Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/162

148 yet limited to men of taste; but for much of the ugliness, and especially the suburban ugliness, we are indebted to that individual known as the architect and builder. I need not enlarge upon his sins. You will, perhaps, see him at his worst in San Francisco, where eleven bay windows are sometimes bestowed upon one small house.

The characteristic of the architect and builder is excess of action and deficiency of thought. He looks so long and so steadily at the mere process of building, at the operation itself, that he quite forgets to ask whether what he builds is beautiful or suitable. He belittles the graver function, the designing. The putting of architect before builder on his signboard is merely for trade purposes. Even excellence of workmanship is no extenuation for such social crimes. No matter how strong and solid and tight an ugly, inconvenient building may be, it remains a social offense, for it has done violence to the higher and essential requirement.

The same criticism must be applied to the schools. They are not admirable simply because they are alert. They may do with rigor and vigor many things that had better be left undone. However well and thoroughly their methods may be carried out, they are a poor thing, after all, if what they create is not beautiful and seemly. Back of the hundreds of builders who put together the Public Library, the Madison Square Garden, the Pennsylvania Station, stand the several true architects in whose hearts and brains these buildings first took shape. Ten million builders could never alone have created so beautiful a result. It was not in them to do it. And as an old lady once said in speaking of her sister-in-law, "You can't get more out of people, my dear, than there is in them"

Back of everything that is noble and beautiful you will find a compelling idea. Back of the five hundred thousand teachers in America, who are to-day fashioning sixteen million young minds into patterns beautiful or grotesque, there should stand the compelling impulse of a high social idea.

The main question in education, indeed, I may say the one question in education, is simply this. What type of men and women do we wish to prevail? What is the social ideal toward which we wish to work? And the one question of method is. What process will produce this type, will realize this ideal?

I need not point out that the question of method can not possibly be answered until the first question is definitely settled. That would be a perfectly useless journey which had no objective point in view. Yet I think it is no exaggeration to say that the very large majority of teachers and school boards have very vague ideas indeed as to where they want the children to be landed when the formal process