'^ V -^^ EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY KBW VORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO EDUCATION FOE DEMOCRACY BY HENRY FREDERICK COPE J13eto gorb THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 19^0 All rights reserved Copyright, 1920, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and printed. Published, April, 1920 MAV (2/920 ©CU566933 y CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Education in a Democracy 1 II Discovering the Need 15 III Democracy as a Religious Ideal .... 28 IV Religion in Democratic Education . . . 42 — V Education and the Problems of Democracy 59 VI Problems of World Living 69 VII The Spiritual Nature of Education in a De- mocracy 81, VIII The School of Democracy 93 IX Beginning at Home 108 X Democratic Training Through the Church 123 \/^ XI The Public Schools and Democracy's Pro- gram 138 ^ XII The Schools and Moral Training . . . 155 __^ • XIII Spiritual Values in School Studies . . . 168 XIV Spiritual Values in School Activities . .183 XV The Bible and Public Education .... 194 XVI Organizing the Community 210 XVII A Community Program 221 XVIII The Function of a College in a Democracy . 232 XIX Teaching Religion in the College . . . 245 XX The Realization of Democracy .... 257 XXI Democracy in the Crucial Hour .... 266 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY CHAPTER I EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY Democracy is more than a form of government; it is a social ideal, a mode of life and a quality of the human spirit ; therefore it cannot be imposed on a people ; it must be acquired. Democracy is social self-determination directed toward ideal ends. It is the civil organization of a common goodwill. It is an attitude of mind which holds that the highest good lies in the good of all, that the aim of all being is common well-being. It is a faith which holds that a common goodwill may control all society. It is an ideal which rises in the minds of a free people and depends on their w^ills and their wisdom for its expression in social life. Hence it has a fundamental interest in education as the means by which people gain vision, develop a social will and organize their purposes effectively. But democracy is more than an ideal ; it is a condition of living; it is a social order. It is for practice as well as for proclamation. We believe in it as a mode of social life. It is this practical realization which the world most eagerly desires. No question grips us more than this : How can our splendid vision be brought to earth and men become willing and able to solve their problems of living together? Two answers appear in American current life: by legislation — that is social 1 % EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY regulation and construction, and by education. Which is the better way? In North America formal education is the product of democracy; in the world-life democracy will be largely the product of education. The American ideal of democ- racy has developed through the practical experience of a free people finding working modes of social organization and control. That experience not only clarified the ideal of democracy, it revealed the conditions of its realization, and convinced even the average citizen of its entire dependence on education. The government that sets men free must aid them to self-government. Political self-preservation dictated universal educational oppor- tunity. Schools were founded to save the free state, and, of necessity, they became free schools. Education became a recognized and essential function of a democ- racy. The democratic state saves itself by saving its selves. Its development depends on the development of every member to the very last one. Democracy gives birth to general education. If edu- cation is the duty of democracy it is because the develop- ment of democracy is a certain result of true educa- tion. The state must maintain the school because the school maintains the state. But the work of the schools depends on the spirit of the state. Given a state de- signed for democratic ends it will foster a system of education designed to develop persons in their social capacities. Here schools exist to train the young in the art of social living. It is their function so to develop in growing persons their social powers and values that they will organize an ideal society. The democratic purpose expresses itself in education in two ways : First, it establishes a definite aim and test, seeking fully devel- oped, socially capable citizens ; in a word, education in a democracy is simply society organizing itself to develop the democratic mind and democratic methods of living. EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 3 Second, it determines the conditions of success in popular education: the purposes of education can only be fully achieved under democratic conditions ; that is to say, persons can develop to their fullness only in a society organized primarily for the sake of persons. This is the distinguishing mark of a democracy ; it is that form of social organization which is determined by the needs of persons, in which civil rights are based upon personal qualities and rights and in which the needs of persons ultimately determine all procedures and shape all aims. These characteristics of civil life are essential also to an educational program, so that, in an important sense, democracy in action is all educative. DEMOCRACY DEFINED The unity of education and democracy becomes clear when, in the light of the modern personal-social aim and process of the schools, we come to examine our current concept of democracy. That concept is implied in Lincoln's famous words, " Government of the people, by the people and for the people," with emphasis on the last clause. A democracy is that form of social organiza- tion for civil purposes which existing by the will of the people directs all its powers to promoting the welfare of all the people. Other civil forms may exist to main- tain the prestige of hereditary monarchs, to perpetuate constitutional modes, to extend territory or to advance trade; but a democracy has the peculiar purpose, that its people may have life and may have it more abundantly. It is well to keep in mind this distinguishing mark. It is often supposed that the right of every person to participate in public affairs makes a democracy ; but that right is only incidental to this dominating purpose, that every power of the whole social organization shall be directed to the public good. That end makes public and universal participation essential. The child goes to school 4 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRAC^ for public ends and not for private motives alone; schooling is the method by which he lives and learns to live the life of a democracy. Democracy an educational problem. If the democratic state must foster education it is not less true that educa- tion must foster the democratic state and society. An educational program of developing lives must be seriously concerned with the society in which these lives are to develop. The new social ideals of education are possible only in a social order which is essentially democratic. The social aim of the school can be realized only where society exists fundamentally for the sake of persons. The difficulties in our present system of education are largely those due to conditions of operation or control which are not truly democratic or to an environment which undoes that which the school accomplishes. We are seeking to educate persons for freedom under school-room experiences of autocracy; the controlling purpose of the school often is either the preparation of the children of the well-to-do for the dominance of others, or the training of others for efficient serfdom. The atmosphere of the school may be emphatically anti-democratic; it may be the tool of political parties or of a social cabal. We can hope to train for democracy only by the experience of democracy. At present the school is set in a society which does not yet fully believe in social education; it is not yet deeply concerned about persons, as such, or their powers or their social realizations. Rather it is anxious that each shall be prepared to play his part to his own individual advantage. And this is only to say that our society has not yet accepted democ- racy. All that it means and how its meaning is realized we are slowly learning. Education a political problem. Democracy depends on education because it cannot exist by edict ; it is made possible only by making democrats. It is more than a EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 5 constitutional civil order; it is a governing ideal in the minds of those who constitute the state. It is not a method of governing the people ; it is a method by which people organize their common affairs. Acts of legislative bodies do not make a democracy ; it often exists in spite of foiTns of government, as in the case of Great Britain. A democracy is possible only as democracy is developed in the minds and wills, in the habits and ideals of all the people. This is the task of education. As a democracy develops the educational imperative is intensified. Social life develops intensively and extensively. In each civil unit democracy becomes more complete ; it reaches out further into all forms of life. It widens the social duties and privileges of every person. It takes over wider reaches of life. The socialization of governmental functions which has developed so rapidly in the last decade is, wherever these functions are exer- cised by the people for the people, simply the more com- plete application of the democratic principle. Even a cursory comparison of the duties of citizenship in the United States a century ago with those duties to-day will suggest the greatly heightened need for the education of the citizen. This need is based on the fact that he has become more truly and more fully a part of the state. He projects more of himself into the life of the state ; he not only pays taxes and votes for representa- tives ; he must use his brain in thinking through grave problems ; and, under the experience of the great war, he has learned that he must serve with all his powers as part of his identification with the state. Democracy makes new demands on all. The develop- ment of democracy extensively may make even greater demands on the citizen. We look back over the growing art of democracy from the folk-meeting and the town- meeting to the state and nation, and now we believe we are within hailing distance of a world democracy. This 6 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY is not only an extension from one unit to many, from a few states to all states, it is an extension from small groups to an all-inclusive group. It is not only a political contagion, passing on to new groups ; it is a new life which welds all the groups into one. Whatever the actual social organization of the world may be to-morrow we are facing the problem of living in a world of the closest social unity under democratic ideals. Our immediate taslc is that of learning to live in the common, close neighbor- hood of the whole world. A world democracy is upon us almost irrespective of forms of civil government, at least the form of civil organization follows rather than precedes the democratic experience. The whole world has been drawn into a common neighboring by the bonds of transportation and commerce. To-day we are nearer to the remotest people than once we were to those in the next state, and we are more dependent on them than once we were on our near neighbors. Into every home the life of every land enters every day. The breakfast-table may carry contributions from every continent. Into the lives of all we each reach out, not only with ease but with tremendous potentiality. There are no longer any independent peoples. No nation can any longer carve out its career alone. The social obligations that come from propinquity are on all, together with the social duties that arise from mutual dependence. The welfare of the least cannot be a matter of indifference to the largest. PROBLEMS OF WORLD DEMOCRACY World living has become a problem m personality. This weaving together of the world life has been accom- panied by the infusion of the blood of personality into the strands of the web. National living has been person- alized. It is not governments that are thrown together but people. It is not China with whom we have to live EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 7 but the Chinese people. This is the case because the contacts are so largely personal. Our relations with other people are not matters of diplomatic arrangements ; they are matters of our daily bread, our common, personal needs and our currency and food of thought and feeling. Further, the relations are personal because civil organiza- tion increasingly becomes personal. Our world-social experiences are determined not by some overhead mech- anism created by the state but by our own wills, our own habits of life and thought. Our adjustments are not between the constitutions of states but between the char- acters of peoples. The blood of life is in the web that binds us together and so world-relations pass from organ- ization to organism. Whatever the external forms of civil life may be the fact is that all must learn to live together in a common world-life which is increasingly democratic in character. No one can be exempt from this world-life; none who have realized it in any degree desire to be exempt. But it is a new life which cannot be lived in the spirit and the mode of the old. It makes new demands. It estab- lishes new standards. It is constantly revealing new requirements. Old ideals are inadequate in a new world. Old motives, based on individual or purely national concepts, will not be sufficient. We need a new morality for a new world life. And therefore we need a new education, or, rather, we need the full development of our educational ideals, conceived in democracy, to meet the needs of this fuller democracy of the race. Democracy is essentially a personal process. Before attempting to state the characteristics of education for democracy, one must face a question that expresses a real difficulty to many. Says one, this reasoning moves in a circle for it regards democracy as both cause and effect in progress, it proposes that the world shall push itself up hill. How can democracy both purpose and 8 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY effect its own progress? Can it grow beyond itself? Is it not an attempt to elevate humanity by its own boot- straps? Such objections appear to acquire special force whenever we contrast the efficiency of a democratic state with that of an autocracy. In the latter the overlord, looking at his people objectively, can will their betterment overnight ; in the former we must wait until the people, who must see themselves subjectively, all will their own betterment. But such comparisons lose sight of one essential feature of a true democracy ; they overlook the most important difference between autocracy and democ- racy. That difference lies not so much in that there may be one governor or many, but in this, that one is a form of civil mechanism and the other is a mode of social living. Democracy is not a method of making people do things ; it is a form of life under which people desire and will to do. It is not a method of pushing people up hill ; it is the devotion of a people to a purpose which moves them forward. It is not a mechanism but an inner motive force. It does not expect to lift people but to develop them. The hope of democracy is not that people will make laws regulating themselves into higher living but that by the devotion of all to the ends of s'ocial living there may be developed a common social will for better living. It depends, not on regulation or controls imposed but on ideals and motives that furnish an inner propulsion for progress. It is government having its seat in the wills of people and progress rising in the growing ideals and desires of people. Is social organization for the ends of personality pos- sible? The central problem of democracy then lies in the question whether people can develop their own ideals, motives, wills, and powers of llife. This development must be in the active rather than in the passive mood; we must guard against speaking of " developing the EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 9 people," as by some overhead, benevolent and superior minority. Improvement has to rise in the common will or, if it does not rise there wholly, it must express itself in the common will. It is not necessary to discuss the question whether people ever do will their own develop- ment, for we know that there are not a few who persistently seek higher levels and greater strength of life, and we know that these individuals stimulate others to like endeavors. The question is whether we can have a social organism which, as a whole, directs itself toward its own development. Can a state be successfully organized for the dominant purpose of growing the lives of men and women ? Is social evolution wholly subject to blind forces lying outside our control, or is man, in the realm of personality, a creature capable of self-directed evolution? The purely naturalistic answer which subjects us entirely to outer forces loses sight of the factor of the human conscious- ness and w^ill. This is just as real a fact as any other. A person is not only subject to forces; he is a force. He is the organizer of forces. He has the power of considering, recognizing and, to a large degree, of di- recting the very processes that determine what he shall be. This is the power that gives rise to education, for education is simply our attempt to direct social evolution. Education is democracy at work developing its own powers of progress. The whole question leaps out of the realm of speculation into that of demonstration. In the labora- tory of life we are to-day scientifically working out an answer to the question. Democracy is proving that man can direct his own development. Every school is a laboratory in that field. Social life and industry are being directed and modified to an increasing degree by the recognition of their power to determine character. All life is being studied with reference to the educational opportunities it offers and the forces it creates. In a 10 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY democracy we tend steadily toward the determination of all the conditions of living by the study of their educa- tional effects, by the manner in which they stimulate and modify our lives. We ask, what manner of people are being made by these things? THE HOPE OF A BETTER WORLD The realization of a truly democratic society depends very much on the development of a spirit of humanism, that is, on an acceptance of the happiness and well-being of all mankind as the supreme aim in human existence. Writing in days when the world is still in arms, when men confidently ascribe the success of their side to the force that sheds human blood, it is difficult to believe that such a spirit can dominate mankind. Yet if it cannot, if the good of all cannot be the aim of all, democracy is no more than a political dream. A writer ^ in one of the most thoughtful journals recently strongly urged the " Ground for Hope," as he expressed it ; he finds many signs, traceable through the history of civilization, that we are coming to a common social aim of human well- being. He seeks for evidence in the question whether " men have in that period of modem history become more united, better able to use their combined forces to a com- mon end of social good, and whether on the whole they have so used their powers. If this appears to be the case, then in a practical sense the ideal of humanity is brought nearer, and world relations on the mechanical side are favorable to the increase of the common elements in ethics and religion." ^ He also pertinently quotes : " Ethically, as well as physically, humanity is becoming one, one, not by the suppression of differences or the mechanical arrangement of lifeless parts, but by a widened consciousness of obligation, a more sensitive response to 1 F. S. Marvin, in the Hibbert Journal for April, 1918, page 387. 2 Ibid., page 392. EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 11 the claims of justice, a greater forbearance toward differ- ences of type, a more enlightened conception of human purpose." ^ The democratic ideal is being formed in all experience, A democratic society must always tend to conceive it- self in educational terms. It will see all life — whether in the home, in social intercourse, in commerce, in shop and factory or school — as an experience in school- ing, in the development of powers, in discipline in the art of living. So long as men are alive and so long as their lives touch one another they must continue to be educated. No man goes into a factory or a mill in the morning and comes out the same person at night; he has been changed by the experience of social contacts with other lives, by work and by thought. Now this is one of those very simple facts that needs no elaborate presentation. But it has been a fact which has not been recognized always as a basis for action. Democracy, because its main interest is in the changes that take place in men and women, in the question whether those changes are for the better or for the worse, democracy looks at that day in the factory from a new angle, from the educational point of view. A democracy says, We will determine the conditions of factory-life because these conditions determine so largely the lives of those who are the state, in fact the factory helps to make or mar the democracy. So that the interest in social welfare which the modern state exhibits is something more than an extension of its functions, it is the expression of its very purpose, it is the discharge of its function of devel- oping the lives of its people. It is government not only of the people, as to conditions of living, but for the people, that these conditions may make the best kind of people. No democracy can ignore any conditions that affect the characters of persons. 1 Quotation from L. H. Hobhouse, "Morals in Evolution" (1916). 12 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY The manifold concerns of the democracy with the details of the life of the people are exhibitions of educa- tional activity. They reveal a social will organizing and directing the forces of life, determining the experiences of persons and groups, choosing the stimuli that shall come to their lives, presenting to them forms of activity, so that out of the whole of life there may develop a strong, wise, just and loving people, living together in common goodwill. If education is democracy addressing itself to the duty of self-development, hom can we he sure that we are moving m the right direction? How can we prepare for the future when it is unknown to us? But it is not necessary to predict the future nor to know the precise conditions under which our children will have to live. We have ground more sure than guesses about to-morrow. We have, first, before our eyes readily discernable social movements, the direction of which may be clearly seen even though the end is not in sight, and, second, we have this principle to proceed upon : that the best prepara- tion for higher functions is the full discharge of existing and present ones. To meet fully the demands of the present hour is the best preparation for the coming one. We do know what our needs are to-day and we know what is called for by the present developments in our social order. If this is an orderly universe we can safely pro- ceed on the assurance that the duty of the present fully met prepares for the demands of to-morrow. What then are the outstanding needs of democracy at this hour? If the concept of democracy here stated is the true one then it is evident that the old answers to this question are totally inadequate. These answers have advocated a number of valuable additions to our educa- tional program, some of which have proved highly useful. They are efficient but not sufficient. We have been urged to extend " education in citizenship," by which is meant. EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 13 usually, instruction in the mode of our form of govern- ment, in its local and state applications and in its constitu- tional basis and present ideals. This needs to be done; it is a constantly imperative duty in a nation absorbing thousands of citizens from lands alien in government and ideals. We must have a citizenship intelligent as to methods of procedure. And yet it takes more than civics to make a citizen anywhere, and in a democracy more than anywhere else. We are told that one of the educational needs of a democracy is that the people shall be trained for practical usefulness. No one questions the value of vocational training provided it means a vocation and a training for all, that it does not mean the regimentation of the masses to be the earlier ready for drafting into the ranks of industry and that it does not mean depriving the young of their heritage of joy and culture in order that they may acquire the habits of wage-earning. But there is no assurance that industrial efficiency will be accompanied by competency to live the social life of a democracy. Learning to make a living is part of the art of life ; but it is only part. A nation of expert mechanics, merchants and farmers would doubtless be better than a nation of untrained and shiftless people ; competency in industry and commerce are amongst the foundations of national happiness and power ; but those competencies may develop a people into the very opposite of a democracy, into a mere aggregation of groups each devoting its efficiencies to its own ends, each seeking its own advantages and thus developing, through unrestrained competition, only social anarchy. So slight a dismissal of these important needs in educa- tion does not indicate an opinion that they are valueless. They are essential. They are parts of the program of education for democracy. But they have been so empha- sized as to obscure certain other and yet more important 14 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY parts without which they are valueless. If democracy is social organization for the sake of the growth of peo- ple, for the development of their lives in a society, then the educational program must include more than learning the mechanics of government and more than training in habits of self-support. It must include all that is involved in the art of life in a society. The duty of a democracy is to train its people to live in a society devoted to the good of all. Education for to-morrow's democracy will be education for the fullness of living in society as effective, contribut- ing members, serving its ends, devoted to its ideals, habit- uated to its ways and trained to realize its purposes. Education for to-morrow's democracy means facing this J problem: have we the vision, can we find the means and develop the agencies not only to teach all how a society of common goodwill should be organized, but also, through actual experience, to train ourselves and our children in its habits and activities, to grow in vision of its ideals and to develop motives sufficiently high and strong to sustain and inspire in all that may be involved in its realization.'* CHAPTER II DISCOVERING THE NEED Are our present educational plans and ideals adequate for democracy as it must be? Education for democracy would be a simple matter under some conditions. It would be proper to assume that any system of education in a truly democratic society, when taken along with the experience of living in that society, would constitute adequate preparation for democ- racy. Many complacently assume that this is the happy condition prevailing in America. Popular orators have stimulated our pride in democratic institutions until we often dream that a democratic society was created by the Continental Congress and consummated by the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution. Then they point to our schools which, since they are ours, must be the best on earth ; surely here children receive all training necessary for democracy for they have courses in American history and civics ; they learn all about the theoretical machinery of our political life! What more could democracy need? Why should we assume that there is need for some new or special type of education in order to prepare for the future democracy? If we have democracy to-day two results follow. First, the very experience of living in a democracy constitutes the best preparation for that form of social life; and, Second, any true democracy will be so conscious of its requirements as to make full and adequate provision for the training of the young. Both these propositions would be true if we were now living in a democracy. But we are not. We have at present only certain elements of 15 16 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY democracy, principally in our forms of political life. We have some democratic institutions, but we do not have a democratic order of society. Rauschenbusch well says, " Political democracy without economic democracy is an uncashed promissory note, a pot without a roast, a form without substance." ^ We cannot have such an order so long as society permits avoidable injustices, so long as it exploits the weak, builds fortunes for the few out of the extremities and adversities of the many, permits one to reap where he has not sown, to enjoy riches that others have earned and are not permitted to enjoy, gives larger rights to the rich than to the poor and continues to regard the child as largely a negligible social factor. Life in the present social order is not an habituation to democracy, but it is calculated to quicken hunger for it. We have yet to acquire democracy. We must teach the practice of democracy because it is an unrealized ideal. It cannot be learned in the way that a child learns his forms of play because at present it is not atmospheric and habitual. We must not confound our current emphasis on the phrases of democracy with its actual realization. We are told many times every day that the great war was fought for democracy. And, in a most important sense, this is exactly true ; it is the price we still are paying to assert the dominance of human rights over all other considerations. But we must not delude ourselves into thinking that because we have inscribed democracy on our banners, and because we are paying a tremendous price for a common international recognition of one of its simple tenets, that, by these tokens, we have fulfilled democracy. Nor must we hope that reiteration of these ideals will give our children the training they need for the democracy of to-morrow. It is easy to mistake the currency of phrases for the reality they represent. 1 " Christianizing the Social Order," page 353. DISCOVERING THE NEED 17 Democracy waits for the democratic mind and will. We may through the war come to the realization of a world civil order; but democracy's struggle will not be over even when all political units shall bear its name and use its forms. Democracy will not be achieved so long as men are willing to use any form of social leverage — business, education, politics, religion, or the exigencies of war-times — to secure advantages for themselves at the price of loss or deprivation to others. Democracy will not be achieved so long as we consent to the contin- uance of social relations predicated on human selfishness, guided by competitive motives and resulting in social inequalities not determined by justice or merit. Democ- racy will not be achieved until our minds have been changed, until we have repented of the old ways that brought us to industrial and economic chaos, until we desire the good of all far more ardently than we now covet all the goods we can get. Changes such as these are much more than changes in government and politics ; they are changes in human ideals and motives, changes possible only through the careful, intelligent, long- continued education of our minds and wills. Democracy waits for a generation controlled by a social view of all life and by a common social goodwill. THE DEMANDS OF NEW WORLD LIFE But we have one further and highly important consid- eration ; that we must have special training for democracy because the democracy of the future will be of a special kind. If the society of to-morrow was to be simply the normal development, by easy and natural stages, of the society of to-day we might assert that to-day's experience was the only necessary schooling for to-morrow. But the world has broken with its past, having tested and rejected many of its ways ; social things are being made new. We enter a new world order. It will be different because old 18 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY methods have failed, old reliances have broken down, old settled habits have been uprooted; old ways have proven inadequate; new social alignments have appeared; new experiences have been given to almost all young people; new powers have been developed in peoples ; new social dependencies have appeared; new forms of cooperation have been tried. Still more, in the future, new demands will be made on all; it will not be enough to be a good man, one will have to be a man whose life counts with all other lives for the world's good. It will not be enough that one is honest in business, according to the world's customs ; one will have to be honest according to the world's needs. Men must square their business, not with the ethics of the trade but with the good of humanity. Not only will men demand their rights in the worth of living; we shall accept our responsibilities to secure to each his full rights. Soon we shall see that so closely are we all bound in the bundle of life that no man can be poor to himself, none can be abject, hopeless, oppressed to himself, that we each have an unavoidable share in the life of the saddest and in the suffering of all. We shall learn that no nation can afford to have any of its people below par, none can afford to weaken heart and life by unnecessary suffering, for the people are the nation and the nation is the people. We are staggered before the problem of the new world with all its changes, its social reorganization, its new ways of thinking; and shall we expect that our children will be ready for its life unless we take some special measures to prepare them? Democracy has been in a bitter school of experience. Democracy came to one of its great tests in the world war. This terrible struggle demanded the utmost of every people. It called for the devotion of all their resources, the application of all their energies, the development of all their efficiencies ; it demanded sacrifice and cheerful- ness in bearing losses, suffering reverses, enduring hard- DISCOVERING THE NEED 19 ships and facing death. All this, and more, it asked in the name of the good of humanity, for the sake of the ultimate ideals of democracy. The testing of American democracy came as soon as the struggle passed from the area of national relationships to that of human interests, when it passed from a quarrel between Germany and her neighbors to the defiance by Germany of the rights of peoples, the laws of humanity and the established morals of civilization. Then we who had preached and boasted so long about the universal brotherhood of man stood by and watched our brothers being cruelly slaughtered, watched one people, armed by decades of stem application and preparation, coolly loot our neighbors, ravage their lands, destroy their treasures, slay their children and ravish their women. We were slow to see the significance of the struggle, dull to the motives that outweighed all other considerations, such as mixed aims in the allied nations ; the one clear issue was clouded by their treaties and our traditions, as well as by our commercial policies, and that one issue was that of human rights over against autocratic, organized and brutally strong selfishness. It was an issue of democracy ; when at last we met it — so late that many of us will long hang our heads with shame at the delay — then we had a wonderful experience in democratic national life. Two features clearly appeared: First, democracy justified itself as responsive to ideals. A great tide of devotion to ideal service swept over us. ^len and women gave themselves without reservation to whatever service most was needed; families gave sons and fathers with tearful joy, their hearts fixed on high purposes. Second, a com- manding purpose brought us into new cooperation. We found unity in a common loyalty to a sufficiently high enterprise. In every community the old divisions were wiped out as all toiled, in actual labor, for the common cause of world freedom. We tasted the joys of a common 20 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY life under a democratic purpose to make this a world con- trolled by human rights and interests. The events are too near to permit of proper perspective. The experience was not all ideally perfect. The despoiler was present. There always will be spiritual aliens in a democracy ; often they are the ones who prate most of citizenship. But food-exploiters, tax-dodgers, slackers, and profiteering princes only stood out in greater contrast to popular devotion and service. They were but evidences of the dangers incident to democracy, as crime is incident to the law. They indicated that we had failed to furnish society the power to relieve itself of the real enemies of democracy. But there were, even in the joy of our dis- covery of common ideals and common service, frequent stirrings of conscience to ask, why had we waited for this strain to reveal the possibilities of democracy.? Why had we failed, in the normal days of prosperity and world calm, to develop the commanding ideals, train in the loyalties and furnish the controls of conduct which would guide all persons? Here we seemed to fail as a whole; it raised the question whether democracy had educated for permanent moral and spiritual living. We had developed the danger of perverted patriotism. We had cultivated a patriotism of national pride instead of one of national devotion to purposes greater than the nation. We had been proud of democracy because it afforded freedom of personal action, a chance for greater rewards in personal possessions than was possible in other nations. We contrasted ourselves with autocracy not at the point of efTectiveness in government for the sake of people, not as to the permanent treasures of national greatness in idealism, but at the point of individual riches. We had hidden our ideals and exhibited our efficiencies in making and keeping things. In a word, to a large degree, we had lost sight of the real ends of democracy. We had turned this social agency for developing people into a DISCOVERING THE NEED 21 machinery for making goods, for selling goods and making fortunes. MISDIRECTED EFFICIENCIES Temporarily democracy had misdirected its efficiencies. It thought of people in terms of business instead of busi- ness in terms of people. It had listened to voices from Prussia, voices which had been vested with authority in our universities and confided with responsibilities in civic life, voices which practically said, " Man lives by bread alone, therefore organize all your society into grades of bread-winners and bend all your energies to securing their bread-winning efficiency." We had imported large elements of our educational system from Germany ; these elements were rapidly and deliberately crowding out all that was not of their world of things. They declared that alone scientific which could be measured spatially. Their teachers were blinded to all that could not be seen. They were fast making us think of civic life as a vast, intricate, soulless machine, wonderfully efficient, smooth-running and serving wholly material ends of power and wealth. We became ashamed of our earlier idealism; it belonged to a pioneer stage, to an earlier day when men were willing to be misled by dreams. We had found more efficient ways ; we could handle this human material as we would handle any other material. Who does not remember the period of the " efficiency engineer " who not only had his place in the factory but was called to the school and to civic life to regulate its affairs ? Their systems were efficient ; but they were deficient; they failed to take into account all the factors. They were practical-minded ; having lost nine-tenths of their minds — the powers of idealism, of recognizing spiritual values — they capitalized what was left. A democracy is always in danger of losing its soul. It develops a system and forgets the spirit and aim for 22 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY which the system exists. Democracy is not a system with a soul ; it is a soul which works out its system. Democracy is in the whole what man should be in the singular. Men build barns and business because of their needs as men, but in time the barns and business becoming so engrossing that they think of building men because barns and business need them. In any intricate system tools always have a tendency to relegate the product to a secondary place. Left to themselves through the calm summer days, when the crops mature so plentifully, it seems as though life's aim was filling barns. Then later speaks the voice at midnight, " Thou fool ! This night thy soul is required of thee." We looked out on nations that heard that voice. They answered flinging all their treasure into the struggle that the soul might be saved. All that they had so painfully gathered together they counted for naught that human rights might be saved, that men might be free. We saw them recklessly spending for an idea the very treasures we had been so successful in gathering, and we were not yet ready to forsake our bursting barns in order to save our souls. We at first refuse to see that we must either turn aside from business as usual or lose ourselves altogether. Democracy has tested the educational method. Now when the time came that we were compelled to stand either with free men or be slaves, when we must choose either to serve ideal ends or to be sold into bondage, what steps were taken to secure unity of ideal action in the democ- racy.'^ None who lived through the first years of America's participation in the war will ever forget the tremendous efforts, on a national scale, to stimulate and direct the thought and feeling and action of the people. In a word, we depended on an educational program. It was a program of teaching through publicity in news- papers, magazines, the pulpit, schools, bill-boards, the theatres, the platform and the mail. We found out that DISCOVERING THE NEED 23 it was necessary to form the minds of people, that we could make no progress save as the wills of men and women were moved. " Wake up, America 1 " we shouted, and America slept on. Then we began to teach America, and she was awakened. A thorough campaign of educa- tion not only secured national unity of action but, what was vastly more important, it secured unity of feeling and sentiment on a high level for the nation's ideals. Standing in the midst of the great events it is evident that the method which has succeeded in meeting an imme- diate urgency is the method we have neglected all too long. We have not educated the nation for democracy. Our system and plans of education have not been determined by the needs of the present, still less by the demands of the future, but by the traditions of the past. We have inherited our educational practice from aristocracy, and we have imported parts of it from autocracy. It has not been designed for democracy. The schools did not regard the child as a potential socially responsible self-governing factor in the life of the state. ^ They trained in aptitudes which had no special reference to those forms of social cooperation and service which are essential in a democratic society. They taught civics which differed from mon- archy or autocracy only in form and not in purpose or spirit, failing to reveal the soul of democracy. Above all they failed to develop the ideals and motives which, in the individual, make a democracy possible. Moreover, we have been under the necessity of effecting certain fundamental changes in the habitual thinking of large elements in our population, of changing their ideals and concepts. Intellectually we are in a singular position in regard to democracy. It is conceived as a form of government, but all our inherited ideas as to governments place them in the category of imposed institutions. The 1 See George A. Coe on " The Functions of ChUdren in a Com- munity," in Religious Education for February, 1918. g4 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY words, " state " and " government," hold meanings almost wholly either monarchial or feudal. They create a picture of some overhead authority. The delusion that a few were born to rule and the many to serve has been ground deep into the fiber of civilized thought. Monarchy in some form or another dies a lingering death. The very phrase " divine right of kings " is so old that it still carries the authority of usage to many. Therefore, when we speak of a democratic government we tend to think of something outside ourselves, a power which, while created by ourselves, has its seat and authority elsewhere. It is difficult to keep clearly in mind the fact that " we, the people " are the state, the government and the democracy. This intellectual concept of an external authority ruling over us is deeply rooted in those who were born under monarchies and autocracies. They know that they are now in a democratic state, but they think of themselves as being under a democracy, just as formerly they were under a monarchy, instead of realizing that they are not under but in, not yielding service to but yielding them- selves to that of which they are a part. The radical educational problem with such minds is to get them to see the real meaning of democracy, to help them realize their identity with it. Democracy must be transferred from the old grouping of governments — where it is a better and freer kind of lordship — into a new class, that of social self-determination. These facts accounted for no small degree of our lethargy and apparent indifference. They called and they still call for a process of interpreting democracy within our own borders. They complicated the problem of national conversion. We faced a world-testing of democracy with a citizenship one-half of which rejoiced in freedom principally because of the personal advantages it conferred and a large portion of which knew not at all what democracy really means. DISCOVERING THE NEED 25 Education must recognize that democracy makes certain peculiar demands on human nature. Since the educational system is responsible for training the members of a democ- racy it is responsible for preparing them to meet those . demands. Since all human relationships constitute moral situations democracy is a moral situation determined by motives of social interests as supreme. Education for democracy is not only education for social living, it is education for living under conditions in which the interests of society, of the well-being and happiness of the whole must always take precedence of our own personal interests and desires. This is true if democracy is self-government for the people. Education for democracy, then, is educa- tion for social living under social motives. ESSENTIALS IN EDUCATION No scheme or system of education can be adequate so long as it fails to recognize these two related facts, that it must train the young to live in societ}^, and that it must train them in the motive and ideal of self-devotion to the good of society. There are involved here the two related and inseparable ideas of social education and religious education. Education for democracy will be^ social education in that it trains lives to live with others ; it will be religious education in that it trains lives to live for others. Neither is possible without the othery/ We cannot live with people except as we really love them ; we cannot love them until we do live with them. It may be said that all these considerations lie in the realm of sentiments and ideals. The assumption under- lying the objection is that sentiments and ideals are unreal and negligible matters and that education has to do only with the practical concerns of life. It is a part of that leaden-eyed philosophy which sees only the ground at a man's toes. Such objectors are apt to say that we must face the stern realities of life and leave theory and ideals 26 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY to take care of themselves. But ideals are not theories ; they are the underlying facts which determine all things in this world; they make cities, build bridges, lead armies and really do all the big things. Your practical man never gets beyond the plans the idealist has sketched. And sentiments are not vapory nothings ; they are the stern realities of life; they are its motive power and its compass. They make all social motion and determine its direction. Our constant danger is that we shall neglect these realities, that we shall build engines complete in all details except that they will not work because they lack motive power. We think we are practical because we build the apparatus of life and neglect altogether its springs of action. The need of education for democracy, then, is that we shall fully recognize the essential importance of developing right sentiments and ideals, that we shall not neglect what Bismarck called " the imponderables." The testing time has revealed our deep need of a spiritual consciousness in civil and political life. The war has been won ; whether the winning will be worth while depends on the kind of men and women we are and the kind our children shall be. The preparation we most of all have needed and do still need is the preparation of our minds with high ideals, the training of our spirits to such an appreciation of the worth of human interests as shall move us to pay any price for their preservation. We need to realize that, like democracy itself, education for democracy deals with persons, and that persons are not educated until they develop their powers as persons, until controls of conduct are developed, until they have the powers of self-knowledge and self-control, until they have the vision of life that guides them into its social fullness. Because these needs have been so largely neglected it would seem that the emphasis in our educational endeavors at this time should be in the direction of training in life for ideal ends, in DISCOVERING THE NEED 87 the education of persons as social beings living for social ends, or, in a word, on religious education in its broad aspects. This then is the need of democracy : A motive or spirit of life which makes it possible and desirable for us to live with others and to live for others. Democracy depends on the social will that substitutes cooperation for com- petitive struggle. Democracy requires devotion to the good of all as the supreme and dominating purpose in all lives. Under no other motives is it possible to live in the congested, interwoven world life. It is not a question of which is best; this only is possible. Any other way lies the unending conflict of selfish passions pushing the warring groups on to social suicide. The world is par- alyzed so long as it is ruled by passions for greed, " red in tooth and claw," for this world is other than the world of beasts. Man needs sympathy, the things not gained by strength alone, for he lives not by bread alone. For the very continuance of human existence, and certainly for its progress, no other way is possible than that of social unity secured by common devotion to ideal pur- poses. Only the religious will survive in the new world order. Then the central need in education for democracy is that of education in the life that is religious, is that of training in the spirit of devotion to a society of good will, is that of religious education. CHAPTER III DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL As the ideals of democracy are clarified they are ele- vated. Government for the people is lifted above the aims of government for national advantages, for the extension of trade or for the increase of reserves of wealth. Some old motives lose their power and others, yet older, return with deeper meaning; America says less about the opportunity of every man to gain riches and thinks more of the obligations of freedom. Democracy, seeking the good of all, discovers that no good is abiding until all enjoy the highest good, and that no people can be rich in things in any satisfying or enduring manner until they are rich in themselves. Democracy realizes that nations are never greater than their people, and that social welfare is at root a matter of social will. Every attempt to secure public good by popular means leads to the same conclusion : that the happiness, freedom and well-being of a people comes not by regulation, nor by legislation, but all wait on the wills of men and cannot come save from within the hearts and minds of men. This is not a speculative philosophy of idealism preached by a few doctrinaires ; it is the bald fact which confronts every student of social institutions, that human progress waits for the human will, that there is no such thing as the prosperity of a people until they are rich and strong in themselves. A democracy is a social organization, in a civic form, which accepts this law and counts principally on the quality of its people for the power of its state. The central interest of democracy, then, lies in peo- 28 DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 29 'ple as persons. Its aim is not only government by the will of the people but government by the goodwill of all, by the power of the people constantly ^villing the highest good for all. Its central problem is that of devel- oping this will, of securing desire, intent and purpose toward the social ideals of the state. Its task, therefore, is one of education, of training persons in the power of self-direction toward broad social ideals, of developing social wisdom and power of choosing steadily the highest good in life. Unless this power is developed our freedom will mean but a wild scramble for passing gains, a common and bloody warfare in which each madly strives for his own goods. Some have so interpreted democracy, as the chance of every man to enter with all his powers into the common, competitive combat for the possession of things. Sometimes we have gloried in the supposed right of social civil war, of internal rapine. We have talked of the glorious chance open to every one of becoming rich at the expense of his fellows, of the chance of the poor boy to climb from the slums to the crest of affluence as though elevation enlarged a man. We seem to have imagined that a mouse on the peak of a mountain must be a mammoth. But the delusion is less common than the superficial evidences indicate. We make much over the feat of the mouse; but we know that our democracy exists for something far greater than the purpose of populating the peaks of prosperity with freaks, men of swollen substance and shrunken souls. And we are learn- ing, too, that the glory of a nation lies not in its records of sudden fortunes but in its steady development of the common good. In the hearts of men are the facts of life. Every page of the past and every problem of the present pro- claims the same fact, that neither with a man nor a nation does life consist in the abundance of things possessed, that happiness lies not in having but in the 30 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY power of appreciating and enjoying, that riches are not possessed by the hands but by the heart, and that no nation can be great unless the people themselves are great. The glory of a nation depends not on extent of territory, nor on resources or possessions, nor on army or navy or factories or trade, but on the minds and affections and ideals of its people. Belgium devastated is greater than Belgium humming with industry. France " bled white " under the pressure of barbarism recru- descent is greater than France in her prosperity. Scot- land's granite hills, with all their beauty, offer little to the seeker after riches, but Scotland's name will always be associated with true greatness. All stand out known by their souls. A soulless democracy is u/nthinkahle. When a gov- ernment is deliberately organized with the purpose of protecting, strengthening and enriching the life of its people, its first and always dominating concern must be with the inner concerns of their lives, with their well- being in all that makes a people great. The problem of democracy is a spiritual problem. Democracy seeks the salvation of the souls of men in the widest, highest, fullest sense, for democracy ultimately seeks the salvation of society. It looks toward a salvation greater than any designed to protect individuals from the arbitrary dictates of an offended deity, a salvation which brings each one out into the freedom and fullness of all his life, and into the joy and power of the life of all. It is a salvation directed toward character and condition rather than toward any theoretical status. Democracy believes that life may be whole, healthful, rounded-out and rich, that its inner springs may be clear and strong, that men may come to will the true rather than the false, light rather than darkness and love rather than hate. It knows that truth and light and love will not bless the lives of all until they command the desires and wills of DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 31 all. Therefore a democracy must be concerned with deeper things than political forms and commercial suc- cesses, for its permanence depends on the extent to which its ideals rule in the hearts of men. How serious and far-reaching, then, is the program of education for democ- racy ! It is no less than the development of those motives, powers and habits which enable all to live a common life of helpfulness, of fellowship on life's highest levels, in the fullness of all its possibilities, under its finest motives and toward its best ideals. This is the fundamental educational problem that confronts democracy. Is it too much to call it a spiritual problem.'^ Can we not see it as a religious task? Democracy is a spiritual process. Education for this form of social living moves out into a broad region. Democrats are not made by passing an examination on the Constitution of the United States. The law may say that citizenship is acquired by such a process, but the law does no more than confer certain civil rights ; it cannot endow the citizen with those qualities which make citizenship in a democracy. For a democracy is not an affair of a social contract, based on rights granted by authority ; it is an affair of the spirit. It can exist only where men and women have common spiritual ideals, where they effectively place the values of persons first of all and are willing to pay any price for these. It is a matter of the spirit because it exists for the sake of our spiritual rights. We speak of freedom as our heritage; what do we mean.'' Is it that we have liberty of action, to go where we will and, largely, to do what we wish.'' That were a small gain. We mean that we have freedom to follow the desires of our own hearts, to achieve our own ambitions, to dream high things and then to do them. It is not physical freedom we cherish, but freedom of the spirit. Above all, this is a land of free- dom of thought; our freedom of action is simply our S2 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY right to follow in action the free path marked out by the spirit within. Education for democracy is possible only as provision is made for the direction of this spir- itual freedom. SPIRITUAL VALUES OUT OF SOCllALt EXPiERIE'NCE Education for democracy is a spiritual problem because it deals with the great questions of social values. It seeks to train people to living for the highest social ends. A democracy is the political discovery of the highest form of values in civil organization. Having rejected the aims of personal prestige, commercial or military dominion, territory and tribute, the democratic nation says, " We find the good that is highest, the value most worth while, in the lives of persons and in the life of society." Here is a splendid ideal, seen long ago by a few prophetic souls, sung by poets and prophets and now adopted, simply and definitely, as a national aim. Democracy is a national assertion of the rights of the soul, for this well-being that is sought for all people is the well-being of the people themselves. It is the devotion of a nation to the devel- opment of wealth in persons. To a democracy all pros- perity of wages, high standards of living conditions, and amplitudes of resources are but means to a further end, that those who possess these things may be richer in themselves, happier, stronger and more noble in spirit. Democracy becomes a national faith. It is not diffi- cult to see how this high spiritual idealism has grown out of Christianity and now fuses with it at every point where it is set free to declare its meaning and value for life. It is not difficult to see how it is becoming the inspiring creed of thoughtful men and women everywhere to-day. Its hope is that which makes life's struggle worth while. It is the shining goal at the end of all our endeav- ors for social justice, for right conditions of living for all persons, for sunlight and air and play for children. DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 33 for leisure and health for men and women, for intelligence and knowledge for all, for freedom and personal rights. The high price we pay to oppose barbaric autocracy, the trains of treasure and rivers of blood that flow forth in a great w^orld war, go out with no regret — save that for the hideous origin and the barbaric method imposed on us — but with hearts made strong through the hope that we may have a world-order of true democracy, that the rights of the spirit may be set above all other rights and become regnant in our world. Democracy waits on the educated wills of all. A democratic nation and a democratic world cannot come alone through the splendid vision of a few. It does begin here; but it must move on until all at last have the vision. This makes the diff^erence of our modern concept from Plato's Republic. His ideal is an elaborate organ- ization intellectually conceived by a few and not concerned with the mass. For democracy is not only social organ- ization for the good of all, but social organization for that end as determined by the will of all and secured through the w^ork of all. The ideal cannot be fully realized until it is seen and desired by all. The people, as well as the prophets, must have the vision. The inclusive educational task therefore is that of training and inspiring a people to a democratic interpretation of all life. If democratic living is based on the primacy of spir- itual values then its first need wall be an intelligent recog- nition and appreciation of spiritual values and its first duties will be those of training in living for those values ; in a word, democracy is confronted by a problem and task of religious education. Democracy is essentially a religious enterprise because the social ends to which democ- racy is devoted are the values in persons and in society, the values of the spirit to which religion is addressed. A religious person is one whose life is devoted, under the 34 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ideal of such values, to realizing a society of the spirit, a social order, a " kingdom of God " in which love, righteousness, peace and goodness are the ruling powers, in which men become more and more like their divine ideal and the world more and more like the splendid vision for which men so long have prayed. And a religious society is that which is devoted to the realization of this ideal through its forms of social or civic life and power. Sub- stitute " democratic " for the word " religious " and the parallel between the two becomes apparent. In a democracy the supremacy of the spiritual must he a common ideal, A common social goodwill rises only in the wills of all. The fundamental problem is that of developing a spiritual concept of life in all. If we resolve the question of education for democracy into a discussion of the problems of religious education it is because this includes all the rest. It is because religious education simply means that kind of education which trains persons to live, as religious persons, in a religious society and to realize the ideals of that society and carry them forward into the future. We cannot solve modern world problems until they are treated as religious problems. So long as they are mat- ters to be adjusted by diplomacy, by legislation or regulation their roots remain untouched. Social solutions cannot come by adjustments of any sort, for social prob- lems are problems of people and people are not things ; they cannot be fitted together and adjusted like inorganic particles of matter. No solutions are permanent until they come from the people themselves, by the modification of their wills, by the growing harmony of their own desires and aims. That is simply to say that the problems of democracy, like the aim of democracy, are personal. It was a homely form of expressing a fundamental truth that Josh Billings used when he said, " You will never have an honest horse-race until you have an honest human DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 35 race." Society will not be right until the people are rig-ht. Social Tightness is that of which ancient teachers spoke, righteousness, a matter of the motives and will. Social welfare depends on social willing of the right, the good and the mutually helpful. And this means that men must not only know the right ; they must love it ardently, desire it supremely and serve it faithfully. Herein lies the function of religion, to so interpret life that men see the good and the time, that they discover and acquire adequate motives, that their desires are stimulated so that they count dear nothing beside if only there may be realized the splendid ideal of social good, of the love of men, and their life in an ideal family of the divine. Education for democracy is education in the religious life, in living in and for the sake of a society that real- izes the divine ideal of a common life of love and serv- ice. The modern democratic ideal comes steadily closer to the fundamental ideal of the Christian religion, that men may live together as one great family. It accepts the religious concept that it is possible to have a so- ciety in which the spiritual relationships are the dom- inant ones. It accepts the teaching that we should call all men our brothers, basing our relationships, not on the accidents of rank or wealth or blood, but on the un- changing fact of the common life of the spirit in which we find ourselves all of one family. Therefore education for democracy is education in the life of the world-family. It is our attempt to-day to answer the prayer we have so long addressed, not to a king, but to a Father, " Thy Kingdom come " ; the prayer, not for a divine monarchy, but for a common family under the divine fatherhood. Ideally a family is a social insti- tution founded on self-giving love and devoted to the giving of lives to the world and their development in the world. Its causes for being, if it has any sound and S6 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY enduring basis, are spiritual. Its purpose, if it is to be redeemed from sensuality and from sordid selfishness, must be spiritual, that children may grow as persons, may find their full world and be able to live in it.^ A democracy is an extension of this smaller ideal society. It is a larger family, not governed by some splendid paternal leader, for a family is not governed by a leader, but, like every good family, governed by a common will of goodness and love. Democracy involves liumanity^s sternest discipline. Living together in love — that is, paying the full measure of the identification of our own lives with the good of all other lives — is a wonderfully beautiful concept but a terribly difficult task. It is not easy even in a family where many instincts aid and where education has been strengthening the will from the very beginning. It is infinitely harder in the larger human family, composed of all kinds of people, likable and otherwise, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant, intelligent and untouched by the spirit of life. We talk much about the democratic spirit to-day and seem to think that we are democratic because we ride in the street car with the man in his working jeans, because we stand with him at the polls. But how much deeper we must go to live a life of family devotion with all, to make our lives part of the common life! EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION Evidently education for democracy must begin with the very roots of life, with the springs of character and will, of ideals and motives. It must stimulate us to willingness to meet in practice all the demands of its ideals, to pay the full price of democratic living, that is, not alone adjusting ourselves to living with others but 1 This concept is developed and applied in the author's " Religious Education in the Family," University of Chicago Press, 1916. DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 37 controlling ourselves to living for others and for all others. Education for democracy involves training all lives to social efficiency and social devotion. Surely it is not a mistake to call all competent training, directed to these ends, religious education ! It is immediately of im- portance to ascertain whether current education is directed to these ends. Any adequate program of education for the future mill involve a re-interpretation of education. The les- son of the current moral assize of the world is surely, first of all, that neither nations nor individuals can live for themselves alone ; self-interest as the guiding principle of life has broken down ; our plans of education — whether in terms of individual industrial efficiency or in terms of individual erudition — have failed and so equally has our individualistic religion, in terms either of dogmatism or of institutionalism. Education with its dawning con- sciousness of social idealism is relating itself to social real- ity and is looking forward to a coming social order domi- nated by new ideals. Are we not now facing that social order in which all may live in unity and the joy of com- mon service? Have we not practically abandoned the mis- leading biological analogy which interpreted life in terms of bitter struggle, of progress only by survival, and have we not come to see the greater and more imperative law of the organized world, that life is found in self-giving? Competition is of the past : our individualistic morality has crumbled under present social strains. We are already in a new world and for its order, its demands, new motives are imperatively needed. Our world has come almost to suicide through loyalty to the principle of selfishness ; the new world waits for those who are learning to live socially and therefore not simply unselfishly but with the spirit of the larger social self. A program of education for the future will include the following characteristics: (a) The stimulation of all 38 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY social development in the direction of life's highest values. Education will be guided by value-consciousness; what is most worth while for all will determine the goal to which all are stimulated. To the modern mind religion is our consciousness of the meaning and worth of life. If this is true education will be under the illumination of the religious concepts and ideals of a people, (b) The motivation of each life by an adequate and developing value-consciousness ; this will mean such a sense of the worth of the life of all as shall lead one effectively to live for that worth. The religious life is the life which is governed by such a consciousness.^ The ultimate purpose of all education must be to develop persons whose gov- erning motives are religious, who are wise enough to live in the light of the total meaning of life, (c) The deter- mination of the mechanism of life by the aim of life; recognition that the tools of living are of subsidiary value and importance to the product of life. We never can have a real educational program until we have a society which really controls and uses the mechanism of living as means of enriching the life of all. This implies an intel- ligent social order, one in which purpose deliberately formulates its program. In the end it would mean a religious social order, (d) The right of society to self- realization in lives. Whatever hinders persons from growth as persons is a social crime. ^ Whatever hinders unity of social action for growth is a crime against each one. Society must be organized for its own ends, for the sake of and in order to produce the possible society. PERSONAL RIGHTS IN DEMOCRACY Religious education plans the organization of society for purposes of spiritual growth ; it demands the scrutiny 1 Cf. George A. Coe in " A Social Theory of Religious Education," (Scribners, 1917). 2 " Whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble . . ." Jesus. DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 39 and the determination of all life's processes as educational processes under religious motives, (a) The right of each person to social realization. Whatever hinders the indi- vidual from the joyous, stimulating experience of unity and self-expression in the life of all robs him of life itself. To educate men in selfishness is to withhold from them the larger part of their lives, to cramp experience into the minute segment of self instead of expanding it in the wide circle of the social whole. Social realization really means full participation in all one's world, for this society stretches in every direction. It includes all the splendid souls of the past whose fellowship and example is our heritage; it embraces all bearers of the light in all lands everywhere ; it makes a part of our own circle all who now live for truth or die for freedom. The develop- ment of power to know and to enter into this rich and stimulating society is no small part of the task of religious education. To live here is to discover life's true values in persons, is to see clearly its abiding elements that remain unchanged by the wrack of time, is to grasp the central ideal of democracy that the life of all, like the life of one, consists in qualities of personality and that the end and purpose of life is to discover and develop these qualities, these worths. Religious education seeks by ac- tual experience in social living, by the stimulating ideals of large and enriching lives, by the push of the historic ideals of the race, by the cultivation of prophetic ideal- ism, to guide each life to the discovery, the realization and the enriching of all life, (b) The right of all, especially of the young, to immediate, practicable instruction in the method of living at this time. Motives and ideals are es- sential but they must be formed in the individual's own experience ; they must grow out of the realities of living. We have tried, too long, to deliver motives to children ; we must try to develop them by directing the child's actual experience in living his own life as a religious life, (c) 40 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY The right to training in the methods which social expe- rience has indicated as the best in reahzing our common social purpose. It will gradually develop a science of a religious society. The peculiar present task of religious education lies in the fact that for us at this time the only practicable life is the religious life. All other motives have proved mis- leading ; all other methods evidently are suicidal. Self- interest makes self-realization impossible because it inhib- its social realization. Social efficiency in terms of a com- petitive struggle leads only, by battlefields — military or industrial — to social annihilation. The only possible way that all can even live to-day is the self-giving wa}^ abandoning the policy of developing the things of life solely as tools of gain, and definitely adopting a program of common service and enriching efficiency, finding the self in realizing the life of all. Religious education claims its primacy in the interest of men to-day, not for the preservation of religious tradi- tions, nor principally because of the rights of the individ- ual to his religious heritage, but because the salvation of society lies this way and no other, no other sort of so- ciety is possible but one in which the individual lives un- der religious motives. Such a society is possible only as lives are trained for this life, and the training is so impor- tant that it ought to be the first concern of society to- day. All who take seriously the problems of the future of democracy will turn their attention first to children ; they will see in them the society of to-morrow. And, with the children, they will set first the needs of the life of the spirit. They will not make training in religious knowl- edge, ideals and habits an incidental part of education ; it will come to be the most important because it deter- mines the ideals and wills of these growing persons ; it forms their characters, and thus decides everything be- DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 41 sides. All who consider the future of democracy will con- sider with great care the agencies and the methods of this religious training. They will seek to develop the agencies to the highest possible efficiency; they will inquire with great care as to the kinds of materials which are being used. They will see that the stories told to children may tremendously affect the whole character of the future, that the religious concepts gained in childhood may be- come the social realities of to-morrow. They will cease to think of religious education as the occasional interest of a few faddists ; they will see it as our most important present duty with relation to the future of society. CHAPTER IV RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION The method of training for life in a democracy is edu- cational ; the motive which fits for life in a democracy is religious. Education for democracy is social training under a spiritual interpretation of life and for the whole of social living. This preparation for living on the plane of life's highest values we choose to call religious education. But the phrase " religious education " misleads many ; at least, it still requires much explanation, for, often, it means nothing beyond instruction in theology and creeds or training in loyalty to ecclesiastical institutions. It is necessary, first, to distinguish between instruction about religion and religious education ; and then it may be help- ful to see the inter-relation and mutual dependence of education and religion in democracy. There is no reason to believe that a man will be a better democrat because he has read or even memorized a dic- tionary of religion. There is no evidence that, of itself, knowledge about religion either makes a religious person or a better citizen. The cynical assertion that religion has nothing to do with politics is entirely just and accu- rate if by religion is meant either pure pietism or mere information about religion. But the assertion is false when it means that life in a democracy has nothing to do with religion, or that religion has nothing to do with democracy. For religion is an ideal and spirit of life which determines the mode of life, and democracy is an ideal and spirit of social life which determines the mode of social life for a people. 42 RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 43 Education for democracy is religious because democ- racy is a religious concept. Religion and democracy can- not be separated. Education for one must include the other. It is impossible to be an irreligious democrat. This is evident if we accept the definitions of democracy already stated and if, beside them, we place the modern definition of religion, as one's interpretation of the mean- ing and value of life. For it is precisely upon this valua- tion of life that democracy is based. Christianity and democracy accept personality as the supreme aim in exist- ence, as that for which society is organized. Christianity is the gospel of democracy, and democracy is the demon- stration of Christianity. Education in Christianity will consist in instruction in the ideals and training in the art of living in a society of common goodwill; it will be edu- cation in the way or mode of the society of the follow- ers of Jesus, in the life of the democracy of the spirit. Education for democracy is education for social life based on a concept of supreme values in personality, of society as existing for spiritual ends. Therefore such education is, of necessity, religious in character, in its ideals, in its aims, for it has to do with and it is determined by definite historic religious facts, by religious experiences and by concepts of spiritual values. Such education, then, is religious education, that is, education as determined by the fact of dealing with religious persons and being di- rected toward a religious end. It is not easy to overcome fixed verbal connotations. Religion has meant either creed, credulity or ecclesiasti- cism to so many and democracy has so long meant no more than a political form that it is difficult to realize their unity and fundamental identity. But it is not diffi- cult to take the first step in realizing that our present- day life makes demands on us that can be met only in the spirit of religion, that it calls for sacrifices under devo- tion to spiritual ideals. It is not difficult to see that a 44 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY society which fully practiced the social ideals of Jesus ^ would be a true democracy. It is not difficult to see that if the young are to be prepared for a society of that char- acter their education must be religious in character and include religion in its content. Religious education be- comes a fundamental need in democracy. Is our think- ing of religion ready for this use? Can we conceive of education in which religion really functions? Education for democracy is religious because the very concept of education is religious. That is still a hard saying to many. There still remain, amongst those who are supposed to be educated, those who think of religion as no more than a matter of superstition. And there are those who regard education as no more than an arro- gant assumption of knowledge destructive of that cred- ulity which they call faith and which they imagine to be religion. Clear thinking on the relations of religion and educa- tion is fundamentally important. We have not yet passed from the controversy which presupposed a con- flict between the two. Education is still suspected of proffering knowledge as a substitute for religion.^ But the large tasks before us in training the society of the future call for the light of all our intelligence ; they call for the alliance of all the forces of the higher life. 1 One thinks of his life and teaching as a demonstration and elucidation of his answer to Pilot's query and Socrates' search, "What is truth? What is the supreme worth in life?" 2 At a recent convention a speaker vehemently denounced religious education, citing the moral defalcation of Germany in evidence; he confounded German technical training with education and the German systems of *' religionsunnterricht " with religious education ; the first is an excellent example of a system of instruction devoid of that spirit and that spiritual aim which are essential to education; the second is an example illustrating the difference between knowl- edge about religion and religious education. RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 45 AN IMAGINARY CONFLICT Ignorance is the mother of much eloquence. Freedom from knowledge often gives liberty of utterance. Simple information has ended many controversies and wisdom has stopped yet more. The ancient debate on the supposed conflict between education and religion lacks vigor to- day because deeper understanding reveals harmony and unity where once only conflict seemed to exist. But just as the weeds of foolish controversy flourish wherever there are areas of ignorance so there are not lacking to-day those who will ask, with much wise wagging of heads, whether the " heart " is not endangered by " the head," whether knowledge is not the foe of grace and even whether one can go to college and still be a religious per- son. It is alleged that the processes of modern education de- feat the purposes of religion. One hears pathetic stories of young people who have gone up to college, their hearts warm with religious zeal, only to have the fires forever quenched. They have graduated, we are told, spiritual wrecks. They return devoid of interest in the aff'airs of the home church. Some strange paralysis, called educa- tion, has come over their spiritual lives. They are re- garded with pity mingled with awe. The disastrous process of religious decay seems very simple to the quiet souls at home; these young people have changed for the worse ; education has wrought their spiritual undoing. Usually those who denounce education as inimical to religion know neither the one nor the other. By educa- tion they mean some strange fantasy of popular crea- tion, a soulless creature constructed of cold facts, lifting its arrogant head in proud independence of God and goodness. But by religion they mean something often infinitely worse, a system of theories about the universe, human destiny and supernatural beings — rigid, median- 46 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ical and unrelated to life. Religion, in the mouths of such debaters, means theology, and, of course, their own theology, the height of which is dependent on its narrow- ness. That there is conflict between two such concepts no one can doubt. Even if education were such a cold, blood- less and largely useless compound of knowledge, it would still be in conflict with superstition. It would oppose theories with facts and it would shed light on the dark places in the human mind. And as knowledge grows from more to more it would naturally come to pass that truth, even though it be bloodless, would oppose untruth. Growing knowledge would mean, as Tenuyson says, grow- ing reverence, and that would mean opposition toward irreverence and especially opposition toward that blatant irreverence that assumes to comprehend and set the bounds for the infinite within its little brain, that dares to declare a monopoly, or at least a patent, on God. While practically all the opposition to education which is based on alleged religious grounds, arises with and is sustained by ignorant people, there remains much doubt and hesitation on the part of many intelligent persons as to the relations of the two. Their difficulties arise at the point of partial knowledge. They have identified edu- cation with scientific research and they have been accus- tomed by tradition to think of science as in opposition to religion. Seldom has any fixed idea had greater currency than that of " the conflict of religion and science " has had in the churches. It has been conceived, not as an historic process but as a condition inherent in the nature of things. Moreover scientific research, fostered by edu- cational agencies, has trimmed away so many concepts that were once supposed to be essential parts of religious belief that there is a strong suspicion whether one can be a scientist and still be a religious person. Often that sus- picion is sufficient reason for condemning all higher edu- RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 47 cation for it is generally held that the colleges are re- sponsible for the spread of the scientific spirit. Of course all thoughtful persons realize that science has not undone religion ; on the contrary much has been gained, and noth- ing essential has been lost, for we are simply substituting facts for theories. A singular situation is revealed when we consider the popular attitude toward science in de- partments of interest other than the religious. No more of faith is involved in biology than in medicine; yet some- how — perhaps because our immediate interests are so real — we have unreservedly accepted science as to the healing of our own bodies while we hesitate to accept it as to the history of those bodies. It may seem to many that the conflict between religion and science is over. That is true in certain communities and amongst a certain class of people. But it is far from being true everywhere. Let a preacher so much as men- tion Evolution or even the name of Charles Darwin in a Baptist pulpit — or almost any other pulpit — in the rural South or Southwest, and he will find himself swept away in a storm of orthodox wrath.^ The ranter and the demagogue make their living by persistent appeals to prejudice of this kind. Denunciations of science are their stock in trade and ridicule of education their reliance for applause. Many good people in their blindness imagine they are defending God by opposing science. But even though the victory were won, even though there were complete reconciliation between science, as the word of education, and religion as the teaching of the churches, much still remains to be done. It is not enough to think of these as two forces which can exist side by side in the same world, the important step is to realize 1 Only recently a school principal in a Southern city was dismissed for " favoring Darwinism," and another in another city for teaching geology in a manner that conflicted with a literal interpretation of Genesis. 48 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY the unity and mutual dependence of religion and educa- tion. Now, in truth, one might as well talk of conflict be- tween the climate and the weather as to discuss warfare between religion and education. When both are known in their simple, essential meanings they are seen not as two distinct ideas and activities but as one and the same. Religion is an ideal as to the meaning of life, humanity and the universe which is so inspiring that it stimulates men to seek the realization of the ideal. Education is this religious ideal endeavoring to find reality in persons and in the social whole. Religion presents a concept of life and destiny ; education offers a program for its real- ization. Thus religion is the force behind all education ; education is religion in one of its great activities. Once accept in its fullness the religious view of the nature and destiny of our race; once see the religious vision of a united, loving common society rejoicing in fullness of powers and in the riches of inner wealth, then the educa- tional program of man's development is the natural and inevitable attempt to realize a religious society. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY " RELIGIOUS "? Of course one is here thinking of religion in its broad and inclusive meanings, as the great, vital principle that in some measure marks all faiths and comes to a rich flowering in Christianity. Religion historically has been a slowly developing concept of the universe ; it has been a gradual unfolding of the meaning of human life and its relations to all other life and to all time. Man has been answering his own question, What does life mean and what is it worth ? Both question and answer steadily have deepened their significances. Out of the answers have come the creeds and forms of religion. A creed has a religious character but it is not religion ; it is a f onnal statement of a point of view. It is commonly a succinct RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 49 presentation of thoughts about rehgion, and, certainly it is almost always a record of a compromise between diverse opinions. But opinions about religion are not religion, often they are not even religious. The educational concept of religion. That spirit and ideal which we call religion views man as set in the eternal processes of the universe, with an eternity behind in which he has grown, and an eternity before in which he yet may grow. It believes in life without limitations ; it sets no boundaries before, because it can trace none in the past. It builds its hopes for the future on the progress of the past and the promise of an ideal wathin. It sees man al- ready conscious of a life that in its outreach and aspira- tion knows no limit. Man is religious because he has eternity in his heart. The law of growth is in his na- ture. Where life means growth, where its worth is just in the chance to grow, religion finds its hope coming to realiza- tion in the processes of education ; faith becomes loyalty to the laws of personal growth in earnest endeavor to secure to all men everywhere the chance to grow to the fullness of the divine ideal. Then religion can only be expressed in the educational terms of all-inclusive develop- ment, and education can be expressed only in the religious terms of fulfilling the divine plan of growth by coopera- tion with the eternal powers of life. The religious person is that one who takes life in terms of growth, whose hope for all life is that all may grow into closer hannony as all approach the ideal life, and whose plan for society is its development into the loving family of the all-Father. He finds he is constantly seek- ing thus the educational ideal ; religion gives him an edu- cational concept of life's processes and its plan. The religious motive is essential in any competent plan of education. If life means limitless possibilities of spir- itual social relations and development, how are these 50 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY realized? Life answers: The way is long but the path is plain ; where life is there is growth. Perfection is not imposed; it is slowly attained. Progress is the outward expression of the inner force of life. It is the vital pow- ers reaching out in new directions, finding new relations, establishing new abilities. Growth is part of a universal process which we call life. This life of personality is part of the great all-inclusive life that moves forward, develop- ing and growing. The law that is written on the blade of grass and on the body of man is written not less on his higher nature. Life comes from life and grows by the processes of life. When this universal and divine law of life as growth is applied to persons we call the process education. After all education is simply our attempt to work with God in growing men. Educational endeavor all through the past has grown out of a religious philosophy of life. Aspiration is pos- sible only where life has higher possibilities. Opportunity for realization is afforded to all only when all life has spiritual values. The view of man as a part of a uni- verse of life, a being made " to grow and not to stop," has fostered every effort to furnish him the agencies and stimuli of growth. The early church promoted educa- tion not simply as means of learning but as a method of life. Schools were founded not because she needed a trained leadership alone but because, wherever she was the guardian and exponent of true religion, she must both preach and teach ; she must both deliver and demonstrate the gospel that men may have life. Her one great mes- sage was that of Life; wherever the light burned clear she illumined the path of life to men ; wherever she was a voice and not an echo she called them to larger life. The church, like her Master, exists that men " might have life and might have it more abundantl3\" She is bound, not alone to proclaim deliverance from death, but to show RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 51 men the way into life through the truth. The funda- mental articles of her creed are that God is life, and that men may grow to His likeness. Therefore she not only believes in education, she must be an educator. Nor is this all, every true agency of education — in the high sense of light that leads into life — shares in the divine task of the church. The religious quality of any insti- tution will be the measure of enriching it gives to the lives of men. Such a test will put the college and uni- versity into a new category. Out of a religious passion they were born ; only a religious aim can adequately ex- press their present social function. The university, born of man's free search for life's meaning, became the torch-bearer of the church ; the schools followed. History is a record of religion — this passion for complete life — stirring in the hearts of men, expressing itself crudely, perhaps at times cruelly, often blindly, but still struggling after more light and life and, therefore, at last crowning all institutions with the schools for the people. To-day the school stands out as the leading social institution of our common life. We often lose sight of the fact but, nevertheless, the school is re- ligion applied to life; the school is religion in the flower and the fruit. Every public school is an expression of society's essentially religious faith that a child may grow and that the first debt which society owes to him is to provide him full opportunity for growth as a member of society. Every school, too, is an expression of the re- ligious motive which delights to sacrifice, to give life to others, for every such school simply means the united sacrifice of each community in order that all children may have the chance to grow. A public school is a social syndication of idealism and sacrifice invested in the lives of to-day for the social life of to-morrow. It is the ex- pression of our democratic creed. 52 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY RELIGION THE MOTHER OF EDUCATION There is no way of accounting for the phenomenon of modern education apart from the ideals and spirit of religion. Why should we pay taxes for public educa- tion except under the recognition of a higher law of obli- gation to give life to all? Why should we withhold our children from bread-winning cooperation in the family except under the imperative call to give them the chance to grow? Why should we expect and encourage large gifts to colleges from persons of means, except that they have the vision of the contribution which the college must make to life? They see the gift not as a monument in buildings but as an act of obedience to the heavenly vi- sion of youth growing into richer living. And this reli- gious ideal is precisely the spirit of democracy ; it is de- votion to the enrichment of life. Education cannot be democratic without this religious faith in life, nor can it be religious without the democratic purpose of devotion to the life of all. The inadequacy, for democracy, of much education lies vn its irreligious character. This lies not in any espe- cial lack of religion in the content but in the absence of a high aim based on the vision of human social possibili- ties and values. In so far as we depart from the essen- tial inspiration of all educational effort, that is, the spirit of organized endeavor to give to all persons the fullness of their lives in a spiritual universe, we depart from true education and indulge in mere instruction and trick-train- ing. Lacking this vision our colleges become mere mills for making money-making machines, business houses to turn out manufacturers, chemists, engineers, wrought out of the material that God meant should become manhood. The mockery and disappointment of modern education is precisely that it often has lost its soul in exploiting the world; it is more interested in mechanics than in men RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 53 because it lacks this higher and wider interpretation of religion. We call it training for social efficiency and we limit it to the acquisition of proficiency in a few of the tricks and habits of making a living. In our insistent emphasis on the practical we have almost persuaded our- selves that the business of school and college is all de- tennined by the needs of trades and professions. We would reorganize the whole curriculum at the demand of the factory. At present we scarce have any system of education, but rather a number of sporadic attempts to teach some of the many things that will develop efficiency in making a larger or bigger living. Herbert Spencer, re-acting from the traditionalism and the proud impracticability of the English universities, has with clever words, intended only as an argument for the practical preparation of work- ers, succeeded in making us ashamed of the cultural ele- ments so that we apologize for everything that does not have a wage or a salary potency. His popular treatise on " Education " was a much-needed call to develop life through actually useful training; but we have taken his means as our end. Our tendency has been to sacrifice the man to the ends of manufacturing. The scholar's pride in the intellect has given place to the technician's pride in the training of hands. This we call vocational training, as though the only vocation, the final and all inclusive one, was that which cries aloud in the market places and factories. Such training loses sight of the values of personality; it develops only workers, efficient machines ; it defeats its own purpose and throws the engineer under the boilers. It consumes the very powers without which the worker can never be efficient. That which industry needs is precisely that which the individual needs, more man, larger and more developed personality. Work must have not alone nimble fingers nor alone a brain nimble with figures but a life 54 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY that has power, has found itself, can grow and Is motived with the passion for growth. Hard, practical and biting events recently have smashed some of our favorite educational theories. For over a generation we pointed to the educational system of Germany, the most perfectly organized mechanism for making efficient workers, artizans, citizens and parts of the machinery of the state. Now the system has come to its supreme test. It has demonstrated both its efficiency and its insufficiency. It has built up a wonderful ma- chine — without conscience or soul. We have the wheels, but there is lacking the spirit of life, the spirit of human feeling, of an affection and aspiration that goes beyond the machine and a soul that counts not gain or dominion first of all. It has demonstrated its diabolical possibili- ties. It converted a nation into a machine and when the devil was ready to use it then it obeyed his will. The spectacle of a national failure of education at the very springs of life only throws into high relief that which is true in our own country. We have applied the fruitage of scientific training wholly to the tools of making a liv- ing, we have bent our energies wholly to making the two blades of grass supplant the one and the two factories reap four times the profit of one. We have cared naught for making each man in himself worth twice what he was before ; we have cared naught for the inner sources of life's guidance and refreshing. We have been so intensely prac- tical that we have developed the menacing machine of edu- bated workers who have all the power of the engine and none of the wisdom of an engineer, who can run fac- tories and great systems of business but lack either wis- dom or power to run themselves. They know where they can make business go but no one knows where thev will drive themselves, nor whither they may drift. The present danger is that of a short-measure educa- tion, excellent so far as it goes but failing to go far RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 55 enough, to include enough to save itself. It is good food — but without saving salt. It is well-organized and highly efficient, but wholly insufficient, because it deals only with the surface of life and fails to touch the springs of action, to develop ideals and motives. It is therefore efficient to make skilled organizers of capital but insuffi- cient to save them from social piracy, to make chemists but unable to save them from poisoning the purchaser of food, able to teach all to read but powerless to develop the choice of the good or to check the tides of moral poison. THE SAVING SPIEIT What is needed? Shall we abandon all education and call it a failure, owning that it does but whet the edge of knavery, that it does but sharpen the tooth of raven- ing beasts of prey and turn our whole system into social shambles where each may rend and devour.'^ Does educa- tion tend only to make nobler beasts, more efficient fac- tors whose energies may be turned to ill and catastrophe.'^ Do we not see other signs.'' Have we not made much prog- ress toward social adjustment and development and have not the steps of progress been under the leadership com- monly of educated men and women.? Turn to the settle- ments, turn to the groups of men and women who are pas- sionately devoting their lives to meeting great social and moral issues, who are waging the real fight for right and giving to their fellows larger life. Who are they but col- lege graduates .'^ They are a fraternity of sacrificial, ef- ficient service. They are examples of education as a proc- ess of the development of powers and their application to personal and social aims. These people have been trained and developed, not that they might gain from life but that they might give life. Here we have the very essence of the religious interpretation of education, a process of the directed development of life into fullness for the 56 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY sake of the full and efficient life of common service. This spirit and this alone will save our system of edu- cation and save our educated men and women. In this spirit is the natural expression of religion in education and it is the effective mode by which religion becomes a part of education. It comes not alone by information on the history and literature of religion ; these have their place only in the degree and are valuable to the extent that they succeed in inspiring this ideal, in that they make us feel the force of past persons and days when this spirit prevailed with men. The religious character of education depends on what it makes life mean to us ; it is tested in the resultant spirit and purpose in any life. Even though men carry on their lips catalogues of prophets and martyrs they easily go out to be despoilers and brigands of society, blind devouring beasts who should be shepherds and saviors. But where life means service, where one is governed by the democratic motive, the great of all days become real through the fellowship of service and religion becomes, not a thin-spun theory, but a real experience in living. No other spirit, than that of devotion to the common good, can hold young people content through the toil and waiting of student days. The immediate world offers tempting rewards ; the future seems uncertain : but it is evidently worth while to wait if thereby growth is en- sured, if waiting and working means greater efficiency and thus a larger contribution to the common life. This spirit gives meaning to all studies and disciplines. The spiritual possibilities of life interpret the universe. Science becomes an open book of revelation ; the impres- sive story of evolution takes on new significance with its promise for man and its invitation to aid in his develop- ment. Given a purpose in personality to the universe it takes over the forms of beauty ; without that purpose the more we know of the universe the more it mocks us with RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 57 its meaningless mechanisms. To see a life purpose in the growth of personality is to give the color of that purpose to the whole world. What, then, is the place of religion in the course of studies? It reveals purpose in life. It opens doors into the yesterdays and reveals men and women who lived for the purposes of spiritual service, for the divine good of humanity. Their shining vision draws us on. We feel race movements under religious inspiration ; we find our- selves as part of the life of peoples moving toward God. We see, not dynasties and statecraft, but leaders and mul- titudes who counted not their lives dear if only mankind might find freedom and fullness of life. They poured out their aspirations, and to us they are not merely forms for literary criticism, they are the very breath of the life of other days. Our race heritage and our race pressure, moving toward God, becomes our possession and our power. Thus religion becomes a spirit of life, a way of think- ing about life and a way of living. Religion is not only that which is studied in the biblical and theological courses ; it is that which rises to guide life in any course when the real meanings and uses of living are seen. The special courses in religion are designed only to furnish through specific and easily distinguished instances the clew to the interpretation of all fields of knowledge. They are not the curriculum compartments into which religion is segregated; they are the sources and springs from w^hich a spirit and interpretation of all knowledge and all training flows into every department. This spirit of religion which makes life a means of serv- ing the life of all is that which saves the modern college. It makes it an institution of ideals in a material age. It makes it an institution of religion, a minister to the souls of men, a means of salvation in a selfish world. The cure for the lust of office, spoliation of the weak, robbery of 58 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY the poor, oppression of childhood, for the mad lust of hate and the black night of lust lies neither in the illumi- nation of knowledge nor in the control of legislation and regulation, but in that which determines our ideals, in- spires our wills and guides our conduct. It lies in wills that will the right, hearts that love the good and true, emotions that stir toward right paths. The new day waits for new man, and men are made new as their spirits are renewed within by the vision of loving devotion to the common good. Religion is, then, such an interpretation of life as alone can make education sufficiently broad, high and vital for the world of to-day. It discloses a society worth being educated, a range of possibilities realizable only through ordered growth, motives that stimulate toward growth, a vision of possibilities of usefulness that call for the devel- opment of powers. Moreover, religion furnishes the method of personal development. It teaches the supreme lesson, that this pathway of service is also the way of self-realization. The life that freely gives itself fully finds itself. Service is the secret of strength and the source of power. This way of devotion to ideals is the curriculum of personality. Here are the two methods of the religious life : the vision before leading on, the activ- ity at hand developing the power to follow the vision. This is the process of education, disclosing the truth and organizing experience in its realization. To be eff^ective education must be a religious experience ; to be real in society religion must reach us through these educational means, through revelation of truth and through experi- ence. And so, moved forward by the vision glorious, heartened by the glory of all that life means, gloriously pouring out life's flood in devotion to all, in common work with God, men are led forward in a continuous educational experience into that common, inclusive society, that fel- lowship of God and all men, which is the true democracy. CHAPTER V EDUCATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY The outstanding problems which must be met in the reaHzation of the democratic hope He in the realm of thought and feeling. We cannot have a democratic state until we have a people of the democratic spirit. Democracy will reign within before it is realized with- out. It will be the prevailing ideal of a people before it really prevails as a mode of social organization. To what degree can we count on the prevalence of the ideals of democracy .f^ This is very different from asking whether we, in America, are committed to democracy. By our political history, our national traditions and our public avowals we are a democracy. But the conversion of this outer form of government into a vital, controlling spirit, directing the lives of individuals and the relations of all persons, is a tremendous task. It is predicated on the possibilitiy of the conversion of the minds and wills of democracy. It is possible only when we have become ha- bituated to thinking in social terms. It means that the popular ideals of this age are democratic. To what ex- tent is this the case? Our first problem is to determine the degree to which democracy has become a prevailing ideal. Is this age already characterized hy the democratic ideal? The character of an age depends on its current ideals. The really important question whenever we would make a judg- ment of any period is, what were its dominating ideals? We cannot know its history until we know what is in its heart. But it is not easy to discover and describe the heart of an age. Ideals are always in flux and develop- 59 60 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ment. While we are defining them others are reahzing them and advancing new ones. Every ideal has within it the power of destroying itself by fulfillment and enlarge- ment. Again, ideals tend to disguise themselves. The more compelling they are the less likely is it that we will confess them. We get only reflections of current ideals in literature and song; they are effective in active life before they take these forms. We must search for them in the activities of people, and not alone in the normal activities, but in those which seem to have special em- phasis or to be developments peculiar to their times. Looking over our own times we can hardly hesitate to recognize two outstanding social activities which have had unusual emphasis. They are social consciousness and education. Social consciousness is an evidence of the democratic ideal. Social consciousness is a term less concrete but much more accurate than " social amelioration " in de- scribing the activities of our times. Social service, social betterment, social rights, civic improvement and all the movements for improving conditions of living, for secur- ing to men and women fair wages, decent housing, leisure and recreation are all expressions of the social conscious- ness. They indicate the fact that we have come to realize not only that we live in a society and that we are a so- ciety, but that the life of this society is the most impor- tant of all human concerns. An awakening social con- sciousness is simply a dawning democratic ideal. Its ac- tivities are based on a sense of the values of people. It seeks to organize all society on the basis of those values. Just as democracy is government for the people by the powers of the people so this social activity is the attempt of the people to govern current life for the sake of people. It would be difficult to determine whether the demo- cratic ideal is an expression of the social spirit or social activity a manifestation of the spirit of democracy. They THE PROBLEiVIS OF DEMOCRACY 61 are inseparable. Democracy is bound to extend itself be- yond the forms of political organization. In our social activity it is giving evidence of its vitality and power. Increasingly human values determine social forms, indus- trial conditions, the aesthetic and the religious life and thus give evidence of the extent to which the basic concepts of democracy develop in and rule the minds of men. Current educational activity is a revelation of current ideals. Amongst all the interests of the present age none more clearly reveals its ideals than that range of en- deavors which we group under education. While we are too near to form a judgment it is not unlikely that the period which hinges on the opening of the twentieth cen- tury will be known as the period of the educational em- phasis. Two things are certainly true ; first, that educa- tional activities constitute the largest single social invest- ment of energy, time and money of this period ; and, sec- ond, that this field has offered the largest opportunitiy to the free expression of the idealism of individuals. Here is the one thing which costs us more than any other and it is the one in which we find the largest and most lasting pleasure, in which we take the highest pride and upon which we are building our highest hopes. It would there- fore appear that to realize just what education means to this age would be to discover the dominant aim of the age. A brief discussion must suffice where an adequate one is quite impossible. Education is the greatest common faith of a free people. We have many sects but only one system of schools, in nearly all communities many churches but only one school. We have various political parties but all support our common educational system and their partisans send their children to the same schools. Here, because of agreement in common conviction, we syndicate our efforts and our means to support the agencies of education. No tax is more cheerfully paid, it makes no 62 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY difference whether or not the citizen sends children to re- ■^^iceive the benefits of the tax. The rich man forsakes his hoarding to endow the college and the poor man forgets his poverty to send his children there. EDUCATION EXPRESSES DEMOCRACY Not only does the age manifest devotion by united sup- port of education, it is now developing an intelligent pop- ular interest in the efficiency of the schools. We are beginning to sell books on education to people who are not professional educators. Lectures and public discus- sions receive popular support. The schools receive a growing measure of attention in the public press. And, far more important than these tendencies, we have wit- nessed a remarkable development of intelligent interest in and cooperation with the schools on the part of the people. The most definite evidence of this lies in the organization and service of the different types of clubs and societies organized as *' Parent-Teacher Associations," " School Clubs," etc. To-day, in nearly every American com- munity, there is to be found a society or club of some sort designed to bring the families, as an organized group, into cooperation with the school. Parents gather to be instructed on educational ideals and methods ; they organize to aid the school in its work ; they guard its interests and foster the improvement of its environment and of the conditions under which its pupils live. But why recite these endeavors in a discussion of the prevailing ideals of democracy .^^ Because these endeavors reveal the extent to which those ideals are already con- trolling action ; they show democracy directing society in public service. When in a community we find the families organized under a consciousness of unity of purpose with the schools, when men and women devote large areas of their time in united social efforts to make the school the efficient center of community development, there we THE PROBLEIVIS OF DEMOCRACY 63 see a segment of democracy organized to secure the demo- cratic end — the development of persons — by the demo- cratic method — the free activities of persons. When the activities of these groups are examined we discover new indications of the growth of the spirit of democracy. We find that they are not organized so much to improve the efficiencies of the school in instruction ; rather they are directing themselves under a concept of the entire life of the community as interpreted in educational terms. They see the school as the center, but they concern themselves with playgrounds, parks, clean streets, the suppression of social plague spots, the regulation and development of amusements and recreation, the provision of objects and centers of art. All these activities grow out of the now rapidly developing conviction that the entire life of a community is constantly operating, educationally, to determine the development and the characters of men and women and especially of the young. Here then we have the democratic concept of social organization as determined by the needs of persons actually controlling organized social activities. Another important evidence of this tendency lies in the recent organization of movements for community betterment and coordination. In a word, we have come to an educational consciousness of community living. Democracy has led us to see beyond our streets and stores, our factories and marts, and has compelled us to think of these, not alone as factors in commercial success or as features for civic pride, but, more seriously, as active factors in determining lives, in promoting or retarding the great purpose of democracy, the growth of lives. We have come, also, to a clearer and deeper realization of the importance of the educational processes in the agencies of religion. We have coined and given wide currency to a new phrase, " religious education.'* We have realized the function of the church as that of the 64 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY development of society, through the training of persons, into the divine ideal of a great common family. A new conscience for character comes into the churches under the ideal of democracy. It is an old concept that seemed to be almost lost for a long time. Now it is being restored and the church is expected to organize its life and direct its powers in order that men and women may become really godlike and society may reflect the divine goodness and love. Therefore the church gives the child a new place. It provides courses of training ; it prepares teachers and engages trained educators ; it erects special educational buildings and has already developed a con- siderable literature on religious education. The spiritual mind turns with new hope to these enterprises, looking on the child and, believing that he can grow normally into fullness of character, it looks forward to a world where all men know and love the truth, where they live for one another and find joy and peace. This is the spirit of democracy illuminated by the ideals of religion and counting on realization through the educational method. We cannot assert that the ideals of democracy wholly control life ; far from it ; but we can surely see the signs of developing control, promises on which we may base our certain hopes. And the hope is the more certain in that all this educational activity constantly includes, both in the content of the curriculum and still more in the nature of the activities, training in the ideals and the practice of democracy. And so to this extent, at least, we can see an answer to the question whether democracy has become a current popular ideal. Our second problem is that of developing the respon- sibilities of freedom over against the temptations of autocracy. There are types who would always rather be governed than exercise thought and effort in governing; THE PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY 65 there are times for all when we sigh for some one to deter- mine conduct for us. Then there are evident advantages in dictatorship. One mind moves much more rapidly than a multitude. One mind ruling all can secure uniformity and unity of action. From the beginning of the great war Germany was the outstanding example of the absolute control of a large group of peoples through one autocratic dictatorship. The most serious difficulty of the Allies, next to their lack of preparation, was their democratic methods of procedure ; there were as many minds as there were nations and, then, within each nation there was a multitude of counselors which did not make either for unity of action or for expedition. To many ob- servers it seemed that the dictatorship had proved its su- perior efficiency. Undoubtedly it has superiority for cer- tain purposes. If aggression, domination and subjugation is the mission of a nation it had better have a dictator. But there seem to be advantages in dictatorship when the national energies are directed toward less reprehensible ends. The United States utilized a series of dictators in carrying on its \var program ; a food dictator, w^hose function has been largely advisory ; a press dictator who attempted to control what we shall know, and, apparently, what we shall think ; a ship-building dictator, and so on. The President steadily sought larger powers, amounting to dictatorship in many respects. It is true that such steps have been taken under the guise of the democratic method, the people permitting them and retaining the power to prevent. But the simple fact is that they are taken as leading to efficiency in conducting the war, and the grave question is, shall we always abandon democracy and turn to the leadership of dictators in every hour of national crisis? Do we take these steps because they are necessary or simply because they are the easy solutions of a problem.'^ 66 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY WHEN DEMOCRACY FAILS Democracy breaks down as a practical political method, or has to be modified at times because the political purpose is not always democratic and the people have not been trained for democracy. They have not so learned its arts as to be able to practice them under strain. To many democracy is only a political expedient to be dropped when another expedient will work better. Most people think only in terms of the present moment; they will do whatever the passing occasion seems to demand. They have not learned to take long views of affairs. They are unconscious of any need for a guiding philosophy and it has never occurred to them that " history is philosophy teaching by example." They know the history of institu- tions only in the most vague and disconnected manner. The movement in Roman history from republican institu- tions to absolutism, through the Caesars to the Kaiser concept, from freedom to fall, means nothing to them. Our politicians are not statesmen ; they scoff at the term as a newspaper man scoffs when termed a journalist. They scorn thinking and pride themselves on being prac- tical minded. Our political discussions are confined to men and immediate measures. It is little wonder we readily yield to the temptations of any undemocratic devices that promise to facilitate government. Trained intelligence must be our principal hope. They see the dangers and they have the larger confidence in democracy who understand the long conflict of humanity with absolutism, who see religion gradually emerging from the notion of a dictator deity to the leadership of a splendid Brother in the great Human family, from control by spiritual authority to institutional democracy, who see the many and long experiments of history with the gradual decline of monarchy and the passing of kings, who see peoples growing in the essential elements of power THE PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY 67 and permanence in the degree that they are free and intelligent. Faith in democracy is founded on knowledge of humanity. The temptations of autocratic expedients are seen in the clear light of humanity's long experience. Such knowledge is the right and heritage of all in a democracy. Nor can we stop with knowledge; there must be training to meet the duties and strains of democ- racy, training determined in the light of our probable problems. This will include actual experience in social life which deliberately chooses the difficult path of democ- racy rather than the short cuts of autocracy, such experience as can be guided in the family and the school. Democracy is a dangerous experiment where it is only an experiment unguided by the wisdom gathered from the race experience and administered by persons untrained in its practice. Third, education must face the problem of nationalism versus individual freedom. We tend to set these two out objectively as opposites, thinking of the nation as a sep- arate entity and of individual freedom as a matter of separate absolutism in the personal realm. But in a democracy the nation is possible only because free men will to act in national capacities. The nation has no separate existence; it is not a something which confers freedom on the people ; it is their creation. And yet we must think in terms of our larger common life, as a nation. Democracy does involve loyalty to the larger group. Nor need that conflict with loyalty to freedom. The difference lies here: nationalism thinks of the nation as a power over the people ; democracy thinks of the nation as the power of the people. Nationalism calls on us to serve the state, defend the state, maintain its honor and enlarge its prestige; democracy calls on us to serve by means of the state, to use our collective capacities which are the state as a means of enriching and honoring all life. The problem is that of developing loyalties, a matter almost 68 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY wholly neglected so far as the democratic motives and ideals are concerned. Our emotional stimuli are nearly all those which work just as well under a monarchy. We fail to develop feeling regarding the great aims of our national life. And yet the material is abundant ; parts of the Bible are saturated with the idealism of human respon- sibility in national life ; splendid passages occur in our American poets and essayists, as in Lowell, Emerson and Lincoln, not to mention others, as Mazzini and Burke. There is no dearth of opportunity nor of illustration in current life if only we have the vision to see our task, to conserve the loyalties in the lesser groups, to direct them in service, to discover the joys of sacrificial devotion to social ends and to lead these habits of loyalty and activity into the larger life. CHAPTER VI PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING The catalogue of world problems we need not attempt to exhaust but there are at least two which face democ- racy and which have forced us to realize their pertinency. First, is the very practical problem of securing human solidarity and harmony u/nder the ideals of personal freedom. How can the highest common interests be con- served without destroying personal freedom? This question comes to the front with increasing impressiveness as human life develops closer relationships. We struggle for the rights and delights of our individual selves in days when events are welding us into world unity. Civilization seems to mean the breakdown of individual living. Commerce weaves us into a world-fabric of mutual dependencies. Separateness of living disappears not only locally but nationally also. Shall we come into rigid uniformity under this new unity? The question lies at the heart of all endeavor for social welfare, for we seek something more than the organization of all persons into regiments living in hygienic apartments, well-fed and clothed, we seek the well-being that comes through the exercise of free wills. It lies at the basis of our discussion of social problems and our agitation for social justice. As Eucken says, " Justice is nothing other than the harmony of life incorporated into one's own volition." The problem of human freedom is as old as the race. It is a problem only because we are set in society, environed by innumerable other wills, equally free. It is the root of the ethical problem, for an ethical life is possible only when one is free to will and act, and 69 70 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY demonstrable only when there are other lives, other wills in relation to which one can act. It is Plato's great theme. He treats it so prominently because the Greeks were the first people to apply the conception of civic freedom. True, freedom meant for them the opportunity of all to live for and in the state, to be parts of the state. The civic limitations of their freedom raised the questions which Socrates faced, the right of each man to follow virtue, the good. In the assertion of personal freedom to seek the good and to serve the best Socrates and Jesus both passed through death. Socrates said, " Knowledge is virtue " ; Jesus, " Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." Men have come to know some part of the truth and to claim their heritage of freedom. Did they know all truth in the Socratic sense of knowing and in the Christ sense of truth there would be no problem of freedom under social relations. To Socrates knowledge included moral insight ; to Jesus truth included the conception of life in terms of love, as part of a universe conceived in infinite love. We to-day are likely to see only the darker features and to get an impression of a problem rather than a process. We see an irresponsible electorate blindly voting away its own soul ; selling its birthright and ours, too ; asserting its freedom to choose its own good, usually goods. We see cunning wedded to cupidity claiming free- dom to exploit us all, and loudly asserting the liberty of the weaker members of society to make bad and vicious bargains with the strong, the right of the socially disinte- grated to stay disintegrated and become the spoil of the integrated mighty ones. Individualism runs amuck under the fair guise of freedom. AVhat has the educational ideal to do with these conditions? We face in a new world-alignment the problem of human freedom in its largest significances: since in this modern integration of human interests social solidarity is abso- PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 71 lutely necessary, can it be attained under freedom? Is the German method of welding a people by the external pressure of authority the only way? Or is it possible that the fusing of purpose and effort will come from within, rising in the free wills of men ? If free men cannot will unity, if in freedom we cannot find a common social goodwill, democracy is doomed. The educational ideal has within it the solution of the problem of freedom under social relations. Firsts it recognizes the necessity of 'preparing men for the strain of freedoin. It seeks to provide for every man the oppor- tunity and the disciplines of self-discovery. Its modern emphasis is on social experience. It begins for the child with his organized association with other lives. It trains in social living through a society called a school. It develops knowledge through common experiences gained in this society. It constantly subjects every life to the training of adjustment to other lives. The subjects that are taught are the means of finding and perfecting con- tacts and adjustments with other lives and groups of lives. It develops habits of social relations. It trains the power of willing what one will do in the light of what others are doing or what should be done with or for others. It reveals the self through social experience. We cannot know what freedom means until we know this agent that would be free, until we learn to discriminate between the freedom of the will and the wild abandon of passion and lust, until we discover this self that ought to sit supreme like the charioteer over his steeds. The educational process brings men to know themselves as persons. It also trains men for freedom by the develop- ment of self-control. This free I is not free until it does as I may will, not as driven by the hot blast of hellish hate or swept along by greed or wild with fanaticism. The age needs men who can rule their spirits. It needs disciplined leaders, fit for freedom. For these it must 72 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY turn to the schools of leadership ; it must look to those who have subjected themselves to the discipline of life under ideal aims. Next, the educational ideal meets the problem of free- dom by its evaluation of a motive and an aijri so high that, while all strive toward it, all find scope for individual freedom in the process. There cannot be social unity so long as men set before them, as the surmnwm honum^ material good of any kind or any object which cannot be shared by all alike. We are not all equally free to be millionaires, nor equally free to be foreign ministers or national presidents. But the educational ideal holds that the least man is as free as the greatest, the poorest as the richest, to set before him as the chief aim in life the fullness and freedom of personality and of social realization. It calls on men to take their money making, their toil, their legislating and presiding as means toward life, the ultimate good. It is the voice that speaks to the barn-builder, " Thou fool, this night thyself is required of thee ! " When men live for personality they find har- mony in freedom. With this aim we discover that those very sacrifices due to social living which seemed to limit our freedom under selfish and material aims, make for the greater freedom and fullness of personality, that the constant struggle between the individual desire and the social welfare is the crucible in which the pure metal of manhood is refined. This is the meaning of the word, " He that will lose his life shall save it." The higher goal places right values on the lower aim. The educated man has learned to live for values that can only be found in the way of service, of investment of self in the good of all ; he has seen a goal that can only be reached as he shall help others toward it. In such a program of human action harmony, unity, and solidarity is consonant with true freedom. But this is only part of a more inclusive solution of PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 73 the problem. By its insistence on ultimate values edu- cation has enabled us to see that life's present values are to be realized only in the social whole. Reiterating the question, what is life worth? it finds satisfying worth only in the life of all. It has so stimulated lives to seek ideal ends that most of us have discovered the very simple fact that they cannot be found individually and can be ours only as they are possible to all. If the idealist could be an egoist he could not be an individualist practically ; he is forced to depend on all others for any realization of ideal ends. But this is not all. The fundamental thesis of education that man was made to grow implies a goal for growth. This it now sees in an ideal society. The other problem is essentially one peculiar to our American life, are we sufficient for the new world oppor- tunity? We are at the dawn of a new day ; its coming was indicated by a darkness that seemed to obscure the moral vision and a sleep that lay like a paralysis over all patriotism. We sneered at the ideals of yesterday ; the cynic's laugh drowned the songs of love of country or the sentiment of devotion to her good. We seemed to be content with the glory of gain, with the proud achieve- ments of kleptocratic princes. Then came the deluge, the world catastrophe of the war. With a tardiness that w^ll be our shame for many days we at last realized its moral significance. We entered the world. We have found our new worlds to conquer. They are not those of the old world nor of territorial extent any- where. They are in the realm of human values. We say that we entered the war to make the world safe for democracy. This is a new idea, fighting for a principle, fighting not for our form of government but for the rights of people to govern themselves. But are, we ourselves ready for democracy.'