Democracy and Education | Page 6

participate in it. Only when
it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its
educative power.
In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and
learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together
educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and
enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and
vividness of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone
mentally as well as physically) would have little or no occasion to
reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. The
inequality of achievement between the mature and the immature not
only necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching
gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and
form which will render it most easily communicable and hence most
usable.
3. The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a marked
difference between the education which every one gets from living with
others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to subsist,
and the deliberate educating of the young. In the former case the
education is incidental; it is natural and important, but it is not the
express reason of the association. While it may be said, without
exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution,
economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging
and improving experience; yet this effect is not a part of its original
motive, which is limited and more immediately practical. Religious
associations began, for example, in the desire to secure the favor of
overruling powers and to ward off evil influences; family life in the
desire to gratify appetites and secure family perpetuity; systematic
labor, for the most part, because of enslavement to others, etc. Only
gradually was the by-product of the institution, its effect upon the

quality and extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually
still was this effect considered as a directive factor in the conduct of the
institution. Even today, in our industrial life, apart from certain values
of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of
the forms of human association under which the world's work is carried
on receives little attention as compared with physical output.
But in dealing with the young, the fact of association itself as an
immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy to ignore
in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition, or
to subordinate that educative effect to some external and tangible result,
it is not so easy as in dealing with adults. The need of training is too
evident; the pressure to accomplish a change in their attitude and habits
is too urgent to leave these consequences wholly out of account. Since
our chief business with them is to enable them to share in a common
life we cannot help considering whether or no we are forming the
powers which will secure this ability. If humanity has made some
headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution is its
distinctively human effect -- its effect upon conscious experience -- we
may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely through
dealings with the young.
We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational process
which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of
education -- that of direct tuition or schooling. In undeveloped social
groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. Savage groups
mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the
same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They
have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in
connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted
into full social membership. For the most part, they depend upon
children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional
set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing. In part,
this sharing is direct, taking part in the occupations of adults and thus
serving an apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the dramatic
plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups and thus
learn to know what they are like. To savages it would seem
preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going
on in order that one might learn.

But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the
young and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in
the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the
case of the less advanced occupations. Much of what adults do is so
remote in space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and less
adequate to reproduce its spirit. Ability to share