played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible
structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted,
the school, to care for such matters.

This mode of association has three functions sufficiently specific,
as compared with ordinary associations of life, to be noted. First, a
complex civilization is too complex to be assimilated in toto. It has to
be broken up into portions, as it were, and assimilated piecemeal, in a
gradual and graded way. The relationships of our present social life are
so numerous and so interwoven that a child placed in the most favorable
position could not readily share in many of the most important of them.
Not sharing in them, their meaning would not be communicated to him,
would not become a part of his own mental disposition. There would be
no seeing the trees because of the forest. Business, politics, art,
science, religion, would make all at once a clamor for attention;
confusion would be the outcome. The first office of the social organ we
call the school is to provide a simplified environment. It selects the
features which are fairly fundamental and capable of being responded to
by the young. Then it establishes a progressive order, using the
factors first acquired as means of gaining insight into what is more
complicated.

In the second place, it is the business of the school environment to
eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing
environment from influence upon mental habitudes. It establishes a
purified medium of action. Selection aims not only at simplifying but at
weeding out what is undesirable. Every society gets encumbered with what
is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively
perverse. The school has the duty of omitting such things from the
environment which it supplies, and thereby doing what it can to
counteract their influence in the ordinary social environment. By
selecting the best for its exclusive use, it strives to reinforce the
power of this best. As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes
that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of
its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future
society. The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this
end.

In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to
balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it
that each individual gets an opport