The preceding chapter has indicated the urgent need of a different type of education from that which prevails for the training of those who are to be the future leaders and guides in the sphere of religion. We need a genuine school of prophets as the builders of the Church in this new epoch. But even more urgent is the need of a new type of religious training for the little children whom God has given us to guide into the ways of life.
Almost every person who is concerned for the spiritual culture of youth is distressed to find that the Sunday School is not a more potent agency in the lives of litde children and young people. There are notable instances in which the Sunday School is a strikingly effective influence, but beyond question there is a widespread revolt of young people against attending it any longer after they reach the age of about sixteen, and sometimes revolt comes earlier. Too often the Sunday [ p. 174 ] [ p. 175 ] School fails to awaken a growing interest in the years of adolescence. Its method of study and its approach to life seems unreal. It produces in many instances a spirit of hostility toward the Bible and toward religion in general and thus often defeats the very end for which it exists. This is partly due to the labored attempts to extract farfetched moral lessons out of Scripture passages which were not written for that purpose. The whole method seems to a lively boy dull, dreary and unreal. With difficulty he holds his mind to it. He feels himself injected into a world in which he does not find himself at home.
Here, as in so many other fields of education, die imaginative quality in the religious training has run too low, while the factual element of the teaching and the emphasis on a moral lesson for a mind not ready for it have been pushed too hard. The litde sections of Scripture, cut out of their literary context, and used apart from their historical background, leave on the mind an air of unreality, and in the end the student fails to get his mind stored even with the fact material of the Bible, and he remains unfamiliar with the story narratives and significant events.
If experts in modern educational methods could work the miracle of discovering how to use die world’s supreme spiritual literature to fit the inherent aptitudes and interests of the maturing mind of our youth and could help them to find through the stages of moral [ p. 176 ] and spiritual development of the race the ideals and springs of life which they need for their own journey, creative results would certainly follow. It is not so much a new type of religious education that is needed as it is the application of the wisest methods of psychology and pedagogy and of good human insight for leading young people on into the richest meaning of life. It is perhaps the most urgent single educational task now waiting in the world to be done.
But an educational reform still more far-reaching than that is essential if we are to have any adequate program for building the new world of our faith and hope. Once the Church held the sole key to the culture and education of those who were to shape the destiny of the world. It is no longer the case. Education, like so many other features of modem life, has been to a great extent secularized and the Church directly touches only a small area of the educational domain. This absence of direct control is as it should be. The function of the Church, here as in so many other aspects of life, should be one of inspiration and creative vision rather than of control, direction and compulsion.
What needs to grow clear in the minds of all who are responsible for the training of youth, whether within or entirely outside the Church, is the fact that all genuine education must have a spiritual quality to it, that is, it must have to do with the formation of personality, the building of character, the enlargement of [ p. 177 ] life, the transmission of the supreme experiences of the race and with setting free the higher potential powers of the individual. Religion is not something apart from life. It is not something injected from the outside. It is life raised to full correspondence with its full rich and complete environment. Those aspects of awe and wonder and reverence which give larger inner dimensions to life belong to all stages of education. Nobody who attains to the life of a person will ever be satisfied with being an efficient tool for doing work. More and more, with the increase of labor-saving devices, the individual will be confronted with the problem of what to do with his enlarging periods of leisure. He will have, one hopes, more time to live -with himself, and he will need more and more to have interior resources. It ought to be a primary function of education to assist the individual to find the whole of himself and to be prepared, not only to do a good piece of work, but to live and to enjoy life in ways that are rich and satisfying.
A great war has been fought in our time “to make the world safe for democracy.” It failed to do it. And more than that, it revealed pretty clearly that no amount of warfare with weapons of force could ever make the world safe for democracy, that is, for self-government of the people, for the people and by the people. It is only by patient, persistent and constructive education that the world will ever be “safe” for any ideal ways [ p. 178 ] of life. Civilization is a perilous experiment in a world like ours. There are imm ense explosive forces concealed in human emotions and passions and complexes which put all noble experiments in peril. H. G. Wells has said that “we must choose between education and catastrophe.” Almost any prophet could say that. What we want most is the prophet who can tell us what type of education we most need for our world tasks and how to get across from our old methods to new and effective ones. While we are waiting for the prophet to come, we must do the best we can to suggest some of the lines along which education should go forward.
