For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned
with education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to
make explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of
education as it operates in different types of community life. To say
that education is a social function, securing direction and development
in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to
which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the
quality of life which prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that
a society which not only changes but-which has the ideal of such
change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods
of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its
own customs. To make the general ideas set forth applicable to our own
educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary to come to closer
quarters with the nature of present social life.
1. The Implications of Human Association. Society is one word, but many
things. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds
of purposes. One man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups, in
which his associates may be quite different. It often seems as if they
had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life.
Within every larger social organization there are numerous minor groups:
not only political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific, religious,
associations. There are political parties with differing aims, social
sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely
together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. In many modern
states and in some ancient, there is great diversity of populations,
of varying languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. From this
standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for
example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an
inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. (See ante, p.
20.)
The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. They have both a
eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense; a meaning
de jure and a meaning de facto. In social philosophy, the former
connotation is almost always uppermost. Society is conceived as one by
its very nature. The qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy
community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of
sympathy, are emphasized. But when we look at the facts which the term
denotes instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation,
we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. Men
banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that
prey upon the public while serving it, political machines held together
by the interest of plunder, are included. If it is said that such
organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal
requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the
conception of society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having
no reference to facts; and in part, that each of these organizations,
no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of
the praiseworthy qualities of "Society" which hold it together. There
is honor among thieves, and a band of robbers has a common interest as
respects its members. Gangs are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow
cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes. Family life may be marked
by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and yet
be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Any education given by a
group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of the
socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. Hence, once
more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social
life. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes. We cannot
set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We
must base our conception upon societies which actually exist, in order
to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. But, as we
have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are
actually found. The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms
of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize
undesirable features and suggest improvement. Now in any social group
whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some interest held in
common, and we find a certain amount of interaction and cooperative
intercourse with other groups. From these two traits we derive
our standard. How numerous and varied are the interests which are
consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms
of association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal
band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members together
are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest in plunder; and
that they are of such a nature as to isolate the group from other
groups with respect to give and take of the values of life. Hence, the
education such a society gives is partial and distorted. If we take, on
the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the standard,
we find that there are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in
which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth for
the experience of other members--it is readily communicable--and
that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into
relationships with business groups, with schools, with all the agencies
of culture, as well as with other similar groups, and that it plays a
due part in the political organization and in return receives support
from it. In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and
shared; and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes
of association.
I. Let us apply the first element in this criterion to a despotically
governed state. It is not true there is no common interest in such an
organization between governed and governors. The authorities in command
must make some appeal to the native activities of the subjects, must
call some of their powers into play. Talleyrand said that a government
could do everything with bayonets except sit on them. This cynical
declaration is at least a recognition that the bond of union is
not merely one of coercive force. It may be said, however, that the
activities appealed to are themselves unworthy and degrading--that such
a government calls into functioning activity simply capacity for fear.
In a way, this statement is true. But it overlooks the fact that
fear need not be an undesirable factor in experience. Caution,
circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future events so as to avert
what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling
the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission. The
real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread
and hope of specific tangible reward--say comfort and ease--many other
capacities are left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but in such
a way as to pervert them. Instead of operating on their own account they
are reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
This is equivalent to saying that there is no extensive number of common
interests; there is no free play back and forth among the members of
the social group. Stimulation and response are exceedingly one-sided. In
order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of
the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take
from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and
experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters,
educate others into slaves. And the experience of each party loses in
meaning, when the free interchange of varying modes of life-experience
is arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject-class prevents
social endosmosis. The evils thereby affecting the superior class are
less material and less perceptible, but equally real. Their culture
tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art
becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their
knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.
Lack of the free and equitable intercourse which springs from a variety
of shared interests makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Diversity
of stimulation means novelty, and novelty means challenge to thought.