^ Are we willing to pay its high price .'^ It means so much more than that every one shall 74 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY be permitted to participate in government; it means that every one shall take up the burden of sovereignty which is not less than high-minded devotion to the common good. The worth of a democracy is determined by the worth of the lives of its people. We are not ready to demonstrate democracy to the world until w^e set aside all our personal aims and desires in order to give to the whole world democracy the full service of a worthy life. ARE WE PREPARED? The new tasks are much more difficult than the old ones. We had completed one task, subduing the material difficulties, subjugating the material forces, and developing the physical resources of a great new domain. These days of schooling past, are we ready for world living? The grave question now is whether we have the spirit and power to take up and carry through the greater, higher a/nd more elusive task that awaits, to conquer ourselves, to apply ourselves to the impressive problem of a world society. We are called from developing a continent to develop the resources of humanity. This is the call of the new patriotism. The moral glory of American character in the past century was due not one whit more to puritan ideals than to the stimulus of a tremendous enterprise ; pioneering made men as truly as puritanism. We were saved by our shortcomings and our struggles. From Valley Forge to the Panama Canal is one eloquent chapter of splendid moral achievement under the curriculum of a nation's birth throes. The vision of a new land of freedom and a new humanity nerved our fathers. The vision has been largel}^ fulfilled and we are the most impoverished of all peoples if to-day w^e are ready to sigh that there is no more chance for heroism. The diflSculty is not to find chances but to find those who will measure up to them. PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 76 The real test of the people comes after the desert has been made to rejoice as the rose, then comes the trial of spiritual greatness. Solomon's glory was too much for Israel's moral fiber. How shall we face our new day, with its demands for costly sacrifices for the sake of aims and ideals that are less easy to apprehend than the rallying cries of " No taxation without representation " or " The union one and indivisible," with purposes less palpable than the clearing of forests and the crossing of the plains, purposes which call for finer heroism? Are we to die where others have died with the good indeed attained but so blindly cherished as to be fatal to the best.? And this is not all; we were thrown into the world life to share in the struggle for moral ideals. The war brought few of the old thrills of patriotism, for we were not fighting for the glory of a nation but for the rights of humanity. The war may be our purging; it will certainly be our testing. It called for pioneering in the realm of ideals. We confess that we were caught unprepared. Certainly we were destitute of fighting tools ; we slept too long in a fool's paradise of separation as though we could be separate from humanit}^ But one does not lessen appre- ciation of the colossal task of physical preparation in suggesting that America was not wholly without prepara- tion of an even more essential nature. Even before war was declared the college youth showed that they were intellectually prepared. Since then the streams of vol- unteers have come from the universities. They but fol- lowed the courses that idealism flowing from these centers had traced. The wide views gained in education had saved them from provincialism and had brought a world within their habits of thinking. The social spirit of the universities had taught them to think in terms of human 76 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY sympathies. That preparation which education had given constitutes just the preparation which the making of a new world will demand. The problem of to-morrow is one of living in a con- gested world. It involves the discovery of those values which all can enjoy to their fullness without trespass one upon another. It is a problem of world-wide social justice under conditions of most intimate neighboring. We will have to solve in world living the very problems of con- flicting interests which have been ours at home. It is an extension of our intense social problem ; are we ready for it.? We have been living in the glut of material power and prosperity. Now we will have to adjust ourselves to new conditions. The prosperity of abundance is past. The appalling fact that the tremendous wealth of our day is accompanied by abject poverty is evidence that we had not learned how to live under conditions of material prosperity. We have been rudderless on the tide of riches while still clamoring for new tributaries. Once the problem was to get wealth out of the forests and the hills, now it is to apply that wealth without waste to the whole of our lives, to insure its highest and enduring values. As we have become masters of the untamed land it is ours also to become masters of its untamed crop of wealth. Our danger is that the rank growth of that crop shall choke us. There is little danger that we shall delude ourselves with the false hope that the new day will come in a beautiful roseate flush of universal benevolence born of affluence. A terrible object lesson has forced us to aban- don the program of salvation by material civilization. Left to the old motives and the old methods man easily relapses into madness we thought he had outgrown. The struggles of the weak and the iniquities of the strong are not of the past alone. They did not end when the PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 77 world war ended. That has only projected on a larger screen our social problem. Now the sword is laid away and the social warfare is fiercer and more cruel than ever. Our social problems are intensified with the return of peace. The competition in business will be keener ; the strain of readjustment will call for new modes of organ- ization between capital and labor, the worker will have tasted new power and greater freedom and the employer will be seeking to recover from heavy exactions. Shall we look for solutions only in conflict.'^ Shall we who have disowned war nationally rely on it industrially .^^ Shall we own up that this problem is too big for our brain .^ It is a tremendous issue, but the very intensity of the problem is the measure of our opportunity. CONTROLLING IDEALS Again our hope is in the educational ideal. Our hopes have specific bases. First, that with its insistence on personal values, education also insists that greatness is only by growth and that growth is not a matter of accretion but of development. It is the prophet of the gospel that there are riches all may enjoy without any one being the poorer, that there is property that all may possess in common and 3^et each one hold for his own. It is our hope because it holds out the one great religious message this age needs. We can look for nothing beyond conflict so long as the one aim of every man is to possess all he can of the world's limited stock of things. There will be harmony when the aim of life is not to possess but to enjoy, not to put things in our names but to use them for the enriching of all life. It is our hope as it leads to the new ultimate aim of a society in which all men unite their efforts for the increase of the common goods of love and joy, of truth and beauty. The educational ideal gives sanity and worth to our national program. It reminds our youth that, as a 78 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY people, we are not great simply because we are big, nor because we have so much. Barns do not make the man nor banks the nation. Size is the last and least criterion in the scale of infinite values. Greatness lies in ideals, it is revealed in human standards. It is manifest in development. Life grows only as it comes into finer and more complex relations. A man is greater than a geologic mammoth because he is a more complex organism. The hope of to-morrow lies in the democratic-minded who will put old goods into new scales, who will teach us to spurn some of our highly cherished lumber, who will help us to see worth and wealth as yet unknown. We shall seek our growth as a people mtensivelyy not in holding more but in becoming more. Before we grasp new lands we will seek to make our own better, our cities places where the boys and girls shall play on the streets thereof, our schools homes of idealism. The increasing complexity of our modern life means for us the opportunity of devel- opment. But it demands more of us ; it requires wider and deeper preparation. The future with its greater social complexity calls on the educator's patience, the pupil's loyalty and the people's cheerful payment of the price of training the powers, disciplining the judgment and developing the will until we are ready for this new day. Our hope is in the educational ideal because it is an ideal; it is always richer with promise than with achieve- ment. It is prophetic. The educated man never shrinks from being called an idealist. He rejoices in the good and the glory of the past as an index of that which is to be. He scorns ease, for the good he has inherited constitutes his indebtedness to the good that may be. He is not ashamed of great emotions, of the hopes that stir men and the passions that compel them, for he has learned that all existing personal wealth has been created in the visions of enthusiasts ; the world has ever found its pot of gold because it followed the rainbow. The cynic's PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 79 contempt of life is not the sign of culture ; it is the evidence of intellectual atrophy. One measure of a man's educa- tion is his response to great stimuli. If the poet's appeal, the prophet's promise or warning, the patriot's ardor mean nothing to you, you have not seen the educational ideal, you are not educated. " Though I have all knowl- edge and understand all mysteries, and though I speak with the tongue of an angel and have not love — I am nothing." Life is desolate without ideals. The out- reaching after that which is not yet seen, the answer to that which cannot be demonstrated, this is the fruitage of education. This is the reason educated men meet emer- gencies, build bridges which make concrete their visions, dig canals which the nations have declared impossible and enter on social programs which earn at their beginning only the laughter of the practical. This is what might be called the function of fools, to follow the ideal. This is that which the world has ever called foolishness whether seen in Jesus at Calvary, Paul at Rome, Garibaldi in Italy, Livingston in Africa, or Lincoln in Illinois. These fools are the people who have seen the day before it is full morn, who believe that one setting of the sun does not mean the crack of doom, who in the night carry the light within, who fear not the future because they have faced the past and have found the eternal values that spring up, fresh with the dew of every new day. They live in the strength of timeless knowledge. They are ready for the new days because neither the rack of clouds at dawn nor the incoherent cries of those who awake from sleep can daunt them ; they have heard of other dawns and they serve the ends that last through all the days. Problems of industry and economic relations perplex us ; under organized greed men writhe until they rise in hot rebellion ; torn by passions and led as sheep by false and greedy shepherds mobs meet and battle with one 80 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY another. " Is this democracy ? " we cry ; " Then give us a benevolent autocracy I " Yes, this is democracy, blind, untrained and in the dark. Yet these are better men who strive for their ideals, who fight for freedom — even though in strange ways — than are those who sit as stall-fed slaves. And the cure for their darkness is light, and for their bitterness true brotherhood and for all their divisions the healing of a common love and the recognition of common rights. These are the ways we all must learn. And these ways we must teach our children lest they fall heirs to a world sadder far than ours. CHAPTER VII THE SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY The spiritual, still regarded as a mysterious, separate something, appears unrelated to the problems of a democ- racy ; can we discover it as an integral quality in life? Modern emphasis on religious education has one serious danger, that we shall fall into the habit of thinking of it as entirely separated from general education, saying to ourselves. Here are these two, general education and religious education ; each has its own aim and its own institutions, workers and methods ; work in one has no necessary relation to work in the other. Commonly our mode of thought to-day permits us to think of these two quite independently. We assume that general education is that which a child receives in public school and college; religious education is that which the Sunday school attempts. The aim of the first is recognized by all ; its processes are generally indorsed; but about the other, religious education, there still remain much doubt and more indifference. This is not strange so long as religious education continues to mean instruction about religion, creating an annex to the child's educational edifice and furnishing it with the history and literature of religion. Given a good school system, why should children go to an additional institution to receive this appendix of knowledge? Those who think in this way naturally ask, is it really essential to one's life equipment to get this extra knowledge? The difficulty arises in part from our use of words ; we have been speaking of general education, musical educa- tion, business education, physical education and religious 81 82 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY education as though we could split education into so many fractions. There is no such a thing, for example, as musical education unless we mean that all the process of education is accomplished in a musical manner or by musical methods. Only two of these phrases or terms have a reasonable basis; general education is conceivable as signifying the entire educational process ; religious education is conceivable as signifying a special aim or value to be given to all education. If by religious educa- tion we mean the special processes of instruction in religious knowledge alone then we use the phrase in a misleading manner. Religious education does include this special instruction, but it also includes whatever has to do with the full development and the social realization of a person as a religious being. Education is religion in action. Only the short-sighted mind can speak of the separation of religion and edu- cation. They are not two separate things which we must somehow harmonize ; they are related as are thought and action, as are life and feeling. Religion is not some- thing to be added, if possible, to the present content of education ; it is its cause and motive. And education is not a process which religion can use for its ends, but education is religion finding a mode in lives. All true education is religious in the degree that it realizes the possibilities of persons growing into social fullness ; all religion is educational in that it moves lives out into the realization of social destiny. The organizations and mechanics of both may be separate, but the meanings, ideas and forces of both are inseparable. We cannot have adequate education apart from essentially religious concepts of persons and society, and it is hopeless to think of religion without the educational ideal of the development of lives and society. These are the truisms of which we must often assure ourselves lest we fall into the habit of partitioning and even setting up in conflict SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 83 the great forces that make for human development. In this long labor that alone gives life worth and meaning, the labor to realize our social ideals, to have a world of love and righteousness, we must keep alive the full vision of all our allies, we must see home and school and church as the great forces of hope, the means by which the new day and the better world is to be. It is highly important that we shall not permit the building of a barrier across the field of education with the sacred on one side and the secular on the other. We must try to avoid the divorce that has come into the rest of our thinking as though one day were sacred and the other days secular, one place sacred and others not, one profession sacred and others devoid of religious signifi- cance. We are trying to redeem the non-sacred from the implications of entire separateness. We seek not alone one sacred day but the sacredness of every day as conse- crated to man's highest good. To-day we would think of all professions in the light of their high responsibilities, their sacred obligations to humanity. There is henceforth nothing common or profane to the man who has seen how even the least things affect that which is most sacred of all, human personality. The idea of separation into sacred and secular is really so modern that it has not obtained ineradicable rooting. Once practically all educa- tion was under the recognized sacred authorities. It still carries over some memory of that association. It is some- how different from other human interests. It must be re- stored to human reality at the same time as religion un- dergoes a like process. Then it ought not to be difficult to prevent the unfortunate cleavage in our thinking of these two. Naturally some one says. But we cannot mix the religious elements into general education in a country where religious freedom is consistently observed. That is to say, the public schools cannot teach religion. Very 84i EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY true; but that is not at all what we are thinking about now ; that is a problem which will be considered in another place. We are pleading against the custom of parceling education out into distinct packages labeled " sacred " and " secular." Perhaps we can best see how illogical such a partition is by considering how the characteristics of sacred and secular are common to all true forms of education. General education mu^t he essentially religious. That which we call secular education is just as sacred as any other. The task of the teacher in a public school is, in the finest sense, as truly religious as the task of the church-school teacher. Of course we all know some week- day teachers who are more effective religiously than are some church-school teachers. But that is not the point ; the significant consideration goes much deeper : rightly conceived the aim of public education involves the most sacred concept that has ever come to the human mind ; it is nothing less than this, that the most important enterprise for society, as society, is the development and organization of persons. The public-school system is our social recognition of the sacredness of personality. It is democracy directing itself to the development of its sources in personality. It is true that public education is often a very poor affair. It is true that the system is often guilty of crimes against personality. It is true that few work with vision and the greater part of school life seems to be controlled by a blind following of traditions. But the ideal is there. One single fact stands out clear, that education is the largest social enterprise of our day. Another fact has always controlled, though it has not always been patent, that this our largest social enterprise is directed toward the good of the society of to-morrow. It seeks to direct the growth of the lives that make the SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 85 citizenship of to-morrow. It is devoted to persons. It works in faith. General education is sacred because it deals with lives directly. This it is that gives sacredness to any pro- fession, the responsibility it has for persons. If religion is our ideal or concept of the meaning and value of life then whatever gives meaning or value to life is to that extent religious. The aim of state education is the enrich- ing of the life of the people. It is building itself through its developing members. It seeks finer people in a finer world. It is doing the work which we think of God as doing. The real meaning of every school, that is every one which is more than an information packing house, is that men might have life more abundantly. It works that the ideals of the race may be realized. Public education reveals the soul of democracy. Pub- lic education is our supreme demonstration of democ- racy. It takes more than universal suffrage to make a democratic people. It requires a popular aim, a popular purpose — that is an aim conceived by people for people — as the ultimate aim of all social life. It means a people united by the dominating aim that life shall grow from more to more. It means the determination of all the mechanisms of civil life by that dominant aim. A democratic state is that state which exists that its people may find fullness of life, that their social vision may be realized. Now this is the direct aim of the public school. H'ere democracy is immediately engaged in its supreme work. Somehow that high aim must be held clear above all the maze of details of school work. We must clearly avow the spiritual character growing out of the democratic purpose of education. Somehow a responsibility for per- sons must be laid on the institution that is shaping the habits, forming the ideals and setting the standards of 86 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY living for our children. Our concern for democracy will help us to see always the spiritual significance of the social aggregation of all the children of a community day after day. It will help us to realize the larger processes that are going on in the school, those to which lessons and learning are incidental, the actual determination of the spirit of youth and their steady habituation in modes of social living. The school is the largest spiritual influence outside the family. Hour after hour for five days of the week all the children of a community are together learning what life means and what it is worth. How foolish it seems for the church, reaching only some of these children for only a few minutes every week, to stand on one side and to assume that its work alone is religious and all the rest, though very useful, is still, at best, non-religious. In the measure that any institution interprets life, gives meaning to life and trains in habits of living, trains as a society, it is religious. Since the public school to-day does this work consciously more fully than any other insti- tution certainly there is a very real and important sense in which it is engaged in religious work. Above all it is religious as by an experience in democracy it prepares for full life in democracy, that is, it is preparing for a social order determined by spiritual values. PUBLIC SCHOOL. AND RELIGION It scarcely seems necessary to face the common objec- tion that the school cannot be religious because it does not teach religion. That is to confound two different things, religion as a quality of life and an experience, on one side, and religion as a field of knowledge. In the lat- ter sense religion is not necessarily religious ; it is religious only in the degree that it imparts the religious quality to life, only as it gives meaning and value and direction to the whole of life. The school is religious, but it is not SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 87 sectarian ; it is not ecclesiastical. We have been using the word " religious " as a descriptive adjective. Here it expresses a quality and a purpose, not a certain group of facts, not a peculiar field of knowledge and not certain special forms of activities. Religion never will be a dominating force in life until we take it out of its ecclesi- astical pigeonhole and open our eyes to see it as a quality and force and an ideal everywhere. The purpose of the school lies with a religious per- son. The schools are necessarily religious because they deal with persons who are essentially religious. They cannot take boys and girls and split off a section of their personalities which may be called the religious nature and bid them leave that outside the schoolhouse. They cannot do this because there is no sectional partition in human nature. It is the whole person who is religious just as it is the whole person who is being educated. In all thinking on the problems and plans of religious education few things are more important than this, to have always clearly in mind the fact that human nature is not a divisible thing; always and everywhere education is dealing with the same person and always in a very true sense it deals with the whole of the same person. The boy who goes to Sunday school may not look like the same boy who is yelling on the school playground; but he is the same, not only in name but in nature. He takes the same nature to both the schools. The Sunday school has for a long time assumed that when John came to its classes he brought only his spiritual powers, but that mistake was no more common and no more serious than the other assumption, that he takes only his mental powers to the public school. The Sunday school is recovering from the mistake of attempting to teach souls without minds ; but the public school must turn from the error of trying to teach minds without souls. Whatever any influence of life does with a boy or a 88 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY girl it does with them as persons, not as minds, memories or spirits. Whatever change the school effects is a change in a life, in the totality of a personality. To change any one's mind is to change him, is to change his life. This is now recognized in modem Sunday schools ; but it must be recognized as precisely what is taking place in any school. As soon as we escape from the traditional concepts of human beings as divided into separate departments or faculties and grasp their essential unity we find it impos- sible to think of the public schools as entirely separated from the religious lives of the pupils. They cannot be separated from any part of their lives. It is impossible to have an educational effect and avoid a religious result. The important thing is to realize that whatever affects a person must affect him as a religious being, that whatever really affects his character must really have some religious quality in it. Whatever the attitude of the school may be on " religious questions " it cannot avoid contact with religious persons and it can- not avoid affecting those persons as to the value and meaning of life for them. One danger lies here, however, that teachers shall become unduly conscious of the religious nature of their tasks, shall feel that they must alw^ays be thinking of the effect of their work on religious natures. The better course is for one simply to do the work that has to be done, giving each life every possible stimulus and means of nurture without attempting an analysis of the parts or phases of grow^th. Again we have to insist on the unity of the person who is being educated. Only harm can come from attempts to disintegrate the total process of growth in order to determine how a soul is getting on. The fact of religious responsibility is not an occasion for morbid anxiety but rather one for rejoicing; it must be seen as the ground for greater dignity in the teaching SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 89 profession; it must give the teacher the joy of sharing in a great and holy work. CHURCHES AND SCHOOLS After all what does this religious responsibility and privilege mean but that public education deals with lives? The schools teach the fine art of living. That is their business. This is their immediate, practical contact with all religious activities. Religion is the motivation of life ; it is such a vision of the meaning and value of life as transforms and compels the life. The church and the school have the same task : to lead people into fullness of living. The difference lies principally in two facts, First, that the church being an entirely free, voluntary body can select and use its own materials and fields of training. Second, churches work with selected groups while the school accepts the entire community. Each church uses the special teachings of its own group. But the schools being the common agencies of all the people, are limited to those forms and activities about which there is general public agreement. This gives the church a much wider range of interests as to subjects. The social limitations of the schools have the practical effect of preventing the current concepts of religion and its special interpretations from coming into use there. But they do not prevent the greatest of all concepts, the glowing ideals of life and its worth and possibilities. On the other hand churches are limited by their group aspects which often tend to give children caste training. If we were to ask the schools what product they have for society they would answer " Citizens." They seek to give back these boys and girls trained to live the social life of their day. If we ask the church as to its product do we not look for the same answer, " Men and women who do the will of God here "? The training in the life of present-day society is, at least, an essential 90 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY part of training to live in the democracy of God. A sense of the unity of such work must be encouraged. The church must recognize every teacher of lives as a spiritual agent and servant. If it docs not do so it loses the aid of its best allies. More, if it does not do so it gives evidence that it does not know its own task. No one can seriously seek the development of lives and the organ- ization of an ideal society without discovering and recog- nizing every agency that develops lives. Whoever touches a life to make it more or less, to give it new riches and strength, to teach it the supreme art of living, works with the great Life of which we are a part. Public education is sustained hy spiritual ideals. Es- sentially the best ideals of public education are religious ideals ; they look to the realization of the noblest hopes the human race has ever cherished. They hold before us the glowing vision of a new earth that is a new heaven. Every true teacher is an idealist in the simple, everyday sense. They have in their hearts the evidence of things not yet seen. Their faith carries them forw^ard. Nothing could be more dreary than the daily routine of telling old facts to unwilling pupils ; nothing could be more like a tread-mill existence than the dreary round through a curnculum that is no more than a highway paved with information. Merely to drill unwilling slaves in intel- lectual exercises is to become a slave where one might be a priest. Professional pride is the sense of the worth of service in the light of its high aim. Teachers believe that education is the means by which the world is coming to self-realization. They see democracy coming into its own. They look beyond school mechanics to their splen- did end in a finer, nobler society. If they teach for wages they are poor economists ; the same energies would give larger rewards anywhere else. They are not prone to boast of the fact, but they labor not for salaries but for society. SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 91 Just as the church is sustained by that vision of a world in which men live in love and do justice and find and follow the truth, so is our system of public schools maintained and conducted in the high hopes that men can learn to live and to so live that the outstanding ills of this day may be no more and a society that fulfills our hopes can come to be. Surely this is working for what the church calls the will of God. And that consciousness is peculiarly keen in the school of our day. The social theory in education is a furtJier indication of religious purpose. This is the period of the social emphasis in education. That means not alone that we recognize that all education is a social process, but it means, too, that we see that these social processes must have social results. Education not only uses social experience but, because it is social experience, it makes society. Evidently we have hardly caught sight of the tremendous religious implications of modern education. Besides the considerations advanced we might mention the religious nature of the school processes ; here we have three great social facts cooperating: first, an ideal social group affording children a tremendously potent social experience ; second, a social theory dominating the methods gf modern education, and, third, a social aim gradually emerging as the reason for and the ultimate aim of the work of the school. Along with this comes the fact of the social emphasis and interpretation of present-day religion. It has discovered the world in which it works and it sees it as the object of its work. It is satisfied no longer with plucking selected individuals from an earth of woe into a heaven of selfish felicity ; it seeks to bring about a society which is the very family of God. In this it works immediately with the schools, no longer conceived as packing houses of information but seen as social insti- tutions organizing social experience that the new society may be realized. That is the faith of teachers to-day. 92 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY Whatever else is true, the true teacher must be a religious person for to be an educator implies that one has faith in life as growth and this is to make a spiritual interpretation of the universe. The teacher is one to whom life means for every one just the chance to become and to become fully in the life of all. The concept that lives may grow and that all life may increase, develop, find harmony and fulfill its hopes underlies all educational effort. But the teacher is one who, as it were, says to the world, I believe so much in life as growth that I give myself wholly to this as my first purpose, and not to my own growth alone but to aiding the growth of all. Each man's work is really his creed in action. Your religion is what you do for the world. To give greater meaning and worth to life is surely the most religious service any one could render. The world is really religious in the measure that life, the life of all, becomes rich and full. It is not talking about religion that gives life its divine quality, it is finding that quality and worth of life that makes the world religious. Many a school has done more to make a community religious than all its churches, for often they have given it nothing but analyses of religion while it has led the people into more life ; it has opened for them the world of the spirit ; it has lifted their eyes from things to the eternal facts ; it has helped them to love one another and to live together kindly, cooperatively ; it has enriched for all the life of things and made it but the means of the life that is more than things. CHAPTER VIII THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY Society has a social purpose; its highest duty is the development of a more perfect society. The degree to which this primary duty is recognized becomes the measure of the democratic tendencies of any society, and our imme- diate community groups are the societies in which this ideal must be demonstrated. Democracy is realized in the degree that society adopts the program of the development of persons. There are many evidences of social consciousness of such a purpose.^ There are signs of recognition of its educational char- acter. There are those who see its spiritual significance. The college sophomore is not the only one who asks, What do we live for? Older men come back with deep serious- ness to that question. It appears in an enlarged form : What do we all live for? When one is conscious of society there must surely be some questionings as to its purpose. And are we not under intimations of meaning as to our world life? We hope for a finer order of life, growing put of this present, one in which the inner life really shall be supreme. But whether we thus cherish high vision or hope only for proximate improvements it is quite clear that life ought to have a plan, and life's organiza- tion, in society, ought not to spend itself without purpose. If one looks at a village or a city, with its manifold com- plex activities, there ought to be an answer to the question, To what end all this endeavor? 1 As in the development of the social sciences, in attention to eugenics, in courses of popular study on social welfare, in the quickened conscience of churches on social needs and in the tendency to predicate social programs on human needs. 93 94 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY Granted the social aim of society, what is the program for its attainment? Here we have to plead guilty to the pathetic indictment so vigorously presented by Wallace ^ and acknowledge that, while we have applied science to practically every other phase of life we have developed no technique and no scientific theory of the development of the personal qualities and phases of life. Boasting of progress in a thousand other fields, of what worth is it to us if we, the masters and users of these processes, ourselves show no improvement? In what ways are our modern methods more efficient in the development of character than were those of Egypt, or in the Athens of Socrates or the Rome of Cicero? True we have multi- plied schools and democratized the processes of instruc- tion ; we have systems of schools ; but it would be impos- sible to show that their courses are determined by the needs of society, by any program for the development of society. The difficulty lies in the fact that we have no consciousness of a real social program. The large game of living society does not play in any completeness ; it rather develops sporadic plays, parts of the game. We discuss democracy as though it were one of a number of efficiencies which society would do well to acquire, failing to see it as the essential program of society, as the real business of developing the lives of all. Perhaps the situation is not as bad as at first appears. The very nature of society establishes certain educational efficiencies. The function of social education is not im- posed on society ; it is inherent in its nature. Society cannot stop educating itself because it cannot cease associ- ating itself. It cannot cease to be a school of social living so long as it affords an experience of social living. As the social order becomes more complex it becomes a school for higher living. Even our present competitive 1 " Social Environment and Moral Progress," Alfred Russell Wal- lace (Cassell, 1913). THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 95 order, rent and torn by failure and disaster, plowed by discontent and watered with ideals, becomes the soil in which a new democracy grows. Social experience is the most effective school. In liv- ing with people democracy is learned. We cannot say, Lo here ! or, Lo there is the school of democracy ! It is everywhere. It is wherever lives are gaining vision, forming motives and ideals, establishing habits and devel- oping methods of living. It is in every family, every school, every village and city way, every social gathering, every college and factory and store, for good or ill. Of course this is one of those very simple facts, a truism, as commonplace as to speak of the earth's perpetual motion. But a truism is that which is so true it is always likely to be overlooked. We know that education is continuous, going on everywhere; but we do not act upon the fact; we do not plan our streets nor control them in the belief that character is being determined more in them than in the school-seats. We acknowledge the fact of continuous education but we limit our attempts at direc- tion to schools. We speak of systems of education and delude ourselves in watching the intricacy of operations in their little sphere. But the whole of education cannot be s^^stematized, though it must be realized ; it must be viewed with a comprehension of its forces and their effects. Educational potencies must he recognized and under- stood if they are to be wisely used. The first step to be taken in the preparation of the new democracy is to understand the constantly operative forces which are determining its character. That will compel a consider- ation of all that happens, especially in the lives of the young, in the light of its educational effects. Forgetting our traditional formalisms of education, with beginnings and endings, we will think of the cradle, home life, the long, sweet and happy play of childhood, the growing so- 96 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ciety that extends down the streets, takes in the school and widens out into the whole world as the child's and man's never recessing school. All the environment of growing lives will be seen in the light of effects, under the questions. In what ways does this help to make the child a true and fit member of society? In what ways does this qualify him for democracy? New scales of values will be applied to the physical conditions of family life, new measures to community conditions, streets, amusements, newspapers, books and occupations. Instead of asking what do men make out of them, we shall ask, what men are made by them? Nor must we impatiently say, these are, again, but truisms, for we do not habitually think or act in this manner regarding the real factors, the everyday experience, that makes men and women. VARIED ACTIVITIES IN EDUCATION But does not this general concept of all life as a process of education leave us in vague confusion of mind because of the interweaving of the many agencies, and in a state of helplessness because of their lack of definite educational characteristics? There need be no more serious diflS- culties here than are found in any real system of educa- tion, for all this variety and intricacy, found in the common experience of living, is essential to the develop- ment, the education of such a complex as man. Even in the school there must be approximately similar variety or the school fails to educate. The variety and infor- mality of everyday experience increases its educational potency. As to any attempt to organize it, that is not the principal need, rather we need to organize our own thinking about all that is happening around us and to give it a guiding spirit of life. Schematic control can only wisely develop as it follows a recognition of functions which has come out of long and patient study. Social agencies serve as educators each according to THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 97 its own function. Perhaps the lines between the different forms of experience in Hfe are less vague than we are accustomed to think. If we analyze social experience into the family, the play-group, the school, the com- munity and industry or occupation we have fairly distinct lines emerging which each form of experience deals with as a distinct phase in one's education, and, in the order stated, there is indicated the steps of development. Each one is a circle of experience containing the preceding experience and reaching out to the next and larger one. Each form of social experience has in it the elements preparing one for life in the larger form. Each has a definite part to play in education for democracy. The need of an educational standard. If education is going on everywhere and all the time, why worry.'' Why not simply seek to improve life in general and let education take care of itself.? The answer is that this is precisely the proper procedure provided we know just what life in general ought to be, and in order to know this we have to determine standards of life, standards of growth of persons. We cannot tell how society ought to be ordered until we think it out in educational terms. We do not know what is wrong with our times until we examine them in the light of their effects on lives, until we test them b}^ the educational gauge. How do we know that a six-day week and an eight-hour day are best.'' Not by our own desires for rest, nor by any traditional imperative. We know only in the light of what is best for man's all-round development. We test all conditions of life by whether they are favorable or otherwise to the growth and happiness of man as a social being. And constantly new factors come into our tests ; even the slave-holder tested conditions by their physical effects on the efficiency of his slaves ; we have to move beyond that and test our cities, our streets, factories and homes by what they do for man as a free spirit. 