Democracy and Education | Page 7

effectively in adult
activities thus depends upon a prior training given with this end in view.
Intentional agencies -- schools--and explicit material -- studies -- are
devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special
group of persons.
Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the
resources and achievements of a complex society. It also opens a way
to a kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young, if
they were left to pick up their training in informal association with
others, since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered.
But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from
indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit, whether directly
or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital. These qualities
compensate, in some measure, for the narrowness of available
opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes
remote and dead -- abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of
depreciation. What accumulated knowledge exists in low grade
societies is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it
exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within
urgent daily interests.
But in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored in
symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and objects. Such
material is relatively technical and superficial. Taking the ordinary
standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. For this measure is
connection with practical concerns. Such material exists in a world by
itself, unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression.
There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will
be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject
matter of life- experience. The permanent social interests are likely to
be lost from view. Those which have not been carried over into the
structure of social life, but which remain largely matters of technical
information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools.

Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion which
ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human association
that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting
information about remote matters and the conveying of learning
through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy.
Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance
between the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional,
modes of education. When the acquiring of information and of
technical intellectual skill do not influence the formation of a social
disposition, ordinary vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while
schooling, in so far, creates only "sharps" in learning -- that is, egoistic
specialists. To avoid a split between what men consciously know
because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning,
and what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the
formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes an
increasingly delicate task with every development of special schooling.
Summary. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being.
Since this continuance can be secured only by constant renewals, life is
a self-renewing process. What nutrition and reproduction are to
physiological life, education is to social life. This education consists
primarily in transmission through communication. Communication is a
process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession. It
modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it. That the
ulterior significance of every mode of human association lies in the
contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of
experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the
immature. That is to say, while every social arrangement is educative in
effect, the educative effect first becomes an important part of the
purpose of the association in connection with the association of the
older with the younger. As societies become more complex in structure
and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning
increases. As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the
danger of creating an undesirable split between the experience gained
in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger
was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid
growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of

skill.

Chapter Two
: Education as a Social Function
1. The Nature and Meaning of Environment. We have seen that a
community or social group sustains itself through continuous
self-renewal, and that this renewal takes place by means of the
educational growth of the immature members of the group. By various
agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms uninitiated
and