Page:Education as the Training of Personality.djvu/24

 ideals; he seeks The Truth, and in the very act ever affirms Absolute Truth; he seeks The Good, and so ever affirms the Absolute Good; he feels and longs after Beauty, and so ever affirms Absolute Beauty."

Personality, then, we shall take to imply unity and intrinsic value, and we shall think of it as creating its own value by the achievement of its interests—material, social, and ideal. But these characteristics do not exhaust the meaning of personality. They only make explicit certain of its implications. We must consider them only as elements in our idea of what a person is, this idea being derived from our consciousness of ourselves as persons and incapable of complete analysis. We all know what we mean by a person, and we must hold fast to this notion of living, concrete persons if we would avoid the errors of abstraction.

Our next step will be to ask whether our conception of education as the training of personality, in the sense just described, will explain our actual experience in our schools. Do we as a matter of fact try to train our boys as individual persons? And do they as persons exhibit the characteristics we have noted? I think a little reflection will show that the effectiveness of our teaching and the educational influence of the school's corporate life can be explained only by the full recognition of our boys and girls as persons.

Let us take first our actual attitude as teachers. When we are doing our best work as masters do we not deal with Brown and Jones as persons? Is there not that