IDEALS AND VALUES IN EDUCATION BY WILLIAM ESTABROOK CHANCELLOR Superintendent of Public Instruction, District of Columbia; Lecturer BOSTON AND NEW YORK The Riverside Press, Cambridge PREFACE In this book I have undertaken that most difficult of all intellectual tasks, to determine the values of the activities and of the ideals of men. In this task, many men engage themselves more or less seriously; poets, philosophers, statesmen, historians, men of affairs, gossips, cynics, idlers; and all fail. Yet no critic is competent to measure the extent of their failures. If, however, the practical educator would lift his own work out of empiricism and traditionalism into the freedom and reasonableness of philosophy, he must undertake this task. The immediate influences upon me have been of two kinds: the practical experiences of a working superintendent and the academic associations of a university lecturer. The true substratum, the bedrock of the book is not science or art, but a faith that seems to me warranted by history as well as by philosophy and necessitated by the nature of the human mind,—that this life is, to use the frequent phrase of Carlyle, "but a little gleam between two eternities." I am well aware of the place of this opinion in the history of philosophy. But only such an opinion, true or false, it seems to me, can justify true seriousness of thought or of conduct in life. It warrants the saying of Emerson, "I am to see to it that the world is better for me, and to find my reward in the act," my reward being the irreversible education of an eternal soul.1 I cannot accept the opinion of Matthew Arnold, for the conclusion seems a non sequitur from the premise, and the premise itself false. I hold life one. Obviously in every progressive age there must be a 2 Poems, "Anti-Desperation." 1 Man, the Reformer. new education," for the progress of humanity is conditioned by the better development of the new generation. A static education is both cause and effect of a static civilization. I use these terms very loosely, for it may fairly be questioned whether education is not in its very nature dynamic, and whether a civilization must not always be either progressive or decadent; but as thus used the terms deliver my meaning. Nothing can be more false than the notion that a civilization may advance while its educational phase remains in statu quo. Yet this false notion is the very substance of most of the opposition, whether popular or professional, to "the new education." It becomes, therefore, a part of my obligation to discuss civilization, success, education, and progress, for until the terms are defined, neither agreement nor conclusion, neither satisfaction nor enlightenment is possible. I must, of course, take for granted certain matters, for education is not a basic science, but rather one that utilizes as its own postulates the conclusions of other sciences. Indeed, by some, the proposition that education is a science is challenged. In this book, I do not discuss these postulates, though I state and, in some instances, illustrate them. The philosophy of education is not quite synonymous with the science of teaching, and the profession of education is not at all coterminous with the art. Teaching is artistic; education architectural, architectonic. From want of this distinction, there have been confusion and conflict. This distinction I draw, following it with various conclusions and applications that appear pertinent to the needs and conditions of this American democracy. The references will, I trust, sufficiently display my obligations to those who have gone before me. Many principles and notions here repeated seem to be too much. the general property of mankind to justify mention of |