The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of HistoryPartridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Philosophy
The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of History
Partridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Education; History -- Philosophy; War
It is these fundamental and common activities and interests and
sympathies that ought to be the chief concern of social education, or
perhaps we had better say that all our educational processes ought so
to be socialized as to broaden sympathies and make activities common.
Education must constantly strive to make the common background of our
national life more firm and strong. More important to-day than any
further education in the direction of specialization of life in
America is the securing of a strong cohesion throughout society by
means of common interests and moods. It is true that specialization
carried out in some ideal way may provide just the conditions needed
for the best social order, but this can be only in so far as
individuals become specialized within the whole of society, so to
speak, in which individuals continue to have a common life.
Individuals as wholes must not be differentiated and left to find
their own means of cooerdination and association, or be brought
together artificially by law or convention. Specialization must be
made the reverse side, as it were, of a social process in which at
every point cooerdination is also provided for. At the present time, it
is the latter rather than the former that is of most importance to us.
Social education in a democratic country must always be a matter of the
greatest concern. In autocratic societies the cohesive force exists in
traditions or can at any moment be generated executively. The
autocratic country can be held together in spite of social antagonism.
In a democracy this cannot be. We voluntarily accept some degree of
incooerdination and confusion for the sake of our ideals of freedom. We
do not wish cohesion based upon any form of pessimism or fear--fear of
enemies without or of powers within. To secure unity in our own
national life we must work for it incessantly, and we ought to be
willing to, for unity means so much to us. It is not cohesion at any
price that we want, but voluntary and natural union, and to secure that
we should not hesitate to make our educational institutions broad
enough to include the education of the most fundamental relations of
the individual to society. We want neither a "healthy egoism" nor a
morbid self-denying spirit that is only a step removed from
slavery--neither instinctive independence nor an artificial and
enforced social organization. We must not be deceived either by a vague
and false idea of liberty or by the equally vicious ideal of militarism
with its superficiality of social relations and its pedagogical
simplicity. Both these ideas represent social life on a low plane.
Healthy individualism, even with its strong sense of tolerance and
comradeship and its respect for law and order, is not the kind of
social ideal that we should now cultivate, for it is too primitive a
state to fit into our already complex social life, or to be a basis for
the firm solidarity we need for the future. As for militarism, it may
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