The child was the organism. Society was the environment. School was the bridge.
This breaks with everything that came before it. Athens, Jerusalem, the medieval Schoolmen, the Renaissance humanists, Newman in the 19th century — all of them assumed the world had a given shape, that reality was real, and that human beings were made to perceive it and respond. Plato called it paideia: the slow turning of the soul toward what is. Aquinas distinguished ratio, our calculative reason, from intellectus, the receptive power by which we behold the truth of a thing. A serious education was meant to form both, with intellectus as the higher.
Josef Pieper, in 1948, called this older tradition the antidote to what he named “the world of total work.” Jacques Maritain, writing in 1943, was answering Dewey directly when he insisted that the first task of the educator is to form a person, and only then a citizen. In that order. Never reversed.
Dewey reversed it.