1

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.

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
 2

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.
 3

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
 4

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.
 5

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.
 6

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
 7

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
 8

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.
 9

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
 10

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
 11

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
 12

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
 13

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
 14

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.
 15

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.
 16

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
 17

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
 18

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
 19

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
 20

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,
 21

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
 22

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
 23

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
 24

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
 25

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
dovolone hut hin nuanan daralanmant nonninto in
 26

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.
 27

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
 28

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
 29

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
 30

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.
more
It remains only to point out (what will receive
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.