Re-education

“ Nation after nation has arisen, reached its zenith, declined, and passed away without dreaming of such a thing as universal education. With the growth of democracy, particularly during the Reformation, the ideal of education as the birthright of every child became well defined and during the years that have intervened, this ideal has become a living reality. ”

“ Schemes of relief and charity do not aim to reach this poverty. What, then, is to be done? “Give more education, and better education,” is the reply of the best reformers. “Let there be smaller classes in the elementary 256school, so that each child’s personality may be developed by the teacher’s personality.” “Let more attention be given to physical training.” “Let compulsory continuous education prevent the appalling wastage which leaves young people to find their interests in the excitement of the street.” ”

“ If education, through schools, churches, books, and all the institutions of society, were neglected, all over the earth, for a single generation, the whole race would fall back into a savage state. But if the culture of one single generation could be enhanced, the spiritual welfare of mankind would also be enhanced to the end of time. ”

“ The protectors of the status quo should understand this revolution will succeed with or without their help. We will create the finest schools for our children and grandchildren. And we will do it by restoring to education the truest American principles: freedom and opportunity and choice. ”

“ Were the duty of enforcing universal education once admitted, there would be an end to the difficulties about what the State should teach, and how it should teach, which now convert the subject into a mere battle-field for sects and parties, causing the time and labour which should have been spent in educating, to be wasted in quarrelling about education. If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. ”

“ Thus the Humanists, as they were called, won the day; and the great reform which they effected was of incalculable service to mankind. But the Nemesis of all reformers is finality; and the reformers of education, like those of religion, fell into the profound but common error of mistaking the beginning for the end of the work of reformation. The representatives of the Humanists, in the nineteenth century, take their stand upon classical education as the sole avenue to culture, as firmly as if we were still in the age of Renascence. ”

“ Hence, except for launching the great conception of state support and control of education, the Reformation accomplished but little directly making for individualism and progress, either through the Catholic awakening or the Protestant revolts. Education fell back before long into the grooves of formalism, repression, and distrust of reason. There resulted a tendency to test life and the educational preparation for living by a formulation of belief almost as much as in the days of scholasticism. ”

“ Education is the preparation of the individual for the community, and his religious training is the core of that preparation. With the great intellectual restatements and expansions of the nineteenth century, and educational break-up, a confusion and loss of aim in education was inevitable. We can no longer prepare the individual for a community when our ideas of a community are shattered and undergoing reconstruction. ”

“ Great reforms had been indicated by us in all that concerns the life of the people, and our greatest care, which is to substitute education for the ignorance of the people and to lessen the difficulties of its life by improving the conditions under which it cultivates the ground, was foremost. ”

“ There as elsewhere a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy; ”

“ They may have the more wisdom for the very reason that they have acquired less worldly discretion. And for all of us who believe that education is already touched by a new spirit and that it is surely being made better, the younger the age of enfranchisement the greater our hopes of an early effect of the new education upon the affairs of mankind.
“Universal education up to eighteen, universal enfranchisement at eighteen”; along that line lies our path to a real civilisation. ”

“ Thus has every reform that has resulted in benefit to the human race received its impetus on earth from bands of spirits whose special work has been in that direction. In this way the question of a universal and free education has been aroused, agitated, and started upon the road to a practical and successful solution in this country. ”

“ Thus the central problem in education of the twentieth and succeeding centuries is to be The educational problem of the future. a constant reorganization of the curriculum and methods of teaching, and this reconstruction must be such as to harmonize a due regard for the progressive variations of the individual with the welfare of the conservative institutions of society. It must include a continual effort to hand on the intellectual possessions of the race, but also to stimulate all individuals to add some modification or new element to the product. ”

“ I have especially tried to present such a picture of the rise, struggle for existence, growth, and recent great expansion of the idea of the improvability of the race and the elevation and emancipation of the individual through education as would be most illuminating and useful to students of the subject. To this end I have traced the great forward steps in the emancipation of the intellect of man, and the efforts to perpetuate the progress made through the organization of educational institutions to pass on to others what had been attained. ”

“ III. One disappointed in the effects of mere reorganization, and distrusting the power of moral exhortation, will urge that what we need above all is education. It is quite true that what we need is education, but something so different from what now passes as such that it needs a new name. ”

“ We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in Education. ”

“ If such benign results have followed the establishment of schools of an inferior character, is it unreasonable to claim that education and the processes of education, however imperfect they may be, are calculated to increase the sum of human progress, virtue, and happiness? ”

“ People forget that education, the process of cultivation itself, is the end—and not “the Empire”—they forget that the educator is required for this end—and not the public-school teacher and university scholar. ”

“ While the active-minded portion of society believed ardently in progressive evolution, in the sufficiency of the intellect, the inerrancy of the scientific method, and the transmission by inheritance of acquired characteristics, this supreme confidence in free, secular, compulsory education as the cure-all of the profuse and pervasive ills of society was not only natural but inevitable. ”

