EDUCATIONAL REVIEW

FEBRUARY, 1918

I

SOCIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES FUNDAMENTAL TO PEDAGOGICAL METHOD

The problem of change and identity has puzzled the minds of metaphysicians from the earliest days of Greek thought. How can anything change and yet remain the same? This problem has been verbally solved, sometimes by denying the reality of change and reducing it to mere seeming, sometimes by a similar denial of identity.

Metaphysical problems parallel and reflect the practical problems of life; and therein lies, no doubt, their unfailing interest. Thus the problem of change and identity is one of the deepest problems of actual life. Its biological aspect is: How can nature prepare an organism to adapt itself to an environment that may either change or remain the same? This is the perennial problem of life, whether in a physical or a social environment; and the fallacy of ignoring either contingency is very liable to be the accepted solution. It is the purpose of this chapter to show that such is the outstanding error of the Zeitgeist, and that the dominant philosophy and especially the dominant pedagogical theory of the times makes little or no effort to correct the error.

For a stable, changeless environment nature's device is an automatism. The adjustment is reflex, and all goes well so long as external conditions remain just as they were. And the reflex is a real biological entity without which life would be impossible. It sounds like the demonstration of an axiom

to emphasize this fact. That our hearts are beating continuously, that the sunrise brings the day, that air pressure on the surface of the body keeps the blood vessels from bursting, are none the less fundamental phenomena because they tend to be forgotten. Likewise the fact that adjustment depends on reflexes. But when the environment changes an organism equipt only with reflexes is lost. Nature's problem then is to prepare for adjustment to a changing environment. One solution to this problem is variation. Variations make possible the change of the species to meet the changing environment. But this does not provide for the changes that confront the individual during his lifetime. Such changes nature provides for thru conscious intelligence. Consciousness, and in its highest ranges, creative intelligence, enables the individual to act in different ways than his reflexes provide for. Thus a problematical situation is solved and the organism successfully adjusted. The successful adjustment achieved, it tends upon repetition to harden into a new reflex. Thus intelligence veneers the instincts over with a mass of more or less plastic habits. The human organism, accordingly, adjusts itself to a stable environment thru habit, and to a changing and problematical environment thru intelligence: a principle so elementary that it hardly needs to be stated here except to launch the argument.

The utility of habit in individual life is evident to every student of psychology, tho it is precisely the psychologists who often seem most prone to overlook its function in social organization. Habit insures efficiency. It can guarantee a perfectly accurate response instead of an awkward, blundering one. This is true in work. The thousand and one skills of the daily round are due to habit. This advantage is exprest in numerous homely proverbs, such as: practise makes perfect, order is heaven's first law, a place for everything and everything in its place. Without the efficiency derived from thoroly habituated skills no person nor people succeeds. The wonderful German efficiency is the standing object lesson of what system, order, technique-die Deutsche Gründlichkeit-can do.

Habit is as essential in morals as in work. It is the moral capital on the income of which one can live a right life without effort. Even in our thought processes the element of habit makes its significant contribution. The proportion of our activities that are thus under the control of habit is large, indeed quite amazing: rising from bed, dressing, eating, walking, speaking, reading; the housekeeper's work in kitchen and chamber, the farmer's work in barn and field, the specialized piece work of mine and factory, driving the automobile, plying the pen or manipulating the typewriter; the arts of music, oratory, surgery; the managerial problems already familiar to the administrator: all these things habit controls. In what an overwhelming percentage of one's daily round one would be helpless without habit is hardly ever sufficiently recognized. This is because the habits themselves are not noticed, being below the threshold of consciousness. The more adequately we realize this fact the more sound will be our social and educational philosophy.

It follows, then, that a second function of habit is to free the attention so that it may devote itself to the problems in the situation. For instance, only the musician who has thoroly automatized his technique can devote thought to the interpretation of his music. The more completely one has the routine details of life reduced to habit the more effectively he can apply himself to the real problems that arise. The successful administrator is not the one who attends to routine details himself, but who instead turns them over to subordinates whom he can depend upon. He is then free to push forward the apex of his policy. His subordinates are, so to speak, the habits of his office force; without them he wastes his energies on detail.

The function of intelligence is to adjust one to the changes in the environment. When an entirely new situation arises habit leaves one helpless. It is only as one can analyze the situation, solve the problem involved, and formulate a new procedure adapted to the new condition that one can meet the crisis. But the solution of new situations that arise of their own accord is by no means the entire function of intelli

gence. The "will to live" sends us out in actual search after changes, which if we do not find we proceed to make. "We do things not only because we have a sensation, but also in order to make a sensation." In this way we create and secure that variety and harmony so essential to adequate self-realization. Without discrimination, initiative, creative intelligence, individual life would be narrow and monotonous, and social progress out of the question.

It needs to be remembered, however, that the guidance of the intellect is not always safe. Out of many variations but few prove an aid to survival. The world has to produce a hundred freaks to get one genius. Change is not necessarily progress by any means; it may be mere caprice. Only a few plans work, the rest turn out to be dreams. Organizations may multiply with no result but duplication, conflict and confusion. Yet social evolution is possible only thru change.

That there should be a struggle, in both life and theory, between habit and inventive intelligence is as inevitable as the metaphysical debate about change and identity. Habit also is not always a safe guide. It seizes upon wrong responses, casts them into permanent form, and makes us their victims. It resists change when change is necessary or desirable. Thus it often narrows, stagnates and enslaves life. Whereupon some Heraclitic rises up to deny the utility of habit altogether; and life, its centripetal tether broken, flies off on the tangent of license, caprice, laziness and inefficiency. On the other hand, inventive intelligence has its dangers. It conceives absurd ventures; it forgets the lessons of experience and singes its wings again and again in the same fires; it is silenced by desire, and so deserts us when most we need it. Then some Eleatic comes to the front and denies its trustworthiness altogether; whereupon life winds itself up tight to the post of habit. Obviously the practical problem of life is to discover a just balance between habit and deliberative choice-a solution which most of us miss, unfortunately, either at one side or the other.

Society, like the individual, presents the two aspects of fixity and change. All such uniformities as customs, insti

tutions, laws, morals, manners, conventionalities represent the habit side of the social life. In fact, these are but the social projections, so to speak, of individual habits. These social uniformities exist precisely because all the individual members of society have the same habits; otherwise they could not exist at all. On the other hand, the intellectual aspects of individual life are paralleled by the adaptive changes of social life; for just as habits are changed by discriminative attention, so customs, laws, institutions and the like, are changed by discussion, debate and conflict. Sometimes such changes occur without serious friction; sometimes they are accompanied by the most tragic violence. A society in which the habitual and customary predominates is static: it stands still; change is the rare exception. A static society is naturally institutional, inasmuch as the established customs and institutions dominate the individual, pressing him into conformity to their demands. On the other hand, a dynamic society, in which change predominates, is inherently individualistic, because the opinions and wishes of individuals figure conspicuously in the discussions and debates which cause the changes.

Seldom does civilization secure a normal balance of these two tendencies; the pendulum swings either to one extreme or the other. The whole history of mankind is a struggle between individualism and institutionalism, first one and then the other in excess. The durable empires of the ancient east and the long periods of imperial Rome and the imperial Church were eras of static institutionalism. There have been but three conspicuously dynamic crises in the world's recorded history: the Periclean age of Greece, the epoch of the Renaissance and Humanism, and the period in which we ourselves are living. As a matter of fact the last two periods blend into one, culminating in the present age, which may eventually be rated as a period of more radical and far-reaching changes than any other historic period.

Just as the Renaissance inherited the spirit of ancient Greece, so the modern era has inherited and augmented the Renaissance spirit. From the fourteenth to the twentieth