Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/166

152 departures, teachers with their own particular methods and special ends. I should be the last to disparage this attempt at originality, for out of it in the end some good will come. But when I look upon it, and upon its first harvests, I am constantly reminded of some wise words of Arnold's—words to the effect that not alone must we live up to the light that is in us, but as well must we see to it that the light be not darkness. These are simple, homely words, but if they once lay hold upon your spirit, they have a compelling force that is imperative.

It is not uncharitable, I think, to say that much of this educational activity is one-sided. Analyze it for a moment. Here is a man who has looked so long and so steadily upon the function of government that he has lost all sense of proportion. The giant apparition of the State has obscured the other sides of life, and has come to occupy the whole field of vision. He sees in men only citizens, and in children only possible citizens. The one study is civics, and education groups itself around that. Here is another man, upon whom the bread-and-butter study has made a too deep impression. When he reflects upon life, the pale and haggard faces of the poor stare at him, and their thin and ragged garments flutter in the wind of his imagination. In the rich city of New York a woman died of hunger. It is horrible. The daily loaf stands out in large dimensions and obscures the rest of life. The one study becomes for him the bread-and-butter study, and education gives place to industrial training. Here is still another man who has busied himself with questions of rent and wages, profit and loss, currency and land, free trade and protection, until these tools of social life become for him the life itself, and the great issue—it seems a sacrilege to say it—• is plainly economic. And another, who sees in trade and shopkeeping the blood of life, and would make arithmetic and bookkeeping and business practice the food of children. Or another, who is impressed with numbers, and who believes that New York and Chicago are great cities because of their millions of people. To him children are socially interesting as future mothers and fathers. His cry is the vainest of all. It is the race. Nor should I omit in even so partial a survey that large group of men and women who rightly hold the achievements of the human spirit to be very precious, but who see, unfortunately, in the vehicle which brings these records from the past into the present—that is to say, in language—a thing as worshipful as the achievements themselves. Are we to forget that Thucydides and Zenophon were soldiers, that Goethe was a chancellor, and Shakespeare an actor; that all the men and women who have reported the spirit worthily have been men and women who have tasted life, and have had something to report? Are we to forget that