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.

At last step

Hence one of the weightiest evils with which the attitude of teaching has to cope is the method of custody a proper balance between the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional, modes of education. When the acquiring of in order and of technical intellectual skill do not influence the formation of a social disposition, ordinary vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far, creates only "sharps" in learning -- that is, egoistic specialists. To avoid a split between what men deliberately know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have engrossed it in the configuration of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly delicate task with every development of special schooling. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being. Since this continuance can be protected only by steady renewals, life is a self-renewing process. What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life? This education consists primarily in transmission through communication. Message is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common control. It modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it. That the ulterior significance of every mode of human friendship lies in the contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the immature. That is to say, while every social arrangement is educative in effect, the educative effect first becomes an important part of the reason of the association in connection with the association of the older with the younger. As societies become more multifaceted in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the hazard of creating an undesirable tear between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.