Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/711

Rh Carefully selected bibliographies and lists of topics for further study are appended to each chapter, both of which will be of great help to student and teacher. There are also placed at the beginning of the discussion of the leading periods condensed chronological tables of the chief political events and personages, literary men and scientists, religious events and personages, educators, educational writings, and leading educational events. These enable the student by a glance to gain a survey of the whole field, and to correct errors of perspective to which he is liable in a study of this sort. Very suggestive and helpful, in the reviewer's opinion, is the treatment of education as adjustment, and an interpretation of the history of educational practice and theory from this point of view. In this aspect education appears as a progressive bringing to consciousness by man of his own ways or methods of doing things, his own unconscious and instinctive reactions to his physical and social environment. Education is the most advanced phase of evolutionary process, its most controlled stage. It is the conscious self-adaptation of humanity to the conditions of its life and growth. "With this stage of evolution the institutional aspect of environment is most important, and social selection of greater functional significance than natural." Yet even this conscious and social selection has been for the most part a stumbling and uncertain guide. That is, "since the social consciousness rather seeks to prevent change, social progress has resulted for the most part through the conscious effort of the individual to secure for himself some advantage which is not permitted or, at least, not consciously given by society." The highest form of social selection is attained when society becomes conscious of its aim in terms of a method, and grasps the meaning of the process of adjustment and readjustment by which the individual and the social are evolved together. "The great positive method developed by modern society for effecting these purposes is public education. Education thus becomes for the social world what natural selection is for the sub-human world—the chief factor in the process of evolution."

Employing this conception, Professor Monroe traces educational practice and educational theory through its successive phases. Primitive man exhibits education as non-progressive adjustment, since here behavior is in accordance with definite and rigidly prescribed customs and habits. Oriental peoples, of which China is taken as the type, illustrate education as recapitulation. Among