indirect to formal education. Sharing in actual pursuit, whether
directly or vicariously in play, is at least personal and vital. These
qualities compensate, in some measure, for the narrowness of available
opportunities. Formal instruction, on the contrary, easily becomes
remote and dead--abstract and bookish, to use the ordinary words of
depreciation. What accumulated knowledge exists in low grade societies
is at least put into practice; it is transmuted into character; it
exists with the depth of meaning that attaches to its coming within
urgent daily interests.

But in an advanced culture much which has to be learned is stored in
symbols. It is far from translation into familiar acts and objects. Such
material is relatively technical and superficial. Taking the ordinary
standard of reality as a measure, it is artificial. For this measure is
connection with practical concerns. Such material exists in a world by
itself, unassimilated to ordinary customs of thought and expression.
There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction
will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the
subject matter of life-experience. The permanent social interests are
likely to be lost from view. Those which have not been carried over
into the structure of social life, but which remain largely matters
of technical information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous
in schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the notion
which ignores its social necessity and its identity with all human
association that affects conscious life, and which identifies it with
imparting information about remote matters and the conveying of learning
through verbal signs: the acquisition of literacy.

Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance between
the informal and the formal, the incidental and the intentional,
modes of education. When the acquiring of information and of technical
intellectual skill do not influence the formation of a social
disposition, ordinary vital experience fails to gain in meaning, while
schooling, in so far, creates only "sharps" in learning--that is,
egoistic specialists. To avoid a split between what men consciously
know because they are aware of having learned it by a specific job of
learning, and what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it
in the formation of their characters