Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/858

 842 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the correlated demand of the new pedagogy, also seconded by the new sociology, that so far as conscious effort is made by instructors to supplement the education of action by the educa- tion of information, the objects of knowledge shall be kept real by being viewed constantly as organic parts of the one reality. They must no longer be made unreal, through analytic segrega- tion which leaves them standing apart as independent realities.

Having thus by negation challenged some of the implicit concessions of the Committee of Ten to the old dogmatic peda- gogy, and to pre-sociological conceptions of reality, I pass to a positive definition of the outlook of sociology. I believe it to be also in line with the pedagogy that will prevail.

Human experience is concerned with three knowable ele- ments : first, man's material environment, inanimate and animate ; second, man himself as an individual, in all his characteristics, from his place in the animal kingdom through his special physi- ology, psychology, and technology ; third, man's associations or institutions. Sociology is the systematic attempt to reduce the reactions of these three elements nature, man, institutions to scientific form and expression. The inclusive reality which sociology finds comprehending both the processes and the prod- ucts of these reactions is society, i. e., individuals in associa- tion within the conditions imposed by the material environment and modified by human achievement. The task set for each individual, when he finds himself participant of this reality, is to accommodate himself to prevailing conditions in such manner that he may both accomplish and enjoy a maximum share of the development which his stage in social evolution is empowered to accomplish.

This life task of men consequently sets the pedagogical task of teachers. The prime problem of education, as the sociologist views it, is how to promote adaptation of the individual to the social conditions, natural and artificial, within which individuals live, and move, and have their being. It would not be in point to discuss here the relative place of action and information in prog- ress toward this end. That belongs to pedagogical technology.