Chapter 24

NEW SOCIAL PROBLEMS

The social problems of education that have arisen because of our new world relations and new internal conditions in our own country are of course only special phases of social education as a whole, and social education cannot indeed be separated sharply from other educational questions. There are, however, new demands and new evidences, and new points of view from which we see social education (or better, education in its social aspects), in a somewhat new and different light, as compared with our ideas of the school in the days before the war. We have discussed some of these social problems. Now we must consider them both in their general significance, and also in their more specifically pedagogical aspects.

There appear to be two things that social education needs especially to do now: create and sustain a firmer unity at home--a wider and deeper loyalty on the part of the individual to all the causes and to all the groups to which he is attached; and to make our _world-consciousness_ a more productive state of mind. It is perhaps because such educational proposals as these are generally left in the form of ideals and things hoped for in a distant future, and are not examined to see whether they may be made definite programs, and are legitimate demands to be made now, that we are likely to regard all suggestions of this nature as impracticable. And yet the production of _morale_ at home and a social consciousness adequate for our new relations abroad seems to be a proper demand to make even upon the school. In part, of course, and perhaps largely, the need is first of all for practical relations, but we must consider educationally also the fundamental and creative factors of the psychic process itself which must in the end sustain the relations that we have established at such cost and shall now begin to elaborate as practical functions.

The greatest work of social education to-day is to infuse into all the social relations a new and more ardent spirit. It is the elevation of the social moods to a more productive level, we might say, that is wanted. Æsthetic elements, imagination, and the harmonizing of individual and social motives are needed. War has shown us the possibilities of exalted social moods; what we ought to do now is to consider how we may make our morale of peace equal in efficiency and in power to our war morale. This is in great part a problem of social education.

Every nation has its own especial social problems which must become educational problems, and be dealt with in some way according to the methods available in schools. In England the social questions seem to be more in mind and to be better understood than here. They are more conscious there of social disharmony and of living a socially divided life than we are. They have seen at close range the dangers of class interests and individual interests. Individualism, class distinction and party politics and the independence of labor came near proving the ruin of England. The Bishop of Oxford has expressed himself as believing that the blank stupid conservatism of his country, as he calls it, is really broken and that a new sense of service is actually dawning in all directions. Trotter says (and he too is thinking of England) that a very small amount of conscious and authoritative direction, a little sacrifice of privilege, a slight relaxation in the vast inhumanity of the social machine might at the right moment have made a profound effect in the national spirit. Generalizing, and now thinking of social phenomena in terms of the psychology of the herd, he says that the trouble in modern society is that capacity for individual reaction--that is for making different reactions to the same stimulus--has far outstripped the capacity for intercommunication. Society has grown in complexity and strength, but it has also grown in disorder.

Such disharmony of the social life of course exists also in America. We have not the sharp division of classes and interests and the demonstrative and protesting individualism that are to be found in England (our individual rights are taken more for granted perhaps) but for that very reason, it may well be, our disharmonies are all the more dangerous and difficult to overcome. The tension of the individual and the social will (using MacCurdy's expression) is great. We are highly individualistic in our mode of life, as is shown both in domestic and in public affairs. Specialization and an intense interest in occupations that bring individual distinction and large financial returns have certainly taken precedence over the more fundamental and common activities and interests.

It is these fundamental and common activities and interests and sympathies that ought to be the chief concern of social education, or perhaps we had better say that all our educational processes ought so to be socialized as to broaden sympathies and make activities common. Education must constantly strive to make the common background of our national life more firm and strong. More important to-day than any further education in the direction of specialization of life in America is the securing of a strong cohesion throughout society by means of common interests and moods. It is true that specialization carried out in some ideal way may provide just the conditions needed for the best social order, but this can be only in so far as individuals become specialized within the whole of society, so to speak, in which individuals continue to have a common life. Individuals as wholes must not be differentiated and left to find their own means of coördination and association, or be brought together artificially by law or convention. Specialization must be made the reverse side, as it were, of a social process in which at every point coördination is also provided for. At the present time, it is the latter rather than the former that is of most importance to us.

Social education in a democratic country must always be a matter of the greatest concern. In autocratic societies the cohesive force exists in traditions or can at any moment be generated executively. The autocratic country can be held together in spite of social antagonism. In a democracy this cannot be. We voluntarily accept some degree of incoördination and confusion for the sake of our ideals of freedom. We do not wish cohesion based upon any form of pessimism or fear--fear of enemies without or of powers within. To secure unity in our own national life we must work for it incessantly, and we ought to be willing to, for unity means so much to us. It is not cohesion at any price that we want, but voluntary and natural union, and to secure that we should not hesitate to make our educational institutions broad enough to include the education of the most fundamental relations of the individual to society. We want neither a "healthy egoism" nor a morbid self-denying spirit that is only a step removed from slavery--neither instinctive independence nor an artificial and enforced social organization. We must not be deceived either by a vague and false idea of liberty or by the equally vicious ideal of militarism with its superficiality of social relations and its pedagogical simplicity. Both these ideas represent social life on a low plane. Healthy individualism, even with its strong sense of tolerance and comradeship and its respect for law and order, is not the kind of social ideal that we should now cultivate, for it is too primitive a state to fit into our already complex social life, or to be a basis for the firm solidarity we need for the future. As for militarism, it may become a mere shell, giving the appearance of social unity when its bonds are mere shreds and the last drop of moral vitality has gone out of it.

Our need and problem are plain enough. We wish to develop social cohesion and unity upon a natural and permanent basis of social feeling expressed in, and in turn produced by, social organization, voluntarily entered into for practical and for ideal purposes. Such solidarity can neither be made nor unmade by external forces. We must form and sustain it by creating internal bonds. We live, in any great society, always over smoldering fires, however highly civilized the society, and we are always threatened with the eruption of volcanic forces. It is fatuous to ignore this, and to make a fool's paradise of our democracy. Our problem is to produce such a social life as shall keep us safe through all dangers--dangers from enemies without, and within, and underneath. A democracy, or indeed any society after all and at its best, contains the makings of the crowd and the mob. Organized as it is, it is always an order made of material units which _may_ enter into disorder. Society is based upon social consciousness, upon the consciousness of kind, but it also has _collective force_. The crowd and the collective force are always contained in society. However far human nature is removed from its primitive form, the social order is always fragile. Mental operations that are not intelligent and are not emotional in the ordinary sense, but which consist, so to speak, of common factors among primitive feelings, may gain and for a time hold the ascendancy. Eruptions in the social consciousness are of the nature of morbid phenomena, and are rare and exceptional expressions of the collective life, but we are never free entirely from the menace of them. Social order, we say, is always fragile. We must not overlook that fact. It is this characteristic of the social life, the potentiality of mob spirit and the forces of primitive anger and fear, that lead some writers to think, wrongly we believe, that this is the psychological basis of wars in general. War comes out of the order of society. The higher ecstatic states and the ideals of man enter into them. These things we speak of are of the nature of disorder, or are only the order of pure momentum. But whatever the truth may be about the relation of instinct to war and however remote the dangers to ourselves from the forces which in society make for disorder, it is the work of social education to control, transform and utilize all social and collective forces, the primitive emotions and instincts, the moods of intoxication and all the higher ecstasies of the social life, and it is only, we suppose, by thus consciously and with premeditation controlling these forces that in any real sense we can "make democracy safe for the world."

It is the idea of society coördinated by intelligence and by common interests and moods that we must always hold before us. Trotter says that civilization has never brought a well-coördinated society, and that a gregarious unit consciously directed would be a new type of biological organism. If this be so, the time seems peculiarly ripe to make advance toward this better social solidarity. Both the promise and the need seem greatest in the great English speaking countries now. There is waiting, we may truly think, a larger sphere of life for all democratic countries. If it be conscious direction alone that can bring about the change, education has a long and a hard task before it, to make the democratic peoples capable of such conscious direction. This must come in part by the development of the idea of leadership, and by the production of all the conditions that make leadership possible. In part it must come by the clear perception of definite tasks to be performed by nations and by all organizations within nations--tasks which have all grown out of the relations existing within society. In part it means cultivating intelligent appreciation of social values, and developing in every possible way all the social powers.

What we appear to need most in our social education just now is a conception of what the individual is and what the social life is in terms of the desires and the functions they embody. These are the raw materials with which we work. We should then treat all our social problems in a somewhat different way from that in which they are mainly dealt with now. We should try especially to make harmony in society not by maneuvering so that we might have peace and good feeling for their own sakes, but by coordinating the functions which are expressed in the life of the individual and in all social relations. That is precisely what is not being done now, in our present stage of society, either in the life of the individual, or in the wider life of society. People live without deep continuity in their lives, and we are not conscious enough of the ideal relationships individuals should have with one another, in order to make the social life productive. In a word we do not sufficiently take account of the purposes to be achieved, but are too conscious of states of feeling. We do not yet appear to see all the possibilities contained in the social life, what voluntary unions are necessary, and what kind of community life must be developed before we can have a really democratic order.

We must not be content, certainly, with a merely superficial and external solidarity or the purely practical gregariousness of the shops or the artificial forms of the conventional social life. Society must more and more accomplish results by the social life. Coordination in the performance of a few obvious functions, and enthusiasm for a few partisan causes, will not be enough. Nor will such order as militarism represents suffice. Is it not plain, indeed, that democracy must rest upon deeper and far more complex coördinations than we have now, and that social feelings or moods must be made more creative? It is the desire to accomplish ends through social organization, rather than the desire to possess and enjoy, that must be made to dominate it. To effect such changes in the social life must be in great part the work of education.

Social education in our present time and conditions might very well be considered in terms of the antinomies which exist in society. These antinomies represent the obstacles to national unity. They stand for inhibitions which are expressed in feelings that are wholly unproductive. Each one of them is a measure of so much waste, so much failure and lack of momentum, so much disorder and disorganization. A program of social education, we say, might be based upon a consideration of these antinomies. It would consider mainly how the waste and obstruction of these conflicting purposes of the social life might be overcome by giving desires more harmonious and more positive direction. A complete account of social education from this standpoint would need to take notice of many disharmonies now very evident in our life as a nation. Among them would be found sectional antagonisms, party opposition, frictions of social classes and industrial classes, religious differences, disharmony between the sexes, racial antipathies. Some of these we have already touched upon briefly. Some others seem to require further mention in the present connection.

The lack of understanding and sympathy between lower and upper classes in society plays a larger part in democratic America than we are usually inclined to admit. There are divided interests, divergent mores, lack of unity and coördination in some of the most urgent duties because of the antagonism of classes and the lack of understanding, on the part of one, of the ways of another. Especially in civic life the unproductiveness of the situation is very apparent. What money and advantage on one side combined with willing hands on the other might do is left undone.

In part this antagonism of classes is merely the result of difference in manners. There are manners and forms that constitute a common bond among the members of a class everywhere. Ought we not to take advantage of this example and use the suggestion it offers for bridging over the differences that we complain of? We have seen during the war, also, how well common tasks can unite all classes. Does not our educational institution afford us opportunity to continue this advantage, and make common service lead more directly to understanding and appreciation, not for the sake of the sympathy alone, but because of all the practical consequences and the opportunities for the future that are thus opened up? We assume that social feeling may be created through social organization. Mabie says that America is distinguished by its capacities for forming helpful organizations. We must make the most of this habit, which presumably is derived from the neighborliness and comradeship of our original colonial life. We need many group causes, not artificially planned as trellises upon which to grow social feelings, but, first of all certainly, in order to accomplish those things that can be done effectively only socially.

