are political parties with differing aims, social sets, cliques,

gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely

together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. In
many modern states and in some ancient, there is great
diversity of populations, of varying languages, religions,
moral codes, and traditions. From this standpoint, many a
minor political unit, one of our large cities, for example, is a
congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an
inclusive and permeating community of action and thought.
(See ante, p. 20.)
The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have
both a eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense;
a meaning de jure and a meaning de facto. In social
philosophy, the former connotation is almost always
uppermost. Society is conceived as one by its very nature. The
qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy
community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends,
mutuality of sympathy, are emphasized. But when we look at
the facts which the term denotes instead of confining our
attention to its intrinsic connotation, we find not unity, but a
plurality of societies, good and bad. Men banded together in a
criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the
public while serving it, political machines held together by the
interest of plunder, are included. If interests as a factor in
social control. The second means not only freer interaction
between social groups (once isolated so far as intention could
keep up a separation) but change in social habit-its continuous
readjustment through meeting the new situations produced by
varied intercourse. And these two traits are precisely what
characterize the democratically constituted society.
Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of
a form of social life in which interests are mutually
interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an
important consideration, makes a democratic community
more interested than other communities have cause to be in
deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of
democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial
explanation is that a government resting upon popular
suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who
obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society
repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a
substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be
created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A
democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily
a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated
experience. The following nature was a political dogma. It
meant a rebellion against existing social institutions, customs,
and ideals (See ante, p. 91). Rousseau's statement that
everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Creator
has its signification only in its contrast with the concluding
part of the same sentence: "Everything degenerates in the
hands of man." And again he says: "Natural man has an
absolute value; he is a numerical unit, a complete integer and
has no relation save to himself and to his fellow man.
Civilized man is only a relative unit, the numerator of a
fraction whose value depends upon its dominator, its relation
to the integral body of society. Good political institutions are
those which make a man unnatural." It is upon this conception
of the artificial and harmful character of organized social life
as it now exists 2 that he rested the notion that nature not
merely furnishes prime forces which initiate growth but also
its plan and goal. That evil institutions and customs work
almost automatically to give a wrong education which the
most careful schooling cannot offset is true enough; but the
conclusion is not to education apart from the environment, but
to provide an environment in which native powers will be put
to better uses.
2. Social Efficiency as Aim. A conception which made nature
supply the end of a true education and society the end of an
evil one, could hardly intellectual opportunities are accessible
to all on equable and easy terms. A society marked off into
classes need he specially attentive only to the education of its
ruling elements. A society which is mobile, which is full of
channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere.
must see to it that its members are educated to personal
initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be
overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and
whose significance or connections they do not perceive. The
result will be a confusion in which a few will appropriate to
themselves the results of the blind and externally directed
activities of others.
3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters
will be devoted to making explicit the implications of the
democratic ideas in education. In the remaining portions of
this chapter, we shall consider the educational theories which
have been evolved in three epochs when the social import of
education was especially conspicuous. The first one to be
considered is that of Plato. No one could better express than
did he the fact that a society is stably organized when each
individual is doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in
such a way as to be useful to others (or to contribute to the
whole to which he belongs); and that it is the business of
education to discover these aptitudes and progressively to
train them for social use assimilation of new presentations,
their character is all important. The effect of new
presentations is to reinforce groupings previously formed. The
business of the educator is, first, to select the proper material
in order to fix the nature of the original reactions, and,
secondly, to arrange the sequence of subsequent presentations
on the basis of the store of ideas secured by prior transactions.
The control is from behind, from the past, instead of, as in the
unfolding conception, in the ultimate goal.
(3) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may be laid
down. Presentation of new subject matter is obviously the
central thing, but since knowing consists in the way in which
this interacts with the contents already submerged below
consciousness, the first thing is the step of "preparation," that
is, calling into special activity and getting above the floor of
consciousness those older presentations which are to
assimilate the new one. Then after the presentation, follow the
processes of interaction of new and old; then comes the
application of the newly formed content to the performance of
some task. Everything must go through this course;
consequently there is a perfectly uniform method in
instruction in all subjects for all pupils of all ages.
Herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching out
of the region of routine and accident control. To say that one
knows what he is about,or can intend certain consequences, is
to say, of course, that he can better anticipate what is going to
happen; that he can, therefore, get ready or prepare in advance
so as to secure beneficial consequences and avert undesirable
ones. A genuinely educative experience, then, one in which
instruction is conveyed and ability increased, is
contradistinguished from a routine activity on one hand, and a
capricious activity on the other. (a) In the latter one "does not
care what happens"; one just lets himself go and avoids
connecting the consequences of one's act (the evidences of its
connections with other things) with the act. It is customary to
frown upon such aimless random activity, treating it as willful
mischief or carelessness or lawlessness. But there is a
tendency to seek the cause of such aimless activities in the
youth's own disposition, isolated from everything else. But in
fact such activity is explosive, and due to maladjustment with
surroundings. Individuals act capriciously whenever they act
under external dictation, or from being told, without having a
purpose of their own or perceiving the bearing of the deed
upon other acts. One may learn by doing something which he
does not understand; even in the most intelligent action, we do
much which we do not mean, because the largest portion of
the connections of the act we consciously intend are not
perceived or anticipated. But we learn only Now for that of
discipline. Where an activity takes time, where many means
and obstacles lie between its initiation and completion,
deliberation and persistence are required. It is obvious that a
very large part of the everyday meaning of will is precisely
the deliberate or conscious disposition to persist and endure in
a planned course of action in spite of difficulties and contrary
solicitations. A man of strong will, in the popular usage of the
words, is a man who is neither fickle nor half-hearted in
achieving chosen ends. His ability is executive; that is, he
persistently and energetically strives to execute or carry out
his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.
Clearly there are two factors in will. One has to do with the
foresight of results, the other with the depth of hold the
foreseen outcome has upon the person.
(1) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of volition.
Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A
man keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started,
not because of any clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the
obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be
quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his
proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed himself to
get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while.
Stubbornness shows itself even more in external; they are
shifting things about. No ideal reward, no enrichment of
emotion and intellect, accompanies them. Others contribute to
the maintenance of life, and to its external adornment and
display. Many of our existing social activities, industrial and
political, fall in these two classes. Neither the people who
engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by them,
are capable of full and free interest in their work. Because of
the lack of any purpose in the work for the one doing it, or
because of the restricted character of its aim, intelligence is
not adequately engaged. The same conditions force many
people back upon themselves. They take refuge in an inner
play of sentiment and fancies. They are aesthetic but not
artistic, since their feelings and ideas are turned upon
themselves, instead of being methods in acts which modify
conditions. Their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of
an inner landscape. Even the pursuit of science may become
an asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life not a
temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification
in future dealings with the world. The very word art may
become associated not with specific transformation of things,
making them more significant for mind, but with stimulations
of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. The
separation and mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the
man of theory or culture, the divorce of fine and industrial
arts, are indications of this situation. only get rid of the
artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.
Education in accord with nature was thought to be the first
step in insuring this more social society. It was plainly seen
that economic and political limitations were ultimately
dependent upon limitations of thought and feeling. The first
step in freeing men from external chains was to emancipate
them from the internal chains of false beliefs and ideals. What
was called social life, existing institutions, were too false and
corrupt to be intrusted with this work. How could it be
expected to undertake it when the undertaking meant its own
destruction? "Nature" must then be the power to which the
enterprise was to be left. Even the extreme sensationalistic
theory of knowledge which was current derived itself from
this conception. To insist that mind is originally passive and
empty was one way of glorifying the possibilities of
education. If the mind was a wax tablet to be written upon by
objects, there were no limits to the possibility of education by
means of the natural environment. And since the natural world
of objects is a scene of harmonious "truth," this education
would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth.
