Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/393

Rh right ideas; so far as they are wrong, they are the product of wrong ideas.

If, as we think, the presence among men of erroneous ideas is the cause of social disorders, the cure will be their displacement, through educational processes, with such as will produce right character in men and inspire right relations among men. We believe this is entirely possible, and we think that both the agencies and the methods are in sight. Both must be educational. All political and legislative schemes, the single-tax theory, the nationalization of land and industries, all socialistic projects, all cooperative remedies, will prove of little avail, if they aim at curing social disorders by improving the environment only of the man. The man himself is wrong. He is the thing which needs correction and improvement; not the world in which he lives, or the form of government under which he lives. The only possible way of correcting him, and through him of permanently curing social disorders, is through the processes of education—education of the child with the potential man in him.

The Church, the press, and the schools are the agencies which, supplemented by other forces, have determined the existing fundamental ideas of society. If these agencies have been able to formulate and fix these, they certainly can modify them, or even displace them by others. The functions of these agencies, however, and the methods employed in the execution of these functions, must be modified, some even revolutionized. Although the Church and the press, the discussion of whose functions and methods the limits of our paper forbid, are powerful agencies whose influence is beyond all computation, or even conjecture—which must be employed in the improvement of social conditions—yet they are not the agency upon which greatest reliance can be placed. This is found in the schools—the great free public-school system. There is greatest hope in this agency for many reasons: particularly because its organization, and no other, is fully adapted to the requirements of the situation; because it deals with the child, which is a moldable and not a crystallized thing; and because the schools are the agency which in large degree determines the character of all other agencies.

Our hope, then, is in the schools; but their function and their methods must be modified, because they are not giving to the world the best they can give. They are not giving what the world most needs—the best possible character, which results very largely from a careful, rational study of our relations to others, from a right understanding of all those relations which are interwoven everywhere among men in all phases and departments of life. Nothing is more important for our children and youth to understand than the nature and character of human relations;