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