Sunday, February 23, 2014

Obama White House calls for the formation of a tyrannical government in the wake of Ukraine protests

The White House released the following statement:
The United States is closely monitoring developments in Ukraine. We have consistently advocated a de-escalation of violence, constitutional change, a coalition government, and early elections, and today’s developments could move us closer to that goal. The unshakeable principle guiding events must be that the people of Ukraine determine their own future. We welcome constructive work in the Rada and continue to urge the prompt formation of a broad, technocratic government of national unity. We welcome former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s release from a prison hospital today, and we wish her a speedy recovery as she seeks the appropriate medical treatment that she has long needed and sought.

We continue to urge an end to violence by all sides and a focus on peaceful, democratic dialogue, working pursuant to Ukraine’s constitution and through its institutions of government. Going forward, we will work with our allies, with Russia, and with appropriate European and international organizations to support a strong, prosperous, unified, and democratic Ukraine. Going forward, the Ukrainian people should know that the United States deeply values our long-standing ties with Ukraine and will support them as they pursue a path of democracy and economic development.

Hmmm..... How many people realize this is an open call for a dictatorship? Right here:

We welcome constructive work in the Rada and continue to urge the prompt formation of a broad, technocratic government of national unity.

"Technocracy" is an obscure term for some, so I would like to educate you on it. The word "Technocracy" was first coined by a progressive named William Henry Smyth, in a series of articles by that same name. You can see that series of articles here. These articles first appeared in The Gazette in 1919, and here is how the Gazette editor described the series:

The author shows that the forces of the four great human instincts to live, to make, to take, to control are as essential in modern social life as at any time in the past. But all of these urges in a living democracy should be controlled without being controlled.

This series lays out the Technocratic Principles, and in a lot of ways they are a commentary on the Wilsonian government. By collecting these essays and publishing them into this book, Smyth essentially pushes out what can accurately be called the Technocratic Manifesto. While it is true that the quote above was not written by Smyth himself, it was written by the Gazette editor. We know Smyth agreed with it and we can prove this in two ways:

First, Smyth would've seen the original Gazette publications before final publication.

Second, Smyth would've seen them again when he collected the essays and published this book.

As to whether or not the description is accurate, take note of these two things from the first essay:

First: The need of a National Purpose; a purpose based upon peace and rational Human Development; a purpose as inspiring and as unifying as War for Democracy, and as high as our highest Ideals of Life.

Second: The need of a Supreme National Council of Scientists supreme over all other National Institutions to advise and instruct us how best to Live, and how most efficiently to realize our Individual and our National Purpose and Ideals.

That certainly sounds like control without control to me.(No matter what you may think, "control without control" is not an oxymoron) We know by reading other progressive authors that they desire to use the regulatory state to achieve their purpose.

I would like to point out to you how he ends the book: (See the last page, page 40)

IS THE EFFICIENT CONTROL OF MEN MORE DESIRABLE THAN FREEDOM?

That's tyranny. A technocracy is nothing more than despotic rule cloaked in "merit" and "expertise".

Note that Smyth himself puts this into caps, I didn't do that. This was an important question for Smyth, because he left that as the last thing. He left this as the final thought, the thing he wanted the reader to most consider and ponder. Is this "freedom thing" really all that valuable? Let's just put the experts in charge. If the little people - if the serfs don't like it well that's just too bad, we are the experts. We know how to run your lives.

http://tinyurl.com/k72xjgc

Saturday, February 15, 2014

John Dewey's propaganda by deed: The School as a Social Center

The "propaganda of the deed" or propagandas by deed have traditionally been an anarchist tool - and for violent purposes....... or have they? That's what we have been told for a long time, but why can't other activities by various statist oriented groups also be deeds intended to make a point - even non violently? I think they are and I think they have.

In the 1920's, the New York State Legislature put together a joint committee to investigate seditious activities, and the result of all this was a work titled "Revolutionary Radicalism". I actually think this does a disservice, because (as I will show below) revolutionaries are not the only ones who can use propaganda by deeds. Evolutionaries can also use it. In "Revolutionary Radicalism", the following is written: (page 1521)

In addition to the extensive propaganda by speech and writings in periodicals, newspapers, and other printed forms, there is a widespread propaganda by what may be termed deed, embracing within it, (a) bomb outrages; (b) direct action, including the general strike; (c) sabotage, and (d) mass demonstrations.

Likewise, in his "Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis", Mikhail Bakunin wrote the following:

All of us must now embark on stormy revolutionary seas, and from this very moment we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.

Other anarchist authors have written very similar things.

So the propaganda by deed is more potent and irresistible than the pamphlet, the leaflet, the speech, or the book. So then when John Dewey proposes to make the The School as a Social Center, how can anybody with a straight face make the case that this is not a propaganda by deed? Consider the following three things: (Not numbered to convey a numerical order of events)

(1) Progressives use government to take over the schools.

