Step number two

In last account, then, not only does community life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very procedure of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no time to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. The inequality of achievement between the mature and the young not only necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form which will render it most easily communicable and hence most usable. The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a marked difference between the education which everyone gets from living with others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young. In the former case the education is incidental; it is natural and significant, but it is not the state reason of the friendship. While it may be said, without exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution, economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging and improving knowledge; yet this effect is not a part of its unique motive, which is limited and more immediately practical. Religious associations began, for example, in the desire to secure the favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil influences; family life in the desire to gratify appetites and secure family perpetuity; systematic labor, for the most part, because of enslavement to others, etc.

Step number three

Only progressively was the by-product of the institution, its effect upon the quality and extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually still was this effect considered as a instruction factor in the conduct of the organization. Even today, in our industrial life, separately from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of human association under which the world's work is carried on receives little notice as compared with physical output. But in dealing with the little, the fact of association itself as an immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy to ignore in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition, or to subordinate that educative effect to some external and tangible result, it is not so easy as in dealing with adults. The need of training is too obvious; the pressure to accomplish a change in their attitude and habits is too urgent to leave this penalty wholly out of account. Since our chief business with them is to enable them to share in a common life we cannot help considering whether or not we are forming the powers which will secure this ability. If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the final value of every institution is its distinctively human effect -- its effect upon conscious experience -- we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely from side to side dealings with the young. We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of education -- that of direct instruction or schooling. In undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching and training.