For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been
concerned with education as it may exist in any social group. We
have now to make explicit the differences in the spirit,
material, and method of education as it operates in different
types of community life. To say that education is a social
function, securing direction and development in the immature
through their participation in the life of the group to which
they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with
the quality of life which prevails in a group. Particularly is
it true that a society which not only changes but-which has the
ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different
standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at
the perpetuation of its own customs. To make the general ideas
set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is,
therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature
of present social life.
1. The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word,
but many things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and
for all kinds of purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude
of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite
different. It often seems as if they had nothing in common
except that they are modes of associated life. Within every
larger social organization there are numerous minor groups: not
only political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific,
religious, associations. There 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 it is said that such organizations are not
societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the
notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of
society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having no
reference to facts; and in part, that each of these
organizations, no matter how opposed to the interests of other
groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of "Society"
which hold it together. There is honor among thieves, and a band
of robbers has a common interest as respects its members. Gangs
are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense
loyalty to their own codes. Family life may be marked by
exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and
yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Any education
given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality
and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims
of the group. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the
worth of any given mode of social life. In seeking this measure,
we have to avoid two extremes. We cannot set up, out of our
heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We must base our
conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have
any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we
have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which
are actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable
traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and
employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest
improvement. Now in any social group whatever, even in a gang of
thieves, we find some interest held in common, and we find a
certain amount of interaction and cooperative intercourse with
other groups. From these two traits we derive our standard. How
numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously
shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of
association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal
band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members
together are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest
in plunder; and that they are of such a nature as to isolate the
group from other groups with respect to give and take of the
values of life. Hence, the education such a society gives is
partial and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind
of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there
are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all
participate and that the progress of one member has worth for the
experience of other members -- it is readily communicable -- and
that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately
into relationships with business groups, with schools, with all
the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar groups,
and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in
return receives support from it. In short, there are many
interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are
varied and free points of contact with other modes of
association.
I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a
despotically governed state. It is not true there is no common
interest in such an organization between governed and governors.
The authorities in command must make some appeal to the native
activities of the subjects, must call some of their powers into
play. Talleyrand said that a government could do everything with
bayonets except sit on them. This cynical declaration is at
least a recognition that the bond of union is not merely one of
coercive force. It may be said, however, that the activities
appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading -- that such a
government calls into functioning activity simply capacity for
fear. In a way, this statement is true. But it overlooks the
fact that fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience.
Caution, circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future
events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are
as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is
cowardice and abject submission. The real difficulty is that the
appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread and hope of
specific tangible reward -- say comfort and ease -- many other
capacities are left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but
in such a way as to pervert them. Instead of operating on their
own account they are reduced to mere servants of attaining
pleasure and avoiding pain.
This is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of
common interests; there is no free play back and forth among the
members of the social group. Stimulation and response are
exceedingly one-sided. In order to have a large number of values
in common, all the members of the group must have an equable
opportunity to receive and to take from others. There must be a
large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise,
the influences which educate some into masters, educate others
into slaves. And the experience of each party loses in meaning,
when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience is
arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject-class
prevents social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the
superior class are less material and less perceptible, but
equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned
back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and
artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge
overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.
Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a
variety of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation
unbalanced. Diversity of stimulation means novelty, and novelty
means challenge to thought. The more activity is restricted to a
few definite lines -- as it is when there are rigid class lines
preventing 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 labor. 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 interest, there is not sufficient
stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships in
industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with
technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very
acute and intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be
developed, but the failure to take into account the significant
social factors means none the less an absence of mind, and a
corresponding distortion of emotional life. II. This
illustration (whose point is to be extended to all associations
lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second point.
The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its
antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found
wherever one group has interests "of its own" which shut it out
from full interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing
purpose is the protection of what it has got, instead of
reorganization and progress through wider relationships. It
marks nations in their isolation from one another; families which
seclude their domestic concerns as if they had no connection with
a larger life; schools when separated from the interest of home
and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned and
unlearned. The essential point is that isolation makes for
rigidity and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and
selfish ideals within the group. That savage tribes regard
aliens and enemies as synonymous is not accidental. It springs
from the fact that they have identified their experience with
rigid adherence to their past customs. On such a basis it is
wholly logical to fear intercourse with others, for such contact
might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion
reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding
mental life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the
physical environment. But the principle applies even more
significantly to the field where we are apt to ignore it -- the
sphere of social contacts. Every expansive era in the history of
mankind has coincided with the operation of factors which have
tended to eliminate distance between peoples and classes
previously hemmed off from one another. Even the alleged
benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the
fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse
between them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one
another, and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic
and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down
external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and
more perceptible connection with one another. It remains for the
most part to secure the intellectual and emotional significance
of this physical annihilation of space.
2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both
point to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous
and more varied points of shared common interest, but greater
reliance upon the recognition of mutual 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 extension in space of the
number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each
has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider
the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is
equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race,
and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full
import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied
points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which
an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on
variation in his action. They secure a liberation of powers
which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are
partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness
shuts out many interests.
The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation
of a greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize
a democracy, are not of course the product of deliberation and
conscious effort. On the contrary, they were caused by the
development of modes of manufacture and commerce, travel,
migration, and intercommunication which flowed from the command
of science over natural energy. But after greater
individualization on one hand, and a broader community of
interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of
deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. Obviously a
society to which stratification into separate classes would be
fatal, must see to it that 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.
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 of mind. Only a complete
whole is fully self-consistent. A society which rests upon the
supremacy of some factor over another irrespective of its
rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads thought
astray. It puts a premium on certain things and slurs over
others, and creates a mind whose seeming unity is forced and
distorted. Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns
furnished by institutions, customs, and laws. Only in a just
state will these be such as to give the right education; and only
those who have rightly trained minds will be able to recognize
the end, and ordering principle of things. We seem to be caught
in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out. A few
men, philosophers or lovers of wisdom -- or truth -- may by study
learn at least in outline the proper patterns of true existence.
If a powerful ruler should form a state after these patterns,
then its regulations could be preserved. An education could be
given which would sift individuals, discovering what they were
good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the work in
life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own part, and
never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be
maintained.
It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic
thought a more adequate recognition on one hand of the
educational significance of social arrangements and, on the
other, of the dependence of those arrangements upon the means
used to educate the young. It would be impossible to find a
deeper sense of the function of education in discovering and
developing personal capacities, and training them so that they
would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society in
which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato
could not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he
clearly saw.
While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual
in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any
conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the
process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of
individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into
a very small number of classes at that. Consequently the testing
and sifting function of education only shows to which one of
three classes an individual belongs. There being no recognition
that each individual constitutes his own class, there could be no
recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable.
There were only three types of faculties or powers in the
individual's constitution. Hence education would soon reach a
static limit in each class, for only diversity makes change and
progress.
In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are
assigned to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and
supplies human wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over
and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively
courageous disposition. They become the citizen-subjects of the
state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians in peace.
But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a
capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess this are
capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time the
legislators of the state -- for laws are the universals which
control the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that
in intent, Plato subordinated the individual to the social whole.
But it is true that lacking the perception of the uniqueness of
every individual, his incommensurability with others, and
consequently not recognizing that a society might change and yet
be stable, his doctrine of limited powers and classes came in net
effect to the idea of the subordination of individuality. We
cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is happy and
society well organized when each individual engages in those
activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his
conviction that it is the primary office of education to discover
this equipment to its possessor and train him for its effective
use. But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the
superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their
original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has
taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and
variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in
the degree in which society has become democratic, social
organization means utilization of the specific and variable
qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.
Although his educational philosophy was revolutionary, it was
none the less in bondage to static ideals. He thought that
change or alteration was evidence of lawless flux; that true
reality was unchangeable. Hence while he would radically change
the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state
in which change would subsequently have no place. The final end
of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not
even minor details are to be altered. Though they might not be
inherently important, yet if permitted they would inure the minds
of men to the idea of change, and hence be dissolving and
anarchic. The breakdown of his philosophy is made apparent in
the fact that he could not trust to gradual improvements in
education to bring about a better society which should then
improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education
could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and
after that education would be devoted simply to its conservation.
For the existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some
happy accident by which philosophic wisdom should happen to
coincide with possession of ruling power in the state.
4. The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In
the eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very
different circle of ideas. "Nature" still means something
antithetical to existing social organization; Plato exercised a
great influence upon Rousseau. But the voice of nature now
speaks for the diversity of individual talent and for the need of
free development of individuality in all its variety. Education
in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the method of
instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original
endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even
as antisocial. Social arrangements were thought of as mere
external expedients by which these nonsocial individuals might
secure a greater amount of private happiness for themselves.
