discover what kind of transportation or educational system
will best serve the city's needs. But whether it will or will not
spend the money necessary depends on the social interests
current.

EDUCATION AS THE TRANSMITTER OF THE PAST. Education is the
process by which society undertakes the transmission of its
social heritage. Indeed the main function of education in
static societies is the initiation of the young into already
established customs and traditions. It is the method used
to hand down those social habits which the influential and
articulate classes in a society regard as important enough to
have early fixed in its young members. The past is simply
transmitted, handed down _en masse_. It is a set of patterns
to be imitated, of ideals to be continued, of mechanisms for
attaining the fixed purposes which are current in the group.

In progressive societies education may be used not simply
to hand down habits of doing, feeling, and thinking, from the
older generation to the younger, but to make habitual in the
young reflective consideration of the ends which must be
attained, and reflective inquiry into the means for attaining
them. The past will not be handed down in indiscriminate
completeness. The present and its problems are regarded as
the standard of importance, and the past is considered as an
incomparable reservoir of materials and methods which may
contribute to the ends sought in the present. But there is so
much material and so little time, that selection must be made.
Many things in the past, interesting on their own merits, must
be omitted in favor of those habits, traditions, and recorded
files of knowledge which are most fruitful and enlightening in
the attainment of contemporary purposes. What those purposes
are depends, of course, on ideals of the group in control
of the process of education. But these purposes of ideals may
be derived from present situations and not taken merely because
they have long been current in the group. Thus, in a
predominantly industrial civilization, it may be found more
advisable and important to transmit the scientific and technical
methods of control which men have acquired in recent
generations than the traditional liberal arts. Science may be
found more important than the humanities, medicine than
moral theory. Even such education that tends to call itself
"liberal" or "cultural" is effective and genuine education
just in so far as it does illuminate the w