Democracy and Education | Page 5

under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with
respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral
achievements of humanity!
2. Education and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the necessity
of teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we
may seem to be dwelling unduly on a truism. But justification is found
in the fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away from an
unduly scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools are, indeed,
one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions
of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other
agencies, a relatively superficial means. Only as we have grasped the
necessity of more fundamental and persistent modes of tuition can we
make sure of placing the scholastic methods in their true context.
Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication,
but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community,
and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things
which they have in common; and communication is the way in which
they come to possess things in common. What they must have in
common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs,
aspirations, knowledge--a common understanding -- like-mindedness
as the
sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from one to
another, like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie
by dividing it into physical pieces. The communication which insures
participation in a common understanding is one which secures similar
emotional and intellectual dispositions -- like ways of responding to
expectations and requirements.
Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity, any

more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet
or miles removed from others. A book or a letter may institute a more
intimate association between human beings separated thousands of
miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.
Individuals do not even compose a social group because they all work
for a common end. The parts of a machine work with a maximum of
cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a
community. If, however, they were all cognizant of the common end
and all interested in it so that they regulated their specific activity in
view of it, then they would form a community. But this would involve
communication. Each would have to know what the other was about
and would have to have some way of keeping the other informed as to
his own purpose and progress. Consensus demands communication.
We are thus compelled to recognize that within even the most social
group there are many relations which are not as yet social. A large
number of human relationships in any social group are still upon the
machine-like plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired
results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition
and consent of those used. Such uses express physical superiority, or
superiority of position, skill, technical ability, and command of tools,
mechanical or fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and child, teacher
and pupil, employer and employee, governor and governed, remain
upon this level, they form no true social group, no matter how closely
their respective activities touch one another. Giving and taking of
orders modifies action and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing
of purposes, a communication of interests.
Not only is social life identical with communication, but all
communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a
recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed
experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so
far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one
who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of
communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to
another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find
your own attitude toward your experience changing; otherwise you
resort to expletives and ejaculations. The experience has to be
formulated in order to be communicated. To formulate requires getting

outside of it, seeing it as another would see it, considering what points
of contact it has with the life of another so that it may be got into such
form that he can appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with
commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively,
something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of
one's own experience. All communication is like art. It may fairly be
said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social,
or vitally shared, is educative to those who