Formal education is but one of the factors that may be employed towards
the development of character; you cannot so easily separate one force in
life from another, assigning a specific duty here, a definite task
there. That is one of the weaknesses of our time, the water-tight
compartment plan of high specialization, the cellular theory of
efficiency. Life must be seen as a whole, organized as a whole, lived as
a whole. Every thought, every emotion, every action, works for the
building or the unbuilding of character, and this synthesis of living
must be reestablished before we can hope for social regeneration.
Nevertheless formal education may be made a powerful factor, even now,
and not only in this one specific direction, but through this, for the
accomplishing of that unification of life that already is indicated as
the next great task that is set before us; and this brings me to a
consideration of the last of the questions I have proposed for answer,
viz.: is our present system of education adequate to the sufficient
development of character, and if not, how should it be modified?
I do not think it adequate, and experience seems to me to prove the
point. It has not maintained the sturdy if sometimes acutely unpleasant
character of the New England stock, or the strong and handsome character
of the race that dwelt in the thirteen original colonies as this
manifested itself well into the last century, and it has, in general,
bred no new thing in the millions of immigrants and their descendants
who have flooded the country since 1840 and from whom the public schools
and some of the colleges are largely recruited. It is not a question of
expanded brain power or applied aptitude, but of character, and here
there is a larger measure of failure than we had a right to expect. And
yet, had we this right? The avowed object of formal education is mental
and vocational training, and by no stretch of the imagination can we
hold these to be synonymous with character. We have dealt with and
through one thing alone, and that is the intellect, whereas character is
rather the product of emotions judiciously stimulated, balanced (not
controlled) by intellect, and applied through active and varied
experience. Deliberately have we cut out every emotional and spiritual
factor; not only religion and the fine arts, but also the studies, and
the methods of study, and the type of text-books, that might have helped
in the process of spiritual and emotional development. We have
eliminated Latin and Greek, or taught them as a branch of philology; we
have made English a technical exercise in analysis and composition,
disregarding the moral and spiritual significance of the works of the
great masters of English; we minimize ancient history and concentrate on
European history since the French Revolution, and on the history of the
United States, and because of the sensitiveness of our endless variety
of religionists (pro forma) text books are written which leave religion
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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