Chapter XXV The Rise of Educational Sociology

In recent decades educational leaders have been thinking in sociological terms. In its experimental phases educational sociology constitutes a phase of applied sociology. The principles of modern educational sociology have a thousand sources.

Pestalozzi (1746–1827) may be considered a forerunner of current social theories of education. He was interested in humanity for humanity’s sake. Like St. Francis of Assisi, he lived with the poor in order that he might teach them to be thrifty and worthy citizens. In his Leonard and Gertrude, he described the life of the poor, and formulated an educational procedure for educating the poor. He was a lover of little children, of poor people, of anyone in trouble, of all humanity. He spoke in dignified terms of the function of a good woman, no matter how humble her station in life. Her first duty is to educate her children and to meet the needs of her family. She has, also, obligations to her neighbors and community. Others, seeing her constructive work, will be inspired and motivated to do likewise.

In opening an industrial school for the poor, Pestalozzi recognized that the poor have the least opportunities for development and the largest numbers of problems to solve,—therefore they are in the greatest need of educational advantages. He held that all the phases of human personality should be trained, and that there should be “a harmonious development of all human powers.” Hence, education is the greatest gift that anyone, rich or poor, can receive. In urging that the child should be educated in company with other children, that is, in groups, he took an attitude superior to that of Rousseau, but presaging that of Froebel.

Froebel (1782–1852), the founder of the kindergarten, considered little children “as plants in a garden.” He recognized the educative importance of the early years of life. He perceived the possibilities of teaching through the use of plays and games. He understood the “interests” of little children. His most important conception, perhaps, was his recognition of the gregarious impulses as an effective setting for the educative processes. While neo-Froebelians have sometimes turned all work into play and have neglected to train the child in doing some things in which he is not interested at the particular time, the utilization of the gregarious and play impulses as vital backgrounds for education is not unworthy. The evils in this connection are no greater than when the Montessori method is followed, with its emphasis upon a maximum of individual choice.

In Horace Mann (1796–1859), American education found a new social emphasis. Education in a democracy, according to Mann, should be public and open equally to all classes of people. Moreover, in a democracy, education is not a mere acquisition of knowledge; it is not concealed in college degrees as such; it is not aristocratic. It was Mann’s contention that education should be an actual training for rearing worthy families, for living an unselfish social life, for being a public spirited citizen in one’s daily activities.

Mann asserted that the common school is the bulwark of the nation. He believed that education should encourage true religion. He inaugurated the normal training school,—in support of his theory of specially trained teachers. His social philosophy is contained in a statement from his last public address: “Be ashamed to die until you have won a victory for humanity.”

During the intervening decades since the days of Horace Mann, the social conception of education has been assuming new practical phases. Professor John Dewey has pointed out that all communication is education; that the terms, common, community, and communication, possess more than a verbal relationship.XXV-1 Anything is educative which produces similar emotional and intellectual dispositions, that is, like ways of responding to stimuli. Societal life, hence, is unusually educative. Education consists of processes of self-development, of self-continuation, of social continuation. These processes are possible only on bases of common means of communication. It is these means, as Professor C. H. Cooley has indicated, which make even the powerful factors of suggestion and imitation so universal.

It is not the environment which directly implants certain desires in individuals.XXV-2 The environment sets up conditions which stimulate certain ways of acting. The child gets a real idea of a hat, not by seeing a hat, or by being told of its uses, but by actually using a hat. The social environment, in other words, forms “the mental and emotional disposition of behavior in individuals by engaging them in activities” that arouse various impulses, purposes, and produces certain consequences.XXV-3

As society becomes exceedingly complex, it is essential that society provide a simplified social environment through which the child may pass, in order that he may adjust himself the more quickly and easily to the complex societal environment. To this end the school serves a valuable purpose. However, in order to function best, the school must be a replica in as many ways as possible of real society.XXV-4

The special social environment, namely, the school, must simplify and arrange in an orderly way the dispositional factors it wishes to develop in children. It must present the existing social customs in purified and idealized forms. It must create a wider and better balanced environment for the young than they would have if they were not in school.

Imitation, to Dr. Dewey, is a less useful term than many social psychologists believe. What objectively is a process of imitation is subjectively a process of like response to like stimuli. The term imitation does not explain; it simply describes—objectively. The fundamental fact that the sociological student needs to keep in mind is that “persons being alike in structure respond in the same way to like stimuli.”XXV-5 This conception is similar to ideas that Professors Giddings and Cooley have elaborated. The societal significance of this interpretation can be stated best in terms of social control. The highest type of social control is that which plans for a common mental disposition, a common way of understanding objects, events, and acts, common sets of socially constructive stimuli.

