uccessfully to keep a balanced connection
with things, an isolated uniform way of acting becomes disastrous at
some critical moment. The vaunted "skill" turns out gross ineptitude.

The essential contrast of the idea of education as continuous
reconstruction with the other one-sided conceptions which have been
criticized in this and the previous chapter is that it identifies the
end (the result) and the process. This is verbally self-contradictory,
but only verbally. It means that experience as an active process
occupies time and that its later period completes its earlier portion;
it brings to light connections involved, but hitherto unperceived.
The later outcome thus reveals the meaning of the earlier, while the
experience as a whole establishes a bent or disposition toward the
things possessing this meaning. Every such continuous experience
or activity is educative, and all education resides in having such
experiences.

It remains only to point out (what will receive more ample attention
later) that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as
personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken in the earlier
chapters somewhat as if the education of the immature which fills them
with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were a sort of
catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult
group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of
established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in
the main. But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape the
experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits,
better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be
an improvement on their own. Men have long had some intimation of the
extent to which education may be consciously used to eliminate obvious
social evils through starting the young on paths which shall not produce
these ills, and some idea of the extent in which education may be made
an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless
far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive
agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only
a development of children and youth but also of the future society of
which they will be the constituents.

Summary. Education may be conceived either retrospectively or
prospectively. That is to say, it may be treated as process of
accommodat