A new emphasis of aim in education has been long overdue. Our excuse for dealing with it here is that there can be no such world as this Preface is forecasting without a profound revision of educational aims. Our educational methods were developed to fit the needs of a simple agrarian people who were busy conquering the virgin soil of a continent, and, before we were quite conscious of the transformation, we found ourselves a great industrial and commercial nation, more than half our people living in cities, a large proportion of them in cities of extensive area and swarming population. We have not yet built up any adequate educational [ p. 179 ] system for the new conditions which confront us. The old world into which many of us were born has long ceased to exist, and we have hardly begun to shake ourselves awake to discover the new order of things, or to shape the type of culture and the social ideals that are needed for it.
No one with sound min d will question the importance of the scientific conquest of nature which has been for two generations the major aim and aspiration in higher education, both here and abroad. The dominant desire to understand the complex frame of things, to feel at home in the universe, to know how to control in some degree its immense forces and to use them for the maintenance and furtherance of human life, is altogether laudable and has without doubt added to the general welfare of mankind. Curiosity, eagerness for a solution of mysteries, and a passion for truth for its own sake, are in themselves noble traits and motives.
But with the discovery and control of the forces of nature have come an immense increase of creative power and the birth of a host of new rivalries. The staggering shock of the World War has awakened many minds to the fact that the control of forces and the possession of power to use and direct the energies and raw materials of nature cannot make our world safe for any kind of well-ordered living. In fact, increase of power through the discovery and control of forces appears to bring into play new and unsuspected [ p. 180 ] dangers to civilization. Titanic forces put into the hands of unm oral giants can only mean a terrible menace to everything pure and true and beautiful and good. There are signs enough already in every line of modern life to indicate that the possession of power and the control of forces and materials, without the training of the heart along with it, make a new type of tyrant and put once more all the noblest inheritances of man’s spirit in jeopardy. Men of an earlier time “built Babylon out of their own Babylonish hearts,” and in all ages civilizations are built out of the dominant ideas and ideals that form the lives of the builders. If we want to remold our civilization, we must first set about training in new fashion the minds that are to do the building, especially training in social ideals.
We must take pretty much the same attitude toward merely vocational and occupational education. Important as it is to be efficient, to possess skill and technique, it, nevertheless, brings a real menace to the best ideals of life to have the workers of the world trained only to be highly efficient tools for turning out work and products, without having developed capacity for appreciating the intrinsic values of life and unable to make any real contribution to the moral and spiritual assets of the world. Competition, rivalry and machine culture grow apace but the spirit does not bloom. All education, however much its final aim may bear on preparation for a profession, or for technical tasks, [ p. 181 ] must be equally concerned with the formation of ideals of life, with the building of character and with the adjustment of the individual to the larger groups to which he belongs. To ignore that side of life is to defy the structural laws of the world.
If there is to be a new stress put upon the formation of personality and upon the building of character in the educational process, it would seem at first sight as though a ready-made pattern of the good life should be set forth for the guidance and direction of perplexed teachers. Could not the “good life” be definitely described and the lines of its formation be drawn? Is it not possible once for all to map out the path of life and to present in advance the goal of life for a rightly fashioned person?
It would no doubt ease the teachers’ burden if the model to be attained were clearly given and if the method of shaping noble personal character could be presented at die beginning of the teachers’ task. But it cannot be done. In the first place, no one has the complete answer ready at this stage. The effective method will call for the cooperative labor of many experts and for the wisdom that can only be derived from many patient experiments. And in the second [ p. 182 ] place, it is not possible to pattern-stamp individual lives or to shape personality to fit exact preformed models. Ideals of life must be free and unique creations for each person. The goal of the good life is not something to be set up like the terminus of a foot race. The most that can be said here in this brief sketch is that the aim and ideal in education should as far as possible be focused upon the development of the whole self and that all the available agencies of self-realization should be used in vital and constructive ways.
