2.
CHAPTER II
EDUCATION AS A SOCIAL FUNCTION:
1. The Nature and Meaning of Environment.
—We have seen that a community or social group sustains itself
means of the educational growth of the immature members of the group.
By various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms
uninitiated and 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 is no great difficulty in seeing
how it shapes the external habits of action. Even dogs and horses have
their actions modified by association with human beings; they form
different habits because human beings are concerned with what they do.
Human beings control animals by controlling the natural stimuli which
influence them; by creating a certain environment in other words. Food,
bits and bridles, noises, vehicles, are used to direct the ways in which
the natural or instinctive responses of horses occur. By operating
steadily to call out certain acts, habits are formed which function with
the same uniformity as the original stimuli. If a rat is put in a maze
and finds food only by making a given number of turns in a given
sequence, his activity is gradually modified till he habitually takes
that course rather than another when he is hungry.
Human actions are modified in a like fashion. A burnt child dreads the
fire; if a parent arranged conditions so that every time a child touched
a certain toy he got burned, the child would learn to avoid that toy as
automatically as he avoids touching fire. So far, however, we are dealing
with what may be called training in distinction from educative
teaching. The changes considered are in outer action rather than in
mental and emotional dispositions of behavior. The distinction is not,
however, a sharp one. The child might conceivably generate in time a
violent antipathy, not only to that particular toy, but to the class of
toys resembling it. The aversion might even persist after he had forgotten
about the original burns; later on he might even invent some reason to
account for his seemingly irrational antipathy. In some cases, altering
the external habit of action by changing the environment to affect the
stimuli to action will also alter the mental disposition concerned in
the action. Yet this does not always happen; a person trained to dodge
a threatening blow, dodges automatically with no corresponding thought
or emotion. We have to find, then, some differentia of training from
education.
A clew may be found in the fact that the horse does not really share in
the social use to which his action is put. Some one else uses the horse
to secure a result which is advantageous by making it advantageous to
the horse to perform the act—he gets food, etc. But the horse,
presumably, does not get any new interest. He remains interested in
food, not in the service he is rendering. He is not a partner in a
shared activity. Were he to become a copartner, he would, in engaging
in the conjoint activity, have the same interest in its accomplishment
which others have. He would share their ideas and emotions.
Now in many cases—too many cases—the activity of the
immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are
useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human
being. His instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain
or pleasure. But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he
has to act in a way agreeable to others. In other cases, he really
shares or participates in the common activity. In this case, his
original impulse is modified. He not merely acts in a way agreeing with
the actions of others, but, in so acting, the same ideas and emotions
are aroused in him that animate the others. A tribe, let us say, is
warlike. The successes for which it strives, the achievements upon
which it sets store, are connected with fighting and victory. The
presence of this medium incites bellicose exhibitions in a boy, first in
games, then in fact when he is strong enough. As he fights he wins
approval and advancement; as he refrains, he is disliked, ridiculed,
shut out from favorable recognition. It is not surprising that his
original belligerent tendencies and emotions are strengthened at the
expense of others, and that his ideas turn to things connected with war.
Only in this way can he become fully a recognized member of his group.
Thus his mental habitudes are gradually assimilated to those of his
group.
If we formulate the principle involved in this illustration, we shall
perceive that the social medium neither implants certain desires and
ideas directly, nor yet merely establishes certain purely muscular
habits of action, like "instinctively" winking or dodging a blow.
Setting up conditions which stimulate certain visible and tangible ways
of acting is the first step. Making the individual a sharer or partner
in the associated activity so that he feels its success as his success,
its failure as his failure, is the completing step. As soon as he is
possessed by the emotional attitude of the group, he will be alert to
recognize the special ends at which it aims and the means employed to
secure success. His beliefs and ideas, in other words, will take a form
similar to those of others in the group. He will also achieve pretty
much the same stock of knowledge since that knowledge is an ingredient
of his habitual pursuits.