(2) Eventually, the school is made the social center.

(3) This makes government the social center.

Now, consider the dual use of the word "center". See, the words is where the progressives always get you. This blog post would not have worked in the year 1927 or 1942, for example, but here we are, with 100~ years of progressivism behind us to examine and learn from. The dual use of the word has already been employed - the progressives have not just made schools a social center, over the last century they have made schools the social center. Schools are held up as god-like institutions. The epitome of clean wind driven snow.

John Dewey in his "Schools as a Social Center" even makes the case that its about socialism, so eventually they wanted to make it 100% state run one way or another. It's just that we have seen the entire agenda be planted, blossom, and bear fruit - because here we are 100 years later.

So what kind of propaganda by deed happens every single day by millions of parents with their children in thousands of living rooms across the country? "Sure, little Johnny, you can go off to government school. You are safe there."

Government will take care of you - how is that for propaganda by deed? Not only is the very essence of the institution itself a propaganda by deed just by its mere existence, because you have turned government into the social center, but now the progressives have by extension turned parents into foot soldiers to spread the gospel of progressivism. Consider this, in his book "The New Democracy", Walter Weyl makes the following point: (page 166)

It is a revolution brought about by and through the common run of men, who abjure heroics, who sleep soundly and make merry, who "talk" politics and prize-fights, who obey alarm clocks, time-tables and a thousand petty but revered social conventions. They do not know that they are revolutionists.

Let's take a moment to consider the revered social convention of just wanting to be left alone, just wanting to live your life and watch your kids grow up? Somewhere in this mix is the daily revered social convention of sending your children off to school.

Those foot soldiers I just spoke of, they do not know that they are revolutionists.

John Dewey himself makes it clear that he viewed Horace Mann as the "Patron Saint" of progressive education, so then what did this "patron saint" actually write? Among other things he wrote this:

We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause

How do parents give hostages to the cause? The Schools as a Social Center - the Center of the universe. They do not know that they are revolutionists.

One of the largest pieces of propaganda by deed in modern history.

http://tinyurl.com/pduy52g

Saturday, February 8, 2014

If Christian schools teach love of Christ, what do government schools teach love of?

Its just a thought piece. I am sure I could cite hundreds, if not thousands of examples of topics removed from public government schools in favor of topics more sympathetic to social justice. As could you. There is a very long train of abuses here.

For topics on my mind in this context, I recently posted text of the 1100 Charter of Liberties, in which King Henry plainly stated that it is oppressive to buy back your inheritance - the death tax.

Also, I am currently recording the full text of the Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, here - How big of an impact would knowledge like this be to the race relations in this country that the progressives are constantly ripping to shreds?

And how much safer would all of ours' family's inheritance be if more people just knew that this was a battle that was already previously won.(then lost again)

Seems plain as day to me what government schools teach love of - government.

What does surprise me though is when people say "The public schools are out of control!" They are? By what metric, you mean Common Core? Your children are hostages to their cause. Government schools are doing exactly what government schools are supposed to do, become the Social Centre. In case it gets overlooked, if schools are the Social Centre, that makes government the social centre.

http://tinyurl.com/me2tewr

Thursday, February 6, 2014

In 1100 AD, The People knew that the death tax was oppressive

I want to introduce you to a magnificent document that far too few people have read. But before I introduce it to you, I need to remind you of something written in Federalist #84, that English history is American history. Hamilton specifically sites several(major) English documents that are important pre-cursors to the US Constitution.

The earliest of said documents in that chain is the magnificent 1100 Charter of Liberties. Hamilton cites Magna Carta as the earliest, but the M.C. is really reliant upon the 1100 Charter as a precedent. In this Charter of Liberties, you will see, among other things, the second entry:

I take away all the bad customs by which the kingdom of England was unjustly oppressed; which bad customs I here set down in part:

2. If any of my barons, earls, or others who hold of me shall have died, his heir shall not buy back his land as he used to do in the time of my brother, but he shall relieve it by a just and lawful relief. Likewise also the men of my barons shall relieve their lands from their lords by a just and lawful relief.

That's what the inheritance tax is, you purchase your inheritance back from the government. The death tax. When senior members of your family die, their possessions pass to their actual owner - the government. But you can buy them back..... for a price. How can people not see this as oppressive?

Now in modern America, it is progressives who foster and defend this oppressive behavior. People say they favor "progress" in a general sense, but knowledge of history is what will allow us to rightfully describe(not paint or falsely attack) progressives for what they truely want to do: make progress back toward tyranny. We have not made "progress" toward more liberty, we are making "progress" toward all powerful government. I encourage you to read the document for yourself. This is a battle that our forefathers claimed victory on. At one time, enough people new this information to force a king to recognize it. Where we have come since - that's not progress.

But none of the things that have happened over the last century have happened suddenly. They have happened one step at a time - that is how the progressives are progressingamerica.

