the educated man. Judge of our
disappointment. We find the faculties, we find the modifications
produced by the training, but we look in vain for the man. With all
our multiplied facilities for producing a trained and disciplined
nature, what we think we have a right to expect,--but what we do not
find,--is a creature conscious of his own great heritage, conscious of
his kinship with all humanity, of his kingship over the universe, of
his power to grapple with the world outside of himself, and of his
rightful dominance over both the life without and the grander life
within. Instead, we find men weak where they should be most purposeful
and brave. We find him the slave of the body who should be able to
make the body the servant of his soul. We find hands untrained to
practical uses, minds unequal to grasping the common wants of
existence, hearts in which the high ideals of character and strong
impulses toward true usefulness are over-swept by that consideration
for self that makes one's own interests seem the very centre of the
universe of God.
The day needs giants; it produces pigmies. It needs men to fight; it
produces men to run. It needs women with minds broad enough to think
and hearts large enough to love. It needs motherhood that, while it
bends protectingly over the cradle of its own child, reaches out a
mother-heart to all the suffering childhood of the race. It needs the
capacity for heroism; it yields the tendency to cowardice. In the
midst of learning, ignorance triumphs, vice rules, and sensualism
thrives; and all this, not because of education, but in spite of it.
And when we consider that our schools in their lower grades, our
kindergartens and our primary and Sunday schools, take the infant mind
before the tendency to vice has had any chance for development, and
that the next higher grades take them on through successive years,
without being able to prevent such results as these mentioned above,
we naturally feel that, at the very outset, our educational system
must be wrong. However it may be suited to the ideal conditions it
cannot be adapted to the average human creature, taken exactly as he
is. The lack, which begins at the very basis of our so-called
intelligent discipline, runs through the whole, in constantly
increasing ratio. Brain is stimulated, and heart and soul are left to
starve, and nothing is more neglected than the cunning of the hand.
Even where some attempt is made at the training of t
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