For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned with
education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to make explicit
the differences in the spirit, material, and method of education as it operates
in different types of community life. To say that education is a social
function, securing direction and development in the immature through their
participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say
in effect that education will vary with the quality of life which
prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that a society which not
only changes but-which has the ideal of such change as will improve it,
will have different standards and methods of education from one which
aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs. To make the general
ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is,
therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of
present social life.
