is mental processes by
the mind of his teacher. He must have strength of conviction to defend
his own opinions, but he must have an open mind to receive truths that
are new to him. One of the great achievements of the school is to fuse
dissimilar elements into common custom and opinion, and thus to
socialize the independent units of community life.

98. =Learning Social Values in the Community.=--The school is the door
to larger social opportunity than the home can provide, but it is not
the only door. The child in passing to and from school comes into touch
with other institutions and activities. He passes other homes than his
own. He sees each in the midst of its own peculiar surroundings, and he
makes comparisons of one with another and of each with his own. He
estimates more or less consciously the value of that which he sees, not
so much in terms of economic as of social worth, and congratulates or
pities himself or his schoolmates, according to the judgments that he
has made. He stops at the store, the mill, or the blacksmith shop,
through frequent contact becomes familiar with their functions, and
thinks in turn that he would like to be storekeeper, miller, and
blacksmith. He sees the farmer on other farms than his own gathering
his harvest in the fall, hauling wood in the winter, or ploughing his
field in the spring, and he becomes conscious of common habits and
occupations in this rural community. He gets acquainted with the
variety of activities that enter into life in the country district in
which his home is located, and he learns to appreciate the importance
of the instruments upon which such activity depends for travel from
place to place. By all these means the child is learning social values.
After a little he comes to understand that the community, with its
roads, its public buildings, and its established institutions, exists
to satisfy certain economic and social needs that the single family
cannot supply. By and by he learns that, like the family, it has grown
out of the experience of relationships, and can be traced far back in
history, and that as time passes it is slowly changing to adapt itself
to the changing wants and wishes of its inhabitants. He becomes aware
of a present tendency for the community to imitate the larger social
life outside, to make its village centre a reproduction in miniature of
the urban centres; later he realizes that the introduction of foreign
elements into the populatio