Sociology and Modern Social ProblemsEllwood, Charles A. (Charles Abram)
General
Sociology and Modern Social Problems
Ellwood, Charles A. (Charles Abram)
Social problems; Sociology
authority, but through the education of the individual, so that he shall
become adjusted to the social life in habits and character before he
participates in it. Human society may be modified, we now see, best
through modifying the nature of the individual, and the most direct
method to do this is through education.
The Socialized Education of the Future.--If what has been said is
substantially correct, then education should become conscious of its
social mission and purpose. The educator should conserve education as
the chief means of social progress, and education should be directed to
producing efficient members of society. The education of the future must
aim, in other words, not at producing lawyers, physicians, engineers,
but at producing citizens. Education for citizenship means that there
must be radical reconstruction in the educational processes of the
present. The education of the nineteenth century aimed at developing
largely power and capacity in the individual as such. Its implicit, and
oftentimes its avowed, aim was individual success. The popularity of
higher education in the nineteenth century especially rested upon the
cult of individual success. It became, therefore, largely
commercialized, and emphasized chiefly the professions and occupations
which best assured the individual a successful career among a commercial
and industrial people.
It is needless to say that the individualistic, commercialized education
of the latter years of the nineteenth century very often failed to
produce the good citizen. On the contrary, with its ideal of individual
power and success, it frequently produced the cultured freebooter, which
our modern industry has so often afforded examples of. Education,
instead of being a socializing agency and the chief instrument of social
regeneration, became an individualizing agency dissolving the social
order itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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