permanent social interests are likely to be lost from view.
Those which have not been carried over into the structure of
social life, but which remain largely matters of technical
information expressed in symbols, are made conspicuous in
schools. Thus we reach the ordinary notion of education: the
notion which ignores its social necessity and its identity with
all human association that affects conscious life, and which
identifies it with imparting information about remote matters and
the conveying of learning through verbal signs: the acquisition
of literacy.

Hence one of the weightiest problems with which the philosophy of
education has to cope is the method of keeping a proper balance
between the informal and the formal, the incidental and the
intentional, modes of education. When the acquiring of
information and of technical intellectual skill do not influence
the formation of a social disposition, ordinary vital experience
fails to gain in meaning, while schooling, in so far, creates
only "sharps" in learning -- that is, egoistic specialists. To
avoid a split between what men consciously know because they are
aware of having learned it by a specific job of learning, and
what they unconsciously know because they have absorbed it in the
formation of their characters by intercourse with others, becomes
an increasingly delicate task with every development of special
schooling.

Summary. It is the very nature of life to strive to continue in
being. Since this continuance can be secured only by constant
renewals, life is a self-renewing process. What nutrition and
reproduction are to physiological life, education is to social