The world stands to-day balanced between two ideals. Human spirit, the spirit of nations, is a free and plastic force; it is also a sum of motives and desires; but most fundamentally of all it is a growing, living, creative and personal spirit. It still clings to its luxuries of feeling, to its provincial life, it is still fascinated by its beautiful romance of empire. On the other hand we see the stirring of a new idea. A new world arises, less dramatic in its appeal than the old world, but a world appealing by its practical problems both to the will and to the intellect. Shall we yield to the fascination of the old romance and go back to our hero worship; or shall we be inspired now by this vision of a new and greater social order, create out of our own powers of imagination the forms this world must assume if it is to appeal to the deepest feelings of all peoples, and make this new world real by our own intelligence and determination?
We stand to-day at a dramatic moment in history; a more dramatic moment than when the victory itself hung in the balance. Perhaps our sense of responsibility for the future is an illusion; perhaps we are driven by an inexorable logic of history, and we do not after all choose what our world shall be. But certainly the sense of human power in the world has never been greater than now nor seemed better justified; nor, if we are deceived, has the reality ever been more out of harmony with the ambitions of man.
THE EDUCATIONAL FACTOR IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONS
Education, like all other institutions, has been charged, we know, with having contributed its share to the causes of the war. The Prussian school system, we have been told, was mainly a school of war; all the emotions and ideas necessary to produce morbid nationalism, distorted views of history, and a belief in and a love of war were there fostered and deliberately cultivated. There is, of course, some truth in this; it is a truth that is deceiving, however, if we regard it as at all indicating the true relation between education and practical affairs. If the school was a factor in the late war, such a creative effect of education appears to be rare in history. In general it is the negative effect of the school that is most conspicuous. It is what the school has not done to prevent war, what it has failed to do in not bringing nations out of their perverted nationalism into a life of more practical relationship with one another that really best characterizes the school.