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. Hie 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
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 2 that he rested the
notion that nature not merely furnishes prime forces which
initiate growth but also its plan and goal. That evil
institutions and customs work almost automatically to give
a wrong education w’hich 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

•26 07:56AM Chapter Nine: Natu y as Aims (12/21) 26.7%

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.

{28. 07:43 AM Chapter Seven: The Education (12/30) 23.4%

assimilation of new presentations, their character is all
important. The effect of new presentations is to reinforce
groupings previously formed. The business of the educator
is, first, to select the proper material in order to fix the
nature of the original reactions, and, secondly, to arrange
the sequence of subsequent presentations on the basis of the
store of ideas secured by prior transactions. The control is
from behind, from the past, instead of. as in the unfolding
conception, in the ultimate goal.

4. ) Certain formal steps of all method in teaching may

be laid down. Presentation of new subject matter is
obviously the central thing, but since knowing consists in
the way in which this interacts with the contents already
submerged below consciousness, the first thing is the step
of "preparation,"—that is, calling into special activity and
getting above the floor of consciousness those older
presentations which are to assimilate the new one. Then
after the presentation, follow the processes of interaction of
new and old; then comes the application of the newly
formed content to the performance of some task.
Everything must go through this course; consequently there
is a perfectly uniform method in instruction in all subjects
for all pupils of all ages.

Herbart's great service lay in taking the work of teaching

out of the region of routine and accident.

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

• 29 0737 AM Chapter Six: Educa Progressive (3/18) 22.3%

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

29 07:40 AM Chapter Six: Educa...rogressive (15/18)

22.8%
Now lor that ol 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 worth while. Stubbornness shows itself even
more in

26 08:00 AM Chapter Ten: Intere d Discipline (7/23)

28.8%
external; they are shifting things about. No ideal reward, no
enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them.
Others contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its
external adornment and display. Many of our existing
social activities, industrial and political, fall in these two
classes. Neither the people who engage in them, nor those
who are directly affected by them, are capable of full and
free interest in their work. Because of the lack of any
purpose in the work for the one doing it, or because of the
restricted character of its aim, intelligence is not adequately
engaged. The same conditions force many people back
upon themselves. They take refuge in an inner play of
sentiment and fancies. They are aesthetic but not artistic,
since their feelings and ideas are turned upon themselves,
instead of being methods in acts which modify conditions.
Their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an inner
landscape. Even the pursuit of science may become an
asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life— not a
temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and
clarification in future dealings with the world. The very
word art may become associated not with specific
transformation of things, making them more significant for
mind, but with stimulations of eccentric fancy and with
emotional indulgences. The separation and mutual
contempt of the "practical'' man and the man of theory or
culture, the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are
indications of this situation.

25 08:04 AM Chapter Ten: Interes. Discipline (20/23)

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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

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

{28. 07:46AM Chapter Seven: The Education (20/30) 23.7%

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 individualcosmopolitan 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

{271 07:49 AM 1. The Nature of an Aim. (3/18) 24.8%

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

{271 07:49 AM 1. The Nature of an Aim. (3/18) 24.8%

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 overintellectuality, but
there is such a thing as a onesided 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
eneaane him in action. And most

26 08:00 AM Chapter Ten: Intere.d Discipline (8/23)

28.8%
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

28 07:48 AM Chapter Seven: The Education (27/30)

24.1%
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.

25 08:03 AM Chapter Ten: Interes Disaphne (13/23) 29.0%

 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 conununity. 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. Aiid 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.

■281 07:48 AM 1 The Nature of an Aim. (1/18) 24.3%

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
kirid 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
*1____ -..J ..ll.M . ________ . — .1

25 08:03 AM Chapter Ten: Interes.. Discipline (12/23)

29.0%
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 onesided
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

■ 29 07:40 AM Chapter Six: Educa...rogressive (16/18) 22.8%

But the idea which underlies it is that education is
essentially retrospective; that it looks primarily to the past
and especially to the literary products of the past, and that
mind is adequately formed in the degree in which it is
patterned upon the spiritual heritage of the past. This idea
has had such immense influence upon higher instruction
especially, that it is worth examination in its extreme
formulation.

In the first place, its biological basis is fallacious.

Embyronic growth of the human infant preserves, without
doubt, some of the traits of lower forms of life. But in no
respect is it a strict traversing of past stages. If there were
any strict "law" of repetition, evolutionary development
would clearly not have taken place. Each new generation
would simply have repeated its predecessors’ existence.
Development, in short, has taken place by the entrance of
shortcuts and alterations in the prior scheme of growth.
And this suggests that the aim of education is to facilitate
such short-circuited growth. The great advantage of
immaturity, educationally speaking, is that it enables us to
emancipate the young from the need of dwelling in an
outgrown past. The business of education is rather to
liberate the young from reviving and retraversing the past
than to lead them to a recapitulation of it. The social
environment of the young is constituted by the presence
and action of the habits of thinking

■ 29 0738 AM Chapter Six Educa Progressive (7/18) 22.4%

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

■ 27 07:51 AM 1 The Nature of an Aim. (14/18) 25.3%

 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,

(27^ 07:51 AM 1. The Nature of an Aim. (13/18) 25.2%