Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/37

Rh will be 25 years hence, for no one can foretell what it will then be like. We must educate them to expect change as the only constant thing in life, to welcome it and to assimilate it as it comes; for the only security we can look forward to is that found in ideally controlled progress. The crucial test of the success of education should be an inclination and capacity for indefinite growth; a growth social because participating in the best life of the world. The prime function of education, in other words, should be to prevent that great and widespread tragedy of life, the closure of a mind at the threshold of what might have become a great adventure, condemning it to go through life immune to new ideas or new attitudes.

Thus the end of education is not the mere acquisition of knowledge but the achievement of a point of view, of an attitude toward life and an orientation to the world. Everywhere the most urgent educational problem should be recognized as the broad inculcation of scientific method and understanding, as inducing the habit of independent, rational and equable thinking, the habit of relying upon accurate information and tested facts, upon observation and experiment rather than upon authority and precedent, the habit and capacity of keeping abreast of the latest findings. The prospect of the spread of this spirit inspires the hope that a stop may be put to the teachings of prejudices, with the students not only desiring to know but desiring to know the grounds of knowing.

The dissemination of this spirit must proceed primarily from our universities, in the hands of which, as the chief bulwarks of freedom and democracy, some see the fate of the intellectual civilization of the world. Through their agency we may hope the teachers of the public schools will become better and better trained in science and prepared to spread the infection of its spirit. For, as Walter Lipmann notes, "the ultimate question is not how the populace is to be ruled, but what the teachers are to think; that is the preface to everything else." There is not a problem in the world today which honest thinking cannot solve, not a danger it cannot effectually cope with. In regard to propaganda, not only do its interested agents fail to exhibit that rare quality, love of truth, but all too often they devote themselves to a consideration of the relative expediency of different falsehoods. Unfortunately, the truth is not always essential to success in attaining the objects of everyday life, and there is some justification for the view expressed by Anatole France, in accounting for the unpopularity of the truth, that the truth is inert, is not capable of modification, is not adapted to the machinations which would enable her to win her way into the hearts and minds of men, while error posesses [sic] the most wonderful resources and adaptabilities.

The printing press has long been a most important agent in the spread of knowledge and the habit of rational thought, but it has become equally available for the spread of error and as an impediment to the rational attitude. We may justly resent direct