EDUCATION. The subject of Education is treated in this introduction under the following heads : I. Educational Theory. II. Psychology and Ancillary Sciences. III. Science of Education. IV. Educational Experiments, followed by sections on History and National Systems.
Definition.—Many definitions have been given of the word "education," but underlying them all is the conception that it denotes an attempt on the part of the adult members of a human society to shape the development of the coming generation in accordance with its own ideals of life. It is true that the word has not infrequently been used in wider senses than this. For example, J. S. Mill included under it ,everything which "helps to shape the human being"; and, with some poetic licence, we speak of the education of a people or even of the whole human race. But all such usages are rhetorical extensions of the commonly accepted sense of the term, which includes, as an essential element, the idea of deliberate direction and training. No doubt, all education is effected through the experiences of the educated, but it does not follow that all experiences are educative. Whether an experience is part of an individual's education or not, depends upon whether its form has been arranged by those who are concerned with the training of him whose experience it is. It follows that an educa tion may be good or bad, and that its goodness or badness will be relative to the virtue, wisdom and intelligence of the educator. It is good only when it aims at the right kind of product, and when the means it adopts are well adapted to secure the intended result and are applied intelligently, consistently and persistently.
Education is, thus, a definitely personal work, and will vary between wide extremes of effectiveness and worth in any given society. For in all times and places there are wide differences in virtue, wisdom and capacity among those who have in their hands the care and nurture of the young. Yet, despite these dif ferences every teacher expresses, more or less perfectly and clearly, the current conception and outlook of his age and country. The first essential for successful educative effort is, then, that the community as a whole should have a true estimate of the nature and value of education.
Assuming, however, a well-inspired community and teachers capable of fulfilling its will, it is not possible to say, except in most general terms, how it will educate its children. For although looking at the individual to be educated, we may say with Plato that the aim of education is "to develop in the body and in the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are ca pable," this leaves quite undecided the nature and form of that beauty and perfection, and on such points there has never been universal agreement at any one time, while successive ages have shown marked differences of estimate. Individual beauty and per fection are shown, and only shown, in actual life, and such life has to be lived under definite conditions of time, place, culture, religion, national aspirations and mastery over material conditions. Perfection of life, then, in the Athens of the age of Plato would show a very different form from that which it would take in the London, Paris or New York of to-day. Hence, so far as any con ception of education can give guidance to the actual process it must be relative in every way to the state of development of the society in which it is given.
Education and the Community.—There is one respect in which the constitution and general outlook of a community are especially likely to affect the character of its education. Educa tion aims at conserving and perfecting the life of the community, but that life is nothing other than the life of its individual mem bers. In an ideal community there would be complete identifica tion between the interests of every unit and of the whole ; but history records no ideal communities. In practice there are always divergences, leading to exploitation here and sacrifice of develop ment there. Societies in different times and places differ from one another, then, in their degree of success in reconciling the in terests of the whole with the claims of individual development, or in their willingness to subordinate the latter to the former; and their educational conceptions naturally reflect these differences. The primitive tendency in communities is towards the complete subordination of the individual, but in the western peoples that tendency has, since the advent of Christianity, been checked and modified by an increasing valuation of the individual life. It is an apparently paradoxical, but easily intelligible, fact that the World War, by its startling revelation of the immense range, the intimate closeness and the vast complexity of modern social organization, actually stimulated the reaction against the primitive tendency and the educational ideas which expressed it. Educational theory must always be more or less "paidocentric"—that is, must focus its attention in the first place upon the single child and upon the gifts and powers which make him educable ; but in its recent trend it goes beyond that, and tends to regard the perfection of the individual as the proper end of educational efforts. This does not imply a disregard of social claims or point towards social disinte gration ; the view is that the best forms of communal life will be fostered by an education which regards social activities as a neces sary medium for the development of the higher stages of individual life rather than something to which the claims of individual devel opment must be subordinated. This conception, held with more or less conscious clearness, has guided much of the typical develop ment which, prominent in America (see EDUCATION : Science of and History of Education, United States) and to a less extent in Britain before the war, has since 1918 proceeded apace in most civilized countries.
The most striking sign of the change of view here in question is afforded by the reorganization of public education now going on in the more progressive lands. Its distinctive feature is the re placement of the old conception, in which elementary and sec ondary schools corresponded mainly to social stratification, by the idea that children of all classes should have the opportunity of a primary education, designed to meet the needs of childhood, followed by a post-primary or secondary education adjusted to the needs of adolescence. In the United States this idea is em bodied in the system of primary schools (q.v.) followed by junior and senior high schools (q.v.) on the "six-three-three" principle. (See ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN THE U.S. and SEC