The importance of language in gaining knowledge is doubtless the chief
cause of the common notion that knowledge may be passed directly from
one to another. It almost seems as if all we have to do to convey an
idea into the mind of another is to convey a sound into his ear. Thus
imparting knowledge gets assimilated to a purely physical process. But
learning from language will be found, when analyzed, to confirm the
principle just laid down. It would probably be admitted with little
hesitation that a child gets the idea of, say, a hat by using it as
other persons do; by covering the head with it, giving it to others to
wear, having it put on by others when going out, etc. But it may be
asked how this principle of shared activity applies to getting through
speech or reading the idea of, say, a Greek helmet, where no direct use
of any kind enters in. What shared activity is there in learning from
books about the discovery of America?
Since language tends to become the chief instrument of learning about
many things, let us see how it works. The baby begins of course with
mere sounds, noises, and tones having no meaning, expressing, that is,
no idea. Sounds are just one kind of stimulus to direct response, some
having a soothing effect, others tending to make one jump, and so on.
The sound h-a-t would remain as meaningless as a sound in Choctaw, a
seemingly inarticulate grunt, if it were not uttered in connection with
an action which is participated in by a number of people. When the
mother is taking the infant out of doors, she says "hat" as she puts
something on the baby's head. Being taken out becomes an interest to
the child; mother and child not only go out with each other physically,
but both are concerned in the going out; they enjoy it in common. By
conjunction with the other factors in activity the sound "hat" soon gets
the same meaning for the child that it has for the parent; it becomes a
sign of the activity into which it enters. The bare fact that language
consists of sounds which are mutually intelligible is enough of
itself to show that its meaning depends upon connection with a shared
experience.
In short, the sound h-a-t gains meaning in precisely the same way that
the thing "hat" gains it, by being used in a given way. And they
acquire the same meaning with the child which they have with the adult
because they are used in a common experience by both. The guarantee for
the same manner of use is found in the fact that the thing and the sound
are first employed in a joint activity, as a means of setting up an
active connection between the child and a grownup. Similar ideas or
meanings spring up because both persons are engaged as partners in an
action where what each does depends upon and influences what the other
does. If two savages were engaged in a joint hunt for game, and a
certain signal meant "move to the right" to the one who uttered it, and
"move to the left" to the one who heard it, they obviously could not
successfully carry on their hunt together. Understanding one another
means that objects, including sounds, have the same value for both with
respect to carrying on a common pursuit.
After sounds have got meaning through connection with other things
employed in a joint undertaking, they can be used in connection with
other like sounds to develop new meanings, precisely as the things for
which they stand are combined. Thus the words in which a child learns
about, say, the Greek helmet originally got a meaning (or were
understood) by use in an action having a common interest and end. They
now arouse a new meaning by inciting the one who hears or reads to
rehearse imaginatively the activities in which the helmet has its use.
For the time being, the one who understands the words "Greek helmet"
becomes mentally a partner with those who used the helmet. He engages,
through his imagination, in a shared activity. It is not easy to get
the full meaning of words. Most persons probably stop with the idea
that "helmet" denotes a queer kind of headgear a people called the
Greeks once wore. We conclude, accordingly, that the use of language to
convey and acquire ideas is an extension and refinement of the principle
that things gain meaning by being used in a shared experience or joint
action; in no sense does it contravene that principle. When words do
not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or
imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a
meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given
groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.
Thus, for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act of
writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the person
performing the act will operate much as an automaton would unless he
realizes the meaning of what he does.
3. The Social Medium as Educative.
Our net result thus far is that social environment forms the mental and
emotional disposition of behavior in individuals by engaging them in
activities that arouse and strengthen certain impulses, that have
certain purposes and entail certain consequences. A child growing up in
a family of musicians will inevitably have whatever capacities he has in
music stimulated, and, relatively, stimulated more than other impulses
which might have been awakened in another environment. Save as he takes
an interest in music and gains a certain competency in it, he is "out of
it"; he is unable to share in the life of the group to which he belongs.
Some kinds of participation in the life of those with whom the
individual is connected are inevitable; with respect to them, the social
environment exercises an educative or formative influence unconsciously
and apart from any set purpose.
In savage and barbarian communities, such direct participation
(constituting the indirect or incidental education of which we have
spoken) furnishes almost the sole influence for rearing the young into
the practices and beliefs of the group. Even in present-day societies,
it furnishes the basic nurture of even the most insistently schooled
youth. In accord with the interests and occupations of the group,
certain things become objects of high esteem; others of aversion.