It would perhaps seem wise, at first thought, if we propose to educate for human relationships, to base our education quite definitely on a detailed study of social and economic questions, to start with elemental problems of the social order and to train up all our youth to hold, maintain, defend, and practice a single, sound, sacred, basic theory of the social-economic system, somewhat the way every scientist, before doctrines of relativity came in to upset the easy method, fitted all his observations and calculations and predictions into a rigid, unvarying system of Newtonian gravitation.
But in the first place it is useless to expea that educators could ever agree universally on any such “right theory.” Human society, with its multitudinous, palpitating human units, cannot be reduced to such abstraa simplicity that it can be organized and handled, as gravitating particles of matter can be, under some unvarying law or principle that always applies and always [ p. 183 ] works. And in the second place, even if it were possible to make such a reduction and discover such a principle, that method of clamping or jamming fixed and readymade ideas on the passive mind of youth is not education. Regimenting minds to a setded system made in advance is a far more serious form of “goosestep’’ than that which drills and disciplines into shape the unrecaldtrant bodies of soldiers, who have surrendered the right to think or to will.
Genuine education does not present to minds, young or old, some ready-made conclusion. It trains minds to face complex situations, it increases their capacity to think them through, to organize the facts involved, to find their laws and principles, to arrive freely and solely under the compulsion of the facts, to the conclusion that fits all the data that are there. To learn by rote, to store up a stock of memories, to receive a lot of stamped-in items, like a wax tablet, is not education. For better or for worse we are bound as educators to take the risks of turning students loose for the great adventure of discovering for themselves how the new world is going to be built.
The most important emphasis in die new education will not be training for the conquest of nature, nor for the invention of machinery, nor for practical efficiency in output, nor for the formulation of economic theories, but for the fullest and completest formation of personal life in the midst of a social environment of [ p. 184 ] other people. The most important function of education is the discovery of the potential aptitudes in the lives of boys and girls, the training and control of instincts and emotions, the formation of ideals and loyalties, the shaping of the trend of character and the infusion of life with magnanimous aims and purposes and the open-minded cooperative spirit. In short, schools and colleges ought to be centers for the big business of life-planning and life-building as well as places for the accumulation and discovery of facts. One of these undertakings has been carried forward to successful achievement; the other has been only indifferently attempted.
In a remarkable address which he delivered in 1930 at the University of California, Owen Young pointed out that the trouble with all the schemes to rehabilitate Europe since the war has been that the manipulators of them have been busy with abstract economics and politics, with leagues and conventions, with delimiting nationalities and finding ways and means of providing for security, while all the time the actual human faces, the palpitating human lives, that make up the population of these countries, are pretty well forgotten. Behind all these abstract schemes that are pushed back [ p. 185 ] and forth like pawns on a chess board, are myriads of human persons, many of them young and expectant, whose lives never come in for consideration in all these conferences for the settlement of economic and political policy and for guaranteeing security. Owen Young does well to remind us of the vital fact of human faces wistfully asking to be considered as an essential part of the problem.
Too often the human faces have in the same way been overlooked in our educational schemes. Education has involved absorbing financial undertakings. The economic factor has swollen to an enormous size. Million dollar school buildings, immense equipment, wheels within wheels of mechanism have been contrived. Institutions have grown almost magically beyond all the dreams of their founders, and the persons entrusted with the management of them have found themselves forced to give a vast amount of their time and energy to the framework and the setting of the educational task. They have had litde opportunity to ask what was happening to the human faces peering out there behind the framework and the setting.
Every time the expert impartially studies the output of the expanded schools and colleges which we have been laboriously building in America he gives us solemn warning drat all is not well with us, that our education too often does not actually educate, that in our maze of pedagogical systems and schemes we are too [ p. 186 ] oblivious of the concrete human faces and the potential lives with which we ought to be concerned.