98 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY So that an educational standard gives a clue to the worth, the value and righteousness of life's conditions. It suggests a social order determined wholly by a con- trolling purpose to cause all conditions to stimulate the growth of persons, the realization of their powers, not alone of action, but of thought and feeling, of aspiration and ideal. That would be a democracy of the spirit, for that purpose would rise out of the common will and be devoted to the common well-being. That cannot come until we all learn steadily to think through the life of our everyday experience, of family and school and com- munity and see them as they determine the lives of people,^ the breadth and depth and wealth of their lives. So far we have an educational consciousness only as to the schools and the colleges and universities ; what would be the effect if we were to accustom ourselves to thinking in educational terms of the family, and of the community life? What further changes would take place should we emphasize, under education, the training and development of the spiritual nature? Should we be able to develop a program of education which would include equally all phases of human development, which would prepare properly for competent and complete social living because it called on every one of the agencies of life to play its full part? Such a program would not depend on formal schools alone ; it would coordinate the powers of every agency and of every institution into a program for all lives. A real program of education for democracy — and this is the same as speaking of a real program of full educa- tion — would determine the part played by each agency or institution in its social function ; it would determine 1 See studies on " The Functions of Community Agencies " in Religious Education for Feb., 1918 (Vol XIII, 1) in which thirteen agencies are considered; also on "Libraries," April, 1918 (Vol. XIII, 2). THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 99 the character of the relations of the growing life to each institution by two things, the need of that life and the purpose of democracy. THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY Any program which includs all the powers of lives for all the purposes of society mill give the place of first importance to the family. Its function is that of bringing lives into the world and nurturing them in a small social group. It has a more distinctly personal function than any other institution, First, because it deals with the young on every side of their lives, it has no reserves or limitations during early years ; it has free- dom of access to the feeling, judgment and will in a constant and most effective manner. Second, it accom- plishes its educational ends by personal means ; it educates by influences, and personal contacts, in a word by being a society ; and. Third, its purpose is avowedly more personal than any other agency. It is known by the kind of persons it produces. It is proud when its mem- bers secure the wealths of personality. Fourth, it reaches lives in the years when the greatest part of the educational process is being perfected. If the child learns more in the first five years than in all the rest of his life then the home must be the greatest of all schools. It may seem difficult to state the precise task of an institution which appears to have all tasks for its own at least for the first years of childhood. But two clarify- ing facts are to be noted: First, that society is tending to take the sole responsibility for several phases of early training away from the individual family and place it on the social group, and Second, there are certain well- defined areas of responsibility, indicated by the nature and function of the family, which society is assigning to it most distinctly. Society does tend to relieve the family of some immediate 100 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY responsibilities by itself caring for the health of infants and the young. The family has ceased to be its own physician just as it has ceased to be its own weaver and tailor. But there is no tendency to establish social machinery which will take the place of parents in the care of the child's early mind and will. In fact one of the reasons for organizing social aid to the family in its physical task is that it may be stronger and have greater freedom for its spiritual duty. One thing society certainly has a right to expect of every family and that is that its first concern shall be for the characters of the children. Parents are under social obligation to organize the home for the education of the spirit, for training young lives in the motives and habits of social living. There has been a tendency to evade the responsibility of the family for the early development of social good- will and social ideals. Parents, recognizing their own failures, have demanded that the schools rectify their errors and make up their deficiencies. But that is im- possible. A child is not clay to be given to-day a twist this way and to-morrow to have the twist taken out of him. The schools begin too late; character is not fixed, but it is well formed by the time children go to school. Whatever value moral training may have in the schools it cannot have the values of beginnings. To attempt to build national character on school training is to try to build by beginning at the third floor with neither plans nor agencies for the lower ones. In any program of education for democracy there must be such a recognition of the fundamental work which the family has to do with character in its beginnings that we shall not only expect certain things of the family but we shall provide the family with the means of accomplish- ing its work and protect it in the prosecution of that work. We shall not hold him guiltless who interferes in THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 101 any way with the freedom and powers of the parents to live with their children and to know them, to guide their minds and train their lives. We shall not look with com- placency on a system that provides us cheap goods or the manufacturer large profits by labor that makes physical parenthood a mockery and spiritual parenthood an impossibility. Nor shall we regard with complacency the family that deserts its opportunities and drives chil- dren either on the streets or into the care of those not trained for spiritual education while parents use its life as an instrument of their pleasures. In both cases we shall realize that the crime is committed against us all, that in such cases the family is simply passing its prob- lems on to the future and society is permitting the devel- opment of social misfits, aliens and despoilers. Any true program of education of all the people for the life of all the people will have a definite, socially recognized and adequately supported place for the family as an educational agency. That task will be just as clearly seen as the task of the schools. Society will count on the family with exactness for the spiritual nurture, the social development of the very young. And it will also count on the family for the continuation of its peculiar processes of intimate personal contacts, of the life of the small social group, through the years of youth. It will be the school in which young people learn first of all and most steadily of all, through immediate experience, the arts of social living and the motives of democratic living. THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH The church will range beside the family in the pro- gram of education. It is really a larger family, the membership of which is determined voluntarily. It is a social group brought together by spiritual ideals and organized to accomplish spiritual purposes. Its function is that of realizing an ideal spiritual society, a democracy log EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY of the spirit. It accomplishes its purpose by bringing persons together in a common program which seeks the development of the likeness of God, the realization of a spiritual ideal in men and the development of the society of God in the world. It is an educational agency because it deals with persons for the purpose of devel- oping their lives and with society for the purpose of developing its life. Its place in the social program is very definite ; it is the means by which, in a democracy, we afford persons freedom to form their own groups for religious purposes. It is the means by which, under civic freedom, it is possible for society to gather up the many forms of spir- itual stimuli which religion affords and to apply them to the whole of social life. It is the socialization of the traditions and the race heritage of religion under social freedom. The measure of its efficiency is the degree to which the stimuli of religion carry over into social life, the degree to which the faiths of the churches and their social life make better and more efficient members of society and a better, more spiritual society. The church then is that social agency which has freedom under democracy to use those powers which the state cannot use through its agencies ; it exists, specifically, to make religion count for life and society. It is to be held responsible in a democracy for the use of this power. Democracy commits to the churches and their agencies that part of the program which has to do with the explicit teaching of religion and with the direct training of religious life. It has a place in the program that is taken by no other. It has a place which is absolutely essential to any complete society. Therefore a democ- racy, as a political organization, will recognize the func- tion of the churches, will protect them in their proper spheres and, so far as it can do so in justice to all, it will encourage their work. This it will do because the THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 103 churches are the special agencies for the spiritual life and this life is the fundamental basis of the power of a democracy. The church then has the function of spir- itual education under conditions which afford entire free- dom in the use of religious ideals and teachings. In its various forms it is democracy finding free association about many types of spiritual ideals. THE FUNCTION OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS The public schools have a highly/ important part in the program of education for democracy. They, again, are manifestations of democracy at work. Their pur- pose is to organize the powers of communities and of states and to direct the cooperation of professional workers so that the young may be properly trained in the life of democracy. This function we must keep clearly in mind, abandoning our inadequate concepts of the school as existing to equip our children with certain useful tools of knowledge ; it exists because democracy wills its existence in order that these on-coming members of the democracy may know its life, its ways, its ideals and may be quickened to carry forward its purposes. The schools as social agencies must be judged by social products. In thinking through the life of any community we have a right to look to the schools to accomplish cer- tain results with the wills, minds and social purposes and habits of the young. This is the basis on which all the varied activities of the school must be determined. Con- sidering the institution functionally we can no longer determine the range of its work by text-books and curricula, but by its responsibilities in social character. Such considerations justify playgrounds equally with libraries and laboratories; they justify social enterprises and recreations equally with recitations; they justify social usefulness equally with study programs. The school has its part to play by doing all that can be done 104 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY under {ortns of social organization and experience to guide the young into the life of democracy. The functions of the schools in a democracy are based on their nature as institutions rising out of the will of the people. A school stands in a community, speaking through its brick and stone, and through all its work, in the words of state documents in the United States " We, the people of ... do will and hereby do carry out our purpose " to secure to to-morrow an intelligent, trained democracy. But if " we the people " do this a serious responsibility lies upon us all. We must know what it is we plan to do and we must know how it is done. Pop- ular education means popular responsibility for educa- tion. The recognition of the function of the school in the community carries with it the duty of all citizens to understand, through careful, painstaking study and intelligent, patient observation, this process of education for which they are responsible. COMMUNITY AGENCIES Communities organize many special agencies to assume specific functions: the public library, the park and recre- ation boards, special institutes and associations to care for special groups and numerous clubs and societies to accomplish particular ends. There is always the danger that organizations and institutions shall multiply, each arising in response to some definite and real need, until their lines of service cross continuously, until forms of service are duplicated, energies are wasted and com- petition becomes the order of the day. A social cross- section of some communities looks much like an ant-hill that has been over-turned, revealing bewildering activity without compensating results^ The condition is so familiar that it is not necessary to attempt to describe it. The problem of comirvwnity organization is altogether too large for satisfactory study here but there is one THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 105 aspect which may be considered properly ; it is one which is fundamental. At present our current studies in com- munity organization seem to emphasize the desirability of adjusting the various activities into a coordinated pro- gram. This is desirable, but it surely must be predicated on deeper considerations than harmonious adjustments. The most perfectly adapted mechanism would be of little value unless it was designed and used to accomplish some- thing. The fundamental consideration, upon which all community organization must proceed, is that of the pur- pose of the community. Adjustment follows common con- viction of purpose. Purpose determines programs. The community is a mechanism ; it has a purpose which lies beyond itself. It exists to shelter, nurture and train persons ; it has the purposes of democracy ; it is the larger association of persons for social ends. And it is much more than a mechanism ; it is an organism ; its life is the life of persons in a society ; so that all programs must take into consideration its vital powers. The first step in community organization is the realiza- tion of the tremendous power of this social mechanism to produce social results, its influence over persons, its constantly exerted power to determine what they think and feel and what they are. It is making persons, not alone by its intentional educational work but because these persons respond to its life ; they see its ideals realized in actualities ; they answer to the community's impress on their lives. The community is seen as a real school w^hen its effects on character are understood. The basis of all community organization ought to be in the power of the community to determine the character of lives. It should express the purpose of the community to determine lives. Much as we may boast of the wealth and the industries of our villages and cities they have a potency far greater than all their factories ; it is the potency over the lives of persons, They have a purpose 106 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY far higher than financial standing or statistical glory, it is that they may produce the best kind of persons. This power and this purpose will furnish the test for every community agency. Your community, seen as a school, will accept or reject activities as they make for or against life. It will make that test final and absolute. No matter what other inducements this or that industry or amuse- ment may offer, it has no right in community life if it does not minister to its program as a school of living. In like manner, this power and this purpose will determine the relationship of the various activities. It will furnish the point of their cooperation. The school will co- operate with the family not to lessen family duties but for the sake of richer, stronger lives. The school will cooperate with the churches, not to save the churches their intellectual labor, but to help them in growing finer manhood and womanhood. There will be cooperation between school and factory, not that the factory may have more intelligent human machines, but that all life may be enriched and especially the life of the worker and the community. The basis of commumty organization lies in the concept of the whole commwnity as a school of democracy. And the basis of community endeavor of every kind lies here.^ This is the test to which we may bring all our projects for community betterment. It is likewise the test to which we may bring all our plans for social amelioration ; do they contribute to the greater efficiency of the social order in developing itself, in developing stronger, happier men and women? 1 This is not in conflict with the plans developed by B. S. Winchester (" Religious Education and Democracy," Pilgrim Press, 1917) and W. S. Athearn, (" Religious Education and American Democracy," Abingdon Press, 1917). Both these authors describe methods by which the work of general education may be supple- mented, and complemented, by community cooperation in religious instruction. They present in detail one feature in the program of a conununity. THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 107 Education for democracy, then, is not a special exer- cise, set into some apportioned periods of time, as the school and college days, the hours of church and church school. It is that which is going on all the time in our families, in all the life of the community. Whether we will to have it so or not the total social life is a school and is determining, by its teaching power, the kind of society we will have to-morrow. We cannot escape this ; we cannot offset this power of life to educate by any special provisions we may make. It is always there and inevitable. Surely then it is the part of wisdom to direct this power. If life is always educating; if it is such a school as we have suggested, should we not begin to regard it as a school, to determine its character and its effects .^^ Is it not high time to look out beyond the public schools and the church schools into the real schools, to consider, with care, how democracy is being determined on the streets, in the vacant lots, in the movies and the play- grounds, in the fruit-and-soda stores, wherever lives are together? Is it not simple common sense, if we organize the regular schools with a view to their purpose, to organize and direct this larger and constant school of life also with a view to its purpose to develop a finer democracy.?* CHAPTER IX BEGINNING AT HOME The family is the first and the most effective school of democracy. Democracy as an experience is an educational process. It is, for every citizen, a schooling in social control. It involves the participation of all persons in self-govern- ment, not alone because all naturally desire to have a voice in their own affairs, but because only through such participation can they learn the social life, only through the experience of governing can they become fit to govern. Democracy rests, as a method, not so much on the rights of persons as on their social and educational needs. As the actual experience of living is the real schooling for life so this laboratory of civic living is essential to citizen- ship. Exercise through social experience is essential to the development of man's social powers ; he learns the life of society through sharing all its experiences including the experience of self -direction.^ Democracy^ as an experience, must begin early in life. If it is true that persons learn the life of democracy only through the democratic experience of social self-direction then it is evident that this experience must come as early as possible in life. The exercise of the suffrage may be deferred until maturity, but the experience of democracy must be realized as soon as any experience 1 The discussion of woman suffrage would have been settled long ago had it moved from the plane of personal rights to that of social needs. Since all in a democracy need the full experience of democracy it follows that women need, for the sake of the democ- racy, a full share in its life. The state cannot afford to have part of its life cut off from its own educational experience. 108 BEGINNING AT HOME 109 can be known. The importance of early beginnings will be clear when we remember that democracy is not a matter of intellectual concepts or of political opinions ; it is a form of life, a way of social living. It is a continuous social life. Its habits cannot be too early acquired. Democratic citizens are not created by suffrage legisla- tion ; they grow through social training. If it is true that the foundations of society are laid in childhood then here we must begin to build our democratic society. Democracy begins at home. The family is the child's first educational group; no other has equal power. An autocratic family makes a poor school for democratic society. Yet nearly all families are either autocracies or dual monarchies. We still hold to the theory of the divine right of paternal kings to absolute rule. True, in American homes, the rule is largely a fiction. As a working man said recently : " We people of to-day catch it both ways ; when we were young we were compelled to respect our parents ; now we are grown we are compelled to respect our children." The seeming conflict and breakdown of the old authority in American homes is due, in part, to our attempt to maintain autocracy there while indorsing democracy outside. But the strife of wills, the asserted and ignored authority of parents, works only to develop individualists. The young often experi- ence a society in which they either live in subjection or in perpetual conflict of w^ills, devoid of all attempts to work out a common goodwill. They look out and forward to another and difl'erent society in which they will play their full and free parts. There is no relationship in experi- ence between the child's first social group of the family and his larger group of the state. To many it will seem a revolutionary doctrine to in- sist that the family must be organized as a democratic society. So men once thought about the state. But the moderp free st^te is founded, not pn some jti^iwly .discov- 110 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ered theory of government, but on the very nature of man, on his inalienable rights and his social needs. So with the family. Its very nature calls for a democratic form of life. The state is democratic because civic forms exist for the sake of social ends, for persons. The fam- ily must be democratic because it exists, even more simply and evidently, for the sake of persons ; it is the one social group which has this sole and dominating reason for exist- ence. It is a little society organized in order that per- sons may be bom into the world under conditions favor- able to their nurture and that they may develop as per- sons. Its raison d'etre lies in social persons. It is or- ganized for people. Its mechanisms for feeding and shel- ter are subsidiary and only contributory to its larger purposes ; they could be conducted much more efficiently in larger groups. The apparently wasteful methods of the small household are justified in the light of the social- educational advantages of the small group for the young. Here in this small group, so closely related, so mutually dependent, the art of life is learned. Social considera- tions dominate all its methods. Because it exists for the growth of lives the weakest and youngest have the largest claim on it. Those who are strong here serve the weak. The baby is the center of the home because de- mocracy always sets the child in the midst. But the practical question remains, how can the home life be so organized that children find in it a real expe- rience in democracy .f^ How can the family provide train- ing in self-government and social direction .^^ Many ask. Does not the practice of democracy involve the abandon- ment of parental authority and, therefore, of parental responsibility? No; on the contrary it increases both; it increases responsibility by making it the duty of the parent not so much to see that the child does as it is told but to aid the child in willing that which is good for all ; it increases authority by adding to the will of the parent BEGINNING AT HOME 111 the will of the child. It makes parents educators of wills instead of dictators of actions. Authority is increased as it passes from autocracy, which has authority only as long as the governed are too weak to resist, to a common social good will. METHODS OF FAMILY TRAINING What, then, are the methods? By affording each mem- ber a steadily developing experience of participation in all the joys and duties, the service and responsibilities of the home; by ceasing to think of the family as a benev- olent autocracy on one side with the children as passive beneficiaries on the other; by beginning to think of and steadily cultivating the habit of regarding the home as the common possession of all, of its life as a common life in which all have a share and toward which all have serv- ice to render. Democratic parents train democratic children by mak- ing possible the democratic family. The first thing needed is that parents shall " repent," change their minds. Perhaps, even before that, we need repentance on the part of society, a change of social mind so that all shall think of marriage and home-making in democratic terms, in the light of the needs of society. We might be frank enough to recognize that the foundations of home-making, the desire for children, are at one with the central motive of democracy, the passion for lives. Then we might con- sider mating in terms of possible lives. A democracy cannot afford that the means by which new lives are given to it should be shrouded in social superstition or its processes of increase regarded as accidents, or ca- tastrophes. We shall recognize that families are founded for social ends, in order that children may be born and trained. Accordingly we shall prepare those who are to give children to society ; we shall not only train them to competency in physical parenthood but also 112 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY to efficiency in spiritual, in guiding minds, developing spirits and educating persons. The true spirit of de- mocrac}^ grows in parents as they realize these vital re- sponsibilities to the whole of society, as they think of their home life in the light of the claims of the world of which it is a part. The democratic home will be guided hy the rights of the child. It will be organized in the light of his right to a full share in social living through the use and posses- sion of its resources ; in the light of his right to a share in its life of service, of common work and fellowship. Think out the home life as we think out our civic life when we say, " The school belongs, not to the school board, but to us all." Just as children have learned to say, " We must not destroy the trees in the parks nor the lamps on the street because they belong to us all," so in the home they learn to think of a common sharing of all possessions and to develop both a sense of social rights and of social responsibilities. The point may seem, at first, an insignificant one, that children should feel that the possessions in the home belong to them. But the principle is fundamental; any ideal identity of inter- ests rests on real interests ; we are never a part of the state until we realize that the concrete property of the state is ours. A child passes to a new attitude when he comes to the sense of the plural possessive. This is the attitude he must take toward the state; he acquires it as a natural attitude in the home when the sense of common possession is real, practical and habitual.^ The problems of discipline give way before the practice of democracy in the family. This is not because de- mocracy is some happy cure-all for the waywardness of children and the arbitrariness of parents, but because 1 On the development of the communal spirit in the home see Chap- ter VIII of " Religious Education in the Family," Henry F. Cop^ University of Chicago Press, 1916. BEGINNING AT HOME 113 democracy is a process of substituting a common purpose for conflicting wills. The problems of family discipline arise from conflicting wills. It is true that the will of one may be right and that of the other wrong, but the purpose of the home is not achieved by forcing the wrong will to yield to the right. The vanquished does not thereby learn to will the right. On the contrary, a van- quished one is not vanquished in will ; he is commonly only strengthened to resist. Even though, at last, all resist- ance is worn down, no gain has been made ; on the con- trary a serious loss has occurred; he has lost the power of resistance. Where the will is " broken " through dis- ciplinary conflicts in the family, the child is robbed of one of the powers he will seriously need in life. And yet, the parent's problem seems to be this : " Shall I give up to the child .^ " However, is it true that the only alterna- tives are either the child's giving up or the parent's yield- ing.? Democracy has a better way. It seeks to discover a common purpose which both can will ; it seeks to develop, in all situations, a common will. This is not the same as a compromise ; it does not mean the parent consenting to this on condition that the child agrees to that. It is rather the gradual development of a common social pur- pose which being seen and followed by all the members of the family group secures harmony and unity of action. Democratic training means more than securing a modus operandi between parents and children ; it means patiently developing ideals, purposes, plans, methods and, most potent of all, compelling enterprises which are accepted by all members of the group. Thinking things over to- gether, discussing them and doing them together, a com- mon will is developed. Through experience in common enterprises a social will is formed; unity of action is se- cured, with freedom of wills. A common social wUl is secured only under freedom. 114 EDtJCATiON FOIl DEMOCRACY Nothing can be imposed on the will. Democracy in af- fairs rests on democracy of the spirit. If the family is to train for democracy it must give every member free- dom to exercise his powers of judgment, choice and will. This can take place only through real participation in family government and management. To be concrete: we will suppose that the B — family, living in the city, are considering moving to another house or apartment. The selection of a future home could be made by the parents alone; but, in the democratic family, no decision is made until all the members have considered the matter, until, as in a council, all have thoroughly discussed the situa- tion. Commonly the reasons for removal, the advan- tages of different situations, of streets and types of homes, of costs and upkeep, are all regarded as details to be settled by the omniscient heads of the household; but they are all vital to the interests of every one ; they af- fect the well-being of each one. And they affect the daily conduct of each. Thorough discussion has several direct effects : it gives a sense of participation which quickens responsibility ; it commits each one to the family enter- prise ; it quickens thought on the problems of family life ; it presents unconsciously and indirectly aspects of many moral problems and ideals. When a decision is reached it is the decision of all, it expresses the will of all. The consciousness of unity, of common purpose, responsibil- ity and action is strengthened and tends to carry over into all the current of family life. This one incident has furnished an experience in democratic living. Does this matter seem trivial? It is no trifle for chil- dren to think habitually of family life as a social expe- rience in which they always have a full share. It is no trifle when they pass from the home passively to regarding it actively. It is no trifle when this kind of experience goes on, day after day, so that all the children are un- consciously forming habits of social cooperation. BEGINNING AT HOME 115 But supposing, in the instance just cited, that no com- mon unanimous decision is possible? Everything then on the practical side depends on the degree to which the members have already practiced this method of democ- racy. In beginning, it is best to learn through lesser experiences, through the everyday life. But a disagree- ment calls for the exercise of the larger social will, the will that chooses to ignore my own interests for the sake of the interests of others and especially for the interests of the larger number. It is an opportunity to practice the principle on which our social life proceeds, that even the clear interests of the few must often give way to the welfare of the many, that individual rights cease to be rights when they conflict with social rights. Such a les- son is learned in the laboratory of life, but children may receive it through instruction, — care should be taken to make the welfare of all so clear to them that they will cheerfully sacrifice individual preferences, and the realiza- tion of the joy of the social will then becomes their own through experience. LABORATORY EXPERIENCE The family, as a school of democracy, applies the edu- cational principle that learning comes by doing. It main- tains constant experience in social action and thus it is a training school in the habits of social living. It is either making social citizens or selfish individuals. It is doing this, not by the adoption of codes of action, nor by even the wise counsels of parents, but by the direction of activity. It forms habits by guiding repeated actions, strengthening them with desirable associations and illum- ining them with ideals. It makes social citizens by guid- ing its members into social activity within its own circle. All the relationships of the family are socially interpreted. Its duties are not tasks for the " head," nor are they " chores " in the day's routine ; they are simply a part 116 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY of the common life, the part which each one plays in tlie life of all. They are not tasks at all ; they are as much a part of life as breathing or eating. The child needs to begin very early to learn the life of a democracy, the life of constant social cooperation. In few ways could we be more cruel than we are when- ever we attempt to train a child for a life free from labor. The " primeval curse " was not that of work, but that of sweating for mere bread. Work is man's high priv- ilege ; it is the point at which he effectively becomes a part of the world. Children need real work in the family. They are being trained in social pauperism where servants do everything. It is true that modern conditions have deprived the home of many forms of activity ; but we only suppose that they have taken all those forms because we lack imagination to see the new ones that arise and that are constantly developing and changing as economic con- ditions change. A boy may not be able to bring the wood and water into the modern home, but he can run the vacuum cleaner and he will not be degraded by washing dishes, or he can help in the cooking. To his society these tasks are just as essential — and therefore just as honorable, despite our prejudices — as desk work or sell- ing goods in the larger world. Those who would be ashamed to have their children work at home may be yet more ashamed to find they have trained those who will not work, as social cooperators, in the larger human fam- It may seem to many that dishwashing has very little to do with democracy, that such trivial affairs weigh noth- ing as compared with the high task of inspiring the 3'oung with the splendid ideals of our country, with love for the flag and devotion to national destiny. Such judgments left us, in an hour of great national need, with an over^ stock of rhetorical patriots and a shortage of effective ^servants. But the hour of national need also brought BEGINNING AT HOME IIT out the splendid spectacle of the " dollar-a-year " men, the leaders of great commercial and industrial enterprises, who willingly gave their time, working long hours, under difficult conditions, and without compensation, for the national service. They were men to whom work was the natural thing ; they were habitually active and mentally cooperative. They are not produced in a single hour of opportunity. They come out of a long training in the habits of active contribution to life. Such habits depend for their strength very largely on early beginnings ; they are acquired, not by waiting to do some splendid, ideal thing, but by doing everything that one can do on every possible occasion. They begin with the trifles of every- day service. Education for democracy is a widening social expe- rience. It is possible to have a home in which every mem- ber actively shares, making a contribution of service, and yet no education for democracy takes place. The school of democracy must take a social attitude to all life. It is not only a little democracy within itself ; it is part of a larger society. The family can easily become a selfish institution. It can develop unsocial attitudes in chil- dren by failing to take, as a society, an attitude of com- mon living and service toward its community, toward other homes and the city and state. The life of democ- racy is not alone that of individuals who cooperate with and contribute toward other lives ; it is rather the life of groups which work, as groups, for the social whole. The family trains in the group life, but it must also train in the life of the group for the whole. It must be con- ceived as a part of society having a common life with all the rest, under the obligations of service and inheriting the joys of self-giving. The democratic family makes the democratic citizen. Its attitude, as an entire group, expresses its social con- sciousness and trains in habits of democratic relationships 118 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY to society as a whole. There are families which are ethically and socially marooned by their own selfish spirit. They live only to themselves. A home is separated in order that it may be socially integrated. It is not a band of persons associated to secure advantages over all other bands. It is a social group which so fully learns social living that it looks out on all its community as a field of opportunity. This involves the difficult problem of developing a sense of universal brotherhood through fam- ily living. To save itself democracy miist save the family. But what of inefficient families, without moral consciousness.'* It is suggested that we will meet this difficulty by the changes that are now taking place in the narrowing of the area of family life, and the tendency to transfer its functions to other institutions. Perhaps something may be accomplished in this direction when we have invented a process to be substituted for parenthood. When chil- dren can be born without mothers and fathers we may get along without families. The psychological parent- hood that broods over the child during all its years of growth up to manhood is as real a fact as the physiolog- ical parenthood that brings him into life. We have to remember, what is more important, that, with all its short- comings, psychological parenthood is still the most potent force within our knowledge for the purposes of develop- ing character. No mechanizations of education can take the place of people. A phonograph repeating French phrases may be just the thing to teach the language to a bank clerk, but a phonograph can never teach life to any one. Moral training is not a matter of reciting les- sons, but of learning what life means and then feeling, willing, and doing aright toward it. That is a lesson that needs all possible reenforcements in affections, ideals and examples. BEGINNING AT HOME 119 THE FAMILY AS A SOCIAL NECESSITY We too readily assume that the family is either an eco- nomic accident or a social institution founded on physio- logical conditions ; it is vastly more, it is a social insti- tution evolved out of the developing necessities of human nature. The breeding of babies does not absolutely neces- sitate a family, but the breeding of human creatures does, for that is a process of slow and long continued growth. Men and women are not bom full-grown morally ; they have to acquire the art of living in this world. We can easily establish institutions for feeding, clothing, and teaching infants, but we cannot find a substitute for the family group which will do its work of fitting people to live in the world in social relations. The family is a so- cial necessity in democracy because it is that school which the nature of man has developed as necessary for his training for social living. Granted the necessity of the experience found in family life, it is evident that we do not solve the problem of in- efficient families by wiping them out and substituting an institution. It becomes the responsibility of society to see that we substitute good families for bad ones. And this is one of the first social duties of a democracy. It will first make fully efficient that which first deals with lives and deals with them most effectively. Now all this is so elementary as hardly to seem worth the saying. But the fact is that, elementary as it is, we have gone no further than to talk about it ; we have failed to act on the simple concept of family life as the essen- tial and altogether fundamental element in the moral training of a people. We will spend without stint for schools but the State is unwilling to spend for improving family life ; that is to say, we are willing to take all sorts of pains to build moral citizenship, beginning when the 120 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY foundations have already been laid, but we are unwilling to spend any thought or money on these foundations. Democracy must protect the family. The first step necessary, in order that the family may meet the present moral crisis, is to give it a chance to do its work. Such industrial and economic adjustments must be made as will give fathers and mothers a chance to have healthy children and a chance to influence them healthfully in their moral development. No matter what the industrial order may seem to demand of the father no State can afford to have children growing up who have been robbed of the sight of his face and his friendship. The rights of the child and the rights of the State of to-morrow de- mand that we shall not rob either of the value of hours of leisure in the family. To build fortunes by grinding the face of the poor is to steal from the citizenship of to- morrow for the lust of to-day. The hovel in which the family is forced to live to-day simply means that we put that family to the school of hovel living, taking lessons in building cities of hovels for us all to live in to-morrow. We build our cities so that there is no real family life. We mourn over this as a sentimental loss but a practical necessity. So short-sighted are we that we fail to see that it is not the sentiment of the past we are losing, but the citizenship of the future we are dwarfing and distort- ing. The tenement not only represents the loss of the ideals of the " Cotter's Saturday Night " ; it represents economic pressure throttling human spirits. Wherever economic considerations alone dictate conditions they rob the man of to-morrow of the one school that can make a real man of him, the one that can surely prevent his be- ing a social burden or menace. Whatever robs the child of his rights to-day robs so- ciety of its portion to-morrow. We cannot steal from the child of to-day without despoiling ourselves in vastly greater measure in the future. BEGINNING AT HOME 121 Democracy must train Jwme-makers. The second step necessary is to take this school of moral living so seri- ously that we will train its teachers for their highest task. We have normal colleges to train teachers in the meth- ods of the knowledge that children must acquire in schools ; we insist that all teachers shall establish their fitness. But we make no conditions of efficiency for the effective teachers of morality. We assume that the high office of parenthood is acquired by accident, that while one must take a course in domestic science before cooking an egg, any one can teach life to a child. The State would have a perfect right to demand before issuing a marriage li- cense that parents prove both their physiological fitness and their ability to train children. At any rate, we may set many capable agencies at work preparing parents. If the church would teach its people directly, practically, how to make their homes better, it must do more than give us sermons about a " home over there.'* We need homes over here just now; the rest will take care of itself. We need classes to turn from dis- cussing the genealogies of the Old Testament to a study of family life here.^ We need to develop the efficiency of our public schools and colleges in this direction. Why teach young people everything in the world except the one thing that is greatest and most important of all in the world to them.'^ We need an educated public opin- ion that will see how fundamental to all true democracy is the right social experience in the family. Then we might hope that, for its own sake, the state would be willing to spend at least as much in aiding the family to eflSciency and competency as it now spends in improv- ing farms and orchards. Because the family, through its normal experiences of democracy, is the earliest and most influential agency in 1 See the author's discussion of this subject in " Religious Educa- tion in the Church," Ch. XVIII, Scribners, 1917. 