Association does not create impulses or affection and dislike, but it
furnishes the objects to which they attach themselves. The way our
group or class does things tends to determine the proper objects of
attention, and thus to prescribe the directions and limits of
observation and memory. What is strange or foreign (that is to say
outside the activities of the groups) tends to be morally forbidden and
intellectually suspect. It seems almost incredible to us, for example,
that things which we know very well could have escaped recognition in
past ages. We incline to account for it by attributing congenital
stupidity to our forerunners and by assuming superior native
intelligence on our own part. But the explanation is that their modes
of life did not call for attention to such facts, but held their minds
riveted to other things. Just as the senses require sensible objects to
stimulate them, so our powers of observation, recollection, and
imagination do not work spontaneously, but are set in motion by the
demands set up by current social occupations. The main texture of
disposition is formed, independently of schooling, by such influences.
What conscious, deliberate teaching can do is at most to free the
capacities thus formed for fuller exercise, to purge them of some of
their grossness, and to furnish objects which make their activity more
productive of meaning.
While this "unconscious influence of the environment" is so subtle and
pervasive that it affects every fiber of character and mind, it may be
worth while to specify a few directions in which its effect is most
marked. First, the habits of language. Fundamental modes of speech,
the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of
life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social
necessity. The babe acquires, as we well say, the mother tongue.
While speech habits thus contracted may be corrected or even displaced by
conscious teaching, yet, in times of excitement, intentionally acquired
modes of speech often fall away, and individuals relapse into their really
native tongue. Secondly, manners. Example is notoriously more potent than
precept. Good manners come, as we say, from good breeding or rather are
good breeding; and breeding is acquired by habitual action, in response to
habitual stimuli, not by conveying information. Despite the never ending
play of conscious correction and instruction, the surrounding atmosphere and
spirit is in the end the chief agent in forming manners. And manners are
but minor morals. Moreover, in major morals, conscious instruction is likely
to be efficacious only in the degree in which it falls in with the general
"walk and conversation" of those who constitute the child's social
environment. Thirdly, good taste and æsthetic appreciation. If the eye
is constantly greeted by harmonious objects, having elegance of form and
color, a standard of taste naturally grows up. The effect of a tawdry,
unarranged, and over-decorated environment works for the deterioration
of taste, just as meager and barren surroundings starve out the desire
for beauty. Against such odds, conscious teaching can hardly do more
than convey second-hand information as to what others think. Such taste
never becomes spontaneous and personally engrained, but remains a
labored reminder of what those think to whom one has been taught to look
up. To say that the deeper standards of judgments of value are framed
by the situations into which a person habitually enters is not so much
to mention a fourth point, as it is to point out a fusion of those
already mentioned. We rarely recognize the extent in which our
conscious estimates of what is worth while and what is not, are due to
standards of which we are not conscious at all. But in general it may
be said that the things which we take for granted without inquiry or
reflection are just the things which determine our conscious thinking
and decide our conclusions. And these habitudes which lie below the
level of reflection are just those which have been formed in the
constant give and take of relationship with others.
4. The School as a Special Environment.
—The chief importance of this foregoing statement of the educative
process which goes on willy-nilly is to lead us to note that the only
way in which adults consciously control the kind of education which the
immature get is by controlling the environment in which they act, and
hence think and feel. We never educate directly, but indirectly by
means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do
the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a
great difference. And any environment is a chance environment so far as
its educative influence is concerned unless it has been deliberately
regulated with reference to its educative effect. An intelligent home
differs from an unintelligent one chiefly in that the habits of life and
intercourse which prevail are chosen, or at least colored, by the
thought of their bearing upon the development of children. But schools
remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed with
express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of
their members.
Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are so
complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to
writing and transmitted through written symbols. Written symbols are
even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked
up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form
tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign to
everyday life. The achievements accumulated from generation to
generation are deposited in it even though some of them have fallen
temporarily out of use. Consequently as soon as a community depends to
any considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its
own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools to
insure adequate transmission of all its resources. To take an obvious
illustration: The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly
influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not
present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences. In
similar fashion, peoples still existing, but remote in space, British,
Germans, Italians, directly concern our own social affairs, but the
nature of the interaction cannot be understood without explicit
statement and attention. In precisely similar fashion, our daily
associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part
played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible
structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted,
the school, to care for such matters.
This mode of association has three functions sufficiently specific, as
compared with ordinary associations of life, to be noted. First, a
complex civilization is too complex to be assimilated in toto. It
has to be broken up into portions, as it were, and assimilated piecemeal,
in a gradual and graded way. The relationships of our present social life
are so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the most
favorable position could not readily share in many of the most important
of them. Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated
to him, would not become a part of his own mental disposition. There
would be no seeing the trees because of the forest. Business, politics,
art, science, religion, would make all at once a clamor for attention;
confusion would be the outcome. The first office of the social organ we
call the school is to provide a simplified environment. It selects
the features which are fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to
by the young. Then it establishes a progressive order, using the
factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is more
complicated.
In the second place, it is the business of the school environment to
eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing
environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a
purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but
at weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with
what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is
positively perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things
from the environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to
counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. By
selecting the best for its exclusive use, it strives to reënforce the
power of this best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes
that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its
existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future
society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this
end.
In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to
balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it
that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations
of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living
contact with a broader environment.
Such words as "society" and "community" are likely to be misleading,
for they have a tendency to make us think there is a single thing
corresponding to the single word. As a matter of fact, a modern society
is many societies more or less loosely connected. Each household with
its immediate extension of friends makes a society; the village or
street group of playmates is a community; each business group, each
club, is another. Passing beyond these more intimate groups, there is
in a country like our own a variety of races, religious affiliations,
economic divisions. Inside the modern city, in spite of its nominal
political unity, there are probably more communities, more differing
customs, traditions, aspirations, and forms of government or control,
than existed in an entire continent at an earlier epoch.
Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active
dispositions of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's
household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative
environments for those who enter into their collective or conjoint
activities, as truly as a church, a labor union, a business partnership,
or a political party. Each of them is a mode of associated or community
life, quite as much as is a family, a town, or a state. There are also
communities whose members have little or no direct contact with one
another, like the guild of artists, the republic of letters, the members
of the professional learned class scattered over the face of the earth.
For they have aims in common, and the activity of each member is
directly modified by knowledge of what others are doing.
In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical
matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory,
was comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce,
transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the
United States are composed of a combination of different groups with
different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps
more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational
institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and
balanced environment for the young. Only in this way can the
centrifugal forces set up by juxtaposition of different groups within
one and the same political unit be counteracted.
The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing
religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader
environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook
upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while
it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is
eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced
appeal.
The school has the function also of coordinating within the disposition
of each individual the diverse influences of the various social
environments into which he enters. One code prevails in the family;
another, on the street; a third, in the workshop or store; a fourth, in
the religious association. As a person passes from one of the
environments to another, he is subjected to antagonistic pulls, and is
in danger of being split into a being having different standards of
judgment and emotion for different occasions. This danger imposes upon
the school a steadying and integrating office.
Summary.
The development within the young of the attitudes and dispositions
necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a society cannot
take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and knowledge. It
takes place through the intermediary of the environment. The
environment consists of the sum total of conditions which are concerned
in the execution of the activity characteristic of a living being. The
social environment consists of all the activities of fellow beings that
are bound up in the carrying on of the activities of any one of its
members. It is truly educative in its effect in the degree in which an
individual shares or participates in some conjoint activity. By doing
his share in the associated activity, the individual appropriates the
purpose which actuates it, becomes familiar with its methods and subject
matters, acquires needed skill, and is saturated with its emotional
spirit.
The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition comes,
without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake of the
activities of the various groups to which they may belong. As a society
becomes more complex, however, it is found necessary to provide a
special social environment which shall especially look after nurturing
the capacities of the immature. Three of the more important functions
of this special environment are: simplifying and ordering the factors of
the disposition it is wished to develop; purifying and idealizing the
existing social customs; creating a wider and better balanced
environment than that by which the young would be likely, if left to
themselves, to be influenced.
