From Rediscovering Americanism, pp. 70 – 71, quoting John Dewey, 1916, Democracy and Education. Dewey was an enormously influential early progressive intellectual whose writings on social-activism education were used extensively as education transformed into a socialization and progressive indoctrination enterprise:
“It remains only to point out … that the reconstruction of experience may be social as well as personal. For purposes of simplification we have spoken … as if the education of the immature which fills them with the spirit of the social group to which they belong, were sort of catching up of the child with the aptitudes and resources of the adult group. In static societies, societies which make the maintenance of established custom their measure of value, this conception applies in the main. But not in progressive communities. They endeavor to shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement over their own. Men had long had some intimation of the extent to which education may be made an instrument of realizing the better hopes of men. But we are doubtless far from realizing the potential efficacy of education as a constructive agency of improving society, from realizing that it represents not only a development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be the constituents.”