122 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY training democrats, society must begin here its work of social organization ; it must first develop efficiencies for its purposes. It must give new thought and make wiser provision for the life of the family. Until the home be- comes in the mind of the educator and in the public vi- sion more important than the school or the college social reconstruction works under a perpetual handicap. They work wisely who begin at beginnings,^ 1 The Religious Education Association, Chicajsro, 111,, publishes, free, a very useful short bibliography on " Religious Nurture in the Home," prepared by Mary E. Moxcey, and including the more important titles dealing with the general problems suggested in this chapter. CHAPTER X DEMOCRATIC TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH The modern church is both the product and the prophet of democracy. Ideally a church is a free social organ- ization of persons associated for the purpose of realizing in men the divine ideal and in society the kingdom of God. It seeks to lead men into godliness in a god-willed society. In other words, its purpose is that of a spiritual democ- racy. If the central spirit of democracy is religious, if its prime needs always will be a spiritual interpretation of life and a Christian motive to guide action, then the church must be the principal agency through which this kind of democracy can be realized. That is, however, supposing that the church is in our society the principal agency of the spiritual life. Democracy needs churches. These religious societies which we call churches have grown out of the needs of democracy. If the autocratic state finds it needs the absolutist and authoritative church, how much more does democracy find it needs the guidance of those ideals and that light that develops as men freely associate in search of the ultimate values and meanings of life. Democracy needs not alone a spiritual ideal; it needs definite formu- lations and expressions of that ideal. It needs the ex- pression of that ideal in social purposes which gather men and direct them toward spiritual aims. It needs, in or- der that all its life may be saturated with religion, many definite social foci of religion. The special part which the church plays in relation to the development of democracy is an educational one. 123 124 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY This is because the function of the church is essentially educational, it is that of social organization for the growth of lives and the direction of society. Much has been written on the educational work of the church/ so that only one aspect of that work in relation to democ- racy will be developed at this time. In order that the church may prepare men and women for democracy it must offer them a real experience in de- mocracy. To belong to a church must be to enjoy a progressive experience of life in an ideal democracy. Per- haps the most important, the most influential relation which the church effects with any person comes neither through preaching, nor classes, nor worship, that is, not through any of these alone, but through the social expe- rience of belonging to the church. Unconsciously we conceive church membership as a social experience ; but the church appears hardly to recognize the value and the effects of all those relationships, activities and expe- riences which constitute its life. It is a society ; its chief power over lives is a social power, the force of the life of the whole group on the one and the effect of the ex- perience of living in the group. What men shall be is determined less by what the minister says, by what teach- ers teach or by what forms are followed than by the kind of life they find inside the church group. Is it an au- tocracy .f* Then they become accustomed to think of their ideal society as autocratic. Is it an oligarchy? then, as their ideal society, it glorifies oligarchy and retards de- mocracy. While there are wide differences in institutional forms there is not so very much difference in social spirit in the churches. An Episcopal church may be more demo- cratic than a Baptist congregation in spite of the well- 1 See the author's " Religious Education in the Church," (Scrib- ners, 1918) which gives references to practically all the recent literature on this subject in English. TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 125 known democratic form of government belonging to the latter. But, whatever the form, the fact remains that, on the M'hole, the modern church is not a democratic in- stitution. It may be well to look at a few evidences to support this statement. Many churches, the greater num- ber, neglect the first principle of democracy, that the so- cial organization exists for the sake of the lives of its people. They do not exist for lives ; they are organized to maintain customs, institutions and forms of thought. They are not judged by their service for lives; they are judged by their success in developing institutional effi- ciency, in buildings, plant, finances, and membership. The impressive purpose of " saving souls " usually means securing adherents to the institution. Nothing could bet- ter prove that the churches are indifferent to the chief motive and ideal of democracy than the fact that they give the place of least importance to the person of great- est import in a democracy, the child. They do not seek to develop lives ; if they did they would spend their chief energies on lives when they can be most influenced, when development is really taking place, in childhood. The church will continue to lag behind the democracy of its own day and of the state until it pays at least as much attention to the child as does the modem democratic state. What then should be done? Furnish every life with a progressive experience vn democracy. This cannot be ac- complished by substituting deacons for elders or pastors for bishops. It will not come from without but, rising within, determining the life of the local society, the spirit of democracy will in time change the character of the entire institution and remove the vestiges of monarchial forms and vassalage. Beginning with the child the church will furnish the child a child's experience of democracy. Ideally, for the child, democracy is an enveloping, protecting, nurturing 126 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY society devoted to the chief purpose of developing his life. To the child to live in a democracy is like living in a fam- ily, it is an experience which reveals life as favorable to his development, as stimulating, inviting, alluring him out into living. This is true in the family because the family exists to nurture the child. It is true in democ- racy because democracy exists for the sake of lives. To such social environment and stimulus the child responds not only by a natural growth but also by an increasing consciousness of life in terms of growth. Thus he learns to live the life of democracy through the experience of the nurture of democracy. Where are the churches that offer 'to the children of their communities a society devoted to enveloping, protecting, nurturing their lives? They may be found; but it is with difficulty. THE CHILD-CENTRIC CHURCH The first step, then, toward a truly democratic church, will be to set the child in the midst. This will be done in the practical manner in which democratic communities are now doing the same thing. The evidence of the child- centric community is the school-house, the teaching force, the playgrounds and the determination of custom and regulation by the needs of child-life. The largest house the community builds for itself is the child's house, the school. Is this true of the church? The heartiest and most immediate response of a community always comes to an appeal for the child's welfare, for playgrounds or civic betterment in their behalf. What is the response of the church to appeals for the child's needs? The best brains of the community are devoted to the training of the child. Is this true in the church? We meet with so much confusion and difficulty in reli- gious ideas, knowledge and efficiencies because the young have failed to receive religious training. To men and women religion is an unreal or an extraneous interest be- TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 127 cause in childhood there was for them no normal and continuous association with religion. To the child the church is so remote, as an institution, that we institute schemes of artificial direction to bring children under the influence of the church. This simply means that the church does not function in their lives. It cannot func- tion for them until it ministers to them according to their needs, until, as a society, it takes the democratic attitude of devotion to their lives. When the church assumes that attitude a new situation is created. The child is no longer an outsider. Responsibility unites him to the church. It may not be a formal union of membership ; it is a union of nurture. That is the union the child can feel and understand. When the church says, " Our resources all belong to these children," it will come to pass that the children will say of themselves, " We belong to this church." That is the only vital kind of belonging. It is the union that exists in a family; children belong be- cause the family is theirs. Out of this attitude of prim?iry devotion to the needs, to the lives of these little ones there will grow the neces- sary provisions for their development. No forms of or- ganizations, no schools, classes nor anything else can min- ister to them unless all are but simple expressions of this attitude of devotion, unless they manifest this purpose as the chief purpose of the church. The church will furnish a developing experience of de- mocracy to groxmng persons. The life of the growing child will respond to the attitude of the church by devo- tion to its ideals and purposes. The democratic church will afford opportunities for the child to express his devo- tion to its life aim. He will find himself as a member of a society with a purpose. He will learn what that pur- pose means ; he will be taught how it may be realized. The church will teach him how to live. If it is organized to develop lives it will make the lessons of living its chief 128 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY teaching concern. But it will do more than talk about living; it will furnish the laboratory of life. That active response under which the child acquires the sense of be- longing will continue only as long as he can project his life into the society.'" Here is the fatal weakness in the plans of many churches ; they do much for children, but they make no provision for the child to live his life in the life of the church. Children do not belong save through the realities of their experience. The church is a real society only as each one in some way can share its life, its activities and service. The church mil direct experience toward the ideals of democracy. As a society it is one of the best schools of social living. But it may be a society without being a democracy; it may have unworthy ends and exist socially in spite of unsocial motives. Mere association does not make a real society ; social motives, social purposes and social living all are necessar3\ So, also, the church be- comes a democracy not by the elementary expedient of permitting each person to vote at its official meetings, but by consciously associating persons for the democratic pur- pose of nurturing lives and serving society. It is a fel- lowship of the spirit for the spiritual ends of democracy, that men may have life more abundantly. The experience of church membership is a reality only as it is an expe- rience in common devotion to the ends of democracy. The purposes of the church with a person are not achieved merely by getting his membership ; they are achieved as he becomes a living and active part of its spirit, its activ- ity and its program. ) The essence of the Pauline figure of the church as a body is that the members are in the body only as they live its life, onl}^ as they actively func- tion in its work. The church makes democrats by giving every one a share in its spiritual work for society. The ideal social life is realized in active service. / This experience of the life of democracy, as sharing and' self- ^ TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 129 giving, is possible at very early stages of life. It is not reserved for the mature man any more than real partici- pation in national life is reserved for adults. Ask the small boy on the street if he is an American ; he will not tell you that he has to wait until he can vote. He al- ready belongs. Perhaps nothing has so strengthened his sense of belonging as the practical things which the nation has called on him to do. To plant and care for a " war- garden," to sell stamps, to serve as a messenger in some patriotic organization is just as important, as vital and as valuable to the boy as anything his father can do as a voter or his big brother as a soldier. So children in the church are finding a part as important and, in the whole scheme of spiritual democracy, as essential as any that the adult may have. One can only refer to the many interesting projects of services which children carry for- ward in their classes or their own societies.^ We must see, however, that these projects are not simply schemes to amuse them, not simply devices which clever adults in- vent to serve as toys for the very young, but that they are the forms of normal activity along which the child's life moves out ; they are as natural and real to them as our work to us. Their purpose is not to hold children in the church until they are old enough to be useful ; their purpose is positive, to let the child live out every ideal he has or can get./ The provision^ which the church makes for children and the young, so that they may have an experience of reli- gion as life and service, is a corollary of our modern emphasis on the reality of the child's religious experience. If he is a spiritual being then he has rights in the church 1 See the plans suggested by Miss Rankin in " Religious Education for Beginners," December, 1917, " Handwork in Religious Educa- tion," A. G. Wardle, U. of Chicago Press, 1916; "Graded Social Service in the Sunday School," W. N. Hutchins, U. of Chicago Press, 1914, " Religious Education Through Activities," H. B. Robins (a free pamphlet), American Baptist Publication Society, 1918. A 130 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY which are equal to those of any other person. To object that his rights are less because he is immature is to sug- gest rather that his rights are greater because his needs are greater. No matter what our adult desires may be our duty is perfectly plain, we must cease to think of the church as a community institution in which we adults " have our little day," we must learn to think of it as the association of the community's spiritual forces in order that every life may have its full day. That will force us to give the child an opportunity for activity in the church. That will compel some resignations. It will make us ashamed, instead of proud, of saying that we have held an office for forty years. It will apply logically the principle that since the young have their religious Hfe to live there must be for them religious work to do, respon- sibilities to acquire and joys of accomplishment to expe- rience. FACING AN ACTUAL WORLD If the church is to be an experieiwe in democracy/ it must face the realities of this present world. Men are to-day so far from the church because the church has set itself so far from men. It is not long since many, per- haps most, churches were ashamed to have any concern for human affairs ; often they affected to separate them- selves so thoroughly from the secular that they gave no care to sickness, human misery and need. But a spiritual democracy is in the very core of life; it is the life of the people. It cannot lift itself above the human. It knows nothing as spiritual that is not also human. It is con- cerned with men now, and not so much with their shrouded past or their unknown future. The world it would save is a world of men and women. Then religion becomes not a speculation about anything, but an experience. Doubt- less it will be said that the church must remain unspotted from the world. Of course she must, but there would TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 131 have been no need for such an injunction if she was to remain aloof. There is no danger of being spotted save as one gets into the crowd. Then the best preventive of soil is ser\^ice. The modern church must go through the experience of the modern university. It has passed from a remote, cloistered affair into a laboratory of life set in the midst of the affairs of men. To-day it func- tions in the field and the factory. If the church is to edu- cate for democracy it will be not by quiet, dignified re- treats of instruction but by prophetic leadership in the ways of men, by living the life of the people, by dealing with their real and present problems. Need one insist again that present-day reality loses no whit of religion, that the great Teacher of the church drew men because He treated the realities of their imme- diate lives on the plane of the eternal? To-day the at- traction which some preachers have is due to the fact that they speak the language of our present experience. There are two extremes of attraction in modern preach- ing; one is that of the seer who deals with the eternally true, the deep and high places which abide forever; we answer to his voice, as deep to deep, because those things of which he speaks are the unchanging verities of all life. The other type speaks of our every-day plans and prob- lems; his language is that on our week-day lips. We answer because of the note of reality and because of our need for help and guidance in these present problems. Can no man combine these two messages ; cannot the man who has been on the mount bring its light into our dark- ened valley and help us to see these realities of sin and sorrow, of affection and joy in the splendor of the vi- sion eternal and glorious? Unless that can be done preaching is likely to be an outworn custom. Democracy needs the prophet. But he must speak in a known tongue about real things and with that voice of authority that comes from touch with the eternal. 132 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY Democracy needs spiritual guidance. The prophet who deals with realities must ever be something more than a photographer or a newspaper; he is a seer. He deals with the present that the future may be determined. He leads forward. Democracy is ever in evolution and its course is determined by the dominant ideals of the people. When we lose faith in the potency of ideals we turn back- ward. If we do not believe in the vision we perish. The sense of reality must not dim the light or lower the stand- ards of ideals which the church gives to its age. Yet those ideals find their natural and most helpful expression in forms of reality. Just as it is vastly more effective to speak of a splendid future in which no children shall toil in factories, no men be slaves to others than it is to generalize the picture, so the church makes her vision plain by definitel}^ pointing out possible reforms and improve- ments. It can translate righteousness into immediately practical forms of right-dealing and relationships. Some may sneer at these " impractical " ideals ; but the church can practice them and then proclaim them. She must insist not only on looking present-day reality in the face but on picturing before men the realities of a forward- looking righteousness ; she must make real the ideals of men. A real experience in democracy will reveal those spirit- ual values for which democracy exists. Belonging to a church ought to be a continuous process of the discovery of the joy and splendor of knowing people, of human friendships. In the very simplest and most practical man- ner it ought to make us prize just people above all other prizes that life has to offer. " Hand Grasps hand; eye lights eye in good friendship And great hearts expand, And grow one in the sense of this world's life." — Browning, " Saul." ^'i^^f. TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 133 This is something we are in danger of losing. ^Our hurried life leaves little time to cultivate these human values that become ours only in friendship and intercourse. But this consciousness of human values as the supreme worth of life will go much deeper than the joys of friend- ship ; where the church serves life its people will learn the joy of seeing lives grow. The very stuff of life seems here to come out more vividly and distinctly than anywhere else. No enriching can come to any life greater than that which is ours when we see that we have been able to help a life, when we, perhaps, can see young men and women stimulated, year after year, until our hope for them is passed in their fine lives. LEAVEN MUST BE IN THE LUMP The democratization of the church will involve a more general fusing of its life with the lives of all the people. It is still a separated institution. It is still a class affair, belonging to the group called " church people." The great streams of city life flow on untouched by it. Its ministries do not really reach the mass for they are im- posed by an external and socially foreign institution. There are very few instances in which, even in smaller places, the church is so much of a community affair that it can be said to be the church of all the people. This is largely due to the fact that a church is still regarded as a group of people integrated by certain intellectual statements or by certain special customs. It does not seek to spread its real life to all ; it seeks to draw the lives of all into itself. It does not belong to the com- munity ; persons in the community belong to it. Churches in a community are commonly small islands of intellec- tual, or of emotional coherence in a sea of practical in- difference. Few are social leaven ; most are more nuclea- tive than disseminating. Apparently the church is effec- tive in educating only those who are already in its group. 134 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY so that the great flood of democracy moves on not imme- diately influenced by its work. If the church is really democratic it will gather to it- self all the spiritual life of its comraunity. It will be- come inclusive of all spiritual purpose and power. It will become the fellowship of all who seek the good and the clearing house of all who serve their fellows. It will polarize scattered idealisms. Its emphasis will not be so much on differentiation as on association, assimilation and inspiration. Its fellowship will be, not through forms or through philosophies, but through common ideals, pur- poses and service. The development of popular forums indicates something of what is possible. Here there are no formal conditions of membership; the people are asso- ciated and united in their common interests. Somewhere the people will find common spiritual centers. Their so- cial idealism will be polarized in integrating rather than in segregating agencies. The tendencies are quite clear. In some communities the public school, with its social center, parents' clubs and recreational program, has be- come the means of nucleating social ideals, stimulating activities, enlarging vision and uniting workers. Com- munity organizations, bringing all who desire the common good into one fellowship, are doing the very work that churches should do. In an age that does not hesitate to pay the highest price to make the world a decent place to live in our former, narrow conditions of spiritual fel- lowship seem wholly ridiculous. A democratic church must find a basis for membership sufficiently broad to em- brace all who give themselves in true devotion to the higher and spiritual purposes of democracy. It must associate all who set spiritual values first. Its test will be ability to bring together all good men, to bind them in common ideals and to send them out in common serv- ice. Custom has so long bound us in the churches that it TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 135 now has an authority which is blindly accepted; it is the cause of our class and creedal divisions and our exclusive groupings. We search in vain elsewhere for a justifica- tion. It hides the simple, basic principles. If Chris- tianity is a democracy of the spirit its churches must be spiritual democracies. Unless they practice democracy they cannot persuade our world society to spiritual de- mocracy. Here, if anywhere, men must have the oppor- tunity to experience democracy on its highest levels. The educational function of the church cannot be discharged by telling the world about an ideal society ; the world needs a demonstration more than an exposition. Espe- cially it needs a demonstration of that fellowship of which the church has spoken so long. If any man is willing to learn Christ's way of life, if any is willing to live for the ends for which he lived, there ought to be a place for him in a church. And surely that way and those ends are perfectly clear to us to-day ; it was the way of a brother- hood ; it was the democratic purpose of pure devotion to the lives of all, to the realization of a social order deter- mined by spiritual rights, needs, duties and possibilities. To all accustomed to think in terms of denominational machinery proposals of this kind will seem to be fatally vague. Yet organized religion cannot lead democracy save as it is essentially a part of democracy, i If the church is a leaven it must be in the lump and not on the side of the mixing bowL If our organization efficiencies stand in the way of the saturation of community life with religion they are not efficiencies. We value many of them because they do effectively serve the whole institution as it is at present organized. But the business of a church is not that of serving an institution, it is that of saving society. To become effective in determining the char- acter of the democracy of to-morrow the church must be democratized to-day. Organized religion must become democratic if democracy is to be religious. 136 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY CHURCH MUST EXPERIENCE DEMOCRACY To become an experience in democracy the church must experience democracy, it must become a part of the life of democracy. In order that democracy may experience religion, religion must experience democracy. To satu- rate society with the religious ideal the bottle must be opened and the life-giving stream flow out. Then rigid lines of " membership " will stand out less prominently as separating walls. The membership that counts will be that of fellowship in common ideals and projects. Some- how we must realize on the splendid flood of good life, of spiritually minded persons, of those who seek the king- dom that is peace and righteousness, and who are now outside the churches. The church, in the education of democracy, will cawse democracy to become an experience m religion. It can lead democracy on from a political experiment into a spiritual reality as it reveals the spiritual nature of the work and the purposes of democracy. The church exists not alone to give society a religion it has not hitherto possessed but to help it to identify the religion it already has. Many are serving spiritual ends who would be sur- prised to have their work thus characterized. The tem- ple of God is neither in this place nor in that but it covers all the ways of men wherever men seek the purposes of iGod. True democracy is not something that may be made religious ; it is religious already in that it is de- voted to spiritual ends. Men find it hard to see this. The very word spiritual misleads them into thinking of some- thing strangely indefinite, belonging to another and un- known world. ^ They go on working for the well-being of all ; but they regard that as something quite separated from religion. Such persons, of whom there are many, 1 As Pres. Henry C. King so well suggests, and explains, in his " Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life," Macmillan, 1914. TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 137 need to discover the religious character of every kind of service that determines the lives of men and the char- acter of society. They need to see that they are playing a part in forming the kingdom of goodwill and righteous- ness. CHAPTER XI THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND DEMOCRACY'S PROGRAM If education is our dependence for all permanent social improvement public education is the peculiar method upon which democracy depends. The public school is the most democratic institution in American civil life ; it is democracy at work on its pecu- liar task of developing people into social unity and effi- ciency. It is democracy in action. Its development in American life is concurrent with national development from a republic organized for freedom to a democracy of free men organized for the fullness as well as the freedom of life. The public school, in the United States, has been at all times democratic in organization, a public institution in a special sense, maintained for the public, and governed by the public. It has been more immediately controlled by and responsive to local sentiment and ideals than any other public institution. Direction and control have been exercised in small local units. Each school has been kept very close to its own social group. Many efforts have been made to centralize control, to erect national educa- tional standards and to secure federal direction. Local control has not been an unmixed blessing; the system is in need of decided changes to meet present-day needs; cer- tainly centralized aid and direction is desirable; but the advantages have more than compensated for the losses. With all their short-comings local boards of education have been a force making for democracy, developing local responsibilities and keeping alive the immediate conscious- ness of education as a right and a duty. But for such a 138 THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 139 democratic system it would have been impossible to de- velop to their present efficiency the central agencies of counsel and stimulus such as the United States Bureau of Education and the voluntary organizations of educa- tors. Through its schools democracy/ edtucates itself. In an important sense public education educates the public. It is unfortunately true that the citizen knows little about educational theory and little about the real work of a school; but the very fact of the school as one of the heaviest charges in his taxes leads him to put, habitually, a relatively important valuation on its work of develop- ing lives. A platform orator recently hurled lurid de- nunciations against state legislators because they appro- priated more money to hog-conservation than to baby- saving. But, while admitting their shameful blindness to human values, we must not forget that the public school is weighty evidence that, after all, we do think more of children than of cattle. Our educational ideals may be hazy, or they may be archaic, but, in the last few decades, taxation for elementary and secondary education has more than doubled in ratio to population and — since this might mean nothing — the more important fact is that this larger investment has been made with greater intelli- gence than ever before. The marvelous growth in facili- ties and working staffs is not a thing separate from pub- lic life; the people cause this and they know they cause it. Their participation in the educational enterprise has led to a remarkable development of appreciation of its importance until, in normal times, it is accepted as our most important single social task. The development of public education — in enriched and extended curricula, increased facilities, larger and more beautiful buildings and enlarged and* more efficient teach- ing force — has been made possible because democracy has fixed its faith on public education. Such impressive 140 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY developments are the results of large expectations as to public education. These expectations have changed and developed in recent years. When Horace Mann and Henry Barnard campaigned for common elementary edu- cation the people responded because they recognized that intelligence was necessary to public safety and to personal prosperity. But since that day the vision has been devel- oping until public education is seen as not only necessary for social protection but essential to social progress. To- day we look to the school not alone to keep growing citi- zens from wrong-doing but to stimulate them to right- living. One might speak of this as a development from protective education to constructive education. More and more the schools have a positive function, to guide the young into service for and devotion to the public good. Education m a democracy is directed toward ideal ends. America counts on the school to develop the American spirit, to make democrats. The public demands more than intelligence ; it demands an attitude of mind. In the trying days of the great war the school was called on not alone to teach things about democracy but to train in the life of democracy, to develop its spirit of service for life. It is true we are not altogether clear as to what this spirit implies ; we often confound mere sentiments of patriotism with devotion to the ideals of democracy. But the ideal is becoming clearer ; it emerges in practical ways, it reveals itself as the energies of school children are applied to forms of human, social service. And, looking forward, our principal concern is that the school shall inspire the young with motives and ideals adequate to the demands of to-morrow ; we grow impatient with political tricks with the school machinery and impatient with dis- cussions over categories of information, and we demand habits of life and attitudes of mind ; w^e expect the school to develop democratic citizens. Public sentiment regard- ing the school reveals the soul of America. No other in- THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 141 stitution is cherished so highly, no other guarded so zeal- ously. It is our one common institution of social ideals. It is the one on which we depend most completely for so- cial improvement and national salvation. Such high expectations as these are the bases for pop- ular criticism of the school. Like the church it is gener- ously criticized because its possibilities are generously appraised. Much of the criticism is negligible, but there is a deep and serious inquiry as to the kind of persons the school is producing. It inquires why, after so much edu- cational progress, there is, in schooling, still so little con- sciousness of direct social purpose .^^ The criticism that points to the juvenile-court records, to the growth of youthful crime and the spread of political corruption may not always be just but it is a clear indication of moral expectation. Democracy demands a moral product from its schools. The demand is entirely justifiable, for the ultimate pur- pose of education is moral and the primary needs of a democracy are moral and spiritual. Education is the organization and direction of social experience to the end that persons may be competent to live as social beings. Social living is essentially a moral process ; it involves every form of human relationship ; in it are included all the problems of life. Democratic living is a social and a moral process ; it is a matter of human behavior under social relations ; it involves all matters of the will, of ideals of habits, of conduct, of right and wrong. Our whole system of education is a farce so far as democracy is concerned, an utter failure, if it does no more than impart information, no more than give to the world so many million heads holding that which so many thou- sands of books already contain. We count on public education for no less than the growth of citizens who in- creasingly see and know and love the right, the social good, the democratic ideals of a world of righteousness 142 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY and loving good-will, who increasingly devote themselves with growing intelligence and skill to these ends. A7nerican schooling has often turned its back on the realities of democracy. Many a boy comes out of high school knowing a good deal more about Athens and Carth- age than he knows of his own city ; the college student often recites on Plato's ideas on justice without the least thought of their possible applications to present social conditions. We train youth to shun the split infinitive with holy horror but we care not, educationally, whether they separate their neighbor's families or their fortunes. We tithe the mint and anise of dead conjugations and neglect the living principles of daily conduct. We are so burdened with learning we have no time to learn to live. As Sir Arthur Helps remarked of another day, " Some persons have learned so many languages they have ceased to think in any one." WHAT IS WRONG WITH EDUCATION? Better far to have been a boy educated in long-ago Egypt, where Plato says the " Youth were suffered neither to hear nor learn any verses or songs other than those which were calculated to inspire them with virtue," than to be one of the high-school youths whom one may see in almost any city, uncouth, flagrantly regardless of the rights of others, slaves to the cigarette, affecting blase cynicism on all ideal subjects, and boasting of filthy- mindedness and craft. Such lads do not represent their class ; but they are sufficiently numerous in the high-school crowd to give rise to serious thought. It is, of course, true that the school is neither wholly nor principally to blame, that selfish and foolishly indulgent parents must be called to account. But the question still remains, what are the schools doing to counteract the tendencies that cause such types to exist? Are they endeavoring to make good citizens out of these boys? If they fail to THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 143 meet squarely the problem created by these youths they acknowledge failure in their entire program. We are wasting a*lot of money on schools where cattle pens would do if we can only raise brutes. Ancient systems may be idealized, but our system will avail little until we have realized some of their ideals. Something is wrong when year after year our social statistics report, parallel to the decreases in illiteracy, appalling increases in juvenile delinquency. This is more than the result of increasingly exact regulation of youth life, and it is more than a matter of social awareness to offenses. Both these factors increase the figures, but they by no means account for the fact that boys commit the crimes that once were confined to men, that the crimes are actually more prevalent and often much more vicious. Our court records simply indicate that our methods of training for life have not kept pace with the developing moral demands of life. Properly to distribute the blame for this condition would call to account industrial, eco- nomic and social conditions, family life, the polarization of population in great cities, and those changes in social ideals under which we have passed from the concept of life in terms of discipline and endeavor for improvement to the concept of life as pleasure. But just here we are concerned with only one social institution, that which is charged with responsibility for training youth for the life of the state. What is it doing to prevent juvenile delin- quency.'^ The 'public schools have ideal possibilities. The school is an institution which has developed remarkable moral potentialities and which has a clearly stated ideal of moral purpose but has not organized those potentialities toward that purpose. No one can fail to see the moral power of the schools as social organizations. They are adminis- tered by a body of idealists, people who remain in that profession because it satisfies their ideals, because of a 144 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY consciousness of sharing in the development of persons. If this is not the case it is hard to account for the fact that the pubHc-school system draws to itself the best brains and abilities of the country and holds them in its trying service. True there are many who are merely text- book mechanics ; but they are not representative of the great teaching body. To know the teachers in American public schools is to know a people with a passion and an ideal. Their eyes lighten whenever they have the chance to look above the wheels of the factory system of instruc- tion and to tell of what they are really doing with lives. Why not give these idealists a chance? The schools are least efficient in that vn which they are most potent. The schools have several distinct forms of moral education already in operation. First, they are forming character by the simple fact that they are asso- ciating the lives of youth. They form character as they direct and organize the experiences of these lives under social conditions. Children here, unconsciously, learn the greatest lesson the school can teach, how to live together. They learn to work together, to play together, to secure social harmony and cooperation. Morals is wholly a mat- ter of living harmoniously and helpfully with other lives. In this the school affords experience every day. Second, they are imparting, in the course of instruction, the ideals of life. This takes place not only in the study of heroes ^ and great deeds, but even more effectively in every item of instruction as it is given as an expression of the method of life, the law of life, the best way to do things. Third, pupils are under the direct influence of persons whom they tend to idealize whenever personal worth is evident.^ 1 On a method of imparting spiritual ideals through biography see E. O. Sisson in " Religious Education," Vol. VI, p. 78-f, and F. C. Sharp in " Education for Character," Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1917. 2 " We believe that the personality of the teacher and the general organization of the school are primary agents in the development of character," New York Conference, 1911. THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 145 Fourth, moral principles are directly taught in some schools and#incidentally in almost all. The schools are moral educators lacking moral con- sciousness. The very fact that we complain at not re- ceiving the moral product indicates social expectancy as to the schools. The school acknowledges the justice of the expectancy, but appears to be powerless to meet it. This is so because neither an ideal leadership nor an un- organized, and largely unrecognized, potency for social training will be sufficient to meet the very real and stern demands of these times. If socially-, morally-minded per- sons are to be the principal product of the school their development must be its principal purpose. We will not have personal effects in education until we set first the personal aim. The public school is not moral in that it does not have a moral aim. It is not yet a social institution. It is bom of society, supported by society. Its purpose is prepara- tion for living in society. But it is not organized as a society in order to give children real social experience. We have constructed a sound theory of social education ^ but we have applied it scarcely at all in our public schools. It is hardly necessary to suggest that the failure to apply the principles of social education involves failure to accomplish moral training, for social training and moral training are the same thing. The morality we de- sire is not that of isolated, individual perfection ; it is that of persons trained to live in society, to discharge their obligations to their fellows gladly and in love. We do not charge the schools with failure to produce unstained characters ; our charge is that they do not attempt the task they confess is theirs, to train lives for right social living. 1 For example in Dewey, " The School and Society," Univ. of Chicago Press, rev. ed., 1917; S. Button, "Social Phases of Educa- tion," Macmillan, 1910; G. A. Coe, "A Social Theory of Religious Education," Scribners, 1917. 146 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY THE LACK OF MORAL PURPOSE Public educators have not designed the school courses for moral ends. The curriculum is a traditional bequest from the cultural ideals of the leisure class who once monopolized educational privileges. Where these ideals have been abandoned the changes that have been made have been for the purpose of training individuals to suc- cess in business. The curriculum, almost universally, has remained unaffected by the development of social think- ing; social principles which have become the founda- tions of modern educational theory have been ignored in its selection. Until in the curriculum there is evidence of a real consciousness of the actual facts of the child's life and the citizen's life we will find it hard to believe that the schools are organized for life purposes. These facts are not alone those of business ; they are not found alone in literary and mathematical activities ; they are the facts of social living, of daily contacts and of relationships with all other human beings. The great problem of life is not after all that of making a living ; for us all it is the problem of so determining the relationships of men that all problems of work and means of living are solved. Our schools are not moral, and therefore cannot have a moral effect because they are not supported hy public moral convictions. We parents do not send our children to school for any particular reason. Usually they are sent under a vague, general notion that " education is a good thing." We are taught that it gives every one a chance to get ahead in business. Public money often is spent in an immoral way, in the support of institutions which have no clearly understood public function in life. To consent to the use of public money either because schooling is the fashion or in the hope that it will boost my boy into a position of social superiority is to abuse a public trust. In a democracy public institutions must THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 147 exist for social ends. We need a new democratic con- science on public education. The schools constitute de- mocracy's great opportunity to train the youth of to-day for the life of to-morrow. To send a child to school is to take a significant step in committing him to public liv- ing ; it is the act by which the family consecrates the child to the life of democracy. It is a recognition that his life needs more than the family can give ; it needs the experi- ence of the larger public life; it needs training for de- mocracy by experience in a democratic social life. As they return to our homes we are solicitous about their lessons ; are we solicitous about their education in social life? Do we realize that the lessons are only incidental to the entire experience of school life.