Social ethics; Social sciences; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the
value and function of each member of the community, however humble he
may be. We have come to believe that the most "brutish man" has a value
in our common life, a function to perform which can be fulfilled by no
one else. We are gradually requiring of the educator that he shall free
the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life. We ask
this not merely because it is the man's right to be thus connected, but
because we have become convinced that the social order cannot afford to
get along without his special contribution. Just as we have come to
resent all hindrances which keep us from untrammelled comradeship with
our fellows, and as we throw down unnatural divisions, not in the
spirit of the eighteenth-century reformers, but in the spirit of those
to whom social equality has become a necessity for further social
development, so we are impatient to use the dynamic power residing in
the mass of men, and demand that the educator free that power. We
believe that man's moral idealism is the constructive force of progress,
as it has always been; but because every human being is a creative agent
and a possible generator of fine enthusiasm, we are sceptical of the
moral idealism of the few and demand the education of the many, that
there may be greater freedom, strength, and subtilty of intercourse and
hence an increase of dynamic power. We are not content to include all
men in our hopes, but have become conscious that all men are hoping and
are part of the same movement of which we are a part.
Many people impelled by these ideas have become impatient with the slow
recognition on the part of the educators of their manifest obligation
to prepare and nourish the child and the citizen for social relations.
The educators should certainly conserve the learning and training
necessary for the successful individual and family life, but should add
to that a preparation for the enlarged social efforts which our
increasing democracy requires. The democratic ideal demands of the
school that it shall give the child's own experience a social value;
that it shall teach him to direct his own activities and adjust them to
those of other people. We are not willing that thousands of industrial
workers shall put all of their activity and toil into services from
which the community as a whole reaps the benefit, while their mental
conceptions and code of morals are narrow and untouched by any uplift
which the consciousness of social value might give them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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