The more activity is restricted to a few definite lines--as it is
when there are rigid class lines preventing adequate interplay of
experiences--the more action tends to become routine on the part of the
class at a disadvantage, and capricious, aimless, and explosive on
the part of the class having the materially fortunate position. Plato
defined a slave as one who accepts from another the purposes which
control his conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no
slavery in the legal sense. It is found wherever men are engaged in
activity which is socially serviceable, but whose service they do
not understand and have no personal interest in. Much is said about
scientific management of work. It is a narrow view which restricts
the science which secures efficiency of operation to movements of the
muscles. The chief opportunity for science is the discovery of the
relations of a man to his work--including his relations to others who
take part--which will enlist his intelligent interest in what he is
doing. Efficiency in production often demands division of labor. But
it is reduced to a mechanical routine unless workers see the technical,
intellectual, and social relationships involved in what they do,
and engage in their work because of the motivation furnished by such
perceptions. The tendency to reduce such things as efficiency of
activity and scientific management to purely technical externals is
evidence of the one-sided stimulation of thought given to those in
control of industry--those who supply its aims. Because of their lack
of all-round and well-balanced social interest, there is not sufficient
stimulus for attention to the human factors and relationships in
industry. Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with
technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very acute and
intense intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the
failure to take into account the significant social factors means none
the less an absence of mind, and a corresponding distortion of emotional
life. II. This illustration (whose point is to be extended to all
associations lacking reciprocity of interest) brings us to our second
point. The isolation and exclusiveness of a gang or clique brings its
antisocial spirit into relief. But this same spirit is found wherever
one group has interests "of its own" which shut it out from full
interaction with other groups, so that its prevailing purpose is the
protection of what it has got, instead of reorganization and progress
through wider relationships. It marks nations in their isolation from
one another; families which seclude their domestic concerns as if they
had no connection with a larger life; schools when separated from the
interest of home and community; the divisions of rich and poor; learned
and unlearned. The essential point is that isolation makes for rigidity
and formal institutionalizing of life, for static and selfish ideals
within the group. That savage tribes regard aliens and enemies as
synonymous is not accidental. It springs from the fact that they have
identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs.
On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others,
for such contact might dissolve custom. It would certainly occasion
reconstruction. It is a commonplace that an alert and expanding mental
life depends upon an enlarging range of contact with the physical
environment. But the principle applies even more significantly to the
field where we are apt to ignore it--the sphere of social contacts.
Every expansive era in the history of mankind has coincided with the
operation of factors which have tended to eliminate distance between
peoples and classes previously hemmed off from one another. Even the
alleged benefits of war, so far as more than alleged, spring from the
fact that conflict of peoples at least enforces intercourse between
them and thus accidentally enables them to learn from one another,
and thereby to expand their horizons. Travel, economic and commercial
tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers;
to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible
connection with one another. It remains for the most part to secure the
intellectual and emotional significance of this physical annihilation of
space.
2. The Democratic Ideal. The two elements in our criterion both point
to democracy. The first signifies not only more numerous and more
varied points of shared common interest, but greater reliance upon
the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in social control. The
second means not only freer interaction between social groups (once
isolated so far as intention could keep up a separation) but change
in social habit--its continuous readjustment through meeting the new
situations produced by varied intercourse. And these two traits are
precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society.
Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form
of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and
where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a
democratic community more interested than other communities have cause
to be in deliberate and systematic education. The devotion of democracy
to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that
a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless
those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a
democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it
must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these
can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A
democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of
associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension
in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so
that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to
consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own,
is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race,
and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import
of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact
denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to
respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in his action.
They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as
the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which
in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.
The widening of the area of shared concerns, and the liberation of a
greater diversity of personal capacities which characterize a democracy,
are not of course the product of deliberation and conscious effort.
On the contrary, they were caused by the development of modes of
manufacture and commerce, travel, migration, and intercommunication
which flowed from the command of science over natural energy. But
after greater individualization on one hand, and a broader community
of interest on the other have come into existence, it is a matter of
deliberate effort to sustain and extend them. Obviously a society to
which stratification into separate classes would be fatal, must see to
it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable
and easy terms. A society marked off into classes need he specially
attentive only to the education of its ruling elements. A society which
is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change
occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated
to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will
be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose
significance or connections they do not perceive. The result will be a
confusion in which a few will appropriate to themselves the results of
the blind and externally directed activities of others.
