Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/733

 NO TES AND ABSTRA CTS 7 J 3

Europe, is that it is being put more and more into the hands of the state, is made more and more a social institution. No, our pedagogical ideal is explained by our social structure as truly as was that of the Greeks and Romans by the organization of their states.

Not only is it society that has elevated mankind to the dignity of the model which the educator ought to strive to reproduce, but it is society which fashioned the model and fashioned him according to her own needs. The man that education ought to realize in us is not the man such as nature has made, but such as society wishes he should be. If there exists a hierarchy of our faculties, if to some of them we attribute a sort of precedence, and which we ought therefore to develop more than the others, it is not because that dignity is intrinsic, it is not that nature from all time made them thus, assigned them an eminence of rank ; but it is because society has set a high value upon them. This scale of values, this hierarchy of faculties, never remains the same through two successive periods of history, h t one time it was courage that held first rank, together with all those faculties that implied the military virtue ; now it is thought and reflection ; in the future it will perhaps be refinement of tastes and sensibility of art. Thus in the present, as in the past, our pedagogical ideal is, even in details, the work of society. It is society that draws the portrait of the man we ought to be, and in this portrait come to be reflected all the characteristics of the social organization.

Simply for convenience of expression it might be said that in each of us there exist two beings (fores). The one is made up of all the mental states which refer only to ourselves and to incidents of our personal life. This may be called the individual being. The other is a system of ideas, of sentiment, of habits, which acquaint us, not with our own personality, but with the group or the different groups of which we are a part ; such are the religious beliefs, the practical and moral beliefs, the national and professional traditions, the collective opinions of all sorts. Their ensemble forms the social being. To create this being in each of us this is the end of education. This social being is not given ready-made in the constitution of primitive man, nor is it a result of spontaneous development. Spontaneously, man was not inclined to submit to a political authority, to respect moral discipline, to sacrifice himself. It was not given to us at birth to be disposed to serve divinities, emblems symbolic of society, to render them a worship, to deny ourselves for their glory. It is society itself which has drawn from its own life those great moral forces coming into contact with which man has learned his own inferiority.

But if sociology is preponderant in determining the end of education, has it the same importance in selecting the means? In choosing means and working out methods, psychology surely claims some consideration. Through psychology of the individual we come to know something of the individual through which are to be realized the ends that society marks out. But when it is remembered that the indi- vidual is not completely known until studied also through social psychology, it may still be an unsettled question as to the adequacy of psychology as usually conceived for determining method. We all know with what caution and with what limits, even in choosing methods, the principles of psychology are acted upon or accepted. Again, society, determining the aim, or, better, the aims, of education, must reasonably have something to say as to the means. Historically this has been true. When society was individualistic, whatever in education tended to do violence to the individuality was frowned down. In fact, whenever educational systems have been profoundly changed it has been under the influence of some great social movement felt through- out the group-life. It was not in consequence of some psychological discoveries that the Renaissance opposed new methods to those of the Middle Ages ; it was that, in consequence of changes in the structure of European societies, a new conception of man and of his place in the world had taken place. Neither Basedow, nor Pesta- lozzi, nor Froebel, was a great psychologist. Regard for natural liberty, hatred of all oppression, love for a man, for a child these express their doctrine, these are the basis of our modern individualism.

Thus, whether we consider the ends of education or the means it employs, they agree with, if they are not determined by, social conditions. It is the collective ideas and sentiments of a people that its educational system expresses. E DURKHEIM, " Pedagogic et sociologie," in Revue de metaphysique et de morale, January, 1903.

T. J. R.