DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATIONAL IDEAS 39 



the home and the school, if there is hope for better things, if we are to 

 have not merely improved machines, but godlike men and women. 

 The individual is at once an end and a means. He exists first for 

 God and himself and then for his fellow men, and he becomes valu- 

 able to the society by which he is so largely formed and fashioned 

 in the degree in which he makes his own life complete and perfect. 

 He is a whole and a part of the whole, and he must continue to im- 

 prove himself, if he is rightly to perform his functions as a social 

 being. This principle applies universally and determines the end 

 and aim of all true education. It must underlie the theory of elect- 

 ive studies, or the result will be fragments of men; fine parts of men 

 rather than great and noble personalities. The young w r ill be en- 

 couraged to move along the lines of least resistance, and the heroic 

 temper and the divine spirit which convert obstacles into opportun- 

 ities will be wanting. They will become impatient and strenuous, 

 eager and reckless, but they will not be made capable of knowing 

 and loving the highest truth and beauty. We shall have experts, 

 but no philosophers, poets, and saints. If the purpose be to train 

 for freedom, we must understand that they alone are freemen who 

 free themselves from within; if for social efficiency, we must recog- 

 nize that the vital, not the mechanical, individual is able to render 

 the best service; if progress and the improvement of the race be the 

 object, it is evident that success is to be hoped for from men rather 

 than from measures. 



The development of educational thought in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury has made plain the absolute worth of the individual, and at 

 the same time the vital union of the individual with the social 

 organism, and his consequent duty to labor for the general welfare. 

 It has also brought into fuller evidence the fundamental truth that 

 human values are moral values, that character, which is the aim and 

 end, is the result of right doing far more than of correct thinking. 

 The world each one should labor to fashion within himself is primarily 

 and essentially a world of righteousness. To educate, therefore, is 

 not merely or chiefly to inform the mind; it is to strengthen, direct, 

 and confirm the will; to foster habits of conduct, to fashion to the 

 practice of virtue, to accustom the young to take delight in all that 

 is good and beautiful, to feel the joy and happiness there is in over- 

 coming passion and appetite, in triumphing over the inborn love of 

 ease and idleness; to taste the sense of power there is in the play 

 of the higher faculties, in the self-activity which illumines the mind, 

 purifies the heart, and raises the imagination; to win them to believe 

 and to know that the best and most useful things are not material 

 but spiritual, justice, honor, magnanimity, truthfulness, purity, 

 gentleness, and love. Moral culture should dominate, direct, and 

 control the whole process of education. Whatever the pupil does 