3. The Platonic Educational Philosophy. Subsequent chapters will be
devoted to making explicit the implications of the democratic ideas in
education. In the remaining portions of this chapter, we shall consider
the educational theories which have been evolved in three epochs when
the social import of education was especially conspicuous. The first one
to be considered is that of Plato. No one could better express than did
he the fact that a society is stably organized when each individual is
doing that for which he has aptitude by nature in such a way as to be
useful to others (or to contribute to the whole to which he belongs);
and that it is the business of education to discover these aptitudes and
progressively to train them for social use. Much which has been said so
far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world. But
conditions which he could not intellectually control led him to restrict
these ideas in their application. He never got any conception of the
indefinite plurality of activities which may characterize an individual
and a social group, and consequently limited his view to a limited
number of classes of capacities and of social arrangements. Plato's
starting point is that the organization of society depends ultimately
upon knowledge of the end of existence. If we do not know its end, we
shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice. Unless we know the end,
the good, we shall have no criterion for rationally deciding what the
possibilities are which should be promoted, nor how social arrangements
are to be ordered. We shall have no conception of the proper limits and
distribution of activities--what he called justice--as a trait of both
individual and social organization. But how is the knowledge of the
final and permanent good to be achieved? In dealing with this question
we come upon the seemingly insuperable obstacle that such knowledge is
not possible save in a just and harmonious social order. Everywhere
else the mind is distracted and misled by false valuations and false
perspectives. A disorganized and factional society sets up a number of
different models and standards. Under such conditions it is impossible
for the individual to attain consistency of mind. Only a complete whole
is fully self-consistent. A society which rests upon the supremacy of
some factor over another irrespective of its rational or proportionate
claims, inevitably leads thought astray. It puts a premium on certain
things and slurs over others, and creates a mind whose seeming unity is
forced and distorted. Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns
furnished by institutions, customs, and laws. Only in a just state will
these be such as to give the right education; and only those who have
rightly trained minds will be able to recognize the end, and ordering
principle of things. We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle.
However, Plato suggested a way out. A few men, philosophers or lovers
of wisdom--or truth--may by study learn at least in outline the proper
patterns of true existence. If a powerful ruler should form a state
after these patterns, then its regulations could be preserved. An
education could be given which would sift individuals, discovering what
they were good for, and supplying a method of assigning each to the
work in life for which his nature fits him. Each doing his own part,
and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be
maintained.
It would be impossible to find in any scheme of philosophic thought a
more adequate recognition on one hand of the educational significance
of social arrangements and, on the other, of the dependence of those
arrangements upon the means used to educate the young. It would be
impossible to find a deeper sense of the function of education in
discovering and developing personal capacities, and training them so
that they would connect with the activities of others. Yet the society
in which the theory was propounded was so undemocratic that Plato could
not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he clearly saw.
While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in
society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional
status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education,
he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall
by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.
Consequently the testing and sifting function of education only shows
to which one of three classes an individual belongs. There being no
recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could
be no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable. There
were only three types of faculties or powers in the individual's
constitution. Hence education would soon reach a static limit in each
class, for only diversity makes change and progress.
In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned
to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human
wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites,
they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition.
They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its
internal guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of
reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess
this are capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time
the legislators of the state--for laws are the universals which control
the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that in intent, Plato
subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it is true that
lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his
incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that a
society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers
and classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of
individuality. We cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is
happy and society well organized when each individual engages in those
activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his conviction that
it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its
possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in
knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping
of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off
classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely
numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say
that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social
organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities
of individuals, not stratification by classes. Although his educational
philosophy was revolutionary, it was none the less in bondage to static
ideals. He thought that change or alteration was evidence of lawless
flux; that true reality was unchangeable. Hence while he would radically
change the existing state of society, his aim was to construct a state
in which change would subsequently have no place. The final end of life
is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not even
minor details are to be altered. Though they might not be inherently
important, yet if permitted they would inure the minds of men to the
idea of change, and hence be dissolving and anarchic. The breakdown of
his philosophy is made apparent in the fact that he could not trust to
gradual improvements in education to bring about a better society which
should then improve education, and so on indefinitely. Correct education
could not come into existence until an ideal state existed, and after
that education would be devoted simply to its conservation. For the
existence of this state he was obliged to trust to some happy accident
by which philosophic wisdom should happen to coincide with possession of
ruling power in the state.
4. The "Individualistic" Ideal of the Eighteenth Century. In the
eighteenth-century philosophy we find ourselves in a very different
circle of ideas. "Nature" still means something antithetical to existing
social organization; Plato exercised a great influence upon Rousseau.
