motherhood fails to come simply by nature, it must be communicated both by schools and other quasi-educational agencies.1 Potential fathers need training also for parenthood, and this training must include some concept of industrial reorganization which will so shorten the industrial work day that time will be left for rational fatherhood. Third, the art of harmonious coöperation between home and school. This involves much already undertaken by so-called Parent and Teachers' Associations, Parent Leagues or Home and School Associations; by Mothers' Clubs; and, as in Council Bluffs, by Fathers' Clubs. Contacts are formed in some communities by visiting school teachers, home gardening teachers, visiting housekeepers, and school nurses, in addition to the ruder, more official visits of attendance and probation officers. Converting schools into social centers and making them the axes of neighborhood life seem to promise the most natural method of developing a zone of healthy contacts. A very genuine sort of cooperation might be developed through parental criticism of the schools, were that criticism genuine, wellinformed, constructive public opinion, and not ill-tempered resentment, prejudice, or petty revenge. In time Howard's vision of Colleges of Domestic Relations alongside of Law and Medicine may be realized. But if instruction for progressive home keeping is to reach the great ninety-nine per cent. of our home makers it should not be postponed till the college course; it must begin with the child's first entrance into the educational world. And as an increasing density of population forces us into more momentous contacts with our fellows, domestic education that is truly social will include deliberate training in thoughtfulness, consideration, coöperation in consumption, cleaning,

1E.g., The Federal Children's Bureau, The National Association for Prevention of Infant Mortality, Mothers' Clubs.

1

cooking, and the ability to put oneself in the other's place.1

I cannot prolong this account of social education: it has been done in detail and in authoritative manner by Professor John Dewey, Alexander Morgan, and others. The machinery for working out these hints is the concern of schoolmen. My problem ends with convincing them that social progress demands capacity to produce and willingness to think communitywise, and that education can aid in meeting the demand. If we believe theoretically with Felix Adler that a new moral and spiritual feudalism, the rightful vicarious spirit of feudalism purged of its false reverence for the few, can create social solidarity, we must also be prepared to place our faith in homely practical pedagogic devices for this training in service. Brother Barnabas infused the raw boys in his Lincolndale Farm with the social spirit by simply showing them that if they turned out clean certified milk they were coöperating to save infants in congested cities. This is the real meaning of leadership, namely, repaying "the unearned increment of social advantage." And it can be taught in schools just as it can be disseminated through Cavendish Associations or Agenda Clubs or samurai. But since it takes leaders to train leaders, schools must be able to attract first-rate men and women. To do this schools must become, if they are not already, social groups where the open, liberal, critical mind can flourish and breed its own kind. Moreover, they must offer certain appropriate prizes for specialized ability. Educational work has too long suffered from the medieval concept of education as charity and of teachers as celibate clerics living off doles from the benevo

1 Any one who has ever lived in an apartment house will agree that training is essential in such elementary habits as walking lightly, playing the piano at reasonable hours, speaking gently, coöperating in the use of the laundry, etc.

lent. Current business philosophy with its ideas of profit and of labor as a commodity (summarized in one of E. H. Harriman's favorite maxims, "Never pay a man all he is worth. If you do, there is no profit in him"), has also conspired to depress the economic position of the teacher. Perhaps business men and clerics and taxpayers have been right. Why waste good productive capital on a man who produces nothing of tangible value? So long as conformity to the mores is the prime demand, very little teaching, and that quite uninspired, is needed. Fourthrate men are good enough to pass on superstition, tradition, and colorless orthodoxy. But let education become dynamic, let it thrill with a vision of becoming the chariot horses and the chariot in which society shall urge itself forward to a better day, and men and women of first rank will arise and consecrate themselves to making the vision full reality. Without that vision "educational measurements," movements to increase "school efficiency," reforms of curricula, "child study," and all the rest of it are but the clattering of machinery grinding chaff; with it they become the tools for generating the self-criticism and creative energies essential to the process of producing an environment in which Social Man can flourish and rise higher and higher above Man the Clod.

CHAPTER XXXIV

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

THE long survey ended, it may be worth while to gather up the conclusions formulated along the way and to summarize and unify them. First, we learned to distinguish progress from mere social change or evolution, on the ground that progress means social change for the better, social amelioration according to some fairly definite standard of human values. We recognized man as distinctively the progressive animal, that is, potentially progressive; almost infinitely adaptive, and with a nature slowly but indefinitely modifiable. We concluded that modern man has risen above the primitive in social integration, in the content. and sweeping expression of his intelligence, and in the insurance aspects of life. This progress represents in the main a change from passive to active adaptation, from fitting into, to utilization and control of, his natural environment. Control tends to pass more and more from geography to intelligence. Mental progress has consisted rather in mind-content than in inherent capacity, rather in sharpness and breadth of intellectual perceptions and a keener sense of moral relations than in sharpness of sensory powers. It seems correct to say also that man has progressed morally, in the sense that moral standards have been refined and extended, while moral values have risen and grown more sensitive.

Is progress, then, natural and necessary? Is it true that the opposite is unthinkable, or that man and the world,

by definition, have an inherent tendency toward betterment? Perhaps they have; perhaps there is even a Prime Mover who communicates the eternal impulse to improve. But we have no tangible evidence of him in this capacity. Such a Power may be assumed pragmatically, but at present is beyond the scientific ken. On the other hand there is plenty of evidence that the opposite of progress is quite thinkable: philosophical pessimism denies it utterly, and many religions conceive humanity as dead in its transgressions; while from the historical angle the principle of retrogression or decadence is to be seen very active if not triumphant. We are forced to conclude that while evolution is universal, progress is rare. Mankind, whatever level it has reached, is always faced with the possibility of degeneration. No people is immune. There have been more failures than successes in the historic past, more savages than civilized peoples.

Progress, when it occurs, is not in a straight line, nor at a uniform rate, but is shifting and uneven, up and down, from one side to another, at varying speeds, but sometimes with cumulative momentum. In military parlance it resembles the nibbling, attrition methods of modern trench warfare rather than the more spectacular big drive.

Progress has not been on the whole conscious or definitely aimed at, since conscious rational life is only a fragment of mental life, and since social processes are so complex as to have defied any attempt at scientific formulation until recently. Probably whatever progress mankind has won is the result of a more or less instinctive struggle against losing any advantages by whatever means already won (individual or group conscience), and of an equally instinctive dissatisfaction with the old and reaching out for the new (ennui, curiosity), by the method of trial and error.