5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first
enthusiasm for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory
upon the constructive side became obvious. Merely to leave
everything to ground that life and instinct are a kind of
miraculous thing anyway. Thus we fail to note what the
essential characteristic of the event is; namely, the
significance of the temporal place and order of each element;
the way each prior event leads into its successor while the
successor takes up what is furnished and utilizes it for some
other stage, until we arrive at the end, which, as it
were,summarizes and finishes off the process. Since aims
relate always to results, the first thing to look to when it is a
question of aims, is whether the work assigned possesses
intrinsic continuity. Or is it a mere serial aggregate of acts,
first doing one thing and then another? To talk about an
educational aim when approximately each act of a pupil is
dictated by the teacher, when the only order in the sequence of
his acts is that which comes from the assignment of lessons
and the giving of directions by another, is to talk nonsense. It
is equally fatal to an aim to permit capricious or discontinuous
action in the name of spontaneous self-expression. An aim
implies an orderly and ordered activity, one in which the order
consists in the progressive completing of a process. Given an
activity having a time span and cumulative growth within the
time succession, an aim means foresight in advance of the end
or possible termination. If bees anticipated the consequences
of their activity, if they perceived their end in imaginative
foresight, they would have the primary element in an aim.
Hence it is nonsense thoroughgoing "disciplinary"
subordination to existing institutions. The extent of the
transformation of educational philosophy which occurred in
Germany in the generation occupied by the struggle against
Napoleon for national independence, may be gathered from
Kant, who well expresses the earlier individual-cosmopolitan
ideal. In his treatise on Pedagogics, consisting of lectures
given in the later years of the eighteenth century, he defines
education as the process by which man becomes man.
Mankind begins its history submerged in nature-not as Man
who is a creature of reason, while nature furnishes only
instinct and appetite. Nature offers simply the germs which
education is to develop and perfect. The peculiarity of truly
human life is that man has to create himself by his own
voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral,
rational, and free being. This creative effort is carried on by
the educational activities of slow generations. Its acceleration
depends upon men consciously striving to educate their
successors not for the existing state of affairs but so as to
make possible a future better humanity. But there is the great
difficulty. Each generation is inclined to educate its young so
as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to
the proper end of education: the promotion of the best
possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate
their children so that they may get on; princes educate
reluctance to criticize ends which present themselves than it
does in persistence and energy in use of means to achieve the
end. The really executive man is a man who ponders his ends,
who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as clear and
full as possible. The people we called weak-willed or self-
indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences
of their acts. They pick out some feature which is agreeable
and neglect all attendant circumstances. When they begin to
act, the disagreeable results they ignored begin to show
themselves. They are discouraged, or complain of being
thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and shift to
some other line of action. That the primary difference between
strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the
degree of persistent firmness and fullness with which
consequences are thought out, cannot be over-emphasized.
(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing
out of results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep
hold of a person. They are something to look at and for
curiosity to play with rather than something to achieve. There
is no such thing as over-intellectuality, but there is such a
thing as a one-sided intellectuality. A person "takes it out" as
we say in considering the consequences of proposed lines of
action. A certain flabbiness of fiber prevents the contemplated
object from gripping him and engaging him in action. And
most situation of human intercourse. On the one hand,
science, commerce, and art transcend national boundaries.
They are largely international in quality and method. They
involve interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples
inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea of
national sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics
as it is at the present time. Each nation lives in a state of
suppressed hostility and incipient war with its neighbours.
Each is supposed to be the supreme judge of its own interests,
and it is assumed as matter of course that each has interests
which are exclusively its own. To question this is to question
the very idea of national sovereignty which is assumed to be
basic to political practice and political science. This
contradiction (for it is nothing less) between the wider sphere
of associated and mutually helpful social life and the narrower
sphere of exclusive and hence potentially hostile pursuits and
purposes, exacts of educational theory a clearer conception of
the meaning of "social" as a function and test of education
than has yet been attained. Is it possible for an educational
system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full
social ends of the educative process not be restricted,
constrained, and corrupted? Internally, the question has to face
the tendencies, due to present economic conditions, which
split society into classes some of which are made merely tools
for the higher indifferently and miscellaneously to any and
every detail. It is centered upon whatever has a bearing upon
the effective pursuit of your occupation. Your look is ahead,
and you are concerned to note the existing facts because and
in so far as they are factors in the achievement of the result
intended. You have to find out what your resources are, what
conditions are at command, and what the difficulties and
obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with reference to
what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not involve
such a forecast of results and such an examination of means
and hindrances is either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In
neither case is it intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to
what is intended and careless in observation of conditions of
its realization is to be, in that degree, stupid or partially
intelligent.
