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of words, instead of setting down in the beginning the definitions in which as wise men we may concur. In what definition of education is it possible that wise men may concur? All will agree that education is a process: not that of play, nor yet of work, but of artistic activity. Play meanders pleasantly toward an external end of no significance. Work drives straight for an end beyond, that is pleasant because of its worth. The process of Art has an end but not beyond. Its end is in itself; and it is pleasurable in its activity because its true activity is a result. From play the artistic process differs because its end is significant; from work it differs because its end is in its activity, and because its activity possesses the pleasure of worth. It is like religion: a process continually begun, and in its incompleteness complete. Its ideal is incapable of temporal fulfilment, but still, in each moment of development, it is spiritually perfect.

Education, then, is an art-the art of the individual realizing himself as a member of a society whose tabernacle is here, but whose home is a house not built with hands. Education is the process of knowing the best, enjoying the best, producing the best in knowledge, conduct, and the arts. Realization, expression of self, physical, intellectual, social, emotional, is its means and end. It implies faith in a moral order and continuing process, of which it is itself an integral and active part.

It is remarkable with what persistency the race of educators has indulged extremes. There has been accorded from time to time an apostle of the golden mean. his disciples have ever proceeded to the ulterior limit: Among the ancients to the pole of self-culture or to the pole of uncultured service; in the Dark Ages to the ideal of the cloister or the ideal of the castle, to joyless learning

or to feudal, and feminine, approval; in the Middle Ages to the bigotry of the obscurantist or the allurement of the material; in the Renaissance to contempt of the ancients or to neo-paganism to theological quibbles or to Castiglione, to the bonfire of vanities or the carnal songs of Lorenzo; in the Reformation, to compulsory discipline or the apotheosis of natural freedom; in the succeeding age to pedantry or deportment. Still later appear Rousseau and the philanthropists with the "return to nature," the worship of individuality, the methods of coddling and play; and then Jacotot-and the equal fitness of all for higher education, the exaggeration of inductive methods, the chimerical equivalence of studies. And now has arrived the subordination of the art to pure profit, or vaudeville, or seminars for sucklings.

Always the fallacy of the extreme!-If education is not for the fit it must be for imbeciles; if not for culture, for Mammon; if not for knowledge, for power; if not of incunabula, of turbines and limericks; if not by the cat-o'nine-tails, by gum-drops. Why the mean of a Plato or a Quintilian could not obtain the sanity of Melanchthon or Erasmus, of Sturm or Comenius, of Milton or the Port Royal, of Pestalozzi, Friedrich Wolf, or Thomas Arnold,Heaven only knows, which in its unscrutable purpose has permitted the race of educators, following the devices of their own heart, to go astray after idols.

To know, to feel, to do aright and best, each and all in all and each of the fields of human activity, that is the art of education.

If we exaggerate one of these functions to the neglect of the rest, our education is no longer an ideal but an idol. If, forgetting that education is an art, we try to make of

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it a pleasant meandering, we set up the idol of Play. If, forgetting that the activity of Art is of intrinsic value and delight, we glorify the empty means and merit of drudgery, then we have erected the idol of Pedantry: we beat the air for discipline, shuffle in and out of corners the straw of arid learning, and choke ourselves with the dust of our own sweeping. If we fix our eyes on the cash, we bow to the tribal idol of Quick Returns. If we forget that, as an art, there is for education a progressive ideal and a law of progress, too, we bow to the idol of Caprice. We fall not only into the fallacies already enumerated but into the fallacy of the equivalence of studies, the fallacy of shifting, the fallacy of dissipation. In Art each factor is in relation to the rest, and all to the whole: we proceed fatuously upon the assumption that the part is the whole; and therefore each part equal to each; and therefore one study as good as any other. In Art the means, which is the end, is relative, progressive: we assume comfortably that studies are independent of each other, that we can take any in any order, pass an examination and have done. In Art the end, which is the means, is absolute and self-referred and ideal: we figure that, by dissipating our energies, we shall happen to hit, here and now, the ideal. Disregarding the progressive unity of education we bow to Caprice.

The idols of the academic market-place to-day are Caprice and Quick Returns and Play, and, in unexpected corners, Pedantry, against which in reaction these three were set up. Of these, Quick Returns was borrowed from the tribe; and not alone, for of this subvention are other tribal gods too numerous to rehearse-specially Numbers and Inevitable Grace and Incidental Issues and Parade. To one or other of these false worships are due

the wane of scholarship, the utilitarian tendency, the excrescence of non-academic activities, the neglected discipline in our education at the present time.

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[NOTE. "The blame," Professor Gayley continues, "is by no means wholly to be laid at the door of the university. It attaches, also, to our system of elementary education." The book discusses other idols of education, and then goes on to propose remedies. Some of the remedies have already been implied. Others, knowing that it is not the better part of valor, I shall venture to suggest. Having heard that Ephraim was joined to his idols, I have not let him alone. I have committed the indiscretion of writing a book about him-a Zoar of a book, to be sure; but then, I have laid myself open. If now, in addition, I write of ideals, what will Ephraim call them?" Part of the answer to this question is, as Professor Gayley says, already in our minds. His complete discussion of it could be read with great interest by all college men and women.]

XI

AN ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN 1

WILLIAM DE WITT HYDE

A graduate of Christ Church College, Oxford, recently remarked to me: "One can have such a good time at Oxford, that it's a great waste of opportunity to work." The humor of this remark, however, was turned to pathos when his wife told me sadly that: "An Oxford training does not fit a man for anything. There is absolutely nothing my husband can do"; and then I learned that the only thing this thirty-year-old husband and father had ever done was to hold a sinecure political office, which he lost when the Conservative party went out of power; and the only thing he ever expected to do was to loaf about summer resorts in summer, and winter resorts in winter, until his father should die and leave him the estate. Fortunately, American society does not tolerate in its sons so worthless a career; yet the philosophy of college life which was behind that worthlessness, translated into such phrases as "Don't let your studies interfere with your college life,” and “C is a gentleman's grade," is coming to prevail in certain academic circles in America.

Put your studies first; and that for three reasons: First, you will have a better time in college. Hard work is a necessary background for the enjoyment of everything else.

1 Delivered to the incoming class at Bowdoin College in 1908. Reprinted through the courtesy of William De Witt Hyde and of The Independent.

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