How can they realize that the good of life consists in being, and not in having? that we are worth what our knowledge, love, admiration, hope, faith, and desire make us worth? They will not perceive that happiness and unhappiness are conditions of soul, and consequently that the wise, the loving, and the strong, whatever their outward fortune, are happy, while the ignorant, the heartless, and the weak are miserable. To know ourselves, we should seek to discover the kind of life our influence tends to create. Consider the kind of world college boys make for themselves, the things they admire, the companions they find pleasant, the subjects in which they take interest, the books that delight them,--and one great cause of the failure of education will be made plain; for though they are sent to school to be taught by professors, their influence upon one another is paramount. Instead of helping one another to see that their real business is to educate themselves, they persuade one another that life is given for common ends and vulgar pleasures. Hence they look with envy upon their companions who are the sons of rich men, as they have not lived long enough to learn that the fate of four fifths of the sons of rich men in this country, is moral and physical ruin. If such is the public opinion of the world in which they live; and if even strong men are feeble in the presence of public opinion,--how shall we find fault with them for not being attracted by the ideals of intellectual and moral excellence. For the trained mind even to think is difficult, and for them independent thought is almost impossible. They do not know the little less than creative power of right education, or that as we are changed by action, we are transformed by thought. What patient labor may do to exalt and refine the mental faculties, until we become capable of entering into the life of every age and every people, has not been shown to them; and hence they are not inspired by the high hope of dwelling, in very truth, with all the noble and heroic souls who have passed through this world and left record of themselves. We bid the youth learn many things which he cannot but find both useless and uninteresting. And yet unless we discover the secret of winning him to the love of study, the educational value of what he learns is lost; for what leaves him unmoved, leaves him unimproved. His information and accomplishments are comparatively unimportant. What he himself is, and what his real self gives us grounds for hoping he shall become, is the true concern. To be able to translate Æschylus or Plato is not a great thing; but it is a great thing to have the Greek's sense of what is fair, noble and intellectual. To be able to solve a complex mathematical problem may be unimportant; but to have the mental habit of accurate, close, patient thinking is important. It is easy to forget one's Greek or the higher mathematics; but an intellectual or a moral habit is not easily lost.
Urban Report
Education and the Higher Life — Part 62
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