The growth of humanitarian sentiment has frequently enforced the improvement of labor and social conditions before improvements were made compulsory by law. And in that field of personal relations, which constitute so large a part of our daily life, our conduct is controlled almost entirely by the force of the public opinion with which we come in contact. There is much more courtesy and kindliness and coöperation manifested in the ordinary contacts of life of a modern city than is required, or ever could be secured by statute.
EDUCATION AS THE AGENCY OF SOCIAL CONTROL. There is enormous power in the habits of approval or disapproval to which we have, in our early days, been subjected by our parents, teachers, and companions. It is through education, in the broadest sense, that the young come to learn, and hence to practice, those actions which are socially approved, and by the same token to avoid those acts which are socially condemned. Through formal education the adult members of a society impress upon the plastic minds of the immature those habits of thought and action which are currently recognized as desirable. Education thus becomes the crucial instrument by which social standards are established and transmitted.
Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. The 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 passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, society could not survive.[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey; _Democracy and Education_, pp. 3-4.]
Society survives through education. Just as truly might it be said that the kind of society, art, culture, industry, religion, science that does survive depends on the kind of likes and dislikes that are through education made habitual in the young.
Education, however, may not only transmit existing standards, but can be used to inculcate newer and better expectations and ideals. In the adult, habits are already set physiologically, and kept rigid by the demands of economic life. In the young there is a "fairer and freer" field. Through education the immature may be taught to approve ways of action more desirable than those which have become habitual with their adult contemporaries. The children of to-day may acquire habits of action, feeling, and thought that will be their enlightened practice as the adults of to-morrow. All great social reformers, from Plato to our own contemporaries like Bertrand Russell, have seen in education, therefore, the chief instrument, as it is the chief problem, of social betterment. We may train the maturing generation to approve modes of behavior which the best minds of our time may have found reason to think desirable, but which could not be substituted immediately for the fixed habits of the already adult generation.