Foot - Note: Contd. educational conceptions naturally reflect these differences. The primitive tendency in communities is towards the complete subordination of the - individual, but in the western peoples that tendency has since the advent of Christianity, been checked and modified by an increasing valuation of the individual life. It is an apparently paradoxical, but easily intelligible, fact that the World War, by its startling revelation of the immense range, the intimate closeness and the vast complexity of modern social organisation, actually stimulated the: reaction against the primitive tendency and the educational ideas which expressed it. Educational, theory must always be more or less “paidocentric”that is, must focus its attention in the first place: upon the single child and upon the gifts and powers. which make him educable; but in its recent trend it goes beyond that, and tends to regard the perfection of the individual as the proper end of educational efforts. This does not imply a disregard. of social claims or point towards social disintegration; the view is that the best forms of communal life will be fostered by an education which regards. sccial activities as a necessary medium for the development of the higher stages of individual life rather than something to which the claims of individual development must be subordinated. This conception held with more or less consciousclearness, has guided much of the typical development which, prominent, in America (see Education: Science of and History of Education, United States). and to a less extent in Britain before the war, has. since 1918 proceeded apace in most civilised. countries. The most striking sign of the change of view here in question is afforded by the reorganisation of public education now going on in the more:
