m.

The account of education given in our earlier chapters virtually
anticipated the results reached in a discussion of the purport of
education in a democratic community. For it assumed that the aim of
education is to enable individuals to continue their education--or that
the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now
this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except
where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there
is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and
institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably
distributed interests. And this means a democratic society. In our
search for aims in education, we are not concerned, therefore, with
finding an end outside of the educative process to which education is
subordinate. Our whole conception forbids. We are rather concerned with
the contrast which exists when aims belong within the process in which
they operate and when they are set up from without. And the latter
state of affairs must obtain when social relationships are not equitably
balanced. For in that case, some portions of the whole social group will
find their aims determined by an external dictation; their aims will not
arise from the free growth of their own experience, and their nominal
aims will be means to more ulterior ends of others rather than truly
their own.

Our first question is to define the nature of an aim so far as it falls
within an activity, instead of being furnished from without. We approach
the definition by a contrast of mere results with ends. Any exhibition
of energy has results. The wind blows about the sands of the desert; the
position of the grains is changed. Here is a result, an effect, but not
an end. For there is nothing in the outcome which completes or fulfills
what went before it. There is mere spatial redistribution. One state
of affairs is just as good as any other. Consequently there is no basis
upon which to select an earlier state of affairs as a beginning, a
later as an end, and to consider what intervenes as a process of
transformation and realization.

Consider for example the activities of bees in contrast with the changes
in the sands when the wind blows them about. The results of the bees'
actions may be called ends not because they are designed or consciously
intended, but because they are true terminations or completions of what
has preceded. When the bees gather p