Education is not now for the first time "socialized" because we now
theorize upon its social function in a new way. Each group of people,
in each phase of social relationship, aims to express and to
perpetuate, through the training of the oncoming generations, the
ideals, the customs, and the institutional forms deemed by them
necessary and desirable. The educative process is indeed a personal
one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized
results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose
and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs.[17] The
family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly
with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin
the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in
activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of
social organization, by what the group of which that family was a part
had accepted as the right and useful end of child-training. The
limitations of the family, therefore, in early as in later education,
have been as marked as its powers, as has been well shown by Doctor
Todd in his book, _The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency_.
=The Three Learned Professions.=--When there were but three learned
professions, law, medicine, and theology, and the man of action,
soldier or ruler, thought lightly of them all in comparison with his
own field of activity, the higher education could be limited to those
of selected classes. Now the social need is for trained talent in a
far broader area, and the consequence is that not only is the
grade-school being made over but the professional goal of college and
university is being extended beyond the dreams of old pedagogues. When
physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually
demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the
line. The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of
the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for
leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when
colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position
until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of
social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most
part on a par with each other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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