Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/495

 SOCIAL CONTROL 479

or dispersed among alien races, must needs impose the yoke of their law by school and synagogue rather than by scourge and prison.

A third factor is the intelligence and self-consciousness of society. The schooling of the young is a long-headed device to promote order, and does not get adopted till the group becomes aware of its task and its resources. At first it is the rare thinker who sees anything in it, and his arguments do not always prevail. Down to the Reformation only the Greek philosophers and the Jewish rabbis had set forth the possibilities of education in respect to social order. Men trust the police- man and the priest sooner than the pedagogue. To collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading-board exhibits a faith in the power of suggestion which few peoples ever attain to. And so it hap- pens that now, when the role of the priest in the social economy seems drawing to an end, the role of the schoolmaster appears to have just begun. The technique of belief and religion has been understood for thousands of years ; but the technique of educa- tion is the discovery of yesterday — or, better yet, tomorrow.

The aims that have dominated the historical systems of edu- cation have not been dictated solely by society's instinct of self- preservation, but reflect other paramount social needs as well.

The informing purpose of the earlier types of education — Egypt, India, China, Israel — was the shaping of human pulp in a rigid traditional mold. The means of reconciling order with progress were not then understood or discussed. In existing institutions it was not possible to part the essential from the acci- dental. The only fabric that men could conceive of was the existing one, and hence social stability seemed bound up with conservatism. Immovable these civilizations were certainly not, but their slow secular drift had little to do with conscious change. Education, therefore, consisted in so hypnotizing the young with the ancient lore that free exercise of the mind on religious, ethical, or political matters should be impossible. They were to be stung and paralyzed with tradition, thrown into a mental catalepsy by exclusive contact with sacred books and