(side note: We can argue whether or not the king is saying that death taxes are oppressive only for nobility - or for all, but he is still saying it is oppressive either way. If it's oppressive for nobility, then certainly death taxes are oppressive for serfs.)

Now keep in mind, it is generally well known that King Henry made concessions with these. In other words, he is recognizing the belief that was held by the people. This is not about the government, its about the people.

http://tinyurl.com/nr2stuy

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

English history is American history - Alexander Hamilton and John Adams

There is an important piece of information contained in Federalist #84 that I would like to highlight:
It has been several times truly remarked that bills of rights are, in their origin, stipulations between kings and their subjects, abridgements of prerogative in favor of privilege, reservations of rights not surrendered to the prince. Such was MAGNA CHARTA, obtained by the barons, sword in hand, from King John. Such were the subsequent confirmations of that charter by succeeding princes. Such was the Petition of Right assented to by Charles I., in the beginning of his reign. Such, also, was the Declaration of Right presented by the Lords and Commons to the Prince of Orange in 1688, and afterwards thrown into the form of an act of parliament called the Bill of Rights. It is evident, therefore, that, according to their primitive signification, they have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people, and executed by their immediate representatives and servants. Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain every thing they have no need of particular reservations. "WE, THE PEOPLE of the United States, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Here is a better recognition of popular rights, than volumes of those aphorisms which make the principal figure in several of our State bills of rights, and which would sound much better in a treatise of ethics than in a constitution of government.

It is this paragraph which makes me hold Alexander Hamilton in much higher regard than most that I know who think somewhat like I do. Yes, Alexander Hamilton is arguing against the Bill of Rights. But examine closely what he says:

Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain every thing they have no need of particular reservations.

In other words, why does the Constitution need a Bill of Rights? The people already have a Bill of Rights, it was written in 1689. Now, the (Yes, I understand how important they are)semantics of this is not what I want to discuss, others can discuss the need(or lack therof) of a Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. They have for over 200 years now. I wanted to demonstrate to you that English history is American history, and I have done that. And I can do so again.

John Adams writes in his A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law:

liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.

Fathers? John Adams does not mean John Adams, Sr., or rather, only John Adams, Sr. He means his grandparents, and fathers of others around him going back several generations.

In other words, Englishmen. As an aside note, let it be remembered that the first seven Presidents were all born subjects to the British Crown.

Like I said. English history is American history. Progressive educators would wish that you did not know this, but much to their consternation it is easily proven.

As another side note, Hamilton makes it fairly clear that the US Constitution would not exist without five documents prior to it. He lists three of them right there in Federalist #84. Those documents are: (2) The Magna Carta, (3) the 1628 Petition of Right, and (5) the 1689 Bill of Rights. Those who know enough of their English history know that Magna Carta is predicated on (1) the 1100 Charter of Liberties.

The entirety of the 1600's in England were a rough place to be. The (4) 1641 Grand Remonstrance is also in there - that helped confirm the need for the 1689 B.O.R. These upheavals kept happening not just because of monarchical tyranny, but because the people knew that the monarchs were being tyrannical. One thing leads to another. 1... 2... 3... 4... 5... ... (6), the US Constitution. Actually, it would be 6 The Declaration, 7 the Articles, and then 8 The Constitution... But who's counting anyways? :o)

http://tinyurl.com/ne6zd6s

Sunday, February 2, 2014

John Dewey was "searching for the State" - Corydon Ford

If you study John Dewey on the surface, much of his history has been brushed away. But if you really go digging, you will find out about two of Dewey's early radical colleagues, those being Corydon and Franklin Ford. (Moreso Franklin than Corydon) In his book "The Child of Democracy: Being the Adventures of the Embryo State", Corydon La Ford recounts some of the relationship between the Fords and John Dewey. What's written on page 174 is just odd:
Professor Dewey, of Philosophy, sawed with me on the schools and welcomed the proposition of a new economy in the State through the organization of intelligence - he was searching for the State when my brother and I found him and his consciousness seized upon division of labor as key to the organic social. In Professor Dewey we found the sympathy of an intelligent co-operation with the ideas of an advance in letters which we had brought from the field of a practice - the laboratory of the moving fact in the region of the school and the newspaper.

Note how "State" is capitalized. I suppose there is a pithy line that could be used here about statists searching for the State so that they can worship the State, but there's a problem here in that in-depth information about Corydon and Franklin is preciously scarce on the internet. Here are a few things that I am able to determine though. By his own hand, John Dewey publicly acknowledged Franklin Ford's influence on him, in the book "Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics", on page ix (in the introduction):

As to the specific forms which give a flesh and blood of its own to this backbone, I may call attention to the idea of desire as the ideal activity in contrast with actual possession; to the analysis of individuality into function including capacity and environment; to the treatment of the social bearings of science and art (a point concerning which I am indebted to my friend, Mr. Franklin Ford); to the statement of an ethical postulate; to the accounts of obligation, of moral rules, and of moral badness.

