Moreover, the society of which the child is to be a member is, in the
United States, a democratic and progressive society. The child must be
educated for leadership as well as for obedience. He must have power of
self-direction and power of directing others, power of administration,
ability to assume positions of responsibility. This necessity of
educating for leadership is as great on the industrial as on the
political side.
New inventions, new machines, new methods of transportation and
intercourse are making over the whole scene of action year by year. It
is an absolute impossibility to educate the child for any fixed station
in life. So far as education is conducted unconsciously or consciously
on this basis, it results in fitting the future citizen for no station
in life, but makes him a drone, a hanger-on, or an actual retarding
influence in the onward movement. Instead of caring for himself and for
others, he becomes one who has himself to be cared for. Here, too, the
ethical responsibility of the school on the social side must be
interpreted in the broadest and freest spirit; it is equivalent to that
training of the child which will give him such possession of himself
that he may take charge of himself; may not only adapt himself to the
changes that are going on, but have power to shape and direct them.
Apart from participation in social life, the school has no moral end nor
aim. As long as we confine ourselves to the school as an isolated
institution, we have no directing principles, because we have no object.
For example, the end of education is said to be the harmonious
development of all the powers of the individual. Here no reference to
social life or membership is apparent, and yet many think we have in it
an adequate and thoroughgoing definition of the goal of education. But
if this definition be taken independently of social relationship we have
no way of telling what is meant by any one of the terms employed. We do
not know what a power is; we do not know what development is; we do not
know what harmony is. A power is a power only with reference to the use
to which it is put, the function it has to serve. If we leave out the
uses supplied by social life we have nothing but the old "faculty
psychology" to tell what is meant by power and what the specific powers
are. The principle reduces itself to enumerating a lot of faculties like
perception, memory, reasoning, etc., and then stating that each one of
these powers needs to be developed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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