The educative process is indeed a personal one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs.[17] The family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of social organization, by what the group of which that family was a part had accepted as the right and useful end of child-training.

The limitations of the family, therefore, in early as in later education, have been as marked as its powers, as has been well shown by Doctor Todd in his book, _The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency_.
=The Three Learned Professions.=--When there were but three learned professions, law, medicine, and theology, and the man of action, soldier or ruler, thought lightly of them all in comparison with his own field of activity, the higher education could be limited to those of selected classes.

Now the social need is for trained talent in a far broader area, and the consequence is that not only is the grade-school being made over but the professional goal of college and university is being extended beyond the dreams of old pedagogues.

When physical, economic, and social sciences were born they gradually demanded a place in the educational system from top to bottom of the line.

The study disciplines they introduced, at first by apology of the cultured, and later by open response to a social demand for leadership in a vastly wider range of activity than was known when colleges first came to be, have attained a higher and higher position until now the various degrees which aim to differentiate the type of social usefulness for which the student is prepared are for the most part on a par with each other.
=New Calls for Trained Leadership.=--This pressure of the new subject-matter of education from the top down, and the pressure from the bottom up of the new ideals in methods of training of the child-mind, have made an educational ferment which has often given confusion of aim and ineffectiveness of accomplishment, but both mean educational advance and educational advance in obedience to new conceptions of common social need.