What this information does do, is allow us to establish a timeline about John Dewey. His entire life, he was surrounded by radicals. Much later in Dewey's life he would serve as president of the League for Industrial Democracy. The LID would give birth decades later to SDS.

Franklin Ford was so influential in Dewey's life that Dewey would introduce Robert E. Park to Franklin Ford.

Where this trio really got involved was when they decided to put together a new kind of newspaper. They brought in George Herbert Mead and they called it "Thought News". Mead, Dewey, Ford, and Park's "Thought News", I shall close out this entry with the following advertisements. Published in the Detroit News for April 13th, 1892: (in the Quarterly Review)

Thought News hasn't such ambitions designs.... Its object is not to introduce a new idea into journalism at large, but to show that philosophy has some use. You know Mr. Huxley once called philosophy a matter of lunar politics - it was all remote and abstract. That's about the way it strikes the student, and the difficulty is to show him that there is some fact to which philosophic ideas refer. That fact is the social organism. When philosophic ideas are not inculcated by themselves but used as tools to point out the meaning of phases of social life they begin to have some life and value. Instead of trying to change the newspaper business by introducing philosophy into it, the idea is to transform philosophy somewhat by introducing a little newspaper business into it. When it can be seen for example, that Walt Whitman's poetry, the great development of short stories at present, the centralizing tendency in the railroads, and the introduction of business methods into charity organizations are all parts of one organic social movement, then the philosophic ideas about organism begin to look like something definite.

The facts themselves get more meaning, too, when viewed with relation to one principle than when treated separately as a jumble. This is what the writer meant, probably, when he alluded to the difference between "happenings" and "typical facts." Any happening, however slight, is typical, if treated as an expression of some law, of the movement of a whole. Any fact, however big, is only an accident if not treated as a symptom, as an exponent. It is quite possible that the daily newspaper treats events more as accidents than typical. It must do until it gets hold of the social law, but that's not the affair, one way or the other, of Thought News.

For now, Google books has that as a full view item.

The line that jumped out at me was the one where "to show that philosophy has some use".

One more announcement I found for Thought News, this time in 'The Open Court':

THE publication is announced for the present month of a new "newspaper" called Thought News. The aim of Thought News is to supply the want of a magazine "which shall not go beyond fact, which shall report thought rather than dress it up in the garments of the past, which, instead of dwelling at length upon the merely individual processes that accompany the facts, shall set forth the facts themselves; which shall note new contributions to thought, whether by book or magazine, from the standpoint of the news in them, and not from that of patron or censor. The immediate responsibility for the conduct of the magazine will lie in the bands of Prof. John Dewey, of Ann Arbor, Mich. Its cost will be $1.50 per volume (12 numbers) ; it will appear irregularly, as often as the material warrants, but at least once a month. We wish the project all success.

This is the kind of activity that radicals engage in.

http://tinyurl.com/os9ykxq

Saturday, February 1, 2014

The School as a Social Centre, by John Dewey

THE SCHOOL AS SOCIAL CENTER

OCTOBER, 1902

An address delivered before the National Council of Education, Minneapolis, Minn., July, 1902.

According to the character of my invitation to speak to you, I shall confine myself to the philosophy of the school as a social center. I accept the invitation with pleasure, but at the same time I do not feel that the philosophical aspect of the matter is the urgent or important one. The pressing thing, the significant thing, is really to make the school a social center; that is a matter of practice, not of theory. Just what to do in order to make the schoolhouse a center of full and adequate social service, to bring it completely into the current of social life - such are the matters, I am sure, which really deserve the attention of the public and occupy your own minds.

It is possible, however, and conceivably useful to ask ourselves: What is the meaning of the popular demand in this direction? Why should the community in general, and those particularly interested in education in especial, be so unusually sensitive at just this period to this need? Why should the lack be more felt now than a generation ago? What forces are stirring that awaken such speedy and favorable response to the notion that the school, as a place of instruction for children, is not performing its full function - that it needs also to operate as a center of life for all ages and classes?

A brief historic retrospect will put before us the background of the present situation. The function of education, since anything which might pass by that name was found among savage tribes, has been social. The particular organ or structure, however, through which this aim was subserved, and the nature of its adjustment to other social institutions, have varied according to the peculiar condition of the given time. The general principle of evolution - development from the undifferentiated toward the formation of distinct organs through division of labor - stands out clearly in a survey of educational history. At the outset there was no school as a separate institution. The educative processes were carried on in the ordinary play of family and community life. As the ends to be reached by education became more numerous and remote, and the means employed more specialized, it was necessary, however, for society to develop a distinct institution. Only in this way could the special needs be adequately attended to. In this way developed the schools carried on by great philosophical organizations of antiquity - the Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean, etc.; then came schools as a phase of the work of the church. Finally, with the increasing separation of church and state, the latter asserted itself as the proper founder and supporter of educational institutions; and the modern type of public, or at least quasi-public, school developed. There are many who regard the transfer of this educational function from the church to the state as more than a matter for regret; they conceive of it as a move which, if persisted in, will result disastrously to the best and permanent interests of mankind. But I take it we are not called upon today to reckon with this class, large and important as it may be. I assume that practically all here are believers in the principle of state education - even if we should not find it entirely easy to justify our faith on logical or philosophical grounds. The reason for referring to this claiming by the state of the function of education is to indicate that it was a continuance of the policy of specialization or division of labor.

