bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the
life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of
thoughtful pains are required. Beings who are born not only
unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the
social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively
interested. Education, and education alone, spans the gap.

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as
biological life. This transmission occurs by means of
communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the
older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals,
hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of
society who are passing out of the group life to those who are
coming into it, social life could not survive. If the members
who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate
the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal
interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of
necessity.

If a plague carried off the members of a society all at once, it
is obvious that the group would be permanently done for. Yet the
death of each of its constituent members is as certain as if an
epidemic took them all at once. But the graded difference in
age, the fact that some are born as some die, makes possible
through transmission of ideas and practices the constant
reweaving of the social fabric. Yet this renewal is not
automatic. Unless pains are taken to see that genuine and
thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group will
relapse into barbarism and then into savagery. In fact, the
human young are so immature that if they were left to themselves