Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/867

 SOME DEMANDS OF SOCIOLOGY UPON PEDAGOGY 851

divided, the great man in whom the story of his age is told seems to fill a sphere apart from ordinary men, affecting their destinies by some undetermined process of long-distance induction.

By the third category, progress or continuity, I mean the con- ception of men and events as always working out new individual conditions and social arrangements, the truth on the one hand that "the roots of the present are deep in the past," on the other hand that the present cannot escape responsibility for the future. When historical acts are recalled they should always be considered at last in this third aspect. What motives and impulses led to them ? What consequences and effects did they set in motion ? This is the scientific attitude of mind toward the past. It is the genuinely social attitude toward the present and the future. It is the purely intellectual condition of the constructive temper which is the last and best product to be demanded of education. Yet I have known courses in history to be conducted under the highest institutional sanction, with no discernible reference to historical cause and consequence. Search and emphasis were entirely for the facts. Specialization of that sort is falsification. Facts cannot be told truly except in their relations.

Sociology demands of educators, finally, that they shall not rate themselves as leaders of children but as makers of society. Sociology knows no means for the amelioration or reform of society more radical than those of which teachers hold the lev- erage. The teacher who realizes his social function will not be satisfied with passing children to the next grade. He will read his success only in the record of men and women who go from the school eager to explore wider and deeper these social rela- tions, and zealous to do their part in making a better future. We are the dupes of faulty analysis if we imagine that schools can do much to promote social progress until they are motived by tliis insight and this temper. 1 ALBION W. SMALL.

IMF. INIVHRSITY OF CHICAGO.

1 This paper was read at the Buffalo meeting of the National Educational Associa- tion, July 10, 1896, and appears in published reports of