With the development of the state has come a certain distinction between state and society. As I use these terms, I mean by "state" the organization of the resources of community life through governmental machinery of legislation and administration. I mean by "society" the less definite and freer play of the forces of the community which goes on in the daily intercourse and contact of men in an endless variety of ways that have nothing to do with politics or government or the state in any institutional sense. Now, the control of education by the state inevitably carried with it a certain segregation of the machinery of both school administration and instruction from the freer, more varied, and more flexible modes of social intercourse. So true is this that for a long time the school was occupied exclusively with but one function, the purveying of intellectual material to a certain number of selected minds. Even when the democratic impulse broke into the isolated department of the school, it did not effect a complete reconstruction, but only the addition of another element. This was preparation for citizenship. The meaning of this phrase, "preparation for citizenship," shows precisely what I have in mind by the difference between the school as an isolated thing related to the state alone, and the school as a thoroughly socialized affair in contact at all points with the flow of community life. Citizenship, to most minds, means a distinctly political thing. It is defined in terms of relation to the government, not to society in its broader aspects. To be able to vote intelligently, to take such share as might be in the conduct of public legislation and administration - that has been the significance of the term.

Now our community life has suddenly awakened; and in awakening it has found that governmental institutions and affairs represent only a small part of the important purposes and difficult problems of life, and that even that fraction cannot be dealt with adequately except in the light of a wide range of domestic, economic, and scientific considerations quite excluded from the conception of the state of citizenship. We find that our political problems involve race questions, questions of the assimilation of diverse types of language and custom ; we find that most serious political questions grow out of underlying industrial and commercial changes and adjustments; we find that most of our pressing political problems cannot be solved by special measures of legislation or executive activity, but only by the promotion of common sympathies and a common understanding. We find, moreover, that the solution of the difficulties must go back to a more adequate scientific comprehension of the actual facts and relations involved. The isolation between state and society, between the government and the institutions of family, business life, etc., is breaking down. We realize the thin and artificial character of the separation. We begin to see that we are dealing with a complicated interaction of varied and vital forces, only a few of which can be pigeon-holed as governmental. The content of the term "citizenship" is broadening; it is coming to mean all the relationships of all sorts that are involved in membership in a community.

This of itself would tend to develop a sense of something absent in the existing type of education, something defective in the service rendered by the school. Change the image of what constitutes citizenship, and you change the image of what the purpose of the school is. Change this, and you change the picture of what the school should be doing and of how it should be doing it. The feeling that the school is not doing all that it should do in simply giving instruction during the day to a certain number of children of different ages; the demand that it shall assume a wider scope of activities having an educative effect upon the adult members of the community, has its basis just here. We are feeling everywhere the organic unity of the different modes of social life, and consequently demand that the school shall be related more widely, shall receive from more quarters, and shall give in more directions.

As I have already intimated, the older idea of the school was that its primary concern was with the inculcation of certain facts and truths from the intellectual point of view, and the acquisition of certain forms of skill. When the school became public or common, this notion was broadened to include whatever would make the citizen a more capable and righteous voter and legislator; but it was still thought that this end would be reached along the line of intellectual instruction. To teach children the constitution of the United States, the nature and working of various parts of governmental machinery, from the nation through the state and the county down to the township and the school district - to teach such things was thought to prepare the pupil for citizenship. And so some fifteen or twenty years ago, when the feeling arose that the schools were not doing all that they should be doing for our life as a whole, this consciousness expressed itself in a demand for a more thorough and extensive teaching of civics. To my mind the demand for the school as a social center bears the same ratio to the situation which confronts us today as the movement for civics bore to the conditions of half a generation ago. We have awakened to deeper aspects of the question ; we have seen that the machinery of governmental life is, after all, but a machinery and depends for its Tightness and efficiency upon underlying social and industrial causes. We have lost a good deal of our faith in the efficiency of purely intellectual instruction.