But the voice of nature now speaks for the diversity of individual
talent and for the need of free development of individuality in all
its variety. Education in accord with nature furnishes the goal and the
method of instruction and discipline. Moreover, the native or original
endowment was conceived, in extreme cases, as nonsocial or even as
antisocial. Social arrangements were thought of as mere external
expedients by which these nonsocial individuals might secure a greater
amount of private happiness for themselves. Nevertheless, these
statements convey only an inadequate idea of the true significance
of the movement. In reality its chief interest was in progress and
in social progress. The seeming antisocial philosophy was a somewhat
transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society--toward
cosmopolitanism. The positive ideal was humanity. In membership in
humanity, as distinct from a state, man's capacities would be liberated;
while in existing political organizations his powers were hampered and
distorted to meet the requirements and selfish interests of the
rulers of the state. The doctrine of extreme individualism was but the
counterpart, the obverse, of ideals of the indefinite perfectibility of
man and of a social organization having a scope as wide as humanity.
The emancipated individual was to become the organ and agent of a
comprehensive and progressive society.
The heralds of this gospel were acutely conscious of the evils of the
social estate in which they found themselves. They attributed these
evils to the limitations imposed upon the free powers of man. Such
limitation was both distorting and corrupting. Their impassioned
devotion to emancipation of life from external restrictions which
operated to the exclusive advantage of the class to whom a past feudal
system consigned power, found intellectual formulation in a worship
of nature. To give "nature" full swing was to replace an artificial,
corrupt, and inequitable social order by a new and better kingdom of
humanity. Unrestrained faith in Nature as both a model and a working
power was strengthened by the advances of natural science. Inquiry
freed from prejudice and artificial restraints of church and state had
revealed that the world is a scene of law. The Newtonian solar system,
which expressed the reign of natural law, was a scene of wonderful
harmony, where every force balanced with every other. Natural law would
accomplish the same result in human relations, if men would only get rid
of the artificial man-imposed coercive restrictions.
Education in accord with nature was thought to be the first step in
insuring this more social society. It was plainly seen that economic
and political limitations were ultimately dependent upon limitations of
thought and feeling. The first step in freeing men from external chains
was to emancipate them from the internal chains of false beliefs and
ideals. What was called social life, existing institutions, were too
false and corrupt to be intrusted with this work. How could it
be expected to undertake it when the undertaking meant its own
destruction? "Nature" must then be the power to which the enterprise was
to be left. Even the extreme sensationalistic theory of knowledge which
was current derived itself from this conception. To insist that mind is
originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying the possibilities
of education. If the mind was a wax tablet to be written upon by
objects, there were no limits to the possibility of education by means
of the natural environment. And since the natural world of objects is
a scene of harmonious "truth," this education would infallibly produce
minds filled with the truth.
5. Education as National and as Social. As soon as the first enthusiasm
for freedom waned, the weakness of the theory upon the constructive side
became obvious. Merely to leave everything to nature was, after all, but
to negate the very idea of education; it was to trust to the accidents
of circumstance. Not only was some method required but also some
positive organ, some administrative agency for carrying on the process
of instruction. The "complete and harmonious development of all
powers," having as its social counterpart an enlightened and progressive
humanity, required definite organization for its realization. Private
individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could
not execute the work. A Pestalozzi could try experiments and exhort
philanthropically inclined persons having wealth and power to follow his
example. But even Pestalozzi saw that any effective pursuit of the new
educational ideal required the support of the state. The realization
of the new education destined to produce a new society was, after all,
dependent upon the activities of existing states. The movement for the
democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and
administered schools.
So far as Europe was concerned, the historic situation identified the
movement for a state-supported education with the nationalistic movement
in political life--a fact of incalculable significance for subsequent
movements. Under the influence of German thought in particular,
education became a civic function and the civic function was identified
with the realization of the ideal of the national state. The "state" was
substituted for humanity; cosmopolitanism gave way to nationalism. To
form the citizen, not the "man," became the aim of education. 1 The
historic situation to which reference is made is the after-effects of
the Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states felt
(and subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that
systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering and
maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they were
weak and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian statesmen they
made this condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and
thoroughly grounded system of public education.
This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory.
