One other obvious end of education may be named along with the imparting of information and the development of capacity to use the mind and the body. That is the forming of good physi cal, mental, and moral habits. The economic reasoning just now referred to is a conscious and sometimes a slow and painful process. But after a while, if the processes of our reasoning are sound, a particular judgment has been formed so clearly, or so often, or is so buttressed by authority, that it is accepted as a moral judgment. It obtains an ethical sanction. The conscious reasoning process is no longer necessary. Time is saved. Effort is saved. Wear and tear of tissue and vital energy are saved. No doubt honesty was once the best policy. There may be borderlands where it is so still. But for us and our children honesty has ceased to be a policy. It is an instinct, a habit of mind, an economic judgment so often made, so clearly established, so authoritatively attested, that it offends rather than helps us to allude to its material advantages. The farther we can go in this direction of economizing the reasoning process, the more instinctive and immediate right courses of conduct can become, the more we shall be able to extend our field of operations, the more complete will be our conquest of nature, and the more pro ductive will be the actual expenditure of energy in satisfying the higher and more complex wants.
This restatement of the elementary aims of education may seem to specialists in the theory of education so obvious as to be trite, or so incomplete as to be fantastic. The school system to the social
economist is an instrument like any other of social construction. Education conceived as the means of carrying civilization forward, as the conscious link between the generations of workers and users of wealth, must do at least these things: Pass on the information; make the mind and body fit instru ments of satisfying the wants of man; encourage those habits and instincts which economize power and promote the social welfare. Put in terms of social problems, the school must aid in preventing poverty by making men more efficient; in prevent ing disease by making men strong and well; in preventing crime by making men law-abiding in spirit and instinctively aware of the rights of others; in preventing violence by inoculating against self righteousness and brutality.
Childhood is the time of life in which the school has its great chance. Education, we cannot too often repeat, does not end then. Education, like industry and art and religion and friendly inter course, is really one of the permanent and serious interests of life, constantly going on under changing forms, until the life of the spirit, whether gradually or suddenly, is lost to our ken. But in childhood there is hardly any rival interest; for play and occupation, art and religion, home life and school life, are in childhood all a part of education. The school, although not exhausting its content, is the institutional embodiment of this idea of education.