Some four specific developments may be mentioned as having a bearing upon the question of the school as a social center. The first of these is the much-increased efficiency and ease of all the agencies that have to do with bringing people into contact with each other. Recent inventions have so multiplied and cheapened the means of transportation, and the circulation of ideas and news through books, magazines, and papers, that it is no longer physically possible for one nationality, race, class, or sect to be kept apart from others, impervious to their wishes and beliefs. Cheap and rapid long-distance transportation has made America a meeting-place for all the peoples and tongues of the world. The centralization of industry has forced members of classes into the closest association with, and dependence upon, each other. Bigotry, intolerance, or even an unswerving faith in the superiority of one's own religious and political creed, are much shaken when individuals are brought face to face with each other, or have the ideas of others continuously and forcibly placed before them. The congestion of our city life is only one aspect of the bringing of people together which modern inventions have induced.

That many dangers result from sudden dislocations of people from the surroundings - physical, industrial, and intellectual - to which they have become adapted; that great instability may accompany this sudden massing of heterogeneous elements, goes without saying. On the other hand, these very agencies present instrumentalities which may be taken advantage of. The best as well as the worst of modern newspapers is a product. The organized public library with its facilities for reaching all classes of people is an effect. The popular assembly and lyceum is another. No educational system can be regarded as complete until it adopts into itself the various ways by which social and intellectual intercourse may be promoted, and employs them systematically, not only to counteract dangers which these same agencies are bringing with them, but so as to make them positive causes in raising the whole level of life.

Both the demand and the opportunity are increased in our large cities by the commingling of classes and races. It is said that one ward in the city of Chicago has forty different languages represented in it. It is a well-known fact that some of the largest Irish, German, and Bohemian cities in the world are located in America, not in their own countries. The power of the public schools to assimilate differing races to our own institutions, through the education given to the younger generation, is doubtless one of the most remarkable exhibitions of vitality that the world has ever seen. But, after all, it leaves the older generation still untouched; and the assimilation of the younger can hardly be complete or certain as long as the homes of the parents remain comparatively unaffected. Indeed, wise observers in both New York and Chicago have recently sounded a note of alarm. They have called attention to the fact that in some respects the children are too rapidly, I will not say Americanized, but too rapidly denationalized. They lose the positive and conservative value of their own native traditions, their own native music, art, and literature. They do not get complete initiation into the customs of their new country, and so are frequently left floating and unstable between the two. They even learn to despise the dress, bearing, habits, language, and beliefs of their parents - many of which have more substance and worth than the superficial putting on of newly adopted habits. If I understand aright, one of the chief motives in the development of the new labor museum at Hull House has been to show the younger generation something of the skill and art and historic meaning in the industrial habits of the older generations - modes of spinning, weaving, metalworking, etc., discarded in this country because there was no place for them in our industrial system. Many a child has awakened to an appreciation of admirable qualities hitherto unknown in his father or mother for whom he had begun to entertain a contempt. Many an association of local history and past national glory has been awakened to quicken and enrich the life of the family.

In the second place, along with this increasing intercourse and interaction, with all its dangers and opportunities, there has come a relaxation of the bonds of social discipline and control. I suppose none of us would be willing to believe that the movement away from dogmatism and fixed authority is anything but a movement in the right direction. But no one can view the loosening of the power of the older religious and social authorities without deep concern. We may feel sure that in time independent judgment, with the individual freedom and responsibility that go with it, will more than make good the temporary losses. But meantime there is a temporary loss. Parental authority has much less influence in controlling the conduct of children. Reverence seems to decay on every side, and boisterousness and hoodlumism to increase. Flippancy toward parental and other forms of constituted authority waxes, while obedient orderliness wanes. The domestic ties between husband and wife themselves, as well as to their children, lose something of their permanence and sanctity. The church, with its supernatural sanctions, its means of shaping the daily life of its adherents, finds its grasp slowly slipping away. We might as well frankly recognize that many of the old agencies for moralizing mankind, that kept men living decent, respectable, and orderly lives, are losing in efficiency - particularly those agencies whose force rested in custom, tradition, and unquestioning acceptance. It is impossible for society to remain purely a passive spectator in the midst of such a scene. It must search for other agencies with which it may repair the loss, and which may produce the results the former methods are failing to secure. Here, too, it is not enough for society to confine its work to children. However much they may need the disciplinary training of a widened and enlightened education, the older generation needs it also. Besides, time is short, very short, for the average child in the average city school. The work is hardly more than begun there, and unless it is largely to go for naught the community must find methods of supplementing it and carrying it farther, outside the regular school channel.

In the third place, the intellectual life, facts, and truths of knowledge, are much more obviously and intimately connected with all other affairs of life than they ever have been at any previous period in the history of the world. Hence a purely and exclusively intellectual instruction means less than it ever meant before. And, again, the daily occupations and ordinary surroundings of life are much more in need of interpretation than ever they have been before. We might almost say that once there was a time when learning related almost wholly to a world outside and beyond that of the daily concerns of life itself. To study physics, to learn German, to become acquainted with Chinese history, were elegant accomplishments, but more or less useless from the standpoint of daily life. In fact, it is just this sort of idea which the term "culture" still conveys to many minds. Where learning was useful, it was only to a comparatively small and particularly select class in the community. It was something that only the doctor or lawyer or clergyman needed in his particular calling, but so far away from and above the mass of mankind that it could only awaken their blind and submissive admiration. The recent public lament regarding the degradation of the teacher's calling is, to my mind, but a reminiscence of the time when to know enough to be a teacher was something which of itself set off the individual in a special class by himself. It fails to take account of the changes which have put knowledge in common circulation, and made it possible for every man to be a teacher in some respect unto his neighbor.