We are fortunately in the midst of sweeping educational reforms but our inherited systems still harbor fixed habits which are outgrown. One of these habit systems is the assumption that a method of teaching that fits one mind must consequently fit all minds, and so we forthwith proceed to wholesale our supplies of truth to all who come, instead of studying individual aptitudes and adjusting our method and our technique to fit the special needs of the particular case. We forget the human faces looking out behind the systems.
Another one of our habit customs is the tendency to educate for “credits” instead of educating for ends and values of life. We are busy asking what will get a person on from one grade in the educational factory to another as though he were a Ford car, instead of asking what will make a person richer and deeper in diaracter. A disillusioned college president tells us that “students are considered as so many logs of pulp-wood to be turned into a certain number of paper degrees at the end of the senior year.” Sooner or later we must smash that old bastile of examinations for grades and find new and freer ways of discovering and estimating intellectual progress. That will be the beginning of a new day. It may be said emphatically that education which focuses on passing off examinations is not in any true sense real education.
[ p. 187 ]
Another of our outgrown customs is our fancy for a vast variety of casual lines and fields of scrappy information instead of the mastery of some continuous, unified, coherent and cumulative plan of work that brings a growing interest to the student and the steady development of his mental powers. A few subjects pursued with diligence and accurately mastered give a far better basic education for life than does a multitude of half -digested fields of study. Time spent in getting a thin smattering of one or two foreign languages, not sufficiently mastered to be of any practical use or to supply any formative culture, is time largely wasted and opportunity for real culture lost.
The way imagination is trained is always one sure test of the educational quality of an institution. Too often the emphasis has been put upon the pupils’ capacity to remember f acts, or to exhibit a successful stock of information, or to give the meter, the syntax and the factual features of a great literary creation, while extremely little has been done to ensure an appreciation of the work, or to heighten the pupils’ power to see the deeper, subtler meaning of life through it, or to enable them to expand their world in ideal directions and see scenes of life in their richer possibilities. It is well [ p. 188 ] known that those who have been drilled on some great classic in literature as a requirement for entrance to college seldom ever want to see it or hear of it again. It has produced a revolt of spirit instead of having given “an imagina tive dominion” over the dry facts of life.
One difficulty which underlies the present apparent loss of interest in religion is the widespread factual approach to all subjects. The way in which the great epic stories of the Old Testament for example have been brought down to the level of fact instead of being seen in terms of their larger significance for life is one dulling effect of the failure to cultivate and expand the power to see, which ought to be the function of all great literature.
Fortunately the dawn is breaking and the new day is at hand. It has already begun in many places, especially in the lower grades of education. New methods, new aims and new ideals are also at least in the experimental stage in many institutions of higher learning.
The culture of imagination, which is such an important mark of successful education, has been carried to a very high level in more than one school. Everybody who teaches knows that the arousal of interest and expectancy is an essential task that confronts the teacher. The “project method” has proved to be an immense stimulus in this direction. It introduces creative ingenuity; it gives scope for muscular activity and [ p. 189 ] skill; it develops originality and leadership; it appeals to die dramatic instinct; it arouses international interests and sympathies; and it gives every member o£ a class something personal to do. The springs of curiosity and discovery are brought into play and education is linked up as it ought to be with actual living. Interests are quickened, imagination is kindled, loyalties are formed and there is a steady unconscious pull forward. Discipline in many instances has ceased to be a major problem for teachers, and parents in many cases have found their children almost recreated by their newly awakened interests and expectations. Unfortunately “project methods” do not fit all educational subjects nor all types of students or teachers.
Not less important than training the imaginative powers of the child is the work of organizing the instinctive and emotional forces through systems of interest and springs of action. These processes of organization go on unconsciously in the life of the child from the very beginning of his development. Alexander Shand, in his Foundations of Character, lays down as the first fundamental law of character formation: “Mental activity tends, at first unconsciously, afterwards consciously, to produce and sustain system and organization.” What happens in this process of system-building is that the native powerful driving forces and explosive tendencies come under the control of central interests and later of ideal aims. Slowly the cruder and coarser [ p. 190 ] instinctive-emotional traits are organized and sublimated and become systems of loyalty, or systems of sentiment, which lie at the base of all character formation. The natural joy in games, the influence of friendship, the feeling of admiration for persons who have attractiveness or prestige, the study of striking biographies, the power of noble ensamples, living or dead, the creative use of characters in fiction and drama — all these thin gs are likely to bring sublimation and to form subtle and far-reaching loyalties.
