s made
some headway in realizing that the ultimate value of every institution
is its distinctively human effect--its effect upon conscious
experience--we may well believe that this lesson has been learned
largely through dealings with the young.

We are thus led to distinguish, within the broad educational
process which we have been so far considering, a more formal kind of
education--that of direct tuition or schooling. In undeveloped social
groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. Savage groups
mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the
same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They
have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in
connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted
into full social membership. For the most part, they depend upon
children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional
set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing. In
part, this sharing is direct, taking part in the occupations of adults
and thus serving an apprenticeship; in part, it is indirect, through the
dramatic plays in which children reproduce the actions of grown-ups
and thus learn to know what they are like. To savages it would seem
preposterous to seek out a place where nothing but learning was going on
in order that one might learn.

But as civilization advances, the gap between the capacities of the
young and the concerns of adults widens. Learning by direct sharing in
the pursuits of grown-ups becomes increasingly difficult except in the
case of the less advanced occupations. Much of what adults do is so
remote in space and in meaning that playful imitation is less and less
adequate to reproduce its spirit. Ability to share effectively in adult
activities thus depends upon a prior training given with this end in
view. Intentional agencies--schools--and explicit material--studies--are
devised. The task of teaching certain things is delegated to a special
group of persons.

Without such formal education, it is not possible to transmit all the
resources and achievements of a complex society. It also opens a way to
a kind of experience which would not be accessible to the young, if they
were left to pick up their training in informal association with others,
since books and the symbols of knowledge are mastered.

But there are conspicuous dangers attendant upon the transition from