Under modern conditions, practically every sphere of learning, whether of social or natural science, may impinge at once, and at any point, upon the conduct of life. German is not a fact, knowledge of which makes a distinction between a man and his fellow, but a mode of social and business intercourse. Physics is no longer natural philosophy - something concerned with remarkable discoveries about important but very remote laws; it is a set of facts which, through the applications of heat and electricity to our ordinary surroundings, constantly comes home to us. Physiology, bacteriology, anatomy, concern our individual health and the sanitation of our cities. Their facts are exploited in sensational if not scientific ways in the daily newspapers. And so we might go through the whole schedule of studies, once so foreign and alien, and show how intimately concerned they now are with commonplace life. The simple fact is that we are living in an age of applied science. It is impossible to escape the influence, direct and indirect, of the applications.

On the other hand, life is getting so specialized, the divisions of labor are carried so far, that nothing explains or interprets itself. The worker in a modern factory who is concerned with a fractional piece of a complex activity, present to him only in a limited series of acts carried on with a distinct portion of a machine, is typical of much in our entire social life. The old worker knew something of his process and business as a whole. If he did not come into personal contact with all of it, the whole was so small and so close to him that he was acquainted with it. He was thus aware of the meaning of the particular part of the work which he himself was doing. He saw and felt it as a vital part of the whole, and his horizon was extended. The situation is now the opposite. Most people are doing particular things of whose exact reasons and relationships they are only dimly aware. The whole is so vast, so complicated, and so technical that it is next to out of the question to get any direct acquaintanceship with it. Hence we must rely upon instruction, upon interpretations that come to us through conscious channels. One of the chief reasons for the success of some of the great technical correspondence schools of the present day, besides the utilitarian desire to profit by preparation for better positions, is an honest eagerness to know something more of the great forces which condition the particular work one is doing, and to get an insight into those broad relations which are so partially yet tantalizingly hinted at. The same is true of the growing interest in forms of popular science, which is a marked portion of the stock in trade of some of the best and most successful of our modern monthly magazines. This same motive has added much to the effectiveness of the university-extension movement, particularly in England. It creates a particular demand for a certain type of popular illustrated lecture. Unless the lives of a large part of our wage-earners are to be left to their own barren meagerness, the community must see to it, by some organized agency, that they are instructed in the scientific foundation and the social bearings of the things they see about them and of the activities in which they are themselves engaged.

The fourth point of demand and opportunity is the prolongation, under modern conditions, of continuous instruction. We have heard much of the significance of prolonged infancy in relation to education. It has become almost a part of our pedagogical creed that premature engagement in the serious vocations of life is detrimental to full growth. There is a corollary to this proposition which has not as yet received equal recognition. Only where social occupations are well defined and of a pretty permanent type can the period of instruction be cut short at any particular period. It is commonly recognized that a doctor or a lawyer must go on studying all his life if he is to be a successful man in his profession. The reason is obvious enough. Conditions about him are highly unstable; new problems present themselves; new facts obtrude. Previous study of law, no matter how thorough and accurate, does not provide for these new situations. Hence the need of continual study. There are still portions of the country where the lawyer practically prepares himself before he enters upon his professional career. All he has to do afterward is to perfect himself in certain finer points, and get greater skill in the manipulation of what he already knows. But these are the more backward and unprogressive sections where change is gradual and infrequent, and where therefore the individual prepared once is prepared always.

Now, what is true of the lawyer and the doctor, in the more progressive sections of the country, is true to a certain extent of all sorts and degrees of people. Social, economic, and intellectual conditions are changing at a rate undreamed of in past history, and unless the agencies of instruction are kept running more or less parallel with these changes, a considerable body of men is bound to find itself without the training which will enable it to adapt itself to what is going on. It will be left stranded and become a burden for the community to carry. Where progress is continuous and certain, education must be equally certain and continuous. The youth at eighteen maybe educated so as to be ready for the conditions which will meet him at nineteen; but he can hardly be prepared for those which are to confront him when he is forty-five. If he is ready for the latter when they come, it will be because his own education has been keeping pace in the intermediate years. Doubtless conversation, social intercourse, observation, and reflection upon what one sees going on about him, the reading of magazines and books, will do much; they are important, even if unorganized methods of continuous education. But they can hardly be expected to do all, and hence they do not relieve the community from the responsibility of providing, through the school as a center, a continuous education for all classes of whatever age.

