The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement. But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually found. We must base our conception upon societies which actually exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one. We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes. Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life. Any education given by a group tends to socialize its members, but the quality and value of the socialization depends upon the habits and aims of the group. Family life may be marked by exclusiveness, suspicion, and jealousy as to those without, and yet be a model of amity and mutual aid within. Gangs are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes. There is honor among thieves, and a band of robbers has a common interest as respects its members. If it is said that such organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of society is then made so “ideal” as to be of no use, having no reference to facts and in part, that each of these organizations, no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of “Society” which hold it together. Men banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public while serving it, political machines held together by the interest of plunder, are included. But when we look at the facts which the term denotes instead of confining our attention to its intrinsic connotation, we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad. The qualities which accompany this unity- praiseworthy community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of sympathy- are emphasized. Society is conceived as one by its very nature. In social philosophy, the former connotation is almost always uppermost. They have both a eulogistic or normative sense, and a descriptive sense a meaning de jure and a meaning de facto. The terms society, community, are thus ambiguous. From this standpoint, many a minor political unit, one of our large cities, for example, is a congeries of loosely associated societies, rather than an inclusive and permeating community of action and thought. In many modern states and in some ancient, there is great diversity of populations, of varying languages, religions, moral codes, and traditions. There are political parties with differing aims, social sets, cliques, gangs, corporations, partnerships, groups bound closely together by ties of blood, and so on in endless variety. Within every larger social organization there are numerous minor groups: not only political subdivisions, but industrial, scientific, religious, associations. It often seems as if they had nothing in common except that they are modes of associated life. One man is concerned in a multitude of diverse groups, in which his associates may be quite different. Men associate together in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes. To make the general ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of present social life.ġ. Particularly is it true that a society which not only changes but-which has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its own customs. To say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group. We have now to make explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of education as it operates in different types of community life. For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned with education as it may exist in any social group.
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