Professor Dewey argues for a school life which fully connects theory and practice. While pragmatic, he emphasizes the necessity for a correct theory, but more particularly the combining of theory and practice—in the school life itself. In other words, anything which sets school life apart from actual life is a disutility; it is educationally harmful. Hence school life must include the actual occupations, nature study, and the like. It must relegate formal education to a secondary position. The moral atmosphere of the schoolroom must change from one primarily of discipline, even formal discipline, to one of co-operation.

School life, in other terms, is properly an embryonic community life. It is the business of the school to train each child into membership of a little community that is a counterpart of society at large, “saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction.”XXV-6 Professor Dewey would make the school a miniature society, fitting its members by their daily activities in the schools for normal membership in “a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.”

The literature on educational sociology is growing rapidly. Within recent years several books on educational sociology have appeared. In the list of the authors of these works are the names of O’Shea, Snedden, Smith, King, Clow, Betts, Dutton, and others of equal importance.XXV-7 Professor Walter R. Smith, for example, in applying sociological principles to educational work, contends that normal school graduates have been taught to look to psychology alone for the key to sound pedagogy, whereas sociology is perhaps an equally important key to effective teaching. Education is not entirely a matter of training the mind of the individual; it is also a process of acquainting the individual with the needs of society and of helping him to participate in improving the quality of societary life. Dr. Smith urges training not for citizenship, but training into citizenship.XXV-8

Inasmuch as men and women live and develop and work as members of groups, it is vital, according to Dr. Snedden, that children be taught as integral units of group life. It is sociology that must determine the aims of education.XXV-9 By sociological standards it has been proved that existing curricula in the United States are excessively individualistic in aim as well as in method. Their purpose has been to encourage the individual to win against, rather than with, his fellows. Our curricula provide self-culture studies and self-development studies, but few social culture and social development studies. The former are indispensable, but if not properly balanced by the latter they are positively dangerous.

The responsibilities of individuals for collective thinking and acting have never been taught to any degree in the schools, and yet these responsibilities, not only in time of war, but increasingly so in time of peace, must be assumed widely, else democracy itself will collapse. By training pupils in the principles of individual success primarily, the schools have turned out a generation of persons who are unready to meet the new world problems that are at hand, and who are unable to promote “constructive programs making for international co-operation and friendliness.”XXV-10

Custom, not social needs, has too often controlled school curricula. The Anabasis and Caesar’s Commentaries, although splendid bits of literary composition, “are about as significant to the realities of a nineteenth or twentieth century as bows and arrows would be in modern warfare, or Roman galleys in the naval contests of tomorrow.”XXV-11 The study of forgotten tongues and antiquated fragments of literature falls far short of training twentieth century youths for the conscious co-operative direction of the social forces of the future.

Vocational education is not all-sufficient. Youth must be taught to be socially and morally efficient—no less than physically and vocationally.XXV-12 In addition to the current emphasis upon vocational education, attention must be given to a moral education in the schools that can produce in individuals the moral character required to meet the needs of a highly developed democracy.

Educational sociology has viewed with alarm certain recent tendencies in vocational guidance. It has supported heartily the plans for giving every child an occupational training and of enabling him to earn his own living. On the other hand, it has deplored the idea that a vocation or earning a living is an end in itself. It has insisted that the main reason for teaching a boy a trade is that the boy may have a larger opportunity for developing his personality and for serving society.

Likewise, educational sociology has often looked askance at scientific management, or the movement for educating all workingmen to the point of highest productive efficiency. Such a training has frequently produced a maximum increase in profits for those who have promoted it and a minimum of increase in wages for the workers, besides tending to turn the latter into mere machines, instead of into human leaders with increased capacities for enjoyment and spiritual service.

The studies in all school curricula must be evaluated in terms of social worth. For example, what is the purpose of teaching history? Is it to give the pupil a chronology of dates and a catalogue of ignoble kings and bloody battles, or is it to give the pupil the meaning of social evolution, social progress, social inheritances, the rise of social needs?XXV-13

Educational sociology holds the theory that training for unselfish social living is as important as training for individual pecuniary success. It is engaged at the present time in working out techniques for introducing every member of the public schools to the sociological viewpoint. The names under which such techniques appear is immaterial, whether as community civics, American history studies, elementary social science, or elementary sociology. The next few decades will undoubtedly be marked by the rapid spread of educational sociology.