In the district of a large city where newly arrived foreign immigrants
gather, you will be shown the group of blocks where the Poles or the
Hungarians have segregated themselves from the rest, and even within
these, the houses where dwell families from a particular province or even
from one definite city or village. Man is social but he is socially
clannish, and the broadest is not so much he who refuses to recognize
these clan or caste relationships as he who enters into the largest number
of them--he who keeps in touch with his childhood home, has a wide
acquaintance among those of his own religious faith and of his chosen
business or profession, keeps up his old college friendships, is
interested in collecting coins or paintings and knows all the other
collectors, is active in civic and charitable societies, takes an interest
in education and educators, and so on. The social democracy that should
succeed in abolishing all these groups or leveling them--that should
recognize no relationships but the broader ones that underly all human
effort and feeling--the touches of nature that make the whole world
kin--would be barren indeed.

We cannot spare these fundamentals; we could not get rid of them if we
would; but civilization advances by building upon them, and to do away
with these additions would be like destroying a city to get at its
foundation, in the vain hope of securing some wide-reaching result in
economics or aesthetics. Occupying a foremost place among these groupings
is the large division embracing our educational activities. And these are
social not only in the broad sense, but also in the narrower. The
intercourse of student with student in the school and even of reader with
reader in the library, especially in such departments as the children's
room, is so obviously that of society that we need dwell on it no further.