ing the future to the past, or as an utilization of the past
for a resource in a developing future. The former finds its standards
and patterns in what has gone before. The mind may be regarded as a
group of contents resulting from having certain things presented. In
this case, the earlier presentations constitute the material to which
the later are to be assimilated. Emphasis upon the value of the early
experiences of immature beings is most important, especially because of
the tendency to regard them as of little account. But these experiences
do not consist of externally presented material, but of interaction of
native activities with the environment which progressively modifies both
the activities and the environment. The defect of the Herbartian theory
of formation through presentations consists in slighting this constant
interaction and change. The same principle of criticism applies to
theories which find the primary subject matter of study in the cultural
products--especially the literary products--of man's history. Isolated
from their connection with the present environment in which individuals
have to act, they become a kind of rival and distracting environment.
Their value lies in their use to increase the meaning of the things with
which we have actively to do at the present time. The idea of education
advanced in these chapters is formally summed up in the idea of
continuous reconstruction of experience, an idea which is marked off
from education as preparation for a remote future, as unfolding, as
external formation, and as recapitulation of the past.

Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education

For the most part, save incidentally, we have hitherto been concerned
with education as it may exist in any social group. We have now to
make explicit the differences in the spirit, material, and method of
education as it operates in different types of community life. To say
that education is a social function, securing direction and development
in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to
which they belong, is to say in effect that education will vary with the
quality of life which prevails in a group. Particularly is it true that
a society which not only changes but-which has the ideal of such
change as will improve it, will have different standards and methods
of education from one which aims simply at the perpetuation of its
own customs. To make the general ideas set