The individualistic theory receded into the background. The state
furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also
its goal. When the actual practice was such that the school system, from
the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied
the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and
administrator and furnished the means for military, industrial, and
political defense and expansion, it was impossible for theory not to
emphasize the aim of social efficiency. And with the immense importance
attached to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and
more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to interpret
social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan humanitarianism.
Since the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required
subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state
both in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy
in commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply a like
subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of
disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since,
however, the ideal of culture as complete development of personality
persisted, educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the
two ideas. The reconciliation took the form of the conception of the
"organic" character of the state. The individual in his isolation is
nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and meaning of
organized institutions does he attain true personality. What appears to
be his subordination to political authority and the demand for sacrifice
of himself to the commands of his superiors is in reality but making his
own the objective reason manifested in the state--the only way in which
he can become truly rational. The notion of development which we have
seen to be characteristic of institutional idealism (as in the Hegelian
philosophy) was just such a deliberate effort to combine the two ideas
of complete realization of personality and thoroughgoing "disciplinary"
subordination to existing institutions. The extent of the transformation
of educational philosophy which occurred in Germany in the generation
occupied by the struggle against Napoleon for national independence,
may be gathered from Kant, who well expresses the earlier
individual-cosmopolitan ideal. In his treatise on Pedagogics, consisting
of lectures given in the later years of the eighteenth century, he
defines education as the process by which man becomes man. Mankind
begins its history submerged in nature--not as Man who is a creature of
reason, while nature furnishes only instinct and appetite. Nature
offers simply the germs which education is to develop and perfect. The
peculiarity of truly human life is that man has to create himself by his
own voluntary efforts; he has to make himself a truly moral, rational,
and free being. This creative effort is carried on by the educational
activities of slow generations. Its acceleration depends upon men
consciously striving to educate their successors not for the existing
state of affairs but so as to make possible a future better humanity.
But there is the great difficulty. Each generation is inclined to
educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of
with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best
possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their
children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as
instruments of their own purposes.
Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve? We must
depend upon the efforts of enlightened men in their private capacity.
"All culture begins with private men and spreads outward from them.
Simply through the efforts of persons of enlarged inclinations, who
are capable of grasping the ideal of a future better condition, is the
gradual approximation of human nature to its end possible. Rulers are
simply interested in such training as will make their subjects better
tools for their own intentions." Even the subsidy by rulers of privately
conducted schools must be carefully safeguarded. For the rulers'
interest in the welfare of their own nation instead of in what is best
for humanity, will make them, if they give money for the schools, wish
to draw their plans. We have in this view an express statement of
the points characteristic of the eighteenth century individualistic
cosmopolitanism. The full development of private personality is
identified with the aims of humanity as a whole and with the idea
of progress. In addition we have an explicit fear of the hampering
influence of a state-conducted and state-regulated education upon the
attainment of these ideas. But in less than two decades after this time,
Kant's philosophic successors, Fichte and Hegel, elaborated the idea
that the chief function of the state is educational; that in particular
the regeneration of Germany is to be accomplished by an education
carried on in the interests of the state, and that the private
individual is of necessity an egoistic, irrational being, enslaved to
his appetites and to circumstances unless he submits voluntarily to the
educative discipline of state institutions and laws. In this spirit,
Germany was the first country to undertake a public, universal, and
compulsory system of education extending from the primary school
through the university, and to submit to jealous state regulation and
supervision all private educational enterprises. Two results should
stand out from this brief historical survey. The first is that such
terms as the individual and the social conceptions of education are
quite meaningless taken at large, or apart from their context. Plato had
the ideal of an education which should equate individual realization and
social coherency and stability. His situation forced his ideal into
the notion of a society organized in stratified classes, losing the
individual in the class. The eighteenth century educational philosophy
was highly individualistic in form, but this form was inspired by a
noble and generous social ideal: that of a society organized to include
humanity, and providing for the indefinite perfectibility of mankind.