Nevertheless, these statements convey only an inadequate idea of
the true significance of the movement. In reality its chief
interest was in progress and in social progress. The seeming
antisocial philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an
impetus toward a wider and freer society -- toward cosmopolitanism.
The positive ideal was humanity. In membership in humanity, as
distinct from a state, man's capacities would be liberated; while
in existing political organizations his powers were hampered and
distorted to meet the requirements and selfish interests of the
rulers of the state. The doctrine of extreme individualism was
but the counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite
perfectibility of man and of a social organization having a scope
as wide as humanity. The emancipated individual was to become
the organ and agent of a comprehensive and progressive society.
The heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of
the social estate in which they found themselves. They
attributed these evils to the limitations imposed upon the free
powers of man. Such limitation was both distorting and
corrupting. Their impassioned devotion to emancipation of life
from external restrictions which operated to the exclusive
advantage of the class to whom a past feudal system consigned
power, found intellectual formulation in a worship of nature. To
give "nature" full swing was to replace an artificial, corrupt,
and inequitable social order by a new and better kingdom of
humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both a model and a
working power was strengthened by the advances of natural
science. Inquiry freed from prejudice and artificial restraints
of church and state had revealed that the world is a scene of
law. The Newtonian solar system, which expressed the reign of
natural law, was a scene of wonderful harmony, where every force
balanced with every other. Natural law would accomplish the same
result in human relations, if men would 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
nature was, after all, but to negate the very idea of education;
it was to trust to the accidents of circumstance. Not only was
some method required but also some positive organ, some
administrative agency for carrying on the process of instruction.
The "complete and harmonious development of all powers," having
as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive
humanity, required definite organization for its realization.
Private individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel;
they could not execute the work. A Pestalozzi could try
experiments and exhort philanthropically inclined persons having
wealth and power to follow his example. But even Pestalozzi saw
that any effective pursuit of the new educational ideal required
the support of the state. The realization of the new education
destined to produce a new society was, after all, dependent upon
the activities of existing states. The movement for the
democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly
conducted and administered schools.
So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified
the movement for a state-supported education with the
nationalistic movement in political life -- a fact of
incalculable significance for subsequent movements. Under the
influence of German thought in particular, education became a
civic function and the civic function was identified with the
realization of the ideal of the national state. The "state" was
substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to
nationalism. To form the citizen, not the "man," became the aim
of education. 1 The historic situation to which reference is
made is the after-effects of the Napoleonic conquests, especially
in Germany. The German states felt (and subsequent events
demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that systematic
attention to education was the best means of recovering and
maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they
were weak and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian
statesmen they made this condition a stimulus to the development
of an extensive and thoroughly grounded system of public
education.
This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in
theory. The individualistic theory receded into the background.
The state furnished not only the instrumentalities of public
education but also its goal. When the actual practice was such
that the school system, from the elementary grades through the
university faculties, supplied the patriotic citizen and soldier
and the future state official and administrator and furnished the
means for military, industrial, and political defense and
expansion, it was impossible for theory not to emphasize the aim
of social efficiency. And with the immense importance attached
to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and
more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to
interpret social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan
humanitarianism. Since the maintenance of a particular national
sovereignty required subordination of individuals to the superior
interests of the state both in military defense and in struggles
for international supremacy in commerce, social efficiency was
understood to imply a like subordination. The educational
process was taken to be one of disciplinary training rather than
of personal development. Since, however, the ideal of culture as
complete development of personality persisted, educational
philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas. The
reconciliation took the form of the conception of the "organic"
character of the state. The individual in his isolation is
nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and
meaning of organized institutions does he attain true
personality. What appears to be his subordination to political
authority and the demand for sacrifice of himself to the commands
of his superiors is in reality but making his own the objective
reason manifested in the state -- the only way in which he can
become truly rational. The notion of development which we have
seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the
Hegelian philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine
the two ideas of complete realization of personality and
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 their subjects as instruments of
their own purposes.
Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve?
We must depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their
private capacity. "All culture begins with private men and
spreads outward from them. Simply through the efforts of persons
of enlarged inclinations, who are capable of grasping the ideal
of a future better condition, is the gradual approximation of
human nature to its end possible. Rulers are simply interested
in such training as will make their subjects better tools for
their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers of privately
conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded. For the rulers'
interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what is
best for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the
schools, wish to draw their plans. We have in this view an
express statement of the points characteristic of the eighteenth
century individualistic cosmopolitanism. The full development of
private personality is identified with the aims of humanity as a
whole and with the idea of progress. In addition we have an
explicit fear of the hampering influence of a state-conducted and
state-regulated education upon the attainment of these ideas.