^ Are we willing to hold things in true proportion, to hold lessons to their contributory place and to see the entire school process in the perspective of training in and for democracy? We say that the schools exist to make good citizens, but we do not hold them to that purpose and judge them by that product. When we do we shall think of schooling primarily as a moral process and test it by moral re- sults. No matter how many formal systems of morality are taught schools do not become moral institutions until they train moral persons, who coming up into life take it all in terms of social responsibility, who are both desirous and competent to solve the problems of social adjustments. One may test a school by the attitude of its graduates to public interests, to slums and municipal vice, to tuberculosis, to labor problems, to neighbors and to other nations. Public schools mill he as good as public ideals. We must create a popular demand for a social product from our schools. We must test these institutions, no longer by whether our children have acquired certain facilities in memory exercises, nor by whether they have a brief, 148 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY temporary and fading acquaintance with the classics, but by whether they are learning to live as social beings, whether they know the right, love truth, hate a lie and delight to follow the life of service, the pursuit of the good. We must demand efficient democrats. We begin to realize that while efficiency does mean ability to earn one's living, it must mean also ability to contribute to the whole of life and ability to be of service, ability to count for a better age. Any failure in the school is a social failure; it is a common, public responsibility. The real difficulty lies just here: the school is a public institution responsive to the public will. Its short-comings are largely inher- ent in democracy ; it is created by the people and admin- istered by the people. It is giving us what the people want. This would seem to indicate that a rigid adherence to the democratic principle would prevent any progress in the schools. But there are several saving considera- tions. First, democracy may mean improvement. Prog- ress depends on the principle that if a people can be moved to will their own elevation they will go much farther than they would under any sort of external power. Sec- ond, the people can be taught to desire better schools, and so to recognize the need for social training that they wdll insist on a moral product from the schools. Some of the best, practical improvements in public- school activities have been the results of campaigns to educate public opinion. The teachers wanted better meth- ods ; the principals agitated for them. But the changes were only effected when a Parents' Association, or some like organization, developed the public mind and when an aroused social opinion insisted on better things. The public is the real educator and the pttblic needs education. Evidently, then, an immediately practical step would be a program of the education of public opin- ion on the subject of democratic education. One of the THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 149 first steps will be to make the schools more truly public property. ,The customs of educational, professional se- crecy must be abandoned. Through the press, through school papers and through public gatherings at the school that familiarity with the school which we had in child- hood can be maintained and developed through life. Par- ents' Associations will help greatly. Leaders of public opinion may develop sane popular thinking and warm in- terest in the schools. It is just as much the duty of the church minister to preach on public education — pro- vided he really knows something about it — as it is his duty to preach on private righteousness. Public responsibility places all persons in a moral at- titude towards the schools. It is the moral duty of the people to understand the work of the schools. It is an immoral act to send children to an institution from which we expect moral training and not know whether that train- ing is being given or how it is being given. It is an im- moral act to be one of the owners of this social institu- tion and to remain in ignorance of its operations. Ig- norance regarding modern education is ignorance on social duty. It is strange that so many religious people to-day apparently are more concerned about how a few thousand people lived several thousand years ago than about how the millions of people of to-day are being pre- pared to live in to-morrow. It is the moral duty of the people to express their will regarding the schools. This they do not do to-day. The common system of the administration of public schools in the United States is an insult to education and a trav- esty on democracy. We elect, to conduct the affairs of the school, a board of people, who know no more about education than about anything else. This board is quite incapable of discharging the duties it assumes and usually unwilling to select a trained expert to whom the admin- istration might be committed. The failure of our schools 150 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY in their moral product has been due, more than to any- thing besides, to our method of public control. The method has been immoral ; it has involved the acceptance of a social responsibility without any serious effort to discharge it. It has been imperfectly democratic. The public has lightheartedly laid its responsibility upon others without the least concern for their competency. Now we are demanding that the workers in the schools take more seriously their social responsibilities while we, the society which owns and conducts the schools, refuse to take our trusteeship seriously. Social responsibility involves obligation to the world*s future. We have a high religious duty toward public education. It lies not in the details of administration, not in insisting that this or the other specific internal re- form shall be immediately made, still less in exercising our freedom of general criticism. It lies in discharging in the spirit of full social responsibility our trusteeship for the lives of the young and for this public institution. That we can best do at this time by insisting that in this educational agency the science of education shall have free opportunity to effect the purposes of education. We are not all educators, but we are all trustees. We cannot administer, but we can insist that only those who are capable shall administer. We can take the school out of politics and set it in education. We can secure com- petent administrators and then give them freedom and responsibility. AWAKENING OF THE EDUCATIONAL CONSCIENCE Educational administration, backed up by public opin- ion, will make possible a tremendous step toward social efficiency, that is, toward securing the desired moral prod- uct from the schools. This is the case because, First, the trained educators are the very ones who realize the essen- tially spiritual character of education and its social, THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 151 moral aim. They have been trained in the science of education. They have seen it as a social process. They are the ones who have most openly and fully expressed their conviction as to the moral aim.^ Second, they alone are capable of directing the necessary reorganization un- der the acceptance of the new ideals. This is an educa- tional problem calling for the most exact scientific knowl- edge and the widest experience. Third, trained educa- tional administration under freedom will secure the de- sired moral results because these results can flow only from a thoroughgoing application of the principles of education. The last mentioned consideration is so important that it deserves more than a passing mention. When we criti- cize the schools for failure to train in moral living we are simply stating their educational failure. Education which does not develop the powers of living in social relations is not education, for the development of those powers is both the process and the purpose of education. We are not demanding that the schools take up some new duty ; we are only asking that they fully discharge that which they already have. Education is for purposes of social training ; it must have a moral product in lives habituated, motivated and efficient to live with other lives and to ren- der to the world the service of full living. This is all we are asking. It will be secured when we give the educa- tional process free course to work in the schools. We can only, after all, lay at our own doors, we the public, the blame for the failure of the schools. They 1 See the Declaration of the Conference on Moral Education, conducted by The Religious Education Association at Teachers College, New York : " We . . . believe that the moral aim, i.e., the formation of character, should be treated as fundamental in all education; that morality has a positive as well as a negative content; that the former should receive primary emphasis; that it consists, in one aspect, of promotion of the common good, in another, of the attainment of individual character." See the complete statement in Religious Education for April, 1911, pp. 117, 118. 152 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY are what we will them to be. We prate like idle children when we complain of moral inadequacy so long as we evade our own moral responsibility toward these our own institutions. WHAT IS MORAL EDUCATION? Undoubtedly the situation would be simplified if we were entirely in the light as to what is meant by moral education. If we mean enriching the student's knowl- edge of ethics, then it is necessary only to organize the material on the historical development of moral princi- ples and to present this together with a philosophical analysis of moral conduct and its principles. But surely this is not our aim. Moral education is something very different from and vastly more important and practical than instruction in morals. " Moral education " is es- sentially a misleading phrase ; it implies the notion that there is a department of human interest or abilities which may be regarded separately and which we call " morals." It carries the implication that the desired end would be attained by special topics in the curriculum, by adding courses in morality. This concept has led to the prac- tice of arranging lessons on the different so-called virtues, conducting drills on selected moral maxims and attempt- ing moral education by instruction in morals. It assumes that an intellectual analysis is the same thing as a vital experience. But the aim in education is not an expert on morality but an expert in morality, one who is capable habitually of the moral life. As in the phrase " religious education " so in " moral education " the adjective is descriptive, indicating the aim and quality of the educa- tional process. That aim, which determines the process, is that through the experience of all schooling youth should be habituated to full competency to social living. Moral education means education directed consciously to- THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 153 ward a society of righteousness, a brotherhood of good- will, a demycracy of love and goodness and well-being. At all events what we as parents desire from the schools, that which as citizens we seek, is that education shall count for moral character. We desire boys and girls who love truth and honor more than aught else of their own, and their fellowmen more than anything that is their own. We would have our children grow up to hate a lie, to loathe all meanness, to honor all truth and greatness, to cultivate the things that are good, to seek out high thoughts, to give their lives to noble, unselfish ends, and unreservedly to live for the common happiness and good. We seek spiritual democrats. We desire the schools to help us to this end ; we expect the schools, in a word, to teach children how to live and to teach them this great inclusive subject, so that they will naturally, habitually work out strong and fair lives for themselves and a better, finer, sweeter society for all. The aim turns us back not so much to any special subject as to the need for a social consciousness that will dominate all subjects. The primacy of the moral aim should make it dom- inant in the curriculum. It will be said that the school curriculum is overcrowded already. Then it is time to take stock and see what had best be thrown out. Take first things first ; if conduct is the largest thing in life, let conduct become the guiding principle in the curriculum ; then all things can come in the order of their merit for this actual social life of ours. Our present curricula are de- termined by a process which has for decades introduced new subjects and never shown an old one to the door. They have become more and more crowded, until all a teacher can do is to hurl the bare bones at a class. Why, for example, should the school attempt to exhaust life's knowledge of the classics of English literature.'^ Why not be satisfied to start a habit? Life leaves much time 154 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY for learning; the schools can leave some facts unknown. Really to teach the art of right living will mean the abandonment of the factory method of pedagogy by mass- drills, giving teachers smaller classes, choosing teachers for their powers of leadership, not for their cheapness; paying more in taxes for this supreme task ; abandoning our follies, our weak pride over traditional trifles and putting life before everything else in the curriculum. CHAPTER XII THE SCHOOLS AND MOEAL TRAINING The society of to-morrow is in the school of to-day. Democracy invests in the education of youth to-day be- cause it believes it is possible to determine, through them, the character of to-morrow. The possibility of realizing democracy depends on the training of the young in its habits and ideals. As a spe- cial type of society democracy demands special types of education in order to secure preparation for its special form of social living. Therefore, education for democ- racy is social training specifically directed toward certain qualities and characteristics. The tests of democratic education pass beyond the intellectual to the moral. We look for certain kinds of persons from the schools. Once we sought to make youth good by repression. In fact the only good child, of whose goodness we could feel assured, was the one safely laid away in the church-yard. Now we believe that the duty of society is to stimulate the child to express his whole life normally. Instead of lamenting that there are no good children we subscribe to the doctrine that there are no bad ones. Faith in nat- ural depravity has waned and faith in growing lives takes its place. Education emphasizes development rather than discipline. It sees in children not only the society of the future time, but society in the future tense, further along on the road toward realized ideals. We no longer seek to force young lives into the set molds of our present ways, ways that we know to be but sad compromises, after all. Rather we would face them forward ; we would stim- ulate them to self-realization. We do not know what they 155 156 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY may yet attain to, but this we do know, that above all besides, we crave for them riches and power in the realm of character. Changing times call for changed methods. In a rela- tively simple order of society the functions of the schools «eem to be simple and easily discharged. The experience of the students is comparatively uniform; their relations are simple and the demands of society upon them are easily met. But when we face our modern congested life, with its cosmopolitan character, its complexities of liv- ing, its temptations and varieties of possibilities, it is obvious that the schools have new problems. City living frequently involves the loss of home consciousness and the decay of neighborliness with its power to mold lives ; it brings a multiplicity of distractions and a new variety in types of living. Add to this the industrial situation, the demands on youth to early exclusive application to toil, the infinite variety of possible tasks, the moral strain of the current conflict between diff^erent orders of work- ers and between employer and employee, and it is evi- dent that the old simple type of neighborly school will not meet the need of the present day. Our *' general culture " has failed. We have expected to meet the need of increasingly complex social living in two ways. First, by dependence on compulsory general education. We said. Give every child all the cultural ad- vantages and knowledge discipline that belongs to a gentleman and you will make gentlemen of all. We, there- fore, selected a wide, inclusive curriculum designed to be applied by a factory process which passed the child through the stages of a knowledge mill, the elements be- ing determined by the traditional requirements of the gen- tleman. We forgot that the knowledge processes were only incidental to the making of the gentleman, that the informational elements in the training of the favored son, of a few generations ago, were only a small fraction of THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 157 that whole course of life, that total environment which molded all* his thoughts and habituated his whole life. The aim was right, to make every youth a gentleman, that is one who took life in terms of obligation and who, preparing himself for the life of usefulness, learned to live in gentleness, goodwill, social harmony and efficiency. But we centered attention on the gentleman's head and forgot his hands and his heart. How signally the infor- mational process has failed to make gentlemen in this sense of efficient social factors must be evident when we remember that juvenile criminality is not less prevalent among our American school graduates than amongst for- eigners, that the personal factors in our severest polit- ical problems are graduates of our schools and that, popular indifference to honesty of action, integrity of word, civic honor and domestic purity is accompanied by growing general intelligence. Our vocational training has been divorced from the greater realities of life. Second, we have sought to meet the demands of an increasingly complex civilization by vocational training. This is a wise recognition of obliga- tions of service to society, of the moral obligation of every one to do his work and to do it well. We can scarcely over-estimate the values of vocational training. Its dan- ger lies either in a narrow emphasis or in a wrong aim. Popular emphasis is distinctly industrial, trying to make full men by making efficient hands. Vocational training can easily mean the exploitation of youth for the sake of factories and dividends. The aim is wrong, too, when vocational training means emphasis on technical abilities as ends in themselves. It is of value only as it seeks to develop persons in efficiency to do their best work in the world. Moral education remains a problem because it has never been attempted in any large and comprehensive manner during modem times. The educational world is afraid 158 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY of it because of its apparent indefiniteness. It cannot be counted and it is intangible ; what place could it have in this age of corporeal realities? The educator who is up-to-date must be a man of business, " practical," iron- minded. If, under the pressure of the public will, he recognizes moral education, it becomes a segregated part of his mechanical scheme of things. His mind is fixed on its schedules, texts and tests. MORAL. TRAINING NOT YET TRIED Moral education has never had a real trial in our mod- ern schools. Almost all the practice that has come under that name has been no more than instruction in ethics or lessons on moral concepts and ideals. Educational in- stitutions have been offering courses of studies on morals instead of training and adjusting pupils as moral per- sons. There are numerous text-books on the virtues, de- scribing, analyzing and usually disintegrating them ; there are numerous syllabi classifying the virtues, directing and planning just when Truthfulness, Justice, Honesty, and Helpfulness shall be taught, but scarcely one comprehen- sive outline of education as a moral process for moral persons. With all these schemes it might well be supposed that children would come from many schools as familiar with the virtues as with the mountains, rivers, capes and bays of their own country and, also, that, just as these latter are but names until encountered in experience, so might the virtues lack all significance and reality. Fur- ther, just as the school geography becomes but an insuffi- cient and, often, a dangerous guide to a man lost amongst the very mountains he memorized in youth, so mere nom- inal familiarity with the topography of the realm of vir- tue would be valueless to those who seek to make their way therein. Moral training has been hindered by pedagogical mech- anisms. The multiplication of devices to teach things THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 159 about morals is probably due to the natural demand for the easiest ^ay of doing things. It is part of the tend- ency toward routine. The teacher who is confronted with the. broad and appalling task of the adequate education of a number of persons as moral beings, will welcome the conveniently arranged syllabus which relieves him of so much anxious thought and makes the task of moral edu- cation as simple as a drill in arithmetic. Such devices tend, however, to keep teachers satisfied with blind obedi- ence to schedules; they move around in sawdust circuits and offer pretenses of education ; they become blind to the breath and dignity of their real tasks. They cannot afford leadership and their dismal efforts have only dis- credited moral education. Disintegrating moral character. It will mean a seri- ous set-back to educational progress if we yield to the notion that moral education is a separable part of educa- tion, that it can be segregated, departmentalized and made the duty of a specialist, so that any others would have no responsibility in regard thereto. This is the fatally fac- ile method of settling the moral problem : push it into a pigeonhole, appropriately labeled, and place some one in charge of it. If " Morals " becomes a separate study in the school that separation is the most impressive les- son we can possibly give as to its unreality. If you can separate your morals from your mathematics then in later years you can separate your morals from your money making. So many now are able to keep their ethical con- ceptions in sealed packages where there is no danger of their escaping into life because they received them in that form, as a pedagogical pack. The familiarity with the virtues which comes from habitually analyzing them breeds only contempt, of them. A lesson in which motives are threshed down to the dust and ethical situations studied as one dissects a flower may easily breed prigs who know all about the virtues but 160 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY are innocent of entertaining any of them. There is no virtue in a memorized catalogue of virtues any more than there is any religion in a series of scriptural passages. Here we meet the old fallacy of substituting the symbol for the experience, imagining that a child grasps com- parative values because he throws his head back and sings that " two times two are four." He does not use the formula when he meets the experience; and he does not carefully repeat " Honesty is the best policy " when he sees his neighbor's peach within reach. Indeed, in the instance of this maxim, he might be even less moral if he repeated it and were controlled by the statement. Now this does not mean that there is no value in the direct teaching of ethics, but that (1) no systematized scheme of teaching virtues or goodnesses will ever make good men or train them in virtuous lives, (2) that immoral results are likely to come from separating morals into special courses, special teachers and departments, and (3) that moral education must be the aim of the whole school, dominating every teacher, guiding every course and touching all the pupil's life. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DEFINITIONS AND DEEDS The natural objection raised just here is, "You are throwing us back into chaos just when we are working out a system." Alas, the fallacy of systems ! They are the good that fights the best ; they are the means at which men rest content instead of going on to their ends. The system and the syllabus are the teacher's guides and never the pupil's goal. They are a good deal like railroad time- tables, something one can go by but not go on or in. Present practice in moral education faces the danger of mistaking the time-table for the journey. It is a good thing to work out syllabi ; they should aid teachers par- ticularly in recognizing the moral significances of current lessons and in determining varying emphases on moral MM THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 161 meanings according to the life-development of each pupil. Further, they will have value as the social and introspec- tive powers develop ; in the years from sixteen on youth can often discuss ethics without prejudice to moral con- duct. But, as means of education, they defeat the moral purpose by substituting discussions for deeds and anal- ysis for activity. There may be a capital difference between teaching morals and moral training. Our emphasis on the task of character development will be a disappointment to the methodologists who are concerned only with the content of the curriculum. We are more concerned with the ef- fect, and that brings into consideration all the causes which will produce the desired effect. We need often to remind ourselves of the perfectly obvious fact that lessons about morals have no special power to make moral people. The analysis of the virtues is not a virtuous act and mem- ory catalogues of moral attributes could be the mental possession of an immoral life. Some excellent definitions of morality have come from poor demonstrators. In other words, the task is not to be accomplished by courses in ethics. These may have some advantages especially in developing a certain needed awareness of moral situations and their possibilities. But even that has its dangers in developing undue consciousness of action. Because the democratic life is a moral experience train- ing for that life must include the essential elements of that moral experience. We are beginning to realize that so- cial living is a moral experience, that it makes tremendous demands on the moral life and that the single great and appalling deficiency of present plans of education lies in neglect to train that life. Therefore we see a quickened and spreading interest in what is called moral education. But there is little hope that we shall accomplish any- thing worth while so long as w^e go on playing the old tricks over with new variations. We have been unwilling 162 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY to think our problem out. We are demanding new courses in morals, new " codes of morality," new sets of commandments, new syllabi for the guidance of teachers. We hear of prizes offered for " codes of morality " as though the great need was that of defining right con- duct, as though the world had just discovered morality and needed to have it digested and codified. Shades of Aristotle 1 Why add to the o'er-topping mountains of definitions.'^ A feeling of sadness at the futility of it all comes over one when the long lines of books on ethics are surveyed. Is it sloth or is it blindness that leads us on, generation after generation, following the faith that de- fining a virtue is the way to obtaining it, hoping that courses on disintegrated virtues would give us the power of the virtuous life.'' -^ There is only one pathway here ; it is the same as that followed by educational science in all other departments and phases of life, the pathway of directed experience. The abilities come only through their exercise and dis- cipline. School-training will have moral effects in the degree that it is recognized by those who train as con- stituting steadily a series of moral situations. It will train for the life of democracy as it practices democracy in the social relationships of the school group, the rela- tionships between all the members of the society composed of pupils, teachers, supervisors, principals, board and other officers. Perhaps the problem is difficult because it is so very simple. It would help if we were to forget all our dis- cussions and seek to state simply just what we expect, particularly from the schools, as to moral effects. Is it not this, that our boys and girls acquire right social con- duct .f' Supposing, for the sake of simplicity, the prob- lem is transferred to another and more limited sphere ; 1 See " Virtue and the Virtues " by Gep. A. Coe, in Religious Edv/- cation for Jan., 1912, Vol. VI, No. 6. THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 163 what would we do if we desired right musical conduct? The expression is not very exact ; but let it pass for the sake of illustration. Modern methods in teaching music comprise at least these elements : creative action, constant repetition, discovery of meaning, development of judg- ment, taste and discrimination, introduction to ideal lead- ers and their work, the development of feeling and senti- ment. The process seems to be first action, then defini- tion and illumination and then idealization, action con- tinuing through and giving reality to all and securing the development of powers. The process results in abil- ities, habits and tendencies. Now the desirable results in moral training might be stated in quite similar terms, provided the experience be considered as a social one. The largest leverage in social, moral training is the control of conduct. It must be control of behavior, not control of mechanism. The principal element in moral training is action, action repeated, action more and more easily willed until it becomes involuntary. Actions make character ; they determine ideals and they interpret ideals. They create ideals for others. The school not only can control social action but it must do so if it is to carry on its ordinary work. It establishes standards of action and thus sets up ideals. It demands adherence to those standards and thus it develops habits. But often it has been thinking of these regulations of conduct purely from the disciplinary point of view, with regard to their rela- tion to the mechanisms of class-rooms and teaching. It is still, apparently, commonly unaware that such controls of conduct are teaching. The behavior of children is really determined in three like ways : through directed action in the learning institution, the school, through imitative action in the nurtural institution, the home, and through free, social action in the playing group. For moral purposes conduct must he creative. This means not simply making things but planning and realiz- 164 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ing purposes through chosen organizations and activities. This implies two elements, ideal enterprises and democratic self-control. Surely it is sufficient to suggest the value of these two elements in developing moral character. In- creasingly the young must realize the school, not as an imposed institution, but as a social enterprise in which they all have a share. This can come about only as spe- cial enterprises are developed, as they pass into student initiative and as they all merge into a general sense of the school as a social enterprise. This process develops pow- ers of control and makes it possible to throw increasingly responsibility for school life, " government " in a wise sense, on the members of this society, the students. Certainly experience of this kind is necessary in prepa- ration for citizenship. As it is, the child on leaving school is suddenly thrust from a condition of abject tutelage into one of unlimited personal freedom. He has had no train- ing in controls, no experience in self-direction as a mem- ber of a free group. Little wonder that we have juvenile delinquency when we have these lads and lasses plunged into life with no schooling for life. Some steps have been taken to meet this need by the organization in the class rooms of model cities and junior republics. The purpose is good ; but the plan does not meet the need. The pu- pils need self-direction in the normal activities of school life. Their training for moral living must be by experi- ence in the morals, the social relationships and duties of the school life itself, for this is their real world. Ethics rise out of moral experience. Given the ex- perience of right action its meaning usually takes care of itself. Whatever definitions may be necessary should follow the deeds. But definitions are seldom necessary. No good fables need a tag. There comes the time, in the high-school years, when youth asks its questions about conduct. The desire to analyze situations may be indulged where the situations hav^ gone before. Then THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 165 moral training is possible through the discussion of life's real situations. For example, let high-school people dis- cuss their possible occupations, let them discuss the voca- tions and then go on to discuss training for them. These elements are parts of real experience. They would lead to the discussion of the ethical situations involved. It would be a simple matter to develop a series of useful discussions on the choice of life work and on the social functions and ethical standards of different occupations and professions. Idealization is the dynamic of moral conduct. There is no moral situation concerning which the school cannot reveal controlling ideals. They are presented in varied forms, through persons, their actions, social situations and movements, and moral sentiments or ideals. They appeal to youth's faith in life, that one can make of it what he will. He believes in heroic determination. The splendor of heroic character makes its alluring appeal. While not so immediately determinative of action as are social habits and incentives it serves to color and often govern action under social stimulus. It sustains good habits and helps to inhibit bad ones. It is difficult to imagine any person with a consciousness of life teaching in a public school and avoiding the revelation of life's ideals in heroic persons and inspiring situations. History is a dry category of dull facts without them. If " history is philosophy teaching by example " the examples are commonly wonderfully inspiring. Through history and literature the door is wide open to ideals in persons, his- torical and fictitious. But the door is open also in all the sciences. Huxley, Darwin, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Wallace, were far from being saints, but their lives preach devotion to ideals, heroism, courage and initiative. Each in their own specialty is part of the child's scientific heritage. How can one teach mathematics and ignore Newton and Kepler or, if the teacher were really human, 166 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY fail to open a door into the mind of Lewis Carroll? If he was truly a mathematician he would find those spiritual worths that Prof. Keyser has uncovered for us all.^ And in like manner with all the fields of knowledge, they cluster about great persons, souls worthy to lead our youth to greatness, men and women whom they can well idealize. There is a tendency to discount the value of sentiments. But one thing is clear, that all persons who think of life objectively cherish some high forms of sentiment, of ideals set in literary beauty. Literary moral maxims have of themselves as much value as table manners. They must be part of something else, part of their setting and, in some measure, part of experience. They become sources of inspiration, they sustain when opposition presses hard, they guide in doubt, they give us choice vehicles to convey encouragement to others. Everything depends on their reality. They cannot be given to a class by an excursion through " Gems of Literature," nor by means of an encyclopaedia of quotations, nor by the old copy-book method. They are discovered as part of the experience of knowing life through literature, history and the sciences. Where the first is taught we learn to read souls, the souls of individuals and of peoples and then there flashes out here and there the shining hope and idealism of these souls. We catch the gleam and hide it in our own souls. That is not a process that can be precisely directed. It does not stand alone. It comes only when there is good teaching, only when one life leads other lives. There is nothing new, nothing added to the curriculum in what has been suggested here. There is no need of adding anything; the great need is that of interpreting all in terms of conduct. Before we attempt to add another subject called " Morals," would it not be well to 1 See his illuminating discussion of The Spiritual Significance of Mathematics in Religious Education, April, 1911, p. 384. THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 167 see what can be accomplished by really using, for the ends of conduct, J;he means now at our disposal? Once to see clearly that the aim of the school is to train persons in competent social living, and to set the school free for that purpose, is to convert the entire school process to moral ends. A school governed by such a purpose would saturate community life and create the environment favorable to its own plans and cooperating with its program. CHAPTER XIII SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES Granted that the primary purpose of the school is a moral one, what relation do the common studies hold to this purpose? The answer would be very simple if the moral aim implied only instruction about morals, but, since it involves a program of the development of social character, vari- eties of relations appear at every point. Any subject is related to the moral aim of the school in the degree that it affects the student's social attitude and habits. The test of the values of studies, for the moral-social purposes, lies in questions such as these : What interpre- tations of conduct and life do they present? What ideals do they help to create? What motives do they stimulate? What social experience do they afford? In what ways do they stimulate feeling toward worthy purposes? In a word, we ask. In what ways do the general studies constitute spiritual experiences? Morality is religion applied to conduct, that is, it is the issue in behavior of our view of social relations and the meaning and value of life. It is the work that results from a faith. All moral training rests on some sort of an idealizing basis. It is a basis formed in whatever constitutes or offers a spiritual experience, a quickening of the feelings of joy and confidence toward life, an eleva- tion of ideals and deepening of meanings. The schools cannot teach sectarian religious facts but they can and do offer this basis of the spiritual. They minister in many ways to the child's spiritual nature. The reality 168 SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 169 and power of that ministry is the measure of their moral value. ^ VALUES IN CIVICS Courses dealing with practical living peculiarly in- volve spiritual experiences. Civics is an instance. It is the science of social organization by political means ; therefore it involves social relations and duties. In a democracy it is a subject peculiarly rich for it must study the social mechanisms by which democracy realizes its spiritual purpose of the growth of social persons and the development of society. The teacher of vision makes it mean vastly more than the mechanics of government ; it passes over into a study of persons in their relations for a common welfare. It emphasizes the importance of political organization as affecting the well-being of people. It studies relative standards of well-being and so must involve questions of spiritual values. So taught, the subject becomes intensely human. It is no longer a matter of collecting taxes and administering justice but a study of how a free people live together and effect their ideals for the common good. It is evidently a moral subject since it must consider social conduct and, as it enlarges into a vision of a common human brotherhood it becomes really religious. Civics rightly taught is simply the teaching of social morality on the wide scale of total social interests. But even larger moral values are possible; this subject affords opportunity to apply the principle that teaching is the direction and organization of experience. Classes are easily led to actually work on the problems of social living; specific situations with which all are familiar in the community become the objects of practical service. A group of boys and girls discussing sanitation in their neighborhood will discover more than the facts revealed by a survey; they will find opportunities for usefulness; 170 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY they will form ideals and concepts of duty. They will practice moral living and, in the experience, find its spir- itual significance. Still this may seem to be remote from religious teaching. Of course, objectively the matter is clear; all teaching of the art of social living is teaching the practice of religion. But we could make a like claim for whatever relates to conduct in any form. What more, then, is needed? The motivation of conduct with religious sanc- tions and ideals. And these are precisely the results that flow, for example, from teaching civics under the demo- cratic concept in any adequate fashion. For the demo- cratic ideal is a social method based on spiritual ideals ; it is the expression of the principle for which Jesus lived, that each life was each man's chance to help the world to larger life. Democracy, studied in the concrete as presented in civics, reveals a social situation possible only as all men learn the way of common service. Thus a definite purpose toward a life of service is established in the pupil's mind. The search for an ideal civic life establishes certain habits of the religious mind ; it is a search for a practical, common, social goodwill; it is an attempt to organize all our varying interests in a common good. It reaches after the experience of a common brotherhood. The ideals involved may not be entirely clear to the student's mind, but the important thing is not so much to identify / religious ideals as to establish the habits that express them. The social emphasis in religion has forced the churches into civic interests ; it has compelled them to work for better civic conditions ; surely whatever helps youth to a better social spirit, through the understanding of civics, must be a direct contribution to the common ends which the churches and schools have together in an ideal society.-^ 1 Some of these ideals are stated in such text-books as, Ward & SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 171 PHILOSOPHY TEACHING BY EXAMPLE History. Many a teacher wishes, in view of the con- duct of youth, that time might be given to courses in the art of life. Yet often these teachers turn, with weariness of spirit to their work in the greatest of all courses, that record of man's endeavor to learn the art of life which we call history. The very people who attempt to teach right living by means of Hebrew history on Sunday often are blind to the spiritual values in other history. This is not so much because of any artificial division between sacred and secular history as because they have never seen how either Hebrew or early Christian history really count for life and society to-day. When that is once realized all consciousness of essential differ- ences is swept away. All history has two characteristics : i it is objectively " philosophy teaching by example," and, ; subjectively, for the student it is his projection into the race experience of learning the art of social living. For the young history is mediated through persons, through great lives. Necessarily it lacks synthesis ; it is polarized about great persons. They become leaders, ideals, revelators of ways of life. The young delight in them. Study may become a social experience of being with these exalted ones. Let no one object that such idealization is the foe of scientific accuracy. The danger lies in the other direction, that we shall imagine we are scientific when we have gathered up only the surface facts, the spatial details of the lives of persons and the move- ments of affairs. Scientific completeness demands more ; it demands that which lives crave, to know the feelings of men, to see their motives and measure their influence ; it must include the facts of the spirit. History cannot be taught unless the pupil is led to see the forces within ' Edwards, " Christianizing; Community Life " (Associated Press) ; H. K. Rowe, "Society, Its Origin and Development" (Scribners). 