Democracy and Education | Page 8

seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and
ideals. Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.
All of these words mean that it implies attention to the conditions of
growth. We also speak of rearing, raising, bringing up -- words which
express the difference of level which education aims to cover.
Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or
bringing up. When we have the outcome of the process in mind, we
speak of education as shaping, forming, molding activity -- that is, a
shaping into the standard form of social activity. In this chapter we are
concerned with the general features of the way in which a social group
brings up its immature members into its own social form.
Since what is required is a transformation of the quality of experience
till it partakes in the interests, purposes, and ideas current in the social
group, the problem is evidently not one of mere physical forming.
Things can be physically transported in space; they may be bodily
conveyed. Beliefs and aspirations cannot be physically extracted and
inserted. How then are they communicated? Given the impossibility of
direct contagion or literal inculcation, our problem is to discover the
method by which the young assimilate the point of view of the old, or
the older bring the young into like-mindedness with themselves. The
answer, in general formulation, is: By means of the action of the
environment in calling out certain responses. The required beliefs
cannot be hammered in; the needed attitudes cannot be plastered on.
But the particular medium in which an individual exists leads him to
see and feel one thing rather than another; it leads him to have certain
plans in order that he may act successfully with others; it strengthens
some beliefs and weakens others as a condition of winning the approval

of others. Thus it gradually produces in him a certain system of
behavior, a certain disposition of action. The words "environment,"
"medium" denote something more than surroundings which encompass
an individual. They denote the specific continuity of the surroundings
with his own active tendencies. An inanimate being is, of course,
continuous with its surroundings; but the environing circumstances do
not, save metaphorically, constitute an environment. For the inorganic
being is not concerned in the influences which affect it. On the other
hand, some things which are remote in space and time from a living
creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even
more truly than some of the things close to him. The things with which
a man varies are his genuine environment. Thus the activities of the
astronomer vary with the stars at which he gazes or about which he
calculates. Of his immediate surroundings, his telescope is most
intimately his environment. The environment of an antiquarian, as an
antiquarian, consists of the remote epoch of human life with which he
is concerned, and the relics, inscriptions, etc., by which he establishes
connections with that period.
In brief, the environment consists of those conditions that promote or
hinder, stimulate or inhibit, the characteristic activities of a living being.
Water is the environment of a fish because it is necessary to the fish's
activities -- to its life. The north pole is a significant element in the
environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in reaching it or
not, because it defines his activities, makes them what they
distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive existence
(supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting, environment or
medium signifies what enters into this activity as a sustaining or
frustrating condition.
2. The Social Environment. A being whose activities are associated
with others has a social environment. What he does and what he can do
depend upon the expectations, demands, approvals, and condemnations
of others. A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own
activities without taking the activities of others into account. For they
are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies.
When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally. We might as well try to
imagine a business man doing business, buying and selling, all by
himself, as to conceive it possible to define the activities of an

individual in terms of his isolated actions. The manufacturer moreover
is as truly socially guided in his activities when he is laying plans in the
privacy of his own counting house as when he is buying his raw
material or selling his finished goods. Thinking and feeling that have to
do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of
behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act.
What we have more especially to indicate is how the social medium
nurtures its immature members. There