Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/732

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS.

Pedagogy and Sociology. I consider as the very foundation of all pedago- gical speculation that education is a thing eminently social, judged from its origin and by its function ; and that, therefore, pedagogy depends upon sociology more directly than upon any other science. Until recent years teachers have considered education as chiefly individual, and pedagogy, therefore, an immediate corollary of psychology alone. By Kant, Mill, Herbart, and Spencer education had for its object the highest possible realization of the attributes constitutive of the human species in general. There was one human nature, the forms and properties of which are determined once for all, and the pedagogical problem was how to engage and employ that nature, thus completely given and latent in the child. The educator had nothing essential to add to the work of nature ; he created nothing. His busi- ness was to exercise the existing powers of the child lest they atrophy through inaction, . be warped in their moral direction, or develop too slowly. Since man was pos- sessed of and furnished with these powers, it followed that a study of man, and of man as an individual, would determine how his development should be directed. The important thing was to know what are his native faculties and what are their charac- teristics. But the science which describes and explains the individual man is psy- chology, and it seemed, therefore, that psychology ought to suffice for all the needs of pedagogy.

But, unhappily for such a view, it finds itself at odds with all that history teaches. Different systems of education have always existed and functioned side by side in every society. Education varies from one caste to another; that of the patricians was not that of the plebians, that of the Brahman was not that of the Cudra. Even now education varies with social classes and even with communities; that of the bourgeon is not that of the laborer, that of the city is not that of the country. Each profession constitutes a method sui generis for bringing out the special powers and aptitudes of the child. In every civilized country there is a tendency more and more to diversify and specialize.

But it is evident that these special schools or systems of education are not organ- ized for individual ends. It is true they develop the special abilities of the individual and in this sense are individual. But it is society, in order to maintain itself, demand- ing this division of labor and that according to the special abilities of its members, which creates these special schools. It is by society and for society that education is thus diversified. And further, this determining influence of society upon the edu- cation is easily demonstrated from history. Each type of people has its own educa- tion, peculiar to itself and which can be described under the same name as its moral, political, and religious organization. Consider how at one time education teaches the individual to give himself completely into the hands of the state, and how at another time it is designed to make him the director of his own conduct ; education was ascetic in the Middle Ages, liberal at the time of the Renaissance, literary in the seventeenth century, and is scientific in our own time. This is not because men have been mistaken as to the nature and needs of man, but it is because his needs have varied, and these have varied because the social conditions upon which human needs depend do not remain the same.

That education has been directly dependent upon social conditions is easily recognized in history, but somehow we think our system of education to be inde- pendent of our social system. But it would be strange if education, after having had during these centuries, and in all known societies, all the characteristics of a social institution, should in our time so completely change its nature. A strange transformation it would be when, at the very moment in which it is thought to have taken place, the most striking fact in the education, not only of France, but of all

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