indifferently and miscellaneously to any and every detail. It is
centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the effective
pursuit of your occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are
concerned to note the existing facts because and in so far as
they are factors in the achievement of the result intended. You
have to find out what your resources are, what conditions are
at command, and what the difficulties and obstacles are. This
foresight and this survey with reference to what is foreseen
constitute mind. Action that does not involve such a forecast
of results and such an examination of means and hindrances is
either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither case is it
intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to what is intended
and careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to
be, in that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.
If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the
physical manipulation of the instruments but with what one
intends to write, the case is the same. There is an activity in
process; one is taken up with the development of a theme.
Unless one writes as a phonograph talks, this means
intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various
conclusions to which present data and considerations are
tending, together with continually renewed observation and
recollection to get hold of the subject matter which bears upon
the conclusions to be reached The account of education given
in our earlier chapters virtually anticipated the results reached
in a discussion of the purport of education in a democratic
community. For it assumed that the aim of education is to
enable individuals to continue their education or that the
object and reward of learning is continued capacity for
growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of
a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual,
and except where there is adequate provision for the
reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of
wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests.
And this means a democratic society. In our search for aims in
education, we are not concerned, therefore, with finding an
end outside of the educative process to which education is
subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are rather
concerned with the contrast which exists when aims belong
within the process in which they operate and when they are
set up from without. And the latter state of affairs must obtain
when social relationships are not equitably balanced. For in
that case, some portions of the whole social group will find
their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will
not arise from the free growth of their own experience, and
their nominal aims will be means to more ulterior ends of
others rather than truly their own combination of the two.
Subject matter is then regarded as something complete in
itself; it is just something to be learned or known, either by
the voluntary application of mind to it or through the
impressions it makes on mind.
The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical.
Mind appears in experience as ability to respond to present
stimuli on the basis of anticipation of future possible
consequences, and with a view to controlling the kind of
consequences that are to take place. The things, the subject
matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as having a
bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether
assisting or retarding it. These statements are too formal to be
very intelligible. An illustration may clear up their
significance. You are engaged in a certain occupation, say
writing with a typewriter. If you are an expert, your formed
habits take care of the physical movements and leave your
thoughts free to consider your topic. Suppose, however, you
are not skilled, or that, even if you are, the machine does not
work well. You then have to use intelligence. You do not wish
to strike the keys at random and let the consequences be what
they may; you wish to record certain words in a given order so
as to make sense. You attend to the keys, to what you have
written, to your movements, to the ribbon or the mechanism
of the machine. Your attention is not distributed because after
the act is performed we note results which we had not noted
before. But much work in school consists in setting up rules
by which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils
have acted, they are not led to see the connection between the
result say the answer and the method pursued. So far as they
are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of miracle.
Such action is essentially capricious, and leads to capricious
habits. (b) Routine action, action which is automatic, may
increase skill to do a particular thing. In so far, it might be
said to have an educative effect. But it does not lead to new
perceptions of bearings and connections; it limits rather than
widens the meaning-horizon. And since the environment
changes and our way of acting has to be modified in order
successfully to keep a balanced connection with things, an
isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at some
critical moment. The vaunted "skill" turns out gross
ineptitude.
The essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which
have been criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it
identifies the end (the result) and the process. This is verbally
self-contradictory, but only verbally. It means that experience
as an active process occupies time and that its later period
completes its earlier portion; it brings to light connections. But
the idea which underlies it is that education is essentially
retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past and especially
to the literary products of the past, and that mind is adequately
formed in the degree in which it is patterned upon the spiritual
heritage of the past. This idea has had such immense influence
upon higher instruction especially, that it is worth examination
in its extreme formulation.