But in less than two decades after this time, Kant's philosophic
successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea that the chief
function of the state is educational; that in particular the
regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education
carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being,
enslaved to his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits
voluntarily to the educative discipline of state institutions and
laws. In this spirit, Germany was the first country to undertake
a public, universal, and compulsory system of education extending
from the primary school through the university, and to submit to
jealous state regulation and supervision all private educational
enterprises. Two results should stand out from this brief
historical survey. The first is that such terms as the
individual and the social conceptions of education are quite
meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato
had the ideal of an education which should equate individual
realization and social coherency and stability. His situation
forced his ideal into the notion of a society organized in
stratified classes, losing the individual in the class. The
eighteenth century educational philosophy was highly
individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a noble
and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include
humanity, and providing for the indefinite perfectibility of
mankind. The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the early
nineteenth century endeavored again to equate the ideals of a
free and complete development of cultured personality with social
discipline and political subordination. It made the national
state an intermediary between the realization of private
personality on one side and of humanity on the other.
Consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating
principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of
"harmonious development of all the powers of personality" or in
the more recent terminology of "social efficiency." All this
reinforces the statement which opens this chapter: The conception
of education as a social process and function has no definite
meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.
These considerations pave the way for our second conclusion. One
of the fundamental problems of education in and for a democratic
society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a wider
social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian"
conception suffered both from vagueness and from lack of definite
organs of execution and agencies of administration. In Europe,
in the Continental states particularly, the new idea of the
importance of education for human welfare and progress was
captured by national interests and harnessed to do a work whose
social aim was definitely narrow and exclusive. The social aim
of education and its national aim were identified, and the result
was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a social aim.
This confusion corresponds to the existing 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 neighbors. 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 culture of others. Externally, the question is concerned
with the reconciliation of national loyalty, of patriotism, with
superior devotion to the things which unite men in common ends,
irrespective of national political boundaries. Neither phase of
the problem can be worked out by merely negative means. It is
not enough to see to it that education is not actively used as an
instrument to make easier the exploitation of one class by
another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude and
efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the
effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of
the nation equality of equipment for their future careers.
Accomplishment of this end demands not only adequate
administrative provision of school facilities, and such
supplementation of family resources as will enable youth to take
advantage of them, but also such modification of traditional
ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and traditional
methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the youth
under educational influences until they are equipped to be
masters of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may
seem remote of execution, but the democratic ideal of education
is a farcical yet tragic delusion except as the ideal more and
more dominates our public system of education. The same
principle has application on the side of the considerations which
concern the relations of one nation to another. It is not enough
to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything which would
stimulate international jealousy and animosity. The emphasis
must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative
human pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations.
The secondary and provisional character of national sovereignty
in respect to the fuller, freer, and more fruitful association
and intercourse of all human beings with one another must be
instilled as a working disposition of mind. If these
applications seem to be remote from a consideration of the
philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning of
the idea of education previously developed has not been
adequately grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very
idea of education as a freeing of individual capacity in a
progressive growth directed to social aims. Otherwise a
democratic criterion of education can only be inconsistently
applied.
Summary. Since education is a social process, and there are many
kinds of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and
construction implies a particular social ideal. The two points
selected by which to measure the worth of a form of social life
are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by
all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it
interacts with other groups. An undesirable society, in other
words, is one which internally and externally sets up barriers to
free intercourse and communication of experience. A society
which makes provision for participation in its good of all its
members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of
its institutions through interaction of the different forms of
associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must
have a type of education which gives individuals a personal
interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of
mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.
Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered
from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal
formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised
in its working out by making a class rather than an individual
the social unit. The so-called individualism of the eighteenth-
century enlightenment was found to involve the notion of a
society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual
was to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the
development of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back
upon Nature. The institutional idealistic philosophies of the
nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the national
state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the
social aim to those who were members of the same political unit,
and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the individual
to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain in
Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed
the existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed
neither the citizen nor the man. Under existing conditions, he
preferred to try for the latter rather than for the former. But
there are many sayings of his which point to the formation of the
citizen as ideally the higher, and which indicate that his own
endeavor, as embodied in the Emile, was simply the best makeshift
the corruption of the times permitted him to sketch.