schooling is only a part, and by no means the major part, of the
educational process, and in which we have distinguished and separated
the home element in the boarding-school from the schooling proper,
there still remains something more than a simple theme in schooling.
After all these eliminations we remain with a mixed function and mixed
traditions, and it is necessary now to look a little into the nature of
this mixture.

The modern school is not a thing that has evolved from a simple germ,
by a mere process of expansion. It is the coalescence of several
things. In different countries and periods you will find schools taking
over this function and throwing out that, and changing not only methods
but professions and aims in the most remarkable manner. What has either
been teachable or has seemed teachable in human development has played
a part in some curriculum or other. Beyond the fact that there is class
instruction and an initial stage in which the pupil learns to read and
write, there is barely anything in common. But that initial stage is to
be noted; it is the thing the Hebrew schoolboy, the Tamil schoolboy,
the Chinese schoolboy, and the American schoolboy have in common. So
much, at any rate, of the school appears wherever there is a written
language, and its presence marks a stage in the civilizing process. As
I have already pointed out in my book "Anticipations," the presence of
a reading and writing class of society and the existence of an
organized nation (as distinguished from a tribe) appear together. When
tribes coalesce into nations, schools appear. This first and most
universal function of the school is to initiate a smaller or greater
proportion of the population into the ampler world, the more efficient
methods, of the reading and writing man. And with the disappearance of
the slave and the mere labourer from the modern conception of what is
necessary in the state, there has now come about an extension of this