The secret of harmony among classes is presumably not to allow any class to have vital interests which are exclusively its own, since to have an exclusive vital interest means of course to live defensively or to carry on offensive strategy. The chief interest of the great working class at the present time is plainly to secure a living, and it is the sense of isolation in this struggle which in part at least is the cause of many unfavorable conditions in our present social order. Ought not education to prepare the way for a different attitude in which all should become vitally interested in the economic problems of all? This does not mean an education directed toward enlarging the spirit of philanthropy; it means mainly organization to serve common purposes.

These social problems are very numerous. They are both national and local. Any city which will undertake to solve in its civic relations this problem of securing greater social unity in social causes will provide an object lesson which will be of the greatest value. It is in these local groups perhaps that some of the best experimental social work may be done. Here the educational and the political modes of attack can best be coördinated, results can be made most tangible, and the primitive and simple forms of solidarity most nearly realized. It is indeed by going back to these simpler forms of social life and seeking means of coordinating the group in fundamental activities that the greatest headway will be made in the solution of wider social problems.

Another of the disharmonies which social education must from now on undertake to control is the disharmony and the inequality of the sexes, not so much as this appears in the domestic life as in the broader relations of the social life. Brinton says that the ethnic psychologist has no sounder maxim than that uttered by Steinthal, that the position of women is the cardinal point of all social relations. Every one, of course, now recognizes the fact that the position of women is to-day in a transitional and experimental stage. Conflicting motives are at work, and on the part of neither sex do the highest motives seem to prevail, nor is there a full realization anywhere of the values that are at stake. Men are thinking of the question of the position of women too much from the standpoint of expediency, and are scrutinizing too closely the immediate future. Women perhaps are thinking too much just now of their _rights_. There is a decadent form of chivalry or at least a sexuality that perpetuates conventions and interests that on the whole seem to interfere with progress. Jealousy and in general the tense emotional relations between the sexes obscure larger issues. Thus misunderstanding or antagonism, or at least disharmony, prevails in relations in which there should be perfect harmony of ideals and purposes, and productive activities of the highest nature. The education of women, whether for the domestic life or for the life outside the home is plainly but a part of the educational problem. The sexes have different desires, and it is precisely the work of harmonizing these desires, and regulating and coordinating activities and functions, that is the most important part of social education in regard to the sexes.

It is not at all difficult to see what the basic need is. It is not so easy to find practical means of applying the remedy in the form of education, because the whole system of living of the sexes must in some way be affected. The generalized principle on the practical side seems clear. All classes or groups in society must learn to think and to act not in terms of and with reference to the desires of their class alone, but with regard to wider tasks and values that are not fully realized by the most natural and the conventional activities of the class. The question is not one of making a moral change--converting individuals or classes from a spirit of selfishness to that of altruism. What we need is an educational process and a social life in which the nature of the individual and of the class is revealed as social, as best represented and satisfied in situations in which both the individual and the wider social idea work together.

Practically, we should say, the problem of education of the sexes with reference to one another and to a wider social life consists first of all in actually educating them together not merely in juxtaposition but in relations of a practical character. The relations of the sexes have evidently been mainly domestic and emotional, or in cases where they are practical the position of women has been little better than servitude. Of social coördination there has been little. _Education of the sexes through situations in which the special abilities of each sex are brought into action_, doing for the wider social life what the natural and instinctive differentiation of activities has accomplished in its way for the domestic life seems to be the main principle now to be employed in the education of the sexes. Women must be made to see that the ideal of independence which is uppermost at the present time is only the mark of a transitional stage, and that coördination in which of course competition of various kinds cannot be entirely eliminated will be the final adjustment. We should have no fear of placing the sexes, in their educational situations, in positions where competition is necessary, since through competition fundamental desires may be brought to the surface and regulated. Provided we admit at all that a new social adjustment is needed between the sexes, we can hardly fail to see that it is primarily in a practical life lived together that both education for the new order will best be conducted and the new order itself realized.

