ill justify our characterization of education as a spiritual process.

Seeing, then, that the body is but a helper whose function is to execute
the mandates of the spirit, and seeing, too, that education is a process
of the spirit, it follows that our concern must be primarily and always
with the spirit as major. It is the spirit that reacts, not the mind or
the body, and education is, therefore, the process of inducing right
reactions of the spirit. The nature of these reactions depends upon the
quality of the external stimuli. If we provide the right sort of stimuli
the reactions will be right. If, today, the spirit reacts to a beautiful
picture, tomorrow, to the tree in bloom, the next day to an alluring
landscape, and the next to the glory of a sunrise, in time its reactions
to beauty in every form will become habitual. If we can induce reactions,
day by day, to beautiful or sublime passages in literature, in due time
the spirit will refuse to react to what is shoddy and commonplace. By
inducing reactions to increasingly better musical compositions, day after
day, we finally inculcate the habit of reacting only to high-grade music,
and the lower type makes no appeal. By such a process we shall finally
produce an educated, cultivated man or woman, the crowning glory of
education.

The measure of our success in this process of education will be the number
of reactions we can induce to the right sort of stimuli. In this, we shall
have occasion to make many substitutions. The boy who has been reacting to
ugliness must be lured away by the substitution of beauty. The beautiful
picture will take the place of the bizarre until nothing but such a
picture will give pleasure and satisfaction. Indeed, the substitution of
beauty for ugliness will, in time, induce a revolt against what is ugly
and stimulate the boy to desire to transform the ugly thing into a thing
of beauty. Many a home shows the effects of reaction in the school to
artistic surroundings. The child reacts to beauty in the school and so
yearns for the same sort of stimuli in the home. When the little girl
entreats her mother to provide for her such a ribbon as the teacher wears,
we see an exemplification of this principle. When only the best in
literature, in art, in nature, in music, and in conduct avail to produce
reactions, we may well proclaim the one who reacts to these stimuli an
educated person. It is well to repeat that these reactions are all
spiritual