1. The Nature and Meaning of Environment. We have seen that a community
or social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal, and
that this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of the
immature members of the group. By various agencies, unintentional and
designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings
into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus
a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. All of these words
mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth. We also
speak of rearing, raising, bringing up--words which express the
difference of level which education aims to cover. Etymologically, the
word education means just a process of leading or bringing up. When
we have the outcome of the process in mind, we speak of education as
shaping, forming, molding activity--that is, a shaping into the standard
form of social activity. In this chapter we are concerned with the
general features of the way in which a social group brings up its
immature members into its own social form.
Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of experience
till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas current in the
social group, the problem is evidently not one of mere physical forming.
Things can be physically transported in space; they may be bodily
conveyed. Beliefs and aspirations cannot be physically extracted and
inserted. How then are they communicated? Given the impossibility of
direct contagion or literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the
method by which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or
the older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves. The
answer, in general formulation, is: By means of the action of the
environment in calling out certain responses. The required beliefs
cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be plastered on. But
the particular medium in which an individual exists leads him to see and
feel one thing rather than another; it leads him to have certain plans
in order that he may act successfully with others; it strengthens some
beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning the approval of
others. Thus it gradually produces in him a certain system of behavior,
a certain disposition of action. The words "environment," "medium"
denote something more than surroundings which encompass an individual.
They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings with his own
active tendencies. An inanimate being is, of course, continuous with
its surroundings; but the environing circumstances do not, save
metaphorically, constitute an environment. For the inorganic being is
not concerned in the influences which affect it. On the other hand,
some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature,
especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly
than some of the things close to him. The things with which a man varies
are his genuine environment. Thus the activities of the astronomer vary
with the stars at which he gazes or about which he calculates. Of
his immediate surroundings, his telescope is most intimately his
environment. The environment of an antiquarian, as an antiquarian,
consists of the remote epoch of human life with which he is concerned,
and the relics, inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes connections
with that period.
In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or
hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living
being. Water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the
fish's activities--to its life. The north pole is a significant element
in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in
reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what
they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive
existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting,
environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as a
sustaining or frustrating condition.
2. The Social Environment. A being whose activities are associated with
others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do depend
upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations of others.
A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities
without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the
indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he
moves he stirs them and reciprocally. We might as well try to imagine a
business man doing business, buying and selling, all by himself, as to
conceive it possible to define the activities of an individual in terms
of his isolated actions. The manufacturer moreover is as truly socially
guided in his activities when he is laying plans in the privacy of his
own counting house as when he is buying his raw material or selling
his finished goods. Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in
association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the
most overt cooperative or hostile act.
What we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium
nurtures its immature members. There is no great difficulty in seeing
how it shapes the external habits of action. Even dogs and horses have
their actions modified by association with human beings; they form
different habits because human beings are concerned with what they do.
Human beings control animals by controlling the natural stimuli which
influence them; by creating a certain environment in other words. Food,
bits and bridles, noises, vehicles, are used to direct the ways in
which the natural or instinctive responses of horses occur. By operating
steadily to call out certain acts, habits are formed which function with
the same uniformity as the original stimuli. If a rat is put in a
maze and finds food only by making a given number of turns in a given
sequence, his activity is gradually modified till he habitually takes
that course rather than another when he is hungry.
Human actions are modified in a like fashion. A burnt child dreads the
fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every time a child touched
a certain toy he got burned, the child would learn to avoid that toy
as automatically as he avoids touching fire. So far, however, we are
dealing with what may be called training in distinction from educative
teaching. The changes considered are in outer action rather than in
mental and emotional dispositions of behavior. The distinction is not,
however, a sharp one. The child might conceivably generate in time a
violent antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to the class
of toys resembling it. The aversion might even persist after he had
forgotten about the original burns; later on he might even invent some
reason to account for his seemingly irrational antipathy. In some cases,
altering the external habit of action by changing the environment to
affect the stimuli to action will also alter the mental disposition
concerned in the action. Yet this does not always happen; a person
trained to dodge a threatening blow, dodges automatically with
no corresponding thought or emotion. We have to find, then, some
differentia of training from education.
A clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really share in
the social use to which his action is put. Some one else uses the horse
to secure a result which is advantageous by making it advantageous
to the horse to perform the act--he gets food, etc. But the horse,
presumably, does not get any new interest. He remains interested in
food, not in the service he is rendering. He is not a partner in a
shared activity. Were he to become a copartner, he would, in engaging
in the conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment
which others have. He would share their ideas and emotions.
Now in many cases--too many cases--the activity of the immature human
being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is
trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His
instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure.
But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in
a way agreeable to others. In other cases, he really shares or
participates in the common activity. In this case, his original impulse
is modified. He not merely acts in a way agreeing with the actions of
others, but, in so acting, the same ideas and emotions are aroused
in him that animate the others. A tribe, let us say, is warlike. The
successes for which it strives, the achievements upon which it sets
store, are connected with fighting and victory. The presence of this
medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy, first in games, then
in fact when he is strong enough. As he fights he wins approval and
advancement; as he refrains, he is disliked, ridiculed, shut out
from favorable recognition. It is not surprising that his original
belligerent tendencies and emotions are strengthened at the expense of
others, and that his ideas turn to things connected with war. Only in
this way can he become fully a recognized member of his group. Thus his
mental habitudes are gradually assimilated to those of his group.
If we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we shall
perceive that the social medium neither implants certain desires and
ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular
habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a blow.
Setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways
of acting is the first step. Making the individual a sharer or partner
in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success,
its failure as his failure, is the completing step. As soon as he is
possessed by the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to
recognize the special ends at which it aims and the means employed to
secure success. His beliefs and ideas, in other words, will take a form
similar to those of others in the group. He will also achieve pretty
much the same stock of knowledge since that knowledge is an ingredient
of his habitual pursuits.
The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief
cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from
one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an
idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus
imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process. But
learning from language will be found, when analyzed, to confirm the
principle just laid down. It would probably be admitted with little
hesitation that a child gets the idea of, say, a hat by using it as
other persons do; by covering the head with it, giving it to others
to wear, having it put on by others when going out, etc. But it may be
asked how this principle of shared activity applies to getting through
speech or reading the idea of, say, a Greek helmet, where no direct use
of any kind enters in. What shared activity is there in learning from
books about the discovery of America?
Since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning about
many things, let us see how it works. The baby begins of course with
mere sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning, expressing, that is,
no idea. Sounds are just one kind of stimulus to direct response, some
having a soothing effect, others tending to make one jump, and so on.
The sound h-a-t would remain as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw, a
seemingly inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection
with an action which is participated in by a number of people. When the
mother is taking the infant out of doors, she says "hat" as she puts
something on the baby's head. Being taken out becomes an interest to the
child; mother and child not only go out with each other physically,
but both are concerned in the going out; they enjoy it in common. By
conjunction with the other factors in activity the sound "hat" soon gets
the same meaning for the child that it has for the parent; it becomes a
sign of the activity into which it enters. The bare fact that language
consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of
itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared
experience.
In short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way that
the thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way. And they acquire
the same meaning with the child which they have with the adult because
they are used in a common experience by both. The guarantee for the
same manner of use is found in the fact that the thing and the sound are
first employed in a joint activity, as a means of setting up an active
connection between the child and a grownup. Similar ideas or meanings
spring up because both persons are engaged as partners in an action
where what each does depends upon and influences what the other does. If
two savages were engaged in a joint hunt for game, and a certain signal
meant "move to the right" to the one who uttered it, and "move to the
left" to the one who heard it, they obviously could not successfully
carry on their hunt together. Understanding one another means that
objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with respect to
carrying on a common pursuit.
After sounds have got meaning through connection with other things
employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in connection with
other like sounds to develop new meanings, precisely as the things for
which they stand are combined. Thus the words in which a child
learns about, say, the Greek helmet originally got a meaning (or were
understood) by use in an action having a common interest and end. They
now arouse a new meaning by inciting the one who hears or reads to
rehearse imaginatively the activities in which the helmet has its use.
For the time being, the one who understands the words "Greek helmet"
becomes mentally a partner with those who used the helmet. He engages,
through his imagination, in a shared activity. It is not easy to get
the full meaning of words. Most persons probably stop with the idea that
"helmet" denotes a queer kind of headgear a people called the Greeks
once wore. We conclude, accordingly, that the use of language to convey
and acquire ideas is an extension and refinement of the principle
that things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint
action; in no sense does it contravene that principle. When words do
not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or
imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having
a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given
groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.
Thus, for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act of
writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the person
performing the act will operate much as an automaton would unless he
realizes the meaning of what he does.
3. The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is that
social environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of
behavior in individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse
and strengthen certain impulses, that have certain purposes and entail
certain consequences. A child growing up in a family of musicians will
inevitably have whatever capacities he has in music stimulated, and,
relatively, stimulated more than other impulses which might have been
awakened in another environment. Save as he takes an interest in music
and gains a certain competency in it, he is "out of it"; he is unable
to share in the life of the group to which he belongs. Some kinds of
participation in the life of those with whom the individual is connected
are inevitable; with respect to them, the social environment exercises
an educative or formative influence unconsciously and apart from any set
purpose.
In savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation
(constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we have
spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the young into
the practices and beliefs of the group. Even in present-day societies,
it furnishes the basic nurture of even the most insistently schooled
youth. In accord with the interests and occupations of the group,
certain things become objects of high esteem; others of aversion.
Association does not create impulses or affection and dislike, but it
furnishes the objects to which they attach themselves. The way our group
or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention,
and thus to prescribe the directions and limits of observation
and memory. What is strange or foreign (that is to say outside
the activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and
intellectually suspect. It seems almost incredible to us, for example,
that things which we know very well could have escaped recognition
in past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital
stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native
intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes
of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds
riveted to other things. Just as the senses require sensible objects
to stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and
imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the
demands set up by current social occupations. The main texture of
disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences.
What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the
capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of
their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more
productive of meaning.
While this "unconscious influence of the environment" is so subtle and
pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and mind, it may
be worth while to specify a few directions in which its effect is most
marked. First, the habits of language. Fundamental modes of speech, the
bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life,
carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.
The babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue. While speech
habits thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by conscious
teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired modes of
speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into their really native
tongue. Secondly, manners. Example is notoriously more potent than
precept. Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are
good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response
to habitual stimuli, not by conveying information. Despite the never
ending play of conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding
atmosphere and spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners.
And manners are but minor morals. Moreover, in major morals, conscious
instruction is likely to be efficacious only in the degree in which
it falls in with the general "walk and conversation" of those who
constitute the child's social environment. Thirdly, good taste and
esthetic appreciation. If the eye is constantly greeted by harmonious
objects, having elegance of form and color, a standard of taste
naturally grows up. The effect of a tawdry, unarranged, and
over-decorated environment works for the deterioration of taste, just as
meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire for beauty. Against
such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more than convey second-hand
information as to what others think. Such taste never becomes
spontaneous and personally engrained, but remains a labored reminder of
what those think to whom one has been taught to look up. To say that the
deeper standards of judgments of value are framed by the situations
into which a person habitually enters is not so much to mention a fourth
point, as it is to point out a fusion of those already mentioned. We
rarely recognize the extent in which our conscious estimates of what is
worth while and what is not, are due to standards of which we are not
conscious at all. But in general it may be said that the things which we
take for granted without inquiry or reflection are just the things which
determine our conscious thinking and decide our conclusions. And these
habitudes which lie below the level of reflection are just those which
have been formed in the constant give and take of relationship with
others.
4. The School as a Special Environment. The chief importance of this
foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on willy-nilly
is to lead us to note that the only way in which adults consciously
control the kind of education which the immature get is by controlling
the environment in which they act, and hence think and feel. We never
educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether
we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design
environments for the purpose makes a great difference. And any
environment is a chance environment so far as its educative influence
is concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with reference to
its educative effect. An intelligent home differs from an unintelligent
one chiefly in that the habits of life and intercourse which prevail are
chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the
development of children. But schools remain, of course, the typical
instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing
the mental and moral disposition of their members.
Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are
so complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed
to writing and transmitted through written symbols. Written symbols are
even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked
up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form
tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign
to everyday life. The achievements accumulated from generation to
generation are deposited in it even though some of them have fallen
temporarily out of use. Consequently as soon as a community depends to
any considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its
own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools
to insure adequate transmission of all its resources. To take an obvious
illustration: The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly
influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not
present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences. In
similar fashion, peoples still existing, but remote in space, British,
Germans, Italians, directly concern our own social affairs, but
the nature of the interaction cannot be understood without explicit
statement and attention. In precisely similar fashion, our daily
associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part
played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible
structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted,
the school, to care for such matters.
This mode of association has three functions sufficiently specific,
as compared with ordinary associations of life, to be noted. First, a
complex civilization is too complex to be assimilated in toto. It has to
be broken up into portions, as it were, and assimilated piecemeal, in a
gradual and graded way. The relationships of our present social life are
so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable
position could not readily share in many of the most important of them.
Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to him,
would not become a part of his own mental disposition. There would be
no seeing the trees because of the forest. Business, politics, art,
science, religion, would make all at once a clamor for attention;
confusion would be the outcome. The first office of the social organ we
call the school is to provide a simplified environment. It selects the
features which are fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to
by the young. Then it establishes a progressive order, using the
factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is more
complicated.
In the second place, it is the business of the school environment to
eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing
environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a
purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but at
weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with what
is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively
perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things from the
environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to
counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. By
selecting the best for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the
power of this best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes
that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of
its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future
society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this
end.
In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to
balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it
that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations
of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living
contact with a broader environment. Such words as "society" and
"community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to
make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.
As a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less
loosely connected. Each household with its immediate extension of
friends makes a society; the village or street group of playmates is a
community; each business group, each club, is another. Passing beyond
these more intimate groups, there is in a country like our own a variety
of races, religious affiliations, economic divisions. Inside the modern
city, in spite of its nominal political unity, there are probably more
communities, more differing customs, traditions, aspirations, and forms
of government or control, than existed in an entire continent at an
earlier epoch.
Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active
dispositions of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's
household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative
environments for those who enter into their collective or conjoint
activities, as truly as a church, a labor union, a business partnership,
or a political party. Each of them is a mode of associated or community
life, quite as much as is a family, a town, or a state. There are also
communities whose members have little or no direct contact with one
another, like the guild of artists, the republic of letters, the members
of the professional learned class scattered over the face of the
earth. For they have aims in common, and the activity of each member is
directly modified by knowledge of what others are doing.
In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical
matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory,
was comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce,
transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the
United States are composed of a combination of different groups with
different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps
more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational
institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and
balanced environment for the young. Only in this way can the centrifugal
forces set up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and the
same political unit be counteracted. The intermingling in the school
of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs
creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter
accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than
is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The
assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony
to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal.
The school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition
of each individual the diverse influences of the various social
environments into which he enters. One code prevails in the family;
another, on the street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth,
in the religious association. As a person passes from one of the
environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and
is in danger of being split into a being having different standards of
judgment and emotion for different occasions. This danger imposes upon
the school a steadying and integrating office.
Summary. The development within the young of the attitudes and
dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a
society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and
knowledge. It takes place through the intermediary of the environment.
The environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are
concerned in the execution of the activity characteristic of a living
being. The social environment consists of all the activities of fellow
beings that are bound up in the carrying on of the activities of any
one of its members. It is truly educative in its effect in the degree in
which an individual shares or participates in some conjoint activity. By
doing his share in the associated activity, the individual appropriates
the purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and
subject matters, acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its
emotional spirit.
The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition
comes, without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake of the
activities of the various groups to which they may belong. As a society
becomes more complex, however, it is found necessary to provide a
special social environment which shall especially look after nurturing
the capacities of the immature. Three of the more important functions
of this special environment are: simplifying and ordering the factors
of the disposition it is wished to develop; purifying and idealizing
the existing social customs; creating a wider and better balanced
environment than that by which the young would be likely, if left to
themselves, to be influenced.