History teaching ought, as far as is humanly possible, to be liberated from the incubus of propaganda and made an illuminative revelation of moral issues. One of the most terrible devices for the distortion of truth, and for the permanent injury of souls, is the use of a history class room for the cultivation of hate in innocent young minds toward the people of a rival nation or race. It is bad enough to use the scenes of past battle fields for the purpose of arousing national pride and for glorifying one country at the expense of another one, but it is far worse to make use of battles and of the enflamed passion that has been bom of past wars to create a new passion in the hearts of children that can be cashed in as an asset toward preparation [ p. 191 ] for new wars. History impartially taught can be made one of the most potent forces of culture for the discovery of the laws of life and for the formation of social ideals. The honest use of it as a genuine method of culture ought to be as sacred an obligation to the teacher as is the impartial study of the laws of nature.
Courses dealing with present-day international issues and with social, political and economic problems in all countries of the world are almost as important as are courses in history, and should as far as possible supplement the latter. What is happening in contemporary life has very vital significance for the formation of culture and for the shaping of ideals. These courses should be carried on with the same breadth of view and with the same solidity of scholarship as is the case in the history courses, and it goes without saying that this work should be under the guidance of wise teachers who have genuine leadership.
It is peculiarly important that all education should clearly bring out the fact that no one in this world can live unto himself, that one person alone is no person. The selfish aspirations of a boy, his decision to aim to get his own isolated pleasure, his snobbery toward others, would tend to fade away and weaken if he were made to see with clear insight that there can be no such thing as an “isolated” person, that it is as impossible as having a stick with only one end to it, that in actual fact we are all bound together with others [ p. 192 ] in life, in interests, in gains and in relationships and that consequently we must share ourselves and surrender ourselves and give ourselves if we are to make any kind of life that is worth living.
The interesting facts of mutual aid among animals can admirably be used to illustrate the working of what has been called the “conjunct” character of life. The tribal habits of primitive man will supply another set of illustrations. Then may come vivid pictures of the impossibility of life for a child in the years of helplessness without the care of others, the supply of food and clothes, shelter and warmth. The pupil can quickly be made to see that no language can be learned unless one is embedded in a living group of persons who speak the language and pass it on to the newcomer. The same is true of our ideas and ideals. We must get all the material of our thinking and of our imagining from some social group. Nobody can be a getter and a receiver unless he is at the same time a giver and a contributor. All these solemn facts need to be driven in and made an inherent part of any true culture.
Some of our greatest authorities in science are telling us that die most inclusive law in the universe is die principle of concretion or organism, or, as the Rt. Hon. J. S. Smuts has called it, “organic wholeness”-— the tendency to produce wholes out of units. If the principle is a sound one, as many thinkers now believe, it means a momentous revolution in thought. However [ p. 193 ] important the “unit” may be, it can never be comprehended until it is seen as a “cell” in a larger organic whole. We do not understand an “atom” until we know how it is bent to conjoin with more atoms to form a “molecule” and the molecule, again, will have its tendency to form a larger whole. As soon as life emerges the organic feature is even more in evidence and we find ourselves carried on and up from single “cells” to ever higher organic wholes. A man is an immense congeries of cooperative cells, but a man is not a “person” until he, too, finds his place in a living cooperative social whole, of ever more inclusive scope and range. Genuine education in the future must aim to train personal units to become living, cooperative parts of inclusive social wholes.
Every opportunity must be sei2ed during lessons and in sport to drive home the importance and the significance of cooperation. Young people need constantly to gain insight into the value of understanding other persons’ minds and thoughts and emotions, and with these processes should go the cultivation of respect for personality at every stage of its development. Everything should be done that can be done to illustrate and demonstrate the effect of getting the other person’s point of view and of coordinating with others rather than aiming to outdo or to get the best of those with whom one has dealings. The cultivation of kindness and thoughtfulness in all relations toward those who [ p. 194 ] have physical defects and peculiarities is an essential part of true education and it ought to extend to differences and peculiarities of race and color, so that it becomes “second nature” to be respectful to persons of other races.
