a Special Environment. The chief importance of this
foregoing statement of the educative process which goes on willy-nilly
is to lead us to note that the only way in which adults consciously
control the kind of education which the immature get is by controlling
the environment in which they act, and hence think and feel. We never
educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether
we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design
environments for the purpose makes a great difference. And any
environment is a chance environment so far as its educative influence
is concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with reference to
its educative effect. An intelligent home differs from an unintelligent
one chiefly in that the habits of life and intercourse which prevail are
chosen, or at least colored, by the thought of their bearing upon the
development of children. But schools remain, of course, the typical
instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing
the mental and moral disposition of their members.

Roughly speaking, they come into existence when social traditions are
so complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed
to writing and transmitted through written symbols. Written symbols are
even more artificial or conventional than spoken; they cannot be picked
up in accidental intercourse with others. In addition, the written form
tends to select and record matters which are comparatively foreign
to everyday life. The achievements accumulated from generation to
generation are deposited in it even though some of them have fallen
temporarily out of use. Consequently as soon as a community depends to
any considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its
own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools
to insure adequate transmission of all its resources. To take an obvious
illustration: The life of the ancient Greeks and Romans has profoundly
influenced our own, and yet the ways in which they affect us do not
present themselves on the surface of our ordinary experiences. In
similar fashion, peoples still existing, but remote in space, British,
Germans, Italians, directly concern our own social affairs, but
the nature of the interaction cannot be understood without explicit
statement and attention. In precisely similar fashion, our daily
associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part