The details of method of what we have called social education for democracy we can only suggest here and of course in a very imperfect and tentative way. All aspects of education and every department of the school are involved; and every available method employed in education must in some way be turned to the purpose of developing social relations. In a very general way we think of these specific processes of the school as methods of learning, methods of art, and methods of activity, although of course in reality there can be no such sharp separation of them as this might imply.

There must be some place in the school now for a subject which in a general way might be designated as social history. We must teach the whole story of the social life of our country in such a way as to reveal the motives of classes, parties, sections, and of all organizations, institutions and principles. Such teaching should have the effect of bringing to light the causes of the disharmonies of society, and it should also be a means of conveying the feelings and moods as well as the ideas that govern the conduct of all groups that make up our national life. We must teach _sympathetically_ what the desires and intentions of all are, on the assumption that behind all conduct there are natural causes and essentially sound instincts. By showing the desires of groups in their relation to one another, their disharmony and their possible harmony, we indicate what society as a functioning whole may be, and we may say that it is the chief end to be gained by the intellectual treatment of the social life to make clear what the ideal of social unity for practical life is, and what the main obstacles are that now stand in the way of it. By this social history we do not mean, moreover, something abstruse and academic suited for the college alone. Wherever the social antagonism is experienced, at whatever age, there is the opportunity to begin to set the mind at work about it, and to prevent the formation of prejudice and resentment. These states of mind begin very early indeed, and they are hard to eradicate.

A very large part in the work of social education is played by methods of education that we may call æsthetic. This must mean not only the inclusion of the methods of art in presenting facts, but we must bring to bear all kinds of æsthetic influences upon the social life. Social life in which there is introduced the dramatic moment is one of the main objectives of all education. It is in the recreational life that some of the best conditions for the realization of social moods in dramatic or æsthetic form are obtained. In the recreational experience the social states must be made productive of social harmony, as they themselves tend to be. In these experiences the conflicting motives of the individual and society, and of individual with individual, and the opposing desires of the individual are harmonized by means of ideal experiences in which the desires are exploited. Since we here touch upon the whole theory of the æsthetic in its practical application, we cannot be very explicit and clear, but the main service of the æsthetic social life experienced typically in the form of recreational activities, ought to be plain. Recreation is a means of giving the common experience so much needed in democratic countries like our own--common feelings, common activities and interests. This store of common life, containing exalted social feelings, expressed in play and art--languages which all nationalities can understand--must constantly be increased. All institutions that control the leisure hours of the people must be made educational as means of raising the social life to a higher level and making it more harmonious and productive of common interests. It is indeed one of the functions of the recreational activities and institutions to create and sustain public morale.

In the recreational experiences under control of the school we have the opportunity to educate the deepest and most powerful of motives. Play and art we should suppose, therefore, ought to have a greater part and more serious recognition in the school. We cannot of course accomplish much merely by crowding more arts and plays and games into the curriculum. It is something larger and more transforming that is wanted. We need to make the school take a greater place in the life of the child; it must reach a deeper level of human nature, in which the motives of play and art lie, and there must be a broader exposure of all young life to those influences of the social life everywhere which contain our highest social ideals. The place of art and to some extent of play as the methods and the spirit of the school is to convey persuasively to the child this larger and better life in which we expect him to take part.

Neither erudition nor art nor both together can, of course, fulfill all the requirements for a social education suited to our present needs. It is presumably in the social life itself, in the form of a practical activity, that social education will in great part be gained. This educational social life, which is also practical, will, however, be one in which every opportunity is taken to show the social life in its historical perspective, and to make clear its purposes and meaning; and in which sympathetic moods and intense social states are realized by conducting this social life, so far as possible, so that it will be subjected to the influences of what we may call in a broad way _art_.