Isolated
from their connection with the present environment in which
individuals have to act, they become a kind of rival and
distracting environment. Their value lies in their use to
increase the meaning of the things with which we have actively to
do at the present time. The idea of education advanced in these
chapters is formally summed up in the idea of continuous
reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off from
education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as
external formation, and as recapitulation of the past.
Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
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.
Pages:
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143