself. (Author/AM)