If we wish to consider details, we may notice that in an educational process having such ends as we have suggested, the teaching of civics, for example, becomes more functional, the teaching of what an individual in a community and what all governments do, rather than analyzing the structure of government. Such civics teaches the meaning of individuals as having functions which are represented and fulfilled in the institutions and organizations of society, including every department of government. It is not the intention to enter here into the special problems in regard to the content and method of teaching civics in the schools, although it is evident that this subject must have an increased place in the future. We already see advances both in the purpose and the plan of civics teaching and in the literature prepared for the schools. Dunn, for example, makes fundamental in all the teaching of civics the question, What are the common interests which people in communities are seeking? Tufts also tries to deal with the fundamental ideas upon which government is based.
Presentation of facts is surely a necessary part of all education, for it is an indispensable means of giving the content of experience upon which wisdom as a selective appreciation of experience is based. But erudition is only a part of education. We must hold firmly now to the principle which is indeed an aspect of the democratic ideal itself, that participation is also a necessary part of education. Institutions become real to the child through the child's association with them in some active way. We shall probably see the idea of free organization carried far, and in every organization and every institution, private and public, there must, we believe, be some place for the services and the interest of all. Let us take the position that there is nothing in government, in any of its branches, that is outside the sphere of the practical life of the individual and we shall have the right point of view even for the work of the school room. Government, in a word, is not a specialization of function in which the few are involved, but it is a generic function, the means, we assert, of carrying to completion all the projects of individuals in all their social relations. Therefore all, not merely those who just now are included among voters, but all women and children, must have a part in the general education for democracy and also have a part in some way in the institutions of government. From first to last government must be thought of and understood in terms of what it does, as a phase of the total social life of the nation, not as something outside the social order. Government is a collective activity. It is as an aspect of the day's work of the nation, that government must be impressed upon all--both legal citizens and citizens in the making.