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.
Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered from
this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally
quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised in its working
out by making a class rather than an individual the social unit. The
so-called individualism of the eighteenth-century enlightenment was
found to involve the notion of a society as broad as humanity, of whose
progress the individual was to be the organ. But it lacked any agency
for securing the development of its ideal as was evidenced in its
falling back upon Nature. The institutional idealistic philosophies of
the nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the national state
the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the social aim to
those who were members of the same political unit, and reintroduced the
idea of the subordination of the individual to the institution.
