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 equitable and easy terms. A society marked off into classes need be 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.
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. |
