Step number four

Savage groups mostly rely for instilling needed nature into the young upon the same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with initiation service by which the youth are inducted into full social association. For the most part, they depend upon children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their moving set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing. In part, this sharing is direct, taking part in the occupations of adults and thus serving an apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the theatrical plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups and thus learn to know what they are like. To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn.But as people advances, the gap between the capacities of the young and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly hard except in the case of the less advanced occupations. Much of what adults do is so remote in space and in meaning that playful simulation is less and less adequate to reproduce its spirit. Ability to share effectively in adult activities thus depends upon a prior preparation given with this end in view. Intentional agencies -- schools--and explicit material  studies  are devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special group of persons.

 Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the resources and achievements of a complex society. It also opens a way to a kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young, if they were left to pick up their training in informal association with others, since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered.

But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit, whether directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital. These character compensate, in some measure, for the thinness of available opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes remote and dead -- abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation. What accumulated information exists in low grade societies is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within urgent daily interests.But in an advanced civilization much which has to be learned is stored in symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and objects. Such material is relatively technical and superficial. Taking the ordinary standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. For this measure is connection with practical concerns. Such material exists in a world by itself, unassimilated to normal customs of thought and expression. There is the standing hazard that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life- experience. The permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view. Those which have not been carried over into the structure of social life, but which remain largely matters of technical information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy.