of making education
hit the mark of utility in addition to those that I have mentioned. The
teachers down in the lower grades who are teaching little children the
arts of reading and writing and computation are doing vastly more in a
practical direction than they are ever given credit for doing; for
reading and writing and the manipulation of numbers are, next to oral
speech itself, the prime necessities in the social and industrial world.
These arts are being taught to-day better than they have ever been
taught before,--and the technique of their teaching is undergoing
constant refinement and improvement.

The school can do and is doing other useful things. Some schools are
training their pupils to be well mannered and courteous and considerate
of the rights of others. They are teaching children one of the most
basic and fundamental laws of human life; namely, that there are some
things that a gentleman cannot do and some things that society will not
stand. How many a painful experience in solving this very problem of
getting a living could be avoided if one had only learned this lesson
passing well! What a pity it is that some schools that stand to-day for
what we call educational progress are failing in just this
particular--are sending out into the world an annual crop of boys and
girls who must learn the great lesson of self-control and a proper
respect for the rights of others in the bitter school of experience,--a
school in which the rod will never be spared, but whose chastening
scourge comes sometimes, alas, too late!

There is no feature of school life which has not its almost infinite
possibilities of utility. But after all, are not the basic and
fundamental things these ideals that I have named? And should not we who
teach stand for idealism in its widest sense? Should we not ourselves
subscribe an undying fidelity to those great ideals for which teaching
must stand,--to the ideal of social service which lies at the basis of
our craft, to the ideals of effort and discipline that make a nation
great and its children strong, to the ideal of science that dissipates
the black night of ignorance and superstition, to the ideal of culture
that humanizes mankind?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 11: An address before the Eastern Illinois Teachers'
Association, October 15, 1909. Published as a Bulletin of the Eastern
Illinois Normal School, October, 1909.]

~VII~

THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN EDUCATION[12]

I