Western education

“ The answer to this question will show whether our national education has any distinctively national ideal at its back and any distinctively national motive and object before it. We know what use Western nations have made of their national education. ”

“ The last question to which we wish briefly to advert is the object of national education. Suppose our national institutions make us masters of all existing knowdege, Eastern and Western, suppose they promote research according to Western methods or methods devised by ourselves, suppose we are equipped with all knowledge, training and appliances to develop and exploit the resources of our country. ”

“ In my attempt to account for the failure of elementary education in England to foster the growth of the educated child, I have travelled far. But I must travel farther yet. The Western belief in the efficacy of examinations is a symptom of a widespread and deep-seated tendency,—the tendency to judge according to the appearance of things, to attach supreme importance to visible "results," to measure inward worth by outward standards, to estimate progress in terms of what the "world" reveres as "success." ”

“ Catching something of the new eighteenth-century western spirit, these rulers tried to introduce some western enlightenment into their as yet almost barbarous land. Each tried earnestly to lift their people to a higher level of living, and to start them on the road toward civilization and learning. ”

“ Plans of education, adapted to the natural, commercial, and social condition of the interior, should be invented; a correspondence instituted among all our higher seminaries of learning, and an interchange established of all local publications on the subject of education. In short, we should foster Western genius, encourage Western writers, patronise Western publishers, augment the number of Western readers, and create a Western heart. ”

“ Gradually the superior advantages of Western education are becoming recognised, more especially in official circles. Students are satisfied now with one of the minor degrees, and, after passing the first degree, are only examined once more if they obtain a diploma from a foreign university or acquire a profession abroad. ”

“ These in turn gave rise to the university foundations, and to the beginning of independent and secular study once more in the western world. The Revival of Learning, the recovery of the ancient manuscripts, the revival of the study of Greek in the West, the founding of libraries, the invention of paper and printing, and the revival of trade and commerce—all were new forces tending to give a new direction to scholarly study, and as a result a new race of scholars, more or less independent of the Church, now arose in western Europe. ”

“ The next step in the history of education came in the development of institutions where thinking and teaching could be carried on free from civil or ecclesiastical control, with the consequent rise of an independent learned class in western Europe. ”

“ I have also tried to give a proper setting to the great historic forces which have shaped and moulded human progress, and have made the evolution of modern state school systems and the world-wide spread of Western civilization both possible and inevitable. ”

“ OFFICIAL EDUCATION The extent to which national character has been fixed by the discipline of centuries, and the extent or its extraordinary capacity to resist change, is perhaps most strikingly indicated by certain results of State education. The whole nation is being educated, with Government help, upon a European plan; and the full programme includes the chief subjects of Western study, excepting Greek and Latin classics. From Kindergarten to University the entire system is modern in outward seeming ”

“ Western civilisation, or rather Western ideas, and education had brought the natives of the Eastern Empire to such a degree of culture and enlightenment that the subjugated ones realised that they had become the equal of their masters long before the dawn of the twenty-first century. ”

“ It seems to me, I must confess, that it is little short of folly that we should throw open to increasing numbers the rich stores of Western learning; that we should inspire them with European ideas, and bring them into the closest contact with English thought; and that then we should, as it were, pay no heed to the growth of those aspirations which we have ourselves created, and the pride of those ambitions we have ourselves called forth. ”

“ Asiatic youths are flocking to Western colleges for the equipment of modern education. Our insight does not penetrate your culture deeply, but at least we are willing to learn. Some of my compatriots have adopted too much of your customs and too much of your etiquette, in the delusion that the acquisition of stiff collars and tall silk hats comprised the attainment of your civilisation. Pathetic and deplorable as such affectations are, they evince our willingness to approach the West on our knees. ”

“ It is remarkable, that our people have their intellectual culture from one country, and their duties from another. This false state of things is newly in a way to be corrected. America is beginning to assert itself to the senses and to the imagination of her children, and Europe is receding in the same degree. This their reaction on education gives a new importance to the internal improvements and to the politics of the country. ”

“ The organization of the great states of western Europe necessitated the study of politics, history, jurisprudence and public finance. Eventually a home-grown culture in western Europe and America made possible the profitable study of modern languages and literatures. And now comes a new condition, the result of a recent and wonderful evolution, destined to influence the place and function of the school in society as powerfully as any of those that have gone before it. ”

“ I should like the seed of universal culture to be scattered, from the very beginning of education, among the pupils of the primary and secondary schools. Above all let me suggest that throughout the countries of Europe an international language should be one of the compulsory subjects of study. ”

“ It is well that every opportunity should have been given to those classes for the acquisition of a liberal European education, the effects of which may be expected slowly to pervade the rest of their fellow-countrymen, and to raise, in the end, the educational tone of the whole country. ”

“ Removed from the main stream of European civilization, these nations have been influenced less by modern forces; the hold of the Church on the education of the young has there been longest retained; and the taking-over of education by the State has there been longest deferred. ”

