To bring one’s nature to full maturity, as represented by the best of the adult community in which one grows up, is true education for life in that community.  Anything less than this falls short of its purpose.  Anything other than this is education misdirected.

In very early days, when community life was simple, practically all of one’s education was obtained through participating in community activities, and without systematic teaching.  From that day to this, however, the social world has been growing more complex.  Adults have developed kinds of activities so complicated that youth cannot adequately enter into them and learn them without systematic teaching.  At first these things were few; with the years they have grown very numerous.

One of the earliest of these too-complicated activities was written language—­reading, writing, spelling.  These matters became necessities to the adult world; but youth under ordinary circumstances could not participate in them as performed by adults sufficiently to master them.  They had to be taught; and the school thereby came into existence.  A second thing developed about the same time was the complicated number system used by adults.  It was too difficult for youth to master through participation only.  It too had to be taught, and it offered a second task for the schools.  In the early schools this teaching of the so-called Three R’s was all that was needed, because these were the only adult activities that had become so complicated as to require systematized teaching.  Other things were still simple enough, so that young people could enter into them sufficiently for all necessary education.

As community vision widened and men’s affairs came to extend far beyond the horizon, a need arose for knowledge of the outlying world.  This knowledge could rarely be obtained sufficiently through travel and observation.  There arose the new need for the systematic teaching of geography.  What had hitherto not been a human necessity and therefore not an educational essential became both because of changed social conditions.

Looking at education from this social point of view it is easy to see that there was a time when no particular need existed for history, drawing, science, vocational studies, civics, etc., beyond what one could acquire by mingling with one’s associates in the community.  These were therefore not then essentials for education.  It is just as easy to see that changed social conditions of the present make necessary for every one a fuller and more systematic range of ideas in each of these fields than one can pick up incidentally.  These things have thereby become educational essentials.  Whether a thing today is an educational “essential” or not seems to depend upon two things:  whether it is a human necessity today; and whether it is so complex or inaccessible as to require systematic teaching.  The number of “essentials” changes from generation to generation.  Those today who proclaim