Woodrow Wilson

“ I think that the most fatal thing that can happen to anybody is to be taken care of by somebody else. To be carried along by somebody's suggestions from the time you begin until the time when you are thrust groping and helpless into die world is the very negation of education. By the nursing process, by the coddling process, you are sapping a race; and only loss can possibly result except upon the part of individuals hero and there, individuals who are so intrinsically strong that you cannot spoil them. ”

“ The man of learning has on his table a telephone that connects him with all the activities of the world, and his windows look out on smoky chimneys; he feels that he is one of the many servants to carry on the great tasks of to-day, whether they be material or intellectual. So that these complexities interlock and are the same complexities, the complexity of knowledge and the complexity of life. ”

“ And therefore when I think of the enormous and complex problem of education, it seems to me that it would be mere presumption to say that we can set it forth in complete analysis, to say that we can lay out a program which covers all the necessities of the growing mind, to say that we are certain at the outset of the exact means which we should use to reach the goal of which we can be only measurably certain. ”

“ Modern society depends upon the two clarifying processes of reasoning and of counsel which are to make or unmake modern society. I do not mean we are to supply the elements of counsel, but we are to supply the minds capable of discrimination, suitable for the residence of wisdom, able to find the light, responsive to the light; men who know how to think and where to find the substance upon which their thought shall be constructed. ”

“ One of the interesting things about liberal education is that it leaves out of the view altogether the question how anyone can directly make money out of it. We boast in our own time that mind is monarch, that we analyze things before we do them; and yet we give ourselves away in every discussion of this particular thing, and show that we have not analyzed it at all. When we discuss what the elements of a practical training are, and what the elements of a liberal training are, the advocates of a practical training all, you will find, include mathematics in their list of studies. ”

“ If we do not do that society will some day look back upon the history of an age of catastrophe and ask: Where were the wise teachers in those days, where were the men who should have come to the front in the face of no matter what opposition, in the face of no matter how great a body of prejudice, and have said, “We have got to begin at the bottom and analyse it, reorganize it from top to bottom”? We have all the elements, but they are not used with discrimination. ”

“ I suppose that what perplexes every man to-day in every walk of life is the extraordinary complexity of modern life as compared with the life in the midst of which our grandfathers found themselves, as compared with the life in the midst of which the generation immediately preceding ours found itself. ”

“ My course of action has never occurred to the parent—that there are means known almost from the beginning of the world for finding out whether a boy will be good or not. There is a predeterminant resident outside the will of the boy himself, and one of the straightest ways to a boy's conscience is through the cuticle of the skin. This is a type of a modern parent, and when he says he wants his son's training suited to his purpose of life he must admit his son has no purpose in life. ”

“ A liberal education consists in putting the mind in such shape that all its powers, like the muscles of the body, will have been called into exercise, will have been given a certain degree of development, a certain uniformity and symmetry of development, so that the mind will not find itself daunted in the midst of the tasks of the world any more than the body itself, and will be able to turn itself in the right direction, even as the athlete, quickly and gracefully, not overwhelmed by the strain, and able to accommodate the several faculties so that they will unite in carrying the strain. ”

“ A liberal training is not a complete body of information. I have never met a man who had a complete body of information, though I have met many who thought they had. But I have never met a man who thought he had whom I would employ to do anything of importance, because I do not go into the lumber room to find a workshop. Every workshop has had rigorously shut out from it all the things that do not belong there. A man who resembles a museum or a lumber room does not resemble a workshop ”

“ It is a great deal harder to stimulate other minds to do things than it is to do the thing yourself. If a man cannot find the means of making a subordinate do the work he wants him to do, he is not fit for the job. If a subordinate keeps asking for instructions from his superior, and the superior says, “Never mind, I will do it myself,” I think that man is unfit for the job. Never carry him beyond a certain point, for the business will break down if you do. And a teacher who cannot find a means of making a pupil do the work is unfit for the job. ”

“ The pupil can separate with a knife what you put on the table before him, and if you give him a magnifying glass he can see what is invisible to the naked eye, and after a short period of training he can pick out all there is there. But when you submit a complicated proposition nowhere to be observed in physical existence, and ask him to analyze it, then comes the tug-of-war, then you learn whether that mind has precision and discrimination. ”

“ The life of the present day is incalculably complex, and so many of its complexities are of recent rise and origin that we haven't yet had time to understand just what they are or to assess the values of the new things that have come into our life. Not only is life infinitely complex in our day as compared with the previous age, but learning is correspondingly complex. In the old days of the fixed curriculum of the college and the school one could say with a degree of confidence that the elements of these curricula did contain the main bodies of knowledge, by specimen at least. ”

“ We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. ”