“ In fact, the whole public educational system, if the ideals of humanity as expressed by the labor movement, are to receive adequate consideration in public education, will require reconstruction around the social studies. ”

“ This is the work which science, art, religion, not less than political revolutions and social reforms, have gradually been accomplishing and perfecting in the last three hundred years. This new spiritual orientation has to a certain extent influenced teaching; and though without a general programme of substantial reforms, the ideal of education has been transformed along idealistic lines. ”

“ This great project of national renewal depends upon true education—not merely training in particular skills, but the formation of citizens. To remain a free people, we must have the knowledge, strength, and virtue of a free people. From families and schools to popular culture and public policy, we must teach our founding principles and the character necessary to live out those principles. ”

“ One word will suffice to characterise it—Violence. The school dominates the children physically, morally, and intellectually, in order to control the development of their faculties in the way desired, and deprives them of contact with nature in order to modify them as required. This is the explanation of the failure; the eagerness of the ruling class to control education and the bankruptcy of the hopes of reformers. “Education” means in practice domination or domestication. I do not imagine that these systems have been put together with the deliberate aim of securing the desired results. ”

“ Both Civilisation and Education are the handmaids of Religion, but, each in its place, and the one may not thrust herself into the office of the other. It is a gain, any way, that we are within sight of giving to all members of the working classes notwithstanding their limited opportunities that stability of mind and magnanimity of character which are the proper outcome and the unfailing test of a Liberal Education ”

“ Ever since then the fight has gone on, and ever since, the Protestant minister, equally with the Catholic priest, has striven for the{71} control of education and so to dominate the mind of the rising generation. The fight for the liberation of the child is thus a fight for the control or the directing of civilization. ”

“ The reform of this system is not a matter of sentiment. These babies are the future scholars of our improved schools that the Education Act is intended to produce, and the future citizens by whom our Imperial position is to be maintained. ”

“ With the development of democratic government there has everywhere been a softening of old laws, the growth of humanitarianism, the wider and wider extension of the suffrage, important legislation as to labor, a previously unknown attention to the poor and the dependents of society, a vast extension of educational advantages, and the taking over of education from the Church by the State and the erection of the school into an important institution for the preservation and advancement of the national welfare. ”

“ Clearly, you cannot wash, teach, and invigorate society without powerfully affecting the whole social fabric. The feeble experiments of the nineteenth century in universal education have already proved that. Some transformation the great endowments of our age are laboring to bring about. For the creating of a new race they have a plan, but not for its salvation, even on this side of heaven. ”

“ Our republic may justly be said to be founded on the intelligence and virtue of the people, and to maintain it, 'the whole force of education is required.' The establishment of common schools appears to be the best plan, that can be devised, to disseminate religion, morality and learning, throughout a whole country. ”

“ It is not assumed that the foregoing propositions comprise all the reforms needed in society. Doubtless there are many other reforms required besides those alluded to; doubtless we want a sound system of national education for youth, made compulsory upon all parents and guardians ”

“ It will be the direct means of redeeming our character, by removing that lack of concentration which is so unworthy of us, and at the same time it will become a powerful means of attaining our main object, the introduction of the new national education. ”

“ The organization of integral education should be one of the principal tasks that will occupy primarily the people called on to reconstruct the social edifice, after the revolution has made a blank slate out of today’s institutions.
Manifesto I The century which is ending will not have passed in vain. A furrow has opened in history which nobody will erase. A revolution has eben accomplished, deeper than those which shook empires: something has changed in the form of happening of the human spirit. ”

“ Coming, as it did, at a time when political and ecclesiastical despotisms were fast breaking down in France, when new forces were striving for expression throughout Europe, and when new theories as to the functions of government were being set forth in the American Colonies and in France, it gave the needed inspiration for the evolution of a new theory of non- religious, universal, and democratic education which would prepare citizens for intelligent participation in the functions of a democratic State, and for a reorganization of the subject-matter of education itself. ”

“ But this ideal will remain a myth unless the system of education is entirely changed. It is the duty of the Government to organize schools and colleges, for boys and girls, both rich and poor, and of all ages. ”

“ This lengthy discussion leads up in the end to practical conclusions. Public education must be reorganised and must work in a new direction. The extant educational system suffers from a threefold inadequacy. ”

“ Now education for citizenship would seem to consist in gaining a knowledge of the actual workings of our social organization, with some illuminating notions of its origin, together with a full realization of its defects and their apparent sources. But here we encounter an obstacle that is unimportant in the older types of education, but which may prove altogether fatal to any good results in our efforts to make better citizens. ”

“ For ages a Church and private affair, of no particular concern to government and of importance to but a relatively small number of the people, education has to-day become, with the rise and spread of modern ideas as to human freedom, political equality, and industrial progress, a prime essential to the maintenance of good government and the promotion of national welfare, and it is now so recognized by progressive nations everywhere. ”