While, therefore, we must take it for granted that Americans
generally believe in a collegiate education, we may still question
whether the colleges are really equipping for leadership the
young men whom they are sending into our modern life. What, after
all, do the colleges give? Out of one hundred graduates whom I
asked what they had gained in college, twenty-one said, “Broader
views of life,” or perspective. Long ago John Ruskin said that
the greatest thing any human being can do in the world is to see
something, and then go and tell what he has seen in a plain way.
To make the undergraduate see something beyond the commonplace is
still the purpose of education. This enlarged vision is often the
salvation of the individual student. It furnishes the impulse of a
new affection. It attaches him to some great, uncongenial task. It
gives him a mission great enough and hard enough to keep his feet
beneath him. It saves him by steadying him.
THE ART OF RELAXATION
But no graduate is equipped for either mental or moral leadership
until he has learned the art of relaxation. Both his health and his
efficiency wait upon his ability to rest, to relax, to be composed
in the midst of life’s affairs. A real cause of American physical
breakdown has been attributed by a famous physician “to those
absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, to that breathlessness
and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of
results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which
with us the work is apt to be accompanied, and from which a
European who would do the same work would, nine times out of ten,
be free. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry,
and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequence, who is your
most efficient worker. Tension and anxiety, present and future all
mixed up together in one mind at once, are the surest drags upon
steady progress and hindrances to our success.”
We find that one of the supreme purposes of education in ancient
Greece was to prepare men to be capable of profiting by their
hours of freedom from labor. In his writing upon education, Herbert
Spencer gives special attention to the training that fits citizens
for leisure hours.
[Illustration: Harper Memorial Building and the Law Building,
University of Chicago]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account