In speaking favorably, as has been done, of certain modern types of education, nothing should be said that would imply sympathy with any methods of education that neglect mental or moral discipline. There is no soft and easy way to any high qualities of life or character. This is the age of the moving staircase. One steps on and is carried without effort to the destination. We turn a button and start our furnace, light our house, or bring the music of a great orchestra to our parlor. But let no one make the mistake of thinking that he can attain truth by the escalator method or that he can achieve a character by the nimble turning of a button. Robust personality can never be formed without constant insistence on the restraints and sanctions of nature and the no less important sanctions and restraints of society. If there is to be any freedom that is based on reality, it must be a freedom that respects everybody else’s rights and, too, a freedom that conforms to the eternal nature of things. It takes long experience to [ p. 195 ] discover where the curve of freedom runs and the wise teacher must not let those in his charge suppose that freedom is a soft and easy thing.
The experiences of the race in all lands through many centuries give unquestioned evidence that periods of deep hush and silence are strikingly effective toward the spiritual development of persons of all ages. Long before anybody knew why pauses of quiet worked restorative and creative effects, and before psychologists had succeeded in demonstrating the fact, the unconscious wisdom of the race had hit upon this method of deepening life. It could, I am convinced, be made an important element both of intellectual and spiritual culture at all stages of school life. The heightened capacity of the mind after periods of quiet concentration is solidly proved, and there is little doubt that group-silence is far more effective than solitary silence is.
There ought, therefore, to be a good deal of experimental work done on the deepening and expansive effects of silent meditation for children and for the discovery of ways to feed and fertilize the deep subsoil of the child’s mind out of which his ideas and his volitions emerge. When anyone discovers how to stir the deeps within, to free the child from fears and to bring this deep-lying life of the individual into closer relationship with the essential Life of the universe, great moral energies are lib- [ p. 196 ] erated. Schools, which for one reason or another do not have a daily period for Bible reading or Prayers, would find a short period of corporate silence of great value for deepening the life of the children and for training them in spiritual control and concentration. It would be well if everybody gave some time each day to consider seriously his own deepest aspirations and to ask himself in a silent confessional what are his most cherished ideals for life.
Coupled with careful scientific training and with the development of capacity to see and to describe facts as they are, should be joined the no less important training of the mind to appreciate and enjoy those subtler aspects of the universe which do not submit to exact description. Beauty is as real as atoms or as lifecells are, and it is at least as important to know how to react significantly to the beauty of the world as it is to know how to describe the atom in mathematical terms. Joy and wonder in the presence of beauty and sublimity are as rich in value for life as fact-knowledge is and the key to the heart of things is certainly not always a formula of knowledge. The thing s by which men live are more apt to be found in the re alm of appreciation than in the realm of pure knowledge, and consequently an education that deals with the latter and neglects the former is sadly limited, as many men and women are now discovering. We are probably nearer the heart of reality in our naive and unanalyzed [ p. 197 ] experiences of Nature than we are when we have reduced these experiences to a later stage of analysis and reflection.
The time is coming when every sound teacher will realize that it is fully as important to have expert treatment for children’s fears and mental “complexes” as for their defects of eyesight and hearing. The child who is abnormally shy, embarrassed and bashful, or who withdraws from all social activities and sports, or who is obsessed by peculiar fears or who is sullen, moody and petulant, will never be successfully educated until he is delivered from his handicap, and no ordinary teacher can set him free unaided. A sound expert in mental hygiene can work what seems nothing short of a miracle in a boy who has acquired the unfortunate reputation of being “bad.” The men and women who swell the ranks of the criminal class and who seem distinctly antisocial might under the right guidance and skill be on their way to be good citizens, if not highpowered saints, instead of criminals.