“ I believe that many of the alumni of Princeton would now describe me as a radical, yet I deem myself a conservative, for I believe that life is the only thing that conserves, and life is the only thing that does not stand still or retrogress. Progress, therefore, is part of the essential process of conservation. The constant renewal which is life is a part of the constant process of change. At the same time the processes of change, being processes of life, are not susceptible to very specific intellectual analysis. ”

“ I know a good deal of this is futile, that the public schools of this country are not sustained by the school boards in dropping anybody: society won't pay the taxes if you turn their sons out. Very well then, the only thing we can do is to keep the boy in the same grade for his lifetime, refuse absolutely to stultify ourselves by advancing him. ”

“ The facts are the crude raw material of the mind, and for the process of training one fact will do as well as another of the same kind.
A liberal education should have the elements of modern learning in it. ”

“ It is absolutely an unpatriotic thing to waste the money devoted to education by trying to do a thing which we know is impossible. The majority of men have to be drawers of water and hewers of wood. The mechanical tasks of the world are infinite, and they must be performed ”

“ So that life and learning are equally complex, and they are interlaced with each other, they are related as never before. There is not the scholar on the one side with his door closed and his window open, and on the other side the manufacturer and the man of commerce beating the seas with his ships and searching the distant markets of the world for new stuffs. ”

“ A man who is acquainted with the intricate processes of mathematics may take a short cut in some calculation, but it is not an essential part of his equipment for the business he is engaged in. I can show you a place half-way through the arithmetic where it would be perfectly feasible to stop so far as nine-tenths of your pupils are concerned if they are not going to undertake an engineering profession. Yet you tell me that this is a practical training. ”

“ The bases of our lives and of our understanding of life is the interpretation which our own experiences put upon it, and the interpretation which the experiences of others put upon it, and the experiences of others as contained in literature. ”

“ It is imperative that we distinguish between education and technical or industrial training. And before we distinguish between these two it is necessary that we distinguish between the individuals who are going to take the one and the individuals who are going to take the other. There is no method in American life by which the state or any public authority can pick out the persons to be educated in the one way or the other. The vitality of American life, and the vitality of all democratic life, lies in self-selection ”

“ It is one which condemns all but the extraordinary individual to a minor part in life, to a part not of command or direction but of specific performance, to the difficult manual tasks of the world which require skill, a perfect command of the muscles, a trained eye, a definite knowledge of physical relations and of complex machinery; its pupils are men schooled precisely in the particular processes which they are to apply. ”

“ Where you are trying to give sufficient technical training you must subordinate the literary training, just as, when you are trying to give a liberal education, you must subordinate the technical training. Nobody ought to get married, I suppose, who isn't a bit of a carpenter and is likely to mash his thumb when he uses a hammer ”

“ If you want the boy to go to school to excuse him for using his mind, then using his mind should be against the rule; but if he is sent to do things, then I say if he cannot do them he ought to go to some other place and find something more suited to his intelligence. ”

“ In the field of mathematics, which I have just used for illustration, you have no laboratory. You have nothing that you can see; you have nothing that you have ever seen when you get into the higher regions of mathematics. ”

“ They have felt those great impulses of life which really constitute the consciousness of the nation. When you get into the consciousness of a nation, and see the favorite pursuits of a nation, you begin to understand its politics ”

“ The present need is that we should examine ourselves and see whether this be true or not; and, if it is true, ask ourselves whether the air has cleared enough, and whether our experiment has gone far enough, to make a definite program, to make a radical change, in the things we have attempted. This is the moment for counsel. The thing that is imperative upon our con-science is that we should ask ourselves whether it be possible to do it differently and better. ”

“ Here he finds- a complex society in which something is the matter, in which a great many things can be done and are done which are against the public welfare, and it is absolutely obligatory upon him to make up his mind what is wrong and, without trying to upset society, prevent the things which are wrong. And his confusion, his unfortunate experimenting in the field of legislation is due to the fact that he has not analysed to the bottom the economic changes that have come upon society. The school teacher is in the same position. ”

“ I take it on faith from the geometrician that there is no such thing in nature as a straight line, that it is a purely imaginary thing, and yet you tell me that this is a very practical study. Of course, I admit that the imagination plays a practical part in life. ”

“ You cannot train everybody for everything. Moreover you are not competent to teach everything. There is not any body of teachers suited in gifts or training to do this impossible thing. Neither the schools nor those who guide them have attempted to make any discrimination with regard to purpose or to settle upon methods which will promise some degree of substantial success. ”

“ And unless the spirit of statesmanship enters into our schools and our colleges, we shall not have an age of statesmen but an age of darkness, compared with which the dark ages shall some day seem bright ”

“ You wish the philosophy of life explained to you, what men have said life is, what they have surmised of its origin, what they have forecasted its end to be, and what the philosophers from the beginning have said of this complex and interesting game we are playing. ”