Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. The transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling, from the older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, society could not survive.[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey; Democracy and Education, pp. 3-4.]
Society survives through education. Just as truly might it be said that the kind of society, art, culture, industry, religion, science that does survive depends on the kind of likes and dislikes that are through education made habitual in the young.
Education, however, may not only transmit existing standards, but can be used to inculcate newer and better expectations and ideals. In the adult, habits are already set physiologically, and kept rigid by the demands of economic life. In the young there is a "fairer and freer" field. Through education the immature may be taught to approve ways of action more desirable than those which have become habitual with their adult contemporaries. The children of to-day may acquire habits of action, feeling, and thought that will be their enlightened practice as the adults of to-morrow. All great social reformers, from Plato to our own contemporaries like Bertrand Russell, have seen in education, therefore, the chief instrument, as it is the chief problem, of social betterment. We may train the maturing generation to approve modes of behavior which the best minds of our time may have found reason to think desirable, but which could not be substituted immediately for the fixed habits of the already adult generation.
Social activity, and the social motive. In our analysis of the social nature of man we have, thus far, been dealing with his specific social tendencies. But apart from these, or rather as an outgrowth of these, men exhibit what Professor Woodworth has well described as a gift for "learning" social behavior.
Possessing, as he eminently does, the capacity for group activity, man is interested in such activity. He needs no ulterior motive to attract him to it. It is play for him.... The social interest is part and parcel of the general objective interest of man.[1]
[Footnote 1: Woodworth: Dynamic Psychology, pp. 202, 203.]
In other words, the activity of man as an individual is not simply deflected a little by man's native gregariousness, sympathy, and susceptibility to praise and blame. Rather, group activity becomes to the gregarious human, born into an environment where he must act with and among other human beings, an interesting and exciting activity in and for itself. Men enjoy working in a group or a society for joint and common objects just as they enjoy food or musical composition or golf.
The social motive is of the same order as the musical or mathematical motive. Just as one who has the musical gift takes to music naturally and finds it interesting for its own sake, so the socially gifted individual understands other people, sees the possibilities of collective activity, and the ways of coördinating it, and enters into such doings with gusto.... The social gift is a capacity for learning social behavior. Individuals differ in degree in the social gift, as in other capacities; some are capable of becoming creative artists or inventors along social lines.[1]
[Footnote 1: Woodworth: Dynamic Psychology, p. 203.]