At four step

Civilization exists from side to side a process of broadcast quite as much as biological life. This 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 transitory out of the group life to those who are pending into it, social life could not survive. If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a job directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity. If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the death of each of its ingredient members is as certain as if an epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes likely through transmission of ideas and practices the constant reweaving of the communal fabric. Yet this renewal is not automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves without the guidance and succor of others, they could not acquire the rudimentary abilities necessary for physical existence. The young of human beings compare so poorly in unique efficiency with the young of many of the lower animals that even the powers needed for physical substantiation have to be acquired under tuition. How much more, then, is this the case with respect to all the technological, artistic, scientific, and moral achievements of humanity! Education and Communication. So obvious, indeed, is the necessity of teaching and learning for the continued existence of a society that we may seem to be dwelling unduly on a axiom. But justification is found in the fact that such emphasis is a means of getting us away from an unduly scholastic and formal notion of education. Schools are, indeed, one important method of the transmission which forms the dispositions of the immature; but it is only one means, and, compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means.