ABSTRACT

IF it is true that education is a function of society, it is no less true that society is a function of education. Just as society determines the content and the method of its educational practice, and imposes certain limitations, so education determines the form that society is to take, the thoughts that it will think, its attitude and its disposition : and education does that more for the society of to-morrow than for the society of to-day : to-day the life of educational institutions is an enrichment of the life which all enjoy, but it is to-morrow that their deeper influence will be felt and that the society which they have largely created will come into being. We may feel ourselves here to be in a vicious circle, but however we regard the problem we cannot be blind to the fact that it is as a social factor that education is all-important. It is indeed

doubtful whether we can regard education from any other standpoint. The business of education is to prepare our children to live their lives well : but no life can be lived well in isolation, there is no fullness of life except in some form of organized communion with others ; and that is what we mean by society on the spiritual side. The inevitable inference is that all our subjects and activities in school and university alike, must have a social bearing, if they are to be educational and not merely instructional : what that bearing is, will be considered in later chapters. Meanwhile, we must be careful not to limit too narrowly the significance of the word " social ", nor to bound with too near a horizon the society we would serve. There are some eloquent words of Burke on this matter : the State, he says, " is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature : it is a partnership in all science ; a partnership in all a r t ; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between

those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." Such a conception at once carries us beyond the here and the now, into that wider world of the Great Society of mankind which, whether men live or die, always demands our allegiance and our service. Nor must we stop there. It is not only for citizenship in the United Kingdom of Great Britain (even in Burke's enlarged and enlightened sense) that we would prepare our children, but for citizenship in the United Kingdom of Heaven and Earth : no Act of Union ever made that kingdom one : it has been united from the beginning of time, and from the beginning of time man has been rendering to God the things that are God's, and to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, yet exercising not two citizenships but one. When he has tried to make them two, he has made a sorry business of both, and the less he has thought about the other world, the more hideous he has made this.