F "Social" As A Function and Test of

situation of human intercourse.
On the one hand,

science, commerce, and art transcend national
boundaries. They are largely international in
quality and method. They involve
interdependencies and cooperation among the
peoples inhabiting different countries. At the
same time, the idea of national sovereignty has
never been as accentuated in politics as it is at the
present time. Each nation lives in a state of
suppressed hostility and incipient war with its
neighbors. Each is supposed to be the supreme
judge of its own interests, and it is assumed as
matter of course that each has interests which are
exclusively its own. To question this is to question the
very idea of national sovereignty which is
assumed to be basic to political practice and
political science. This contradiction(for it is
nothing less) between the wider sphere of
associated and mutually helpful social life and the
narrower sphere of exclusive and hence
potentially hostile pursuits and purposes, exacts of
educational theory a clearer conception of the
meaning ❑f "social" as a function and test of
education than has yet been attained. Is it possible for
an educational system to be conducted by a
national state and yet the full social ends of the
educative process not be restricted, constrained,
and corrupted? Internally, the question has to
face the tendencies, due to present economic
conditions, which split society into classes some of
which are made merely tools for the higher
indifferently and miscellaneously to any and
every detail. It is centered upon whatever has a
bearing upon the effective pursuit of your
occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are
concerned to note the existing facts because and in
so far as they are factors in the achievement of the
result intended. You have to find out what your
resources are, what conditions are at
command, and what the difficulties and obstacles
are. This foresight and this survey with reference to
what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does
not involve such a forecast of results and such an
examination of means and hindrances is either a
matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither
case is it intelligent. To be vague and uncertain
as to what is intended and careless in observation
of conditions of its realization is to be, in that degree,
stupid or partially intelligent.
If we recur to the case where mind is not

concerned with the physical manipulation of the
instruments but with what one intends to write,
the case is the same. There is an activity in
process: one is taken up with the development of a
theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph talks, this
means intelligence: namely, alertness in
foreseeing the various conclusions to which
present data and considerations ar•e tending.
together with continually renewed observation
and recollection to get hold of the subject matter
which bears upon the conclusions to be reached.
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The account of education given in our earlier
chapters virtually anticipated the results reached in
a discussion of the purport of education in a
democratic community. For it assumed that the
aim of education is to enable individuals to
continue their education-or that the object and
reward of learning is continued capacity for
growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the
members of a society except where intercourse of
man with man is mutual, and except where there is
adequate provision for the reconstruction of
social habits and institutions by means of wide
stimulation arising from equitably distributed
interests. And this means a democratic society. In
our search for aims in education, we are not
concerned, therefore, with finding an end outside of
the educative process to which education is
subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We
are rather concerned with the contrast which
exists when aims belong within the process in
which they operate and when they are set up
from without. And the latter state of affairs must
obtain when social relationships are not equitably
balanced. For in that case, some portions of the
whole social group will find their aims
determined by an external dictation; their aims
will not arise from the free growth of their own
experience, and their nominal aims will be means to
more ulterior ends of others rather than truly
their own.
2.E
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situation of human intercourse.

On the one hand,

If we recur to the case where mind is not

{18 07:48 AM Chapter Seven: The...Education (27/30) 24.1%

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