[In the following review of Dewey's Democracy and Education, Otto focuses on the sociological aspects of the work, which Otto expresses as the need for education to reflect common experiences.]

The present educational situation presents an interesting paradox. We were never so convinced of the social necessity for public education and never more uncertain what public education should be. We insist that our children must have it even though we do not know what it is they must have. Which is very natural, of course, under the circumstances. With strong vigorous groups threatening the radical reconstruction of the fundamental concepts of life, we are tempted to feel ourselves in a whirl of random movements, a whirl too complicated for analysis and movements too powerful to be resisted. Confused and uncertain, we turn for solace and hope to a compensatory society to be realized through the education of youth. In this we are right—provided we can substitute an intelligent program of education for blind faith in the process itself. In other words, the outstanding need of the contemporary world is an adequate philosophy of education.

Fortunately, a noteworthy statement of such a philosophy is at hand in John Dewey's Democracy and Education. The book deserves the widest possible reading and the most careful study. For, in the first place, whatever may be the fate of the philosophy called pragmatism, it is perfectly safe to predict that this expression of it is destined to be one of the world's educational classics; and in the second place, the author's educational theory is being translated into educational facts not only in the United States, but in Europe and in the Orient.

Roughly speaking (if we may murder to be brief) the central doctrine of the twenty-six chapters may be put as follows: as physiological life renews itself through nutrition and reproduction, social life renews itself through education. Education is the sharing of experience to make it become a common possession. In a simple state of society this is secured through direct participation in the common activities, but as life becomes more complex a special environment is set aside for the training of the young. The tendency then is to separate between education and life. This has now taken place to a degree so harmful to the individual and to society that the present problem is to institute a type of education which will reunite the life-customs of the group and the impulses of the young. This is by no means a simple matter, but it will be accomplished to the extent that we make possible education through growth. "The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact." Thus education, technically defined, becomes "that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience."

The volume is filled with material illustrating the application of the theory to concrete subjects—history, geography, science, and the like; it is a storehouse of succinct statements of notable theories of education and should succeed in setting right the critics who have misunderstood or misinterpreted the author's position on such controversial subjects as the value of past cultures and vocational training. John Dewey is the enemy of only a certain kind of loyalty to the past and the friend of only a certain kind of vocational training. He is concerned for this one thing: to break down the barriers between people and to add to the meaning and joy of life by transforming education into an adventure for making human life better worth living.