Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/388

382 It seems to me that evidence of an actual opposition between the liberal and the technical in education is found in three distinct evils which pervade the activities of society; and in each case it seems to me that the remedy for the evil lies only in adhering to and establishing the ideal of liberal education.

It is regarded as the business of the technically trained man to give people what they want, if they will pay for it. He is not expected to judge, or to be capable of judging, whether what is thus done makes for the development of human nature and personality. A shipbuilder is not expected to judge whether the object for which he builds the ship—war, it may be, or contemptible luxury—is a worthy object; the skilled advertising agent is not blamed if he collects money for the publication of a magazine much worse than useless, but permitted by law; the bridge-designer is not expected to see that his designs are executed under conditions that make for the safety and welfare of the workmen; the automobile manufacturer is not censured for the construction of machines ill adapted to run according to law, but excellently suited to break the law and to put other people to discomfort and in danger; the newspaper editor is not blamed for the destruction of acres of noble spruce trees sacrificed to the production of a "comic" supplement.

Even though we ask of the preacher and the teacher, of the physician and the scientist—yes, of the lawyer and the politician—that they have regard to the welfare of men in their several lines of art, and though such technical training as all these men may receive is not without reference to this liberal aspect of the professions they are to follow, yet we have to recognize that none of these professions is free from the general principle that people should get what they are willing to pay for, and not much else. And it must be confessed that in every line •of technical education, with the partial exception of the training for teaching and the ministry, what little insistence there is upon the importance of the liberal conception of life and art, is not accompanied by thorough instruction in determining what ideals of manhood and personality are worthy and well founded. On the study of what things are of real worth much has been written (outside the literature of "revelation") which compares in solidity and scope of treatment with the best that the mathematician and the physicist have achieved in their fields of science. But the study of these teachings is at present largely neglected, and seldom systematic or continuous.

From the liberal standpoint the highest development of a man's personality involves the sense of a thoroughgoing responsibility for what he does, and the determination to decide for himself, so far as possible, whether what he does is, in its results upon human welfare, worthy of himself. No man surely is called free who acts without