The fourfold need, and the fourfold opportunity, which I have hastily sketched, defines to some extent the work of the school as a social center. It must provide at least part of that training which is necessary to keep the individual properly adjusted to a rapidly changing environment. It must so interpret to him the intellectual and social meaning of the work in which he is engaged that it will reveal its relations to the life and work of the world. It must make up to him in part for the decay of dogmatic and fixed methods of social discipline. It must compensate him for the loss of reverence and of the influence of authority. And, finally, it must provide means for bringing people and their ideas and beliefs together, in ways that will lessen friction and instability, and introduce deeper sympathy and wider understanding.

In what ways shall the school as a social center perform these various tasks? To answer this question in anything like detail is to pass from my allotted sphere of philosophy into that of practical execution. But it comes within the scope of a theoretical consideration to indicate certain general lines. First, there is a mixing up of people with each other; a bringing them together under wholesome influences, and under conditions which will promote their getting acquainted with the best side of each other. I suppose, whenever we are framing our ideals of the school as a social center, what we think of particularly is the better class of social settlements. What we want is to see the school, every public school, doing something of the same sort of work that is now done by a settlement or two scattered at wide distances through the city. We all know that the function of such an institution as Hull House has been primarily not that of conveying intellectual instruction, but of being a social clearinghouse. It is not merely a place where ideas and beliefs may be exchanged in the arena of formal discussion, for argument alone breeds misunderstanding and fixes prejudice ; but it is much more a place where ideas are incarnated in human form and clothed with the winning grace of personal life. Classes for study may be numerous, but they are regarded as modes of bringing people together, of doing away with the barriers of caste or class or race or type of experience that keep people from real communion with each other.

The function of the school as a social center in promoting social meetings for social purposes suggests at once another function - provision and direction of reasonable forms of amusement and recreation. The social club, the gymnasium, the amateur theatrical representation, the concert, the stereopticon lecture - these are agencies the force of which social settlements have long known, and which are coming into use wherever anything is doing in the way of making schools social centers. I sometimes think that recreation is the most overlooked and neglected of all ethical forces. Our whole Puritan tradition tends to make us slight this side of life, or even condemn it. But the demand for recreation, for enjoyment just as enjoyment, is one of the strongest and most fundamental things in human nature. To pass it over is to invite it to find its expression in defective and perverted form. The brothel, the saloons, the low dance house, the gambling den, the trivial, inconsiderate, and demoralizing associations which form themselves on every street corner, are the answer of human nature to the neglect, on the part of supposed moral leaders, of this factor in human nature. I believe that there is no force more likely to count in the general reform of social conditions than the practical recognition that in recreation is a positive moral influence which it is the duty of the community to take hold of and direct.

In the third place, there ought to be some provision for a sort of continuous social selection of a somewhat specialized type - using "specialized," of course, in a relative sense. Our cities carried on evening schools long before anything was said or heard of the school as a social center. These were intended to give instruction in the rudiments to those who had little or no early opportunities. So far they were and are good. But what I have in mind is something of a more distinctly advanced and selective nature. To refer once more to the working model upon which I am pretty continuously drawing, in the activities of Hull House we find provision made for classes in music, drawing, clay-modeling, joinery, metal-working, and so on. There is no reason why something in the way of scientific laboratories should not be provided for those who are particularly interested in problems of mechanics or electricity; and so the list might be continued. Now, the obvious operation of such modes of instruction is to pick out and attract to itself those individuals who have particular ability in any particular line. There is a vast amount of unutilized talent dormant all about us. Many an individual has capacity within himself of which he is only dimly conscious, because he has never had an opportunity for expressing it. He is not only losing the satisfaction of employment, but society suffers from this wasted capital. The evils of the unearned increment are as nothing beside those of the undiscovered resource. In time, I am confident, the community will recognize that it is quite as natural and necessary a part of its own duty to provide such opportunities for adults as will enable them to discover and carry to some point of fulfilment the particular capacities that distinguish them, as it is to give instructions to little children.

In conclusion, we may say that the conception of the school as a social center is born of our entire democratic movement. Everywhere we see signs of the growing recognition that the community owes to each one of its members the fullest opportunity for development. Everywhere we see the growing recognition that the community life is defective and distorted except as it does thus care for all its constituent parts. This is no longer viewed as a matter of charity, but as a matter of justice - nay, even of something higher and better than justice - a necessary phase of developing and growing life. Men will long dispute about material socialism, about socialism considered as a matter of distribution of the material sources of the community; but there is a socialism regarding which there can be no such dispute: socialism of the intelligence and of the spirit. To extend the range and the fulness of sharing in the intellectual and spiritual resources of the community is the very meaning of the community. Because the older type of education is not fully adequate to this task under changed conditions, we feel its lack and the demand that the school shall become a social center. The school as a social center means the active and organized promotion of this socialism of the intangible things of art, science, and other modes of social intercourse.

JOHN DEWEY.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.