In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious. Embyronic
growth of the human infant preserves, without doubt, some of
the traits of lower forms of life. But in no respect is it a strict
traversing of past stages. If there were any strict "law" of
repetition, evolutionary development would clearly not have
taken place. Each new generation would simply have repeated
its predecessors' existence. Development, in short, has taken
place by the entrance of shortcuts and alterations in the prior
scheme of growth. And this suggests that the aim of education
is to facilitate such short-circuited growth. The great
advantage of immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it
enables us to emancipate the young from the need of dwelling
in an outgrown past. The business of education is rather to
liberate the young from reviving and retraversing the past than
to lead them to a recapitulation of it. The social environment
of the young is constituted by the presence and action of the
habits of thinking there is a disposition to take considerations
which are dear to the hearts of adults and set them up as ends
irrespective of the capacities of those educated. There is also
an inclination to propound aims which are so uniform as to
neglect the specific powers and requirements of an individual.
forgetting that all learning is something which happens to an
individual at a given time and place. The larger range of
perception of the adult is of great value in observing the
abilities and weaknesses of the young, in deciding what they
may amount to. Thus the artistic capacities of the adult exhibit
what certain tendencies of the child are capable of; if we did
not have the adult achievements we should be without
assurance as to the significance of the drawing, reproducing,
modeling, coloring activities of childhood. So if it were not
for adult language, we should not be able to see the import of
the babbling impulses of infancy. But it is one thing to use
adult accomplishments as a context in which to place and
survey the doings of childhood and youth; it is quite another
to set them up as a fixed aim without regard to the concrete
activities of those educated.
(2) An aim must be capable of translation into a method of
cooperating with the activities of those undergoing
instruction. It must suggest the kind of environment needed to
liberate and to organize their capacities. Unless it lends itself
to the And it is well to remind ourselves that education as such
has no aims. Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have
aims, not an abstract idea like education. And consequently
their purposes are indefinitely varied, differing with different
children, changing as children grow and with the growth of
experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even the most
valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more
harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims,
but rather suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how
to look ahead, and how to choose in liberating and directing
the energies of the concrete situations in which they find
themselves. As a recent writer has said: "To lead this boy to
read Scott's novels instead of old Sleuth's stories; to teach this
girl to sew; to root out the habit of bullying from John's make-
up; to prepare this class to study medicine, these are samples
of the millions of aims we have actually before us in the
concrete work of education." Bearing these qualifications in
mind, we shall proceed to state some of the characteristics
found in all good educational aims. (1) An educational aim
must be founded upon the intrinsic activities and needs
(including original instincts and acquired habits) of the given
individual to be educated. The tendency of such an aim as
preparation is, as we have seen, to omit existing powers, and
find the aim in some remote accomplishment or responsibility.
In general, adequate interplay of experiences the more action
tends to become routine on the part of the class at a
disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on the
part of the class having the materially fortunate position. Plato
defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes
which control his conduct. This condition obtains even where
there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men
are engaged in activity which is socially serviceable, but
whose service they do not understand and have no personal
interest in. Much is said about scientific management of work.
It is a narrow view which restricts the science which secures
efficiency of operation to movements of the muscles. The
chief opportunity for science is the discovery of the relations
of a man to his work-including his relations to others who
take part-which will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is
doing. Efficiency in production often demands division of
labour. But it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless
workers see the technical, intellectual, and social relationships
involved in what they do, and engage in their work because of
the motivation furnished by such perceptions. The tendency to
reduce such things as efficiency of activity and scientific
management to purely technical externals is evidence of the
one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in control of
industry-those who supply its aims. Because of their lack of
all-round and well-balanced social perfunctory and superficial
where there is no interest. Parents and teachers often
complain-and correctly that children "do not want to hear, or
want to understand." Their minds are not upon the subject
precisely because it does not touch them; it does not enter into
their concerns. This is a state of things that needs to be
remedied, but the remedy is not in the use of methods which
increase indifference and aversion. Even punishing a child for
inattention is one way of trying to make him realize that the
matter is not a thing of complete unconcern; it is one way of
arousing "interest," or bringing about a sense of connection. In
the long run, its value is measured by whether it supplies a
mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by the adult
or whether it leads the child "to think"-that is, to reflect upon
his acts and impregnate them with aims.
