Society has grown in complexity and strength, but it has also grown in
disorder.

Such disharmony of the social life of course exists also in America.
We have not the sharp division of classes and interests and the
demonstrative and protesting individualism that are to be found in
England (our individual rights are taken more for granted perhaps) but
for that very reason, it may well be, our disharmonies are all the
more dangerous and difficult to overcome. The tension of the
individual and the social will (using MacCurdy's expression) is great.
We are highly individualistic in our mode of life, as is shown both in
domestic and in public affairs. Specialization and an intense interest
in occupations that bring individual distinction and large financial
returns have certainly taken precedence over the more fundamental and
common activities and interests.

It is these fundamental and common activities and interests and
sympathies that ought to be the chief concern of social education, or
perhaps we had better say that all our educational processes ought so
to be socialized as to broaden sympathies and make activities common.
Education must constantly strive to make the common background of our
national life more firm and strong. More important to-day than any
further education in the direction of specialization of life in
America is the securing of a strong cohesion throughout society by
means of common interests and moods. It is true that specialization
carried out in some ideal way may provide just the conditions needed
for the best social order, but this can be only in so far as
individuals become specialized within the whole of society, so to
speak, in which individuals continue to have a common life.
Individuals as wholes must not be differentiated and left to find
their own means of cooerdination and association, or be brought
together artificially by law or convention. Specialization must be
made the reverse side, as it were, of a social process in which at
every point cooerdination is also provided for. At the present time, it
is the latter rather than the former that is of most importance to us.

Social education in a democratic country must always be a matter of the
greatest concern. In autocratic societies the cohesive force exists in
traditions or can at any moment be generated executively. The
autocratic country can be held together in spite of social antagonism.
In a democracy this cannot be. We voluntari