“ Nothing reveals in a more amazing light the extent to which in this country the true meaning of our being a nation has been forgotten than the use that has been made in recent years of the term "national education." ”

“ Most of the civilized nations have passed through that stage of their development: though the few or the many are still taught the science or the art of war in all countries called Christian, there is yet a class of men for whom the state furnishes the means of education that is not military ”

“ You have been drinking now for a generation at the fountains of European knowledge. It is time you should begin to give Europe something in return. The very smallest additions to the stores of the Western men of learning, coming from the people of Southern India, will be, I am sure, not only thankfully, but rapturously, received. ”

“ During the minority of my father, the West afforded but poor facilities for the most opulent of the youth to acquire an education, and the majority were dependent, almost exclusively, upon their own exertions for whatever learning they obtained. ”

“ As large numbers of immigrants from distant lands have entered some of the leading nations, notably England and the United States, and particularly immigrants from less advanced nations where general education is not as yet common, and where far different political, social, judicial, and hygienic conditions prevail, a new duty has been thrust upon the school of giving to such incoming peoples, and their children, some conception of the meaning and method and purpose of the national life of the people they have come among. ”

“ At first the schools of America closely resembled those of the European countries from which the colonists came, and the seventeenth century in American education is largely a period of ‘transplantation.’ But toward the middle of the eighteenth century, as new social and political conditions were evolving and the days of the Revolution were approaching, there were evident a gradual modification of European ideals and the differentiation of American schools toward a type of their own. ”

“ Not even the rudiments of either the sciences or the arts were imparted, and yet it is only through a knowledge of the sciences and the arts that progress in civilization is made. The early settlers of New England devised a new system of schools, but they imported into them an old system of education, the Greco-Roman subjective system, introduced into England with the revival of learning. ”

“ For years students in great numbers, thousands, have been coming from these heathen nations to our country to get our Western learning. Throughout the colleges and lower schools of the land, both East and West, in the greater universities, and in the more modest small church colleges they can be found. ”

“ This is a novel experience for us who have been originators only of free education in the past or of administrative systems, not of types of new education. Largely what we have to guide us is some experience of France and England in what to avoid. ”

“ The refinement of manners and the acuteness of the intellect have, in the East, nothing in common with what we call education. It is the men from the schools, on the contrary, who are considered badly trained and pedantic. ”

“ In every school the educational aims must be moral training, education in citizenship, personal and vocational efficiency and above all, the cultivation of German national character and of the spirit of international reconciliation. ”

“ At the same time, primary instruction was being placed on a new basis, and specially promising lads were sent across the sea to imbibe Western learning at its source. When not allowed to go abroad, even well-born young men were happy to black the shoes of a foreign family, in the hope of being able to pick up foreign languages and foreign manners. ”

“ The United States had for two centuries 312 been undergoing a gradual transition from the institutional types transplanted from England and the Continent in colonial days, and was coming more and more to blossom out into democracy and the people’s schools, but for a long time there was little knowledge of what A systematic exposition of European education needed, was being done by the other countries that had by this time adopted similar ideals. ”

“ We must eventually think of internationalism on its educational side as most fundamentally a question of developing in the world the international spirit. We might quite naturally think of this as the education of social feeling or of the social instinct. ”

“ The most surprising thing about the spread of culture and the desire for the higher education during the Thirteenth Century, is that they developed in spite of the fact that the rulers of the time were all during the century, embroiled in war either with their neighbors or with the nobility. ”

“ There is, however, a thing that was once done in schools as a convenient accomplishment, and which has—with that increase in communication which is the salient material fact of the nineteenth century—developed in Western Europe to the dimensions of a political necessity, and that is the teaching of one or more modern foreign languages. ”

“ Provision in the United States.The inhabitants of the North American Continent, possessing an amount of material comfort, unknown to the peasantry of any other part of the world, are generally very sensible to the importance of education. And the noble provision which every one of the northern States of the Union has gloried in establishing for the education of its youth, has excited a general spirit of emulation amongst the neighbouring Provinces, and a desire, which will probably produce some active efforts, to improve their own educational institutions. ”

“ The task before them is harder than that which the North Americans had, because their system of elementary and secondary education is far less complete. With this extension of higher instruction and the closer communion of the best minds with those of the northern hemisphere, there may at any time come an outburst of purely intellectual activity. ”

“ But in another point of view, a foreign education is directly opposite to our political interests, and ought to be discountenanced, if not prohibited.
Every person of common observation will grant, that most men prefer the manners and the government of that country where they are educated. Let ten American youths be sent, each to a different European kingdom, and live there from the age of twelve to twenty, and each will give the preference to the country where he has resided. ”

“ A wide appreciation of the growth of morality, culture, and social life, rather than merely the development of patriotism, became the object in studying this subject. English and German history, as well as American, which alone was formerly taught, and sometimes Greek, Roman, and Norse, appear in the curricula of many elementary schools, and, instead of being confined to the two upper classes, historical material is often presented from the third grade up. ”