RELATION TO SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 95 



activities of the modern world. It would teach men to be 

 true to both sides of the truth. If it fosters an untempered and 

 arrogant individualism, it is false to its trust, but not less false if, 

 rushing to the other extreme, it were to seek to inculcate passive 

 obedience to some social or intellectual theory, imposed dogmatically 

 by rulers who, however scientific, yet denied the right of criticism, 

 of protest, and of practical dissent. 



II 



The enormous difficulty of accomplishing this educational task in 

 the circumstances in which the work has to be done, and with the in- 

 struments available for the purpose, must fill every student of the 

 subject with some misgiving and concern. Nor is the difficulty 

 materially lessened w r hen we take into account the fact that all that 

 the school in its specific sense can at best be expected to accomplish is 

 to set its pupils on the road to getting for themselves intellectual and 

 moral benefit from the much longer course of education which awaits 

 them, when school days are over, in the real tasks of life. Yet at 

 the very time when the student of education has come to realize 

 more vividly than ever before the intricacy and incalculable difficulty 

 of the higher work of the school, the great mass of every free people is 

 evincing to a degree hitherto unparalleled its belief in the value of 

 popular education and its readiness to make large sacrifices for its 

 extension and improvement. Such confidence as this has not been 

 lightly won. That it should be thus displayed with evident sincerity, 

 and on so vast a scale, is in itself a proof that popular education has 

 already achieved a colossal work. At a period of unexampled 

 economic development it has furnished to the strong and energetic 

 (to take the matter as it should be taken, at its best) with a keener 

 perception of personal opportunity, with some of the means of seiz- 

 ing those opportunities, and (what is of high economic and often 

 of moral worth) with self-confidence and bright hopes for the future. 

 To have done this, at such a crisis and on so vast a scale, is an epoch- 

 making work and one of which the benefits far transcend the accom- 

 panying disadvantages. To many thousand humble homes on either 

 side of the Atlantic there has come after long and bitter discourage- 

 ment a ray of bright hope from the American public school. 



But this quickening sense of new economic opportunity does not 

 alone explain the modern belief in the virtues of public education 

 freely open to the masses of the people. Does there not also lie 

 behind that belief a more subtle cause? Shall we be wrong in trac- 

 ing it back in part to something not less fundamental than eagerness 

 for new economic opportunities, namely, to an instinctive sense of 

 need of something which may fill the place of those traditional and 

 less conscious processes of social education now in swift decay? 