One of the greatest advantages in introducing some degree and some form of self-government in schools and colleges will be found in the way in which it develops a sense of responsibility for honor and truth in [ p. 198 ] the life of the school and for corporate order. It helps to make every student realize that he bears obligation not only for his own personal conduct but that he enters into and shares in the success and the failures of the whole group to which he belongs. He thus discovers through experience what it means to be a unit in a social organism.
In connection with discipline and control every one needs to receive instruction both by practice and teaching, in the use of gentle forces. It is a well-known fact that persons who shout and scream and threaten have no power of discipline. A calm and quiet tone and manner accomplish vastly more than storm and bluster do. Every way that can be devised of getting moral results by other methods than resort to force should be tried, if, for no other reason, because of the educative effect of it on the pupils and students themselves. There are few things more worth learning than the secret that the greatest forces are soul-forces, that the supreme power of one life over another one lies in the spirit and not in the muscles.
Education in its more creative and deepening aspects has almost certainly been retarded by the excessive emphasis put on football as a public spectacle. It is a noble and manly game when it is played as a sport. It involves a large element of intellectual skill and ingenuity as well as muscular hardness and robust physique. The features of control, of discipline and [ p. 199 ] of management have been a genuine asset. But the stadium features of a great spectacle, the worked-up mass cheering, the “must win” attitude, the immense commercial element, the excessive emphasis on coaching, the intense rivalries that are produced, the advertising factors which thrust themselves in, and the almost ineradicable tendencies on the part of alumni and others to secure a winning team by methods that are illegitimate, either in the field of sport or of education, should give serious pause to all who are concerned for genuine education for life. It seems to be clearly evident that the present system of high-powered, competitive mass athletics with its commercialism and its close kinship to professionalism, must give way to real sport of many types, with the opportunity for every student to play some game himself instead of being lined up to produce mass enthusiasm for the inspiration of a few highly trained players in an arena.
There can be little question that our youth to-day have suffered an immense loss in their education in that they have not been held more seriously to the task of carrying their intellectual problems through to ultimate issues. That has not been considered to be the concern of science. Science has quite properly confined [ p. 200 ] its operations to a less ambitious mission. It never pretends to go beyond the domain of things and events that occur in time and space. It declines to deal with mind or spirit as an actual factor in the processes of the world. It refuses to raise ultimate questions of origin and destiny. It cannot, therefore, make die universe a completely intelligible affair. But there are other departments of thought whose essential business is the deeper interpretation of life. There are farreaching implications in the nature of these human minds of ours, with their capacities to organize facts of experience and to build up systems of truth, implications which need to be thought out to their farther reaches. We are confronted, too, all the time with realities of a different order from that composed of atoms and molecules. It is an unmistakable fact that the world reveals beauty and love and moral goodness as certainly as it does coal and copper. What we need as the keystone to any educational arch is an interpretation of these realities by which we live, in such a way that the student can be carried forward to a solid ground and basis for beauty and love and goodness in the eternal nature of things, and for the self-conscious spirit in us that apprehends and verifies these realities. Start anywhere you will with exalted beauty, or sacrificial love, or self-giving goodness and it leads on into a world that has spiritual foundations. It enables a person to “inhabit reality.”
[ p. 201 ]
We need to find a principle of intelligibility and insight rather than more new facts in behind old facts. Here lies the central weakness and the main confusion of our present educational methods. This emphasis has swung the center of gravity very strongly over to the material side and the mental and spiritual and social factors of life have been missed to far too great an extent in the culture of our time. That is one of the deepest tragedies in the life and thought of to-day.
The tide has already turned, the new and deeper currents of thought are in evidence. The wiser leaders are conscious that the whole business of life suffers and goes awry as soon as the meaning and significance and high destiny of life fade away. That means that the scientific method of approach in all college work must be supplemented and balanced by a discipline of philosophy, by the study of the fundamental nature of mind and by a consideration of the central values of life and the social issues of it, as they have been revealed in the spiritual history of the race. If the results are to be sane and wholesome the defeative philosophers must decrease and die magnanimous thinkers must increase in influence.