Are política 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.

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 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
be 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.
4. 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.

(i) 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 worthwhile. 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.
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
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 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 indifferently and miscellaneously to any and... 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. Embryonic 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
construction of specific procedures, and unless it influences the selection of means, of
material, and of the order of the successive stages of the training, it is worse than
useless.

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 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 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 if 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.

The 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 develops, but his proper development consists in 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." 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.

The tendency to treat culture as an abstract thing or as a fixed quantity of stock,

instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency
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 a
continuous process of growth and change.

(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 better
hopes of men.