Means and Ends of EducationSpalding, John Lancaster
Philosophy
Means and Ends of Education
Spalding, John Lancaster
Culture; Education
Increase of the power to love is increase of life. But love needs
guidance. We first awaken in the world of the senses, and are
attracted by what we see and touch and taste. The aim of education is
to help the soul to rise above this world, in which, if we remain, we
are little better than brutes. Hence the teacher seeks in many ways to
reveal to the young the fact that the perfect, the best, cannot be seen
or touched, cannot be grasped even by the mind; but that it is,
nevertheless, that which they should strive to make themselves capable
of loving above all things. And thus he prepares them to understand
what is meant by the love of truth and righteousness, by the love of
God. In the training of animals even, patience and gentleness are more
effective than violence. How, then, shall we hope by physical
constraint and harsh methods to educate human beings, who are human
precisely because they are capable of love and are swayed by rational
motives? There is no soul so gross, so deeply buried in matter, but it
shall from some point or other make a sally to show it still bears the
impress of God's image. At such points the educator will keep watch,
studying how he may make this single ray of light interfuse itself with
his pupil's whole being.
It is not possible to know there is no God, no soul, no free will, no
right or wrong; at the worst, it is only possible to doubt all this.
The universe is as inconceivable as God, and theories of matter as full
of difficulties as theories of spirit. It is a question of belief or
unbelief; ultimately a question of health or disease, of life or death.
They who have no faith in God can have little faith in the worth of
life, which can be for them but an efflorescence of death, a sort of
inexplicable malady of atoms dreaming they are conscious. If the age
tends irresistibly to destroy belief in God, the end will be the ruin
of belief in the good of life. In the mean while the doubt which
weakens the springs of hope and love is not a symptom of health but of
disease, pregnant with suffering and misery for all, but most of all
for the young. He who is loved in a true and noble way is surrounded
by an element of spiritual light in which his worth is revealed to him.
In perceiving what he is to another, he comes to understand what he is
or may be in himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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