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.