(ii) That interest is requisite for executive persistence is even
more obvious. Employers do not advertise for workmen who
are not interested in what they are doing. If one were engaging
a lawyer or a doctor, it would never occur to one to reason that
the person engaged would stick to his work more
conscientiously if it was so uncongenial to him that he did it
merely from a sense of obligation. Interest measures-or rather
is the depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one,
moving one to act for its realization.
2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest in to it laden with the
spoils of the past. A mind that is adequately sensitive to the
needs and occasions of the present actuality will have the
liveliest of motives for interest in the background of the
present, and will never have to hunt for a way back because it
will never have lost connection.
3. Education as Reconstruction. In its contrast with the ideas
both of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of the
formation from without, whether by physical nature or by the
cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in the
conception that education is a constant reorganizing or
reconstructing of experience. It has all the time an immediate
end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end-the
direct transformation of the quality of experience. Infancy,
youth, adult life, all stand on the same educative level in the
sense that what is really learned at any and every stage of
experience constitutes the value of that experience, and in the
sense that it is the chief business of life at every point to make
living thus contribute to an enrichment of its own perceptible
meaning.
We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that
reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to
the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to
direct the course of subsequent experience. (1) The increment
of meaning corresponds to the increased perception of the
Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato
first consciously taught the world. But conditions which he
could not intellectually control led him to restrict these ideas
in their application. He never got any conception of the
indefinite plurality of activities which may characterize an
individual and a social group, and consequently limited his
view to a limited number of classes of capacities and of social
arrangements. Plato's starting point is that the organization of
society depends ultimately upon knowledge of the end of
existence. If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy
of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end, the good,
we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the
possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social
arrangements are to be ordered. We shall have no conception
of the proper limits and distribution of activities-what he
called justice as a trait of both individual and social
organization. But how is the knowledge of the final and
permanent good to be achieved? In dealing with this question
we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that such
knowledge is not possible save in a just and harmonious social
order. Everywhere else the mind is distracted and misled by
false valuations and false perspectives. A disorganized and
factional society sets up a number of different models and
standards. Under such conditions it is impossible for the
individual to attain consistency importance of what has been
taught consists in its availability for further teaching, reflects
the pedagogue's view of life. The philosophy is eloquent about
the duty of the teacher in instructing pupils; it is almost silent
regarding his privilege of learning. It emphasizes the
influence of intellectual environment upon the mind; it slurs
over the fact that the environment involves a personal sharing
in common experiences. It exaggerates beyond reason the
possibilities of consciously formulated and used methods, and
underestimates the role of vital, unconscious, attitudes. It
insists upon the old, the past, and passes lightly over the
operation of the genuinely novel and unforeseeable. It takes,
in brief, everything educational into account save its essence,
vital energy seeking opportunity for effective exercise. All
education forms character, mental and moral, but formation
consists in the selection and coordination of native activities
so that they may utilize the subject matter of the social
environment. Moreover, the formation is not only a formation
of native activities, but it takes place through them. It is a
process of reconstruction, reorganization.
2. Education as Recapitulation and Retrospection. A peculiar
combination of the ideas of development and formation from
without has given rise to the recapitulation theory of
education, biological and cultural. The individual differences
of endowment the dynamic values of natural inequalities of
growth, and utilize them, preferring irregularity to the
rounding out gained by pruning will most closely follow that
which takes place in the body and thus prove most effective."
1 Observation of natural tendencies is difficult under
conditions of restraint. They show themselves most readily in
a child's spontaneous sayings and doings, that is, in those he
engages in when not put at set tasks and when not aware of
being under observation. It does not follow that these
tendencies are all desirable because they are natural; but it
does follow that since they are there, they are operative and
must be taken account of. We must see to it that the desirable
ones have an environment which keeps them active, and that
their activity shall control the direction the others take and
thereby induce the disuse of the latter because they lead to
nothing. Many tendencies that trouble parents when they
appear are likely to be transitory, and sometimes too much
direct attention to them only fixes a child's attention upon
them. At all events, adults too easily assume their own habits
and wishes as standards, and regard all deviations of children's
impulses as evils to be eliminated. That artificiality against
which the conception of following nature is so largely a
protest, is the outcome of attempts to force children directly
into the mold of grown-up standards.
instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is
opposed to efficiency. Whether called culture or complete
development of personality, the outcome is identical with the
true meaning of social efficiency whenever attention is given
to what is unique in an individual and he would not be an
individual if there were not something incommensurable
about him. Its opposite is the mediocre, the average.
