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Individual and social organization.
But how is the

knowledge of the ultimate and permanent good to
be achieved? In addressing this question, we
encounter the seemingly insurmountable obstacle
that such knowledge is not possible except in a
just and harmonious social order. Everywhere
else, the mind is distracted and misled by false
valuations and false perspectives. A disorganized
and factional society establishes a number of
different models and standards. Under such
conditions, it is impossible for the individual to
attain consistency—perfunctory and superficial
where there is no interest. Parents and teachers
often complain, and correctly so, that children “do
not want to hear or want to understand.” Their
minds are not upon the subject precisely because it
does not engage them; it does not enter into their
concerns. This is a state of affairs that needs to be
remedied, but the remedy is not in the use of
methods which increase indifference and aversion.
Even punishing a child for inattention is one way
of trying to make him realize that the matter is not
one of complete unconcern; it is one way of
arousing “interest,” or bringing about a sense of
connection. In the long run, its value is measured
by whether it supplies a mere physical excitation
to act in the way desired by the adult or whether it
leads the child “to think”—that is, to reflect upon
his acts and imbue them with meaning.
The fuller one's conception of possible future

achievements, the less one’s present activity is tied
down to a small number of alternatives. If one
knew enough, one could start almost anywhere
and sustain his activities continuously and
fruitfully.
Understanding, then, the term general or

comprehensive aim simply in the sense of a broad
survey of the field of present activities, we shall
take up some of the larger ends that have currency
in the educational theories of the day, and consider
what light they cast upon the immediate concrete
and diversified aims that are always the educator’s
real concern. We premise (as indeed immediately
follows from what has been said) that there is no
need to make a choice among them or regard them
as competitors. When we come to account for a
tangible way, we have to select or choose a
particular act at a particular time, but any number
of comprehensive ends may exist without
competition, since they simply represent different
ways of looking at the same scene. One cannot
climb several different mountains simultaneously,
but the views had when different mountains are
ascended supplement one another; they do not set
up.
Incompatible, competing worlds. Or, putting the
matter a slightly different way, one statement of an
end may suggest certain questions and
observations, and another (mechanical) is.
“Nature” may be said to declare that there are
conditions of educational efficiency, and that until
we have learned what these conditions are and
have learned to make our practices accord with
them, the noblest and most ideal of our aims are
doomed to suffer—are verbal and sentimental
rather than efficacious.
The aim of natural development translates into the

aim of respect for physical mobility. In
Rousseau’s words: “Children are always in
motion; a sedentary life is injurious.” When he
says that “Nature’s intention is to strengthen the
body before exercising the mind,” he does not
fairly state the fact. But if he had said that nature’s
“intention” (to adopt his poetic form of speech) is
to develop the mind especially by exercise of the
muscles of the body, he would have stated a
positive fact. In other words, the aim of following
nature means, in the concrete, regard for the actual
part played by the use of bodily organs in
exploration, in handling materials, in play, and
games.
The general aim translates into the aim of

regarding individual differences among children.
Nobody can take the principle of consideration of
native powers into account without being struck
by the fact that these powers differ in different
individuals. The difference applies not to being
enslaved to one’s appetites and circumstances
unless one submits voluntarily to the educative
discipline of state institutions and laws. In this
spirit, Germany was the first country to undertake
a public, universal, and compulsory system of
education extending from primary school through
university, and to subject all private educational
enterprises to jealous state regulation and
supervision. Two results should stand out from
this brief historical survey. The first is that such
terms as the individual and the social conceptions
of education are quite meaningless when taken at
large, or apart from their context. Plato held the
ideal of an education that should equate individual
realization with social coherency and stability. His
situation forced his ideal into the notion of a
society organized in stratified classes, losing the
individual in the class. The eighteenth-century
educational philosophy was highly individualistic
in form, but this form was inspired by a noble and
generous social ideal: that of a society organized
to include humanity and providing for the
indefinite perfectibility of mankind. The idealistic
philosophy of Germany in the early nineteenth
century endeavored once more to equate the ideals
of free and complete development of cultured
individuals.
Participate, and that the progress of one member
has worth for the experience of other members – it
is readily communicable – and that the family is
not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into
relationships with business groups, with schools,
with all the agencies of culture, as well as with
other similar groups, and that it plays a due part in
the political organization and in return receives
support from it. In short, there are many interests
consciously communicated and shared; and there
are varied and free points of.
Education as Formation. We now come to a type
of theory that denies the existence of faculties and
emphasizes the unique role of subject matter in the
development of mental and moral disposition.
According to it, education is neither a process of
unfolding from within nor is it a training of
faculties resident in the mind itself. It is rather the
formation of the mind by setting up certain
associations or connections of content by means of
subject matter presented from without. Education
proceeds by instruction taken in a strictly literal
sense, a building into the mind from without. That
education is formative.

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Individual and social organization.

But how is the

The fuller one's conception of possible future

Understanding, then, the term general or

The aim of natural development translates into the

The general aim translates into the aim of

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