unity to escape from the limitations
of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living
contact with a broader environment. Such words as "society" and
"community" are likely to be misleading, for they have a tendency to
make us think there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.
As a matter of fact, a modern society is many societies more or less
loosely connected. Each household with its immediate extension of
friends makes a society; the village or street group of playmates is a
community; each business group, each club, is another. Passing beyond
these more intimate groups, there is in a country like our own a variety
of races, religious affiliations, economic divisions. Inside the modern
city, in spite of its nominal political unity, there are probably more
communities, more differing customs, traditions, aspirations, and forms
of government or control, than existed in an entire continent at an
earlier epoch.

Each such group exercises a formative influence on the active
dispositions of its members. A clique, a club, a gang, a Fagin's
household of thieves, the prisoners in a jail, provide educative
environments for those who enter into their collective or conjoint
activities, as truly as a church, a labor union, a business partnership,
or a political party. Each of them is a mode of associated or community
life, quite as much as is a family, a town, or a state. There are also
communities whose members have little or no direct contact with one
another, like the guild of artists, the republic of letters, the members
of the professional learned class scattered over the face of the
earth. For they have aims in common, and the activity of each member is
directly modified by knowledge of what others are doing.

In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical
matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory,
was comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce,
transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the
United States are composed of a combination of different groups with
different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps
more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational
institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and
balanced environment for the young. Only in this way can the centrifugal
forces set up by juxtaposition of different groups within one and t