First part

The parts of a mechanism work with a utmost of cooperativeness for a common result, but they do not form a community. If, however, they were all aware of the common end and all interested in it so that they regulated their specific activity in view of it, then they would form a community. But this would involve communication. Each would have to know what the other was about and would have to have some way of keeping the other knowledgeable as to his own reason and progress. Consensus demands message. We are thus compelled to be familiar with that within even the most social group there are many relations who are not as yet social. A large number of human relationships in any social group are still upon the machine-like plane. Individuals use one another so as to get desired results, without reference to the emotional and intellectual disposition and permission of those used. Such uses express physical superiority, or superiority of position, skill, technological ability, and command of tools, mechanical or fiscal. So far as the relations of parent and child, teacher and student, employer and employee, governor and governed, remain upon this level, they form no true social group, no matter how intimately their respective activities touch one another. Giving and taking of orders modifies action and results, but does not of itself effect a sharing of purposes, a communication of interests. Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing; otherwise you resort to expletives and ejaculations. The experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated. To formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would see it, considering what points of contact it has with the life of another so that it may be got into such form that he can appreciate its meaning. Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of anther's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience. All communication is like art. It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social, or vitally shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power.

Second part

In last account, then, not only does community life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very procedure of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought. A man really living alone (alone mentally as well as physically) would have little or no time to reflect upon his past experience to extract its net meaning. The inequality of achievement between the mature and the young not only necessitates teaching the young, but the necessity of this teaching gives an immense stimulus to reducing experience to that order and form which will render it most easily communicable and hence most usable. The Place of Formal Education. There is, accordingly, a marked difference between the education which everyone gets from living with others, as long as he really lives instead of just continuing to subsist, and the deliberate educating of the young. In the former case the education is incidental; it is natural and significant, but it is not the state reason of the friendship. While it may be said, without exaggeration, that the measure of the worth of any social institution, economic, domestic, political, legal, religious, is its effect in enlarging and improving knowledge; yet this effect is not a part of its unique motive, which is limited and more immediately practical. Religious associations began, for example, in the desire to secure the favor of overruling powers and to ward off evil influences; family life in the desire to gratify appetites and secure family perpetuity; systematic labor, for the most part, because of enslavement to others, etc. Only progressively was the by-product of the institution, its effect upon the quality and extent of conscious life, noted, and only more gradually still was this effect considered as a instruction factor in the conduct of the organization. Even today, in our industrial life, separately from certain values of industriousness and thrift, the intellectual and emotional reaction of the forms of human association under which the world's work is carried on receives little notice as compared with physical output. But in dealing with the little, the fact of association itself as an immediate human fact, gains in importance. While it is easy to ignore in our contact with them the effect of our acts upon their disposition, or to subordinate that educative effect to some external and tangible result, it is not so easy as in dealing with adults. The need of training is too obvious; the pressure to accomplish a change in their attitude and habits is too urgent to leave this penalty wholly out of account. Since our chief business with them is to enable them to share in a common life we cannot help considering whether or not we are forming the powers which will secure this ability. If humanity has made some headway in realizing that the final value of every institution is its distinctively human effect -- its effect upon conscious experience -- we may well believe that this lesson has been learned largely from side to side dealings with the young. We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of education -- that of direct instruction or schooling. In undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching and training.

Third part

Savage groups mostly rely for instilling needed nature into the young upon the same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with initiation service by which the youth are inducted into full social association. For the most part, they depend upon children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their moving set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing. In part, this sharing is direct, taking part in the occupations of adults and thus serving an apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the theatrical plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups and thus learn to know what they are like. To savages it would seem preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on in order that one might learn. But as people advances, the gap between the capacities of the young and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly hard except in the case of the less advanced occupations. Much of what adults do is so remote in space and in meaning that playful simulation is less and less adequate to reproduce its spirit. Ability to share effectively in adult activities thus depends upon a prior preparation given with this end in view. Intentional agencies -- schools--and explicit material  studies  are devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special group of persons. Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the resources and achievements of a complex society. It also opens a way to a kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young, if they were left to pick up their training in informal association with others, since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered. But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit, whether directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital.

Four parts

These characters compensate, in some measure, for the thinness of available opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes remote and dead -- abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of depreciation. What accumulated information exists in low grade societies is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within urgent daily interests. But in an advanced civilization much which has to be learned is stored in symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and objects. Such material is relatively technical and superficial. Taking the ordinary standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. For this measure is connection with practical concerns. Such material exists in a world by itself, assimilated to normal customs of thought and expression. There is the standing hazard that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life- experience. The permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view. Those which have not been carried over into the structure of social life, but which remain largely matters of technical information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy.

Five parts

Hence one of the weightiest evils with which the attitude of teaching has to cope is the method of custody a proper balance between the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional, modes of education. When the acquiring of in order and of technical intellectual skill do not influence the formation of a social disposition, ordinary vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far, creates only "sharps" in learning -- that is, egoistic specialists. To avoid a split between what men deliberately know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have engrossed it in the configuration of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes an increasingly delicate task with every development of special schooling. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being. Since this continuance can be protected only by steady renewals, life is a self-renewing process. What nutrition and reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social life? This education consists primarily in transmission through communication. Message is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common control. It modifies the disposition of both the parties who partake in it. That the ulterior significance of every mode of human friendship lies in the contribution which it makes to the improvement of the quality of experience is a fact most easily recognized in dealing with the immature. That is to say, while every social arrangement is educative in effect, the educative effect first becomes an important part of the reason of the association in connection with the association of the older with the younger. As societies become more multifaceted in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases. As formal teaching and training grow in extent, there is the hazard of creating an undesirable tear between the experience gained in more direct associations and what is acquired in school. This danger was never greater than at the present time, on account of the rapid growth in the last few centuries of knowledge and technical modes of skill.