The idealistic philosophy of Germany in the early nineteenth century
endeavored again to equate the ideals of a free and complete
development of cultured personality with social discipline and political
subordination. It made the national state an intermediary between the
realization of private personality on one side and of humanity on the
other. Consequently, it is equally possible to state its animating
principle with equal truth either in the classic terms of "harmonious
development of all the powers of personality" or in the more recent
terminology of "social efficiency." All this reinforces the statement
which opens this chapter: The conception of education as a social
process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind
of society we have in mind. These considerations pave the way for our
second conclusion. One of the fundamental problems of education in and
for a democratic society is set by the conflict of a nationalistic and a
wider social aim. The earlier cosmopolitan and "humanitarian" conception
suffered both from vagueness and from lack of definite organs of
execution and agencies of administration. In Europe, in the Continental
states particularly, the new idea of the importance of education for
human welfare and progress was captured by national interests and
harnessed to do a work whose social aim was definitely narrow and
exclusive. The social aim of education and its national aim were
identified, and the result was a marked obscuring of the meaning of a
social aim.
This confusion corresponds to the existing situation of human
intercourse. On the one hand, science, commerce, and art transcend
national boundaries. They are largely international in quality and
method. They involve interdependencies and cooperation among the peoples
inhabiting different countries. At the same time, the idea of national
sovereignty has never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the
present time. Each nation lives in a state of suppressed hostility and
incipient war with its neighbors. Each is supposed to be the supreme
judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as matter of course that
each has interests which are exclusively its own. To question this is
to question the very idea of national sovereignty which is assumed to
be basic to political practice and political science. This contradiction
(for it is nothing less) between the wider sphere of associated and
mutually helpful social life and the narrower sphere of exclusive and
hence potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of educational
theory a clearer conception of the meaning of "social" as a function
and test of education than has yet been attained. Is it possible for an
educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full
social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and
corrupted? Internally, the question has to face the tendencies, due to
present economic conditions, which split society into classes some
of which are made merely tools for the higher culture of others.
Externally, the question is concerned with the reconciliation of
national loyalty, of patriotism, with superior devotion to the things
which unite men in common ends, irrespective of national political
boundaries. Neither phase of the problem can be worked out by merely
negative means. It is not enough to see to it that education is not
actively used as an instrument to make easier the exploitation of one
class by another. School facilities must be secured of such amplitude
and efficiency as will in fact and not simply in name discount the
effects of economic inequalities, and secure to all the wards of the
nation equality of equipment for their future careers. Accomplishment
of this end demands not only adequate administrative provision of school
facilities, and such supplementation of family resources as will
enable youth to take advantage of them, but also such modification
of traditional ideals of culture, traditional subjects of study and
traditional methods of teaching and discipline as will retain all the
youth under educational influences until they are equipped to be masters
of their own economic and social careers. The ideal may seem remote
of execution, but the democratic ideal of education is a farcical yet
tragic delusion except as the ideal more and more dominates our public
system of education. The same principle has application on the side of
the considerations which concern the relations of one nation to another.
It is not enough to teach the horrors of war and to avoid everything
which would stimulate international jealousy and animosity. The emphasis
must be put upon whatever binds people together in cooperative human
pursuits and results, apart from geographical limitations. The secondary
and provisional character of national sovereignty in respect to the
fuller, freer, and more fruitful association and intercourse of all
human beings with one another must be instilled as a working disposition
of mind. If these applications seem to be remote from a consideration
of the philosophy of education, the impression shows that the meaning
of the idea of education previously developed has not been adequately
grasped. This conclusion is bound up with the very idea of education
as a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to
social aims. Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can only be
inconsistently applied.
Summary. Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds
of societies, a criterion for educational criticism and construction
implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which to
measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the
interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness
and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable
society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up
barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. A society
which makes provision for participation in its good of all its
members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its
institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated
life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of
education which gives individuals a personal interest in social
relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure
social changes without introducing disorder. Three typical historic
philosophies of education were considered from this point of view.
The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that
stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class
rather than an individual the social unit. The so-called individualism
of the eighteenth-century enlightenment was found to involve the notion
of a society as broad as humanity, of whose progress the individual was
to be the organ. But it lacked any agency for securing the development
of its ideal as was evidenced in its falling back upon Nature. The
institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied
this lack by making the national state the agency, but in so doing
narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members of
the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination
of the individual to the institution. 1 There is a much neglected strain
in Rousseau tending intellectually in this direction. He opposed the
existing state of affairs on the ground that it formed neither the
citizen nor the man. Under existing conditions, he preferred to try for
the latter rather than for the former. But there are many sayings of his
which point to the formation of the citizen as ideally the higher, and
which indicate that his own endeavor, as embodied in the Emile, was
simply the best makeshift the corruption of the times permitted him to
sketch.