Education and the Higher LifeSpalding, John Lancaster
Religion
Education and the Higher Life
Spalding, John Lancaster
Education
there; they love the unchartered liberty of chance desires, and are
easily brought to look upon the task of self-improvement as a slavish
work. They would have done with study that they may be free, may enter
into what they suppose to be a fair and rich heritage. They cannot
understand that so long as they are narrow, sensual, and unenlightened,
the possession of a world could not make them high or happy. They do not
know that to have liberty, without the power of using it for worthy
ends, is a curse not a blessing. They imagine that experience of the
world's ways and wickedness will make them wise, whereas it will make
them depraved.
How can they realize that the good of life consists in being, and not in
having? that we are worth what our knowledge, love, admiration, hope,
faith, and desire make us worth? They will not perceive that happiness
and unhappiness are conditions of soul, and consequently that the wise,
the loving, and the strong, whatever their outward fortune, are happy,
while the ignorant, the heartless, and the weak are miserable. To know
ourselves, we should seek to discover the kind of life our influence
tends to create. Consider the kind of world college boys make for
themselves, the things they admire, the companions they find pleasant,
the subjects in which they take interest, the books that delight
them,--and one great cause of the failure of education will be made
plain; for though they are sent to school to be taught by professors,
their influence upon one another is paramount. Instead of helping one
another to see that their real business is to educate themselves, they
persuade one another that life is given for common ends and vulgar
pleasures. Hence they look with envy upon their companions who are the
sons of rich men, as they have not lived long enough to learn that the
fate of four fifths of the sons of rich men in this country, is moral
and physical ruin. If such is the public opinion of the world in which
they live; and if even strong men are feeble in the presence of public
opinion,--how shall we find fault with them for not being attracted by
the ideals of intellectual and moral excellence. For the trained mind
even to think is difficult, and for them independent thought is almost
impossible. They do not know the little less than creative power of
right education, or that as we are changed by action, we are
transformed by thought. What patient labor may do to exalt and refine
the mental faculties, until we become capable of entering into the life
of every age and every people, has not been shown to them; and hence
they are not inspired by the high hope of dwelling, in very truth, with
all the noble and heroic souls who have passed through this world and
left record of themselves. We bid the youth learn many things which he
cannot but find both useless and uninteresting. And yet unless we
discover the secret of winning him to the love of study, the educational
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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