Whenever distinctive quality is developed, distinction of
personality results, and with it greater promise for a social
service which goes beyond the supply in quantity of material
commodities. For how can there be a society really worth
serving unless it is constituted of individuals of significant
personal qualities?
The fact is that the opposition of high worth of personality to
social efficiency is a product of a feudally organized society
with its rigid division of inferior and superior. The latter are
supposed to have time and opportunity to develop themselves
as human beings; the former are confined to providing
external products. When social efficiency as measured by
product or output is urged as an ideal in a would-be
democratic society, it means that the depreciatory estimate of
the masses characteristic of an aristocratic community is
accepted and carried over. But if democracy has a moral and
ideal meaning, it is that a social return be demanded from all
and lived in a dumb unsocial environment where men refused
to talk to one another and used only that minimum of gestures
without which they could not get along, vocal language would
be as unachieved by him as if he had no vocal organs. If the
sounds which he makes occur in a medium of persons
speaking the Chinese language, the activities which make like
sounds will be selected and coordinated. This illustration may
be applied to the entire range of the educability of any
individual. It places the heritage from the past in its right
connection with the demands and opportunities of the present.
(2) The theory that the proper subject matter of instruction is
found in the culture-products of past ages (either in general, or
more specifically in the particular literatures which were
produced in the culture epoch which is supposed to
correspond with the stage of development of those taught)
affords another instance of that divorce between the process
and product of growth which has been criticized. To keep the
process alive, to keep it alive in ways which make it easier to
keep it alive in the future, is the function of educational
subject matter. But an individual can live only in the present.
The present is not just something which comes after the past;
much less something produced by it. It is what life is in
leaving the past behind it. The study of past products will not
help us understand the present, because the present is
intelligence because, given ready-made, they must be imposed
by some authority external to intelligence, leaving to the latter
nothing but a mechanical choice of means.
(2) We have spoken as if aims could be completely formed
prior to the attempt to realize them. This impression must now
be qualified. The aim as it first emerges is a mere tentative
sketch. The act of striving to realize it tests its worth. If it
suffices to direct activity successfully, nothing more is
required, since its whole function is to set a mark in advance;
and at times a mere hint may suffice. But usually-at least in
complicated situations-acting upon it brings to light
conditions which had been overlooked. This calls for revision
of the original aim; it has to be added to and subtracted from.
An aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration
to meet circumstances. An end established externally to the
process of action is always rigid. Being inserted or imposed
from without, it is not supposed to have a working
relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation. What
happens in the course of action neither confirms, refutes, nor
alters it. Such an end can only be insisted upon. The failure
that results from its lack of adaptation is attributed simply to
the perverseness of conditions, not to the fact that the end is
not reasonable under the circumstances. The value of a
legitimate aim, on the contrary, lies involved, but hitherto
unperceived. The later outcome thus reveals the meaning of
the earlier, while the experience as a whole establishes a bent
or disposition toward the things possessing this meaning.
Every such continuous experience or activity is educative, and
all education resides in having such experiences.
It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample
attention later) that the reconstruction of experience may be
social as well as personal. For purposes of simplification we
have spoken in the earlier chapters somewhat as if the
education of the immature which fills them with the spirit of
the social group to which they belong, were a sort of catching
up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult
group. In static societies, societies which make the
maintenance of established custom their measure of value,
this conception applies in the main. But not in progressive
communities. They endeavor to shape the experiences of the
young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better
habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an
improvement on their own. Men have long had some
intimation of the extent to which education may be
consciously used to eliminate obvious social evils through
starting the young on paths which shall not produce these ills,
and some idea of the extent in which education may be made
an instrument of realizing the