17^ EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY men. But to make a boy the worshiper of a worthy hero and one justly appreciated for his inner life is to give the worshiping life stimuli in the right direction. To establish the pupil's will toward ideal lives is to make history real, vital and effective. It is to gather up the flood of the life of the past for the forward movement of present lives. The light of personalized ideals is organized by the pupil, if he is wisely directed, into a moral consciousness in history. He thinks, no longer of individuals alone, but of groups, of persons in social relations, of the effect of lives on other lives, of the consequences of actions on the well-being of all. Without moralizing the teacher who sees these significances can help the pupil to discover them. Then the pupil enters sympathetically into the process which history records, man's endeavor for right and full life. But the essential contribution is that which has been only hinted at, the study of history may be a social experience. The ideal personages, the thrilling causes, the splendid situations, when youth's imagination touches them, pass from the past and the pages of books into living, present realities. The student feels himself in the moving throng of other days ; he shares their feelings ; his muscles quiver to act with them; he enlarges his area of social experience as he idealizes it. Then the skillful teacher directs and develops this social experience through dramatics and pageantry, intensifies its reality, and clari- fies its accuracy through wider study. There are those to whom heroes are very real for they have walked with them and learned of them. THE SOUL AND SOCIETY IN LITERATURE Literature. Here we stand on very familiar and oft- trodden ground. Few have thought with any care regard- ing the work of the schools without realizing that while SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 173 the study of literature marks its high point of spiritual possibilities^ it is also its low tide of pedagogical and social efficiency. English is the one required course prac- tically all through the high school and it is the one toward which the students most unanimously have an emphatic aversion. It is the bete noir to all save the few who manage to get be3^ond the mechanics of teaching and discover joy for themselves in the material studied. The reasons are very simple : First, they do not study English Literature ; they study things about it, its history, language forms and its creators. They are drilled in descriptions and dissections ; they are invited to admire that which they are required to analyze, an impossible combination. Second, the logical processes are inverted ; the teacher expects love for literature to grow out of its facts ; on the contrary, a desire for the facts would grow out of the love quickened through an experience of literature. The interest in an author's life follows a long acquaintance wuth his work. We have been pur- suing wrong ends, developing literary critics. We have constructed courses for the high school in the anatomy of literature, for the college in its pathology, as though we were training its physicians. And when the lower schools would fain respond to the student's hunger for the joys of literature they find themselves hampered by the college- entrance requirements. The tragedy of it all lies in the fact that the lower schools are using the years when youth's tastes are being determined not only in failing to quicken literary appre- ciation but in developing positive aversions. It is not strange that the people prefer the tawdry magazine and the defiling newsprint when they have been told that the path to real literature lies through the desert of dry facts, through the wearying analyses and the dust of the specialist's workshop. ^ut for the purposes pf democracy the most significant 174 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY values lie in the peculiarly vital social experiences that are involved in the love of literature. No one can enjoy a worthy book alone, for the enjoyment is pleasure born of the contact with another spirit and commonly involves ^ idealized contacts with the beings created by the author. Literature is an open door into fellowship with all the great, with those who have actually lived in the flesh and those who have been born of the imagination. They wait to walk with us. That which society has stored for our enriching becomes easily and immediately ours. Such communion and stimulus is only one side of social fellow- ship, but it is a most valuable side. Young lives especially need the stimulus of wiser minds and richer hearts ; they have a right to the leadership of the great ; they have a right to belong, not only to the society of the passing hour, but to the fellowship of all time, and to know its joy and strength. Literature is the means by which the democracy of the spirit is open to all; it is the means by which we have communion with the soul of all. This is its vital spirit. Here " spirit to spirit may speak." Here lies surely one of the large spiritual oppor- tunities of the school. If we could but hold clear the distinction between the letter and the life I Literature is a spirit of life which takes form in letters ; it does not consist in them, it only uses them as a means of revelation and communication. To know its ways is to enter the society of all those who have enriched the world with enduring thoughts, to hear the songs of those who have given us new heart, to catch the vision of those who have not been afraid of light, to grasp the hands of those who have not feared to walk alone, in mist or fog, in face of foe or doubts. It is to enlarge one's personal world. It is to have the power of banishing the rattling street and drawing within the magic circle of the evening lamp the calm face of Socrates, the sparkling eyes of Cellini, SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 175 the saturnine grin of Cervantes, the cynical smile of Carlyle, tlje human sympathy of Browning, Dickens, Thackeraj^ Mrs. Gaskell — time fails to tell the innumer- able company that wait our silent invitation. Such a society is very real. Habituation in its ways develops familiarity with its ideals, its language and its customs. The love of good literature is a high social experience and no one knows how to read a worthy book until the worth sought is just this contact with persons, wdth them in a degree that grows in reality and intimacy until the page seems to fade and the spiritual becomes the only reality. 'Not only is such experience possible to youth ; it is their right ; it is our social necessity. All this involves the conversion of the teaching of literature into an experience in literature. Surely this is precisely what we are doing with all school studies ; they pass from descriptions about facts to the facts them- selves as life realities. Those who are sighing for an opportunity to teach the Bible in the public schools have overlooked the fact that a thorough acquaintance with the masterpieces of English prose and poetry of the last three centuries would either give directly or would lead to all the biblical knowledge that would be definitely useful to their lives. ^ This does not imply that direct study is without value, but surely the values of biblical material do not depend on whether they are found in books or bound in limp leather. Language studies have their spiritual values, not only as the doors into literatures and the means of enriching the significance of our own literature, but as revelators of the inner lives of other peoples. They bring close to us those who are separated by language. They break down our prejudices and broaden our sympathies and appreciations. Race prejudices are possible only in 1 See, e.g., the many works on Browning, also such books as " The Bible in Shakespeare," W. A. Burgess. 176 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ignorance of the spiritual life of other peoples. Our derisive phrases shame us when we know their souls. Mathematics may make moral and spiritual contribu- tions. What can be more impressive than its universality, the sweep of its higher laws.? Reverence, humility and some sense of or desire for harmony with the universe comes when the student goes far enough in this subject. But, for the schools, the more immediate values appear in the methods of teaching the lower branches. To-day it is held in close relations to real life ; it so penetrates everyday experiences that it involves definite moral inter- ests in human relations and behavior. When problems deal with food-distribution, health-statistics, interests, rents and wages, while the teacher does not need to tag a moral, the pupil is always ready to discuss the social rights and duties that are involved. It is not enough that young people learn how to calculate the profits on a transaction ; they must be able to discern all its impor- tant elements, to think of it in its entirety and especially in its social relations. Where there is no consciousness of conduct, under social relations, any efficiencies acquired miay be only those of the enemies of society. Meanwhile habituation in exactitude is no small discipline of the soul because it involves real experiences both in thought and in action. It is hardly necessary to call attention to a less important but still quite valuable possibility in mathematics, the teaching of the current principles of commercial honesty and business integrity. Such social standards are surely a part of the curriculum of the school if its purpose is to prepare pupils for social living. CHOOSING A VOCATION Vocational guidance studies; these often consist in courses planned to survey the different occupations, to reveal their social functions and to aid in selection of SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 177 vocation. They are predicated on great moral concepts, such as the duty of work in order to play our part in society, the duty of choice under motives of service and the duty of fullness of cooperation with all the work of society. In the discussion of the various callings their ethical standards and their social relations become very clear to the minds of students. Pupils may gather the codes of professions and callings so far as they have been codified,^ and they may endeavor to discover the current principles or rules in other cases. These codes furnish the basis for discussions that are never lacking in interest. The discovery of the existence or the lack / of moral rules opens up the whole field of human relations in the trades and callings. Scarcely anywhere else is it possible to find interest as keen, participation as complete as in groups of high-school students discussing this two- fold subject: what occupations should we choose and what are the rules of the game in these occupations? Further a valuable moral contribution is made as the school actually aids the pupil in making a wise, suitable choice as to his life-work. Given teachers and guides conscious of the issues involved, with imagination seeing the youth going out into the world of work, it becomes a spiritual experience to consider life's opportunities. The total attitude toward the world may be determined here. Seriousness is natural to youth at this time when he thinks of occupation ; it constitutes his great social puberty initiation. He may find it a spiritual experience, a time of forming high purposes to play his part nobly and well, to give a full and rich life to his day. Industrial training may have spiritual values. Such training is very closely associated with vocational guidance and choice. But in the actual hand work in shops new 1 As, e.g., by the American Medical Association, the various Bar Associations and the Rotary Club. All these may be obtained from the respective local representatives. 178 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY possibilities appear. They arise in the peculiar relation- ships which here develop between instructors and workers ; they come into a common field, on a common plane, work- ing together. The informality and freedom of the shop with its close contacts gives opportunity for the use of personal influence and leadership. Other values appear as the shop experience calls out powers of discrimination, of foresight and will in the selection of objects of work and materials to be used. These are forms of will develop- ment and motor control. They throw the pupil on his own selfhood ; they call on him to weigh, choose and initiate conduct under conditions very like those which prevail in everyday life. Such values are easily lost where the school regards industrial training simply as a means of training mill hands and factory operatives. Hygiene, Here the moral values are evident ; the religious ones are not less. When we consider the life handicap of disease, the spiritual conflict that many wage simply because of unnecessary loads on the body one is tempted to place this subject first in the category of values. Who can live aright with others who is not right in himself? Who can live the life of devotion to the common good whose goodness harbors dirt and disease? And, still more fundamental, the life of the spirit rests so largely on these foundations that touch the earth. It is hard to live a holy life without a whole life; every strain carried by the will on account of unnecessary physical disabilities draws off from the power needed for life's greater purposes. The program of democratic liv- ing calls for the " keen joy of living," for strong and sup- ple muscles, for clear minds in clean bodies, for the free- dom and vigor of the healthy life. Most of all, social duty emphasizes the moral and spiritual value of the teaching of hygiene. Personal hygiene is only a form of social hygiene; health is desirable because one is a member of a larger body which SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 179 not only needs our full powers but must be shielded from ills we might disseminate. That leads to the study of community hygiene as a social duty, to the means by which we may cooperate to make this world a healthy place to live in, constituting an environment positively counting for joy and goodness. Personal hygiene is a splendid means of teaching social duty under spiritual ideals. Much of the teaching of this subject has been highly individualistic. It has often tended toward morbid self-consciousness especially where undue emphasis has been thrown on the aspect called sex- hygiene. All instruction in this special aspect should be merged in general hygiene. The facts of the sex life do not need the impress of singularity by specialization in youth ; they need integrating in the normal ways of life ; they need to become part of one's thought of society. But this does not lessen the importance of instruction in the facts of sex and training in the controlled sexual life. The important consideration is that it shall not be segre- gated from life, and, still more, that it shall not be divorced from its social significances. Certain simple facts must be faced regarding the teach- ing of the laws of sex-hygiene. They are : that the foun- dations of all social well-being lie in physical well-being, that immeasurable wretchedness, suffering and social loss result from offenses against the laws of sex and repro- duction, that much of this is due to ignorance and to partial or mistaken knowledge, that parents do not teach their children but permit them to acquire information from misleading and polluted sources, that the church has neglected this field of teaching and, in any case, would reach only a fraction of the youth population, and that the public schools have the knowledge, the texts, the facilities and the access to youth necessary. Let no one ask, why impart any information.'* Children are not remaining in blissful ignorance — even admitting that 180 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ignorance has any elements of bliss — for the street and the school-yard companions are their teachers ; they know much more than almost any parent suspects. The sad fact is that they know so much that is not true and so much with vicious emphases. Four things have to be held in mind as to the work of the schools in moral training in this particular field. First, that the purpose is conduct. Courses in personal and social hygiene are not designed to satisfy curiosity ; they are intended to stimulate toward right living. Light thrown on the physical facts of life is for purposes of leadership. Second, distinguish between the pathology of this subject and the plain clean facts which make for health and social ideals. On the point under discussion two things are to be taught, how life begins and how it is maintained in health. Both are only parts of the entire, embracing subject of physical well-being and effi- ciency in which this particular subject must be merged. The facts on the beginnings of life are a normal part of the subject of biology; they can be taught so that it is as simple and natural for the youth to know the biological facts regarding himself as to know those regarding any other living organism. The maintenance of right habits of sex ought never to be thrown out into a consciousness separate from general health and social duty. The third essential is that this subject shall be taught only by regular teachers, scientifically qualified, trained not only in the biological and physiological laws but also so trained that they will teach the subject with reference to social conduct. They are teaching in the light of the next generation ; they must have in mind the making of the democracy of the future. The fourth essential consid-^ eration is that no amount of information alone will accomplish the desired effect unless accompanied by rever- ence of spirit, by strong idealisms and by conscious rela- tions to conduct. Youth must be moved to love the right SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 181 way of life, to reverence their own lives, their own bodies and the Ha^cs of others. To hold in high reverence an ideal of purity and personality, to loathe heartily all un- cleanness will guide where much knowledge would fail. Such idealisms and reverences may be largely generalized, young people may be trusted to make their own special applications. But, next to the matter of scientific accuracy as to the facts to be taught, nothing is of greater importance than that the teacher shall feel that here one is dealing with spiritual issues, that here one is developing ideals and creating standards of value for living. This is true because here we deal with one of our primary and most controlling instincts, here we deal with forces that will continue to control large areas all through life, and here we touch that part of the life of feeling where ideals mount highest, where the greatest sacrifices may be made and the largest joys discovered. One has only to con- sider for a moment the relation of this pliase of life to that which we call character to realize its spiritual im- portance. One has only to consider its importance to society to realize the duty of a democracy in this respect as to the education of the young. A few subjects have been taken from the curriculum of the school and their opportunities for moral training, for the development of spiritual values, have been considered. Surely they sufficiently illustrate the principle that teach- ing the young the art of social living is, in any of its phases, a spiritual process, and that all forms of true teaching, when addressed to persons under a consciousness of their social relations, are but forms of moral training and, in a broad sense, forms of religious education. Such considerations are by no means unfamiliar to teachers in the public schools, but our mechanical processes,^ our 1 See the vivid description of current schooling by Professor William E. Hocking in his discussion of Education in " Human 18^ EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY bread-and-butter measures in public instruction, con- stantly tend to inhibit the teacher's interpretation of his everyday task in spiritual terms. The result is that we obtain only routine instruction. Every true teacher deals with souls; subjects are only his tools. Nature and Its Remaking," page 237. (Yale University Press, 1918). CHAPTER XIV SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL ACTIVITIES Since a school is much more than an agency of instruc- tion and is principally an organization of lives it will be in the activities of pupils that we shall look for the development of moral and spiritual powers. It is an axiom of modern education that the activities of the school are more important than its formal programs of instruction. This principle holds with equal force in religious education. In his activities the child has a real experience into which all his powers may be projected. It becomes a much more complete experience than is possible with class instruction. In action purposes are formed, projects are undertaken, ideal social purposes take form in the will. Ideals become real as they are realized in action. First, the school, as a total activity may aid in devel- oping a democratic ideal of social pui^poses. In itself the school is an expression of democracy. It is a social institution devoted to the development of society through persons. It preaches democracy, clarifying, illuminating and enlarging ideals, as it is explicitly organized for social ends. In the community, as each person shares in supporting and conducting the school, it affords for all some experience in democratic living. This participation is not confined to tax-paying; it is most valuable in an intelligent understanding of the school's work and in cooperation therewith, as through Parent-Teachers clubs and the like. Further, the very fact that the outstanding common institution of community life exists for the devel- opment of persons strengthens the community sense of the 183 184 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY value of persons. Such impressions affect not only adults ; they carry over to the children in the community. The school itself, as an activity, is a lesson in the meaning of democracy. Second, the more direct results will come from tlie pupiVs own activities in the school. One can arrive at some judgment of the spiritual values of school experience by asking as to the changes that take place in the social life of the school. What are the effects in attitudes and conduct of certain studies and of certain activities? If at any time one finds that kindness, consideration for others, social cooperation, earnest truth-seeking and con- sciousness of social standards for conduct become current on the playground and amongst student groups, it is usually safe to look for the causes in ideals which have grown out of actual experience in school work. Some- times the course of development is quite apparent as when, following certain courses, children play at civic organization, municipal service or do actually attempt in seriousness these forms of social relationship. But many of the most valuable lessons in democratic living come within the normal experience of the school itself and involve no social projection beyond its life. Spiritual values for democracy are developed in the school's discipline, government and organization. A school is a little world. It is the child's most immediate and impressive world. By its character it is determining the meaning of all his worlds. Sanity, order, precision and joy may here become normal to his universe. In the school where the plan of organization is definitely appre- hended by the teachers, where their cooperation and loy- alty to its ideals secures staff harmony the student con- stantly sees and feels lessons more impressive than any that could be put into words. Constantly he is catching ideals and adopting standards. What these are often appears when the child plays school; they become evident SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 185 when he goes out into the larger world. In such a school student-government gives expression to these impressions. Student self-government has value only where the school itself is Avisely governed. We owe much of the loose and morally disjointed, slip-shod methods of civic life to the happy-go-lucky, undisciplined, disorganized and often chaotic conditions of public-school management. This may have seemed inevitable in the small country school but it is without excuse in any organized school. But the value of all organization and government will depend on the degree to which it arises in the pupil's will. In this sense it must be self-government. So long as it is only imposed it will not be possessed as a personal quality. We are training for the life of democracy in the schools ; that must be a life of free willing for the common good. But our still prevailing idea of school discipline is that of a feminine Prussianism, a rose-colored but none the less absolute pedagogical autocracy. There are two very simple considerations to remember: First, school-life is the child's first experience in making wider social adjustment; Second, the life of the school is his first interpretation of the life of the state. If the school- room means the arbitrary regulation of his life, then social living is likely to mean that he will be good just so long as society succeeds in regulating him, in keeping an eye on him and a rod over him. If the administration of the school-room is imposed he is likely to feel no responsibility, no sense of a common social life and no ambition beyond that of beating this over-lord at its own game. DEMOCRACY AS AN EXPERIENCE The suggestion that democracy should actually be prac- ticed by classes in the school-room comes as a shock to many. " It would never do to let children have so much power; they would run away with the school." But that 186 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY is precisely what the autocrats have always said to pro- posals of democracy even for adults. The theory always has been that only those who now have the power can be trusted with it. Yet there does seem to be some ground for the objection that children have not yet acquired the powers of self-control; they do not yet know how to govern. That objection constitutes the most impressive argument for extending the experience of governing to them. We do not deny a child the right to sing because he has never had a course in singing. We expect he will, perhaps, come to the point where his singing may justify the listening audience if he has the chance to practice and undergo discipline. But, in every art, he will never learn without practice, least of all in the art of social organization. This art of living in a democ- racy, of social self-direction, is acquired just as other arts are. It cannot be learned through books or lectures or picked up after the habits are fixed. The way to become proficient in democracy is to practice democracy. Something has already been accomplished by the organ- ization of " school cities " and the like in classrooms. All such plans have merit in the degree that they furnish social experiences in control. But they have one serious shortcoming; it is evident to the pupils that they are special creations, importations to the class situation. The class turns from being a class to become a city or a junior republic. The experience of democracy should be integral to the normal social situation, or, if it takes a new form, the movement should rise spontaneously in the will of the group and not be directed or imposed. Otherwise the " school city " is likely to be only a routine exercise. But democratic experience may he provided in the nor- mal life of the room and the school, the playground and all that belongs to school experience. Here we meet what SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 187 is to many a serious difficulty in thinking of democracy as an activity in the school; it is objected that the children could not possibly elect their own teachers, nor could they select their courses and text-books. This is stated, apparently, as a fundamental objection. But it is based on the false assumption that the principal func- tions of a democracy are exercised in electing officers and directing legislation. So far is this from the fact that such activities are quite occasional; they are simply special forms of exercising those responsibilities in democ- racy which belong to adult life. The real practice of democracy goes on in all the common life of service, in our daily labor as contributing to the common good, in service we can render as citizens, in paying taxes, in common neighborliness. Just as in society the principal activity of democracy goes on through normal participa- tion in everyday life so will it be in the democracy of the school. To be temporarily debarred from electing officers is not to be deprived of the major functions of citizenship in democracy. The whole democratic society determines this matter of selecting teachers and courses — it is important that the child shall clearly see that the school is conducted by the will of the people — ; but this 3^oung citizen has ample opportunity to contribute to the democracy by regular w^ork, voluntary service, serious applications to tasks and to play and to the social ideals of the school by controls of conduct. The special need now is that school people shall take their eyes off text-books and school politics long enough to realize the possibilities in the child's actual experience in the school, that they shall become conscious of the school as a society and the child as one of its members. Here the child is actuall}^ living a social life, rather than " getting ready to live." In that social life many forms of activity arise, enterprises develop and powers are 188 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY called into play. The many-sided response of the child to the school's stimulation suggests the variety of forms of democratic initiative and control open to him. In free play, sports and atJiletics. Here the child is essentially at school; more of him is likely to be present here than at any other time. To him play is one of the most natural experiences of social living. No peda- gogical consciousness obtrudes itself and yet nowhere can teaching be more effective. Every power of life is called into play under conditions and for ends which are often thoroughly democratic. Here not only is play effective because it involves social mingling but because it develops social cooperation, coordinated and concerted action. Here social autonomy is exercised ; whatever is done is by the will of the people, the playing group. There is experience in guiding and modifying the social will under the pressure of school opinion. The mode of modification may often be far from calm or academic ; but it affords real experience in democratic living. In any organized play the social will is called into use and developed. A game is simply practice in the formation of a common goodwill. Play always reveals the anti-social child, the one who will not get into the game because he has not seen how much better is the common will than his own way. Some never get into any game as long as they live ; play is one of the best cures for their moral ill. The playing group will often succeed in curing selfish individ- ualism where the parents have failed. Here, too, the future men and women determine how they will play the game of life and whether they shall play for the game, or merely for winning or for some reward exterior to the game. In the care of rooms amd grounds. Democracy implies common property rights, and responsibilities in the school. If the room belongs to the child he must learn to accept the stewardship of his rights. Formerly the SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 189 school patrons presented plaster casts to the school rooms or hung enlarged photographs of the Forum ; now the room decides what it wants and, after discussion for weeks in which more is learned of art and beauty than ever before, the room experiences community improve- ment. It has made its own standard. The group has lived through a social passage from " 3^our room " or " your old grounds " to our room and our grounds. COMMUNITY AS A SCHOOL. Community service. The school trains for democracy through an organized experience in democracy; a part of that experience will be participation in the life of the community. If, as a society, the school group does not share in community service it does not train for com- munity living. A self-centered school cannot educate for democracy. This principle has been emphasized by mod- ern educational science, regarding education as a social experience directed toward a social aim it insists that all shall participate in the realities of social action. Therefore we find the group leaving the school room and going out into the factories and workshops to discover their community. They go out, also, to work in their community. Civics, mathematics and agriculture effect combinations that lead to the cultivation of garden plots, the eradication of weeds on the highways, the planting of trees and the realization of city ideals. Often it is difficult for older folks, with memories of the drill-room school, to realize that their children are being properly trained, educated, when they take the tools of highway- making in hand or do any useful, directed service. But all doubts would be removed if we could see what takes place in these pupils as they work, how they not only thus acquire the text-book lesson but, also, the lessons of social cooperation and the habit of thinking of the community in terms of obligation and service. 190 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY The purpose of democracy will convert the community into the child's school of social living. It will not only regulate its life for his protection : it will direct it so that it may be morally creative. It will devise forms of social cooperation. It will so organize its activities that there is a proper place for the voluntary service of the school group. Where the school becomes a part of the system of the city or village or county it has a working place, and its workers become part of the normal life of their community. This was what was happening recently when a dozen high-school boys left the building each carrying pick, or hoe or shovel. They spent the day in a small village, under the village official's supervision, in repairing certain spots in the highways and walks. They went as volunteers : they certainly enj oyed them- selves. But the point is that they identified themselves, by a social experience, with their community's life. That was effective moral training for democratic living. The great war gave a remarkable stimulus to school activities in service, calling every child to a share in the national enterprise. Red-Cross work, knitting, garden- cultivation, food-conservation, thrift, bond-sales, and work for children in other lands all projected the child's energies, feeling and imagination into the world life. The nation became more real and better loved, and the far-off world was brought near and into personal relations. The child shared the national life in a deeper degree and in a new manner, through service and sacrifice. It has been possible to make all this service something much finer than loyalty to the national group, valuable as that is ; often it has become loyalty to universal ideals, a process of identifying ourselves with a national life that sought to serve splendid aims. Such service has been an expressional activity in relation to spiritual ideals. As the vision has been kept clear and high it has had spiritual value. It has been simple, normal and most valuable moral SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 191 training. But it need not be confined to the times of national stress and emergency. Service is the normal experience of every member of a democracy. What is done when the need stands out in a startling manner may be done always — though the degree of intensity may vary — so long as there is developed a consciousness of common life in the nation and a purpose of loving help- fulness toward all men. Only a few of the possibilities of developing high pur- pose and establishing social habits through the experience of activity have been suggested. These simple facts are that the school is doing work with active persons ; nor- mally they are active all the time, and all their activity is determining the quality, the levels and power of their lives. They are always in the active mood. The school has ceased to be governed by its old-time picture of a child as a slightly animated ear, a passive vessel for information. Whatever it accomplishes with the child it accomplishes through his cooperation. If then, in all that it causes the child to do, it has the purpose of train- ing his powers of willing, choosing and doing from motives of social life, under the democratic ideals of life, as a member of a common, loving society, it is always carrying on moral training. It is always dealing with spiritual natures for social ends. It will be objected that the results that flow only from a general purpose are vague and likely to be unimportant. We are always tempted to turn from general purposes, from a common program that is a part of the whole school program, to some special efforts, such as courses of direct instruction in moral conduct. That is because it is difficult for some persons to have faith, hard to beheve that the highest good is always a by-product, hard to see that when life has its entire program it accomplishes its entire purposes. Just as no one finds happiness by looking for it, so no one finds strength or elevation of 192 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY character by any deliberate efforts to these ends. In every life spiritual strength comes through unwelcome pain, through everyday joys and appreciations, through difficulties met and struggle experienced. Desirable mo- tives develop in the life by indirection ; they do not come usually by observation. The principle which leads us to look for spiritual effects from the ordinary work of the school is one of the highest importance. It is fundamental to moral train- ing. We must remember that the spiritual is not a sep- arate faculty, a something disintegrated from the total personality. It cannot be taken out of the life nor can it be treated or influenced without influencing the whole of a life. And so that which is sought is the develop- ment of a whole life. Whatever symmetrically develops the powers of a life develops its moral and spiritual powers. Virtues are not separate items to be separately acquired. Indeed, it is not a series of virtues that is sought but the virtuous person, that is one whose devel- oped powers are directed toward certain ideals and ideal purposes. But to many all these considerations will seem to be very far from religious training. They certainly are if by religious training is meant instruction about certain subjects, biblical lessons and drills in catechisms. But if we regard the aim of religious education as that of prepar- ing persons to live in a religious society then these school experiences will not seem to be without value to that end. These school experiences ma}'^ not extend the pupil's knowledge of theology, but they may lead to habits of thinking about all life and the world in religious terms ; they may lead to those habits of mind and of action which characterize all religious persons. They will serve their purpose in realizing the religious aim of a society which sets first spiritual ends and is organized for love and truth and goodness. The school which furnishes SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 193 the pupil an experience of a society of common goodwill and of loving social cooperation is constantly, without the least danger of sectarian trespass, engaged in religious education. The effectiveness of the school to develop those qualities of life which are essential in a democratic society depends very largely on our faith in its spiritual possibilities. The whole problem of moral training is merged in this larger matter of developing social lives, in creating and making effective social ideals. The school is efficient in moral training in the degree that it stimulates and guides the child's spiritual nature, in the degree that it makes life mean for him a common living with all, common joy and common work under spiritual ideals. CHAPTER XV THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION If a religious spirit is essential for life in a democracy, and if this spirit is developed through education, does it follow that instruction in the Bible must be included in public education? Many answer with an emphatic affirmative and they bring many arguments to support their contention. Those who are urging the use of the Bible in the schools, however, often have no special educational basis for their claims ; they are likely to believe that religion is something which, in a mysterious manner, is conveyed from the Bible to those who study it. While we reject this notion it is worth while to consider other reasons for including the Bible in the materials of education, and to face the question whether this book can be used in the public schools. The Bible is integral to the heritage of democracy. Our developing ideal of democracy is the result of a long process of moral and intellectual growth, an accumulation of spiritual ideals. We have not created it ; it has come down from our fathers and each age has enlarged and enriched it. This heritage of freedom is inextricably woven with the history of the Bible. This is largely because the struggle for political freedom was so much a struggle for religious freedom. Wyclif, Tyndall, Milton, all suggest the relatedness of political emancipation to the popular use of the Bible. The ideals of man's worth and man's rights inspired the leaders for freedom ; the writers seem to be saturated with the language of this book. The literature of Anglo-Saxon freedom cannot be 194 THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 195 understood by one ignorant of the Bible. The prophets of democracy found here their strength and inspiration. Our peculiar type of civilization is a direct descendant of that which Hebrew prophets outlined and Hebrew people enjoyed. There are vast differences due to devel- opment, but there are the same insistences on certain values, personal, ideal and social, and there are the same endeavors after freedom of the spirit. He who would know the heritage of democracy in world ideals must have the prophets and poets of the Bible in his mind. The Bible is a unique book and yet a universal book. Every man finds his own heart there. Every people finds itself at home in the biblical ideals. That is because they transcend their own settings ; we lose sight of the orientalisms and the common language of religion is heard. Thus the Bible becomes for us the most natural and the most powerful instrument in developing religious ideals and feeling. When we seek to teach religion no other literature can approach this. Whatever view we may have as to its historic making we are compelled to recog- nize it as the supreme religious classic. It has been greatly misused in the name of religion, abused as the tool of sectarians, and treated as a fetish by the ignorant, yet it comes to us with the dew of the morning, stimulating with ideals, compelling in its commanding characters, touching the deep places of all sincere lives. It is the literary precipitation of the spiritual life of a people " with a genius for religion." For us who are their spiritual heirs it is difficult to think of any kind of train- ing for life which omits this book. The Bible is peculiarly the book of democracy. When we clarify its essence from the incidental we find, all through, one consistent, developing emphasis on the inter- pretation and valuation of all life in spiritual terms. That emphasis is distinct in the later prophets and finds its most illuminating setting in the life and teachings of 196 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY Jesus. Now this central emphasis is also that of democ- racy. The total effect of the Bible sets forth those values in personality which democracy holds supreme. For the strengthening of the spiritual ideal of democracy society to-day needs the stimulus of its historical development, needs that setting in noble words and that illumination in heroic lives which come through an open-minded familiar- ity with the Bible. Now if the Bible is so valuable Jiow are we to make sure that it becomes the spiritual heritage of the children of democracy? There is only one institution which reaches practically all the children, and so the ready answer is, See that the Bible is taught, or at least used, in all public schools. That suggestion is easily made, but it calls for courses of action in which the difficulties and objections seem to be insuperable. These must be faced before we can be quite clear as to any plans for teaching the Bible as a part of education for democracy. There are, first, serious problems which arise in con- nection with the three reasons urged for the reading and study of the Bible in public schools. These reasons are: that it is part of the child's literary heritage, that it is of value in moral training, and that the child needs its materials for religious instruction. But the three reasons are often confused in the public mind. Many are urging the literary and moral value of the Bible who are inter- ested only in its doctrinal teachings. Those who urge the value of its direct moral teachings must face the question of its immoral teachings, as in the practices of an ancient people and the claims for divine approval of social customs long since outlawed. An examination of the propaganda for the use of the Bible in the schools reveals a preponderance of interest on the dogmatic side. The reasons adduced are educational but the motives are ecclesiastical. While many teachers recognize and seek to use the literary values of the Bible, the vigorous cam- THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 197 paigns for its introduction into public education are distinctly sectarian. Now it ought to be clear that we must not endeavor to secure the teachings even of our own faith — even when we are confidently and complacently certain of its superiority — under false pretenses. No purpose is so noble it can justify ignoble means. Even though we desire with all our hearts, and with the best human aspira- tion possible, that all the young should become Christian we cannot covertly, by means socially unworthy, attempt to secure their conversion. The question of the Bible in the schools must be examined altogether apart from our convictions regarding our own religious doctrines and institutions. THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE USE OF THE BIBLE The Bible and the child* s literary heritage. The first reason for the use of the Bible in schools seems to be a good one. The school must help the child discover his literary heritage. Not only is the Bible an essential part of that heritage but biblical language has saturated all our everyday speech. Moreover this book is a part of the world's literature. Our day calls for sympathy with the thought of people of all lands and times. There is the same reason, at least, for the study of the Bible as for the use of Greek, Roman, Romance and Norse literature. But we must be sure that it is used as literature, subject to the laws that govern all literary productions, treated precisely as we treat Greek and Norse legends and poetry. The school has no right even to suggest its religious authority over the child's conscience. We may, with propriety, insist that, in our American civilization, the Bible lies back of Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Lowell, Lincoln and Ruskin. There can be no valid objection to the inclusion of passages of literary worth from any religious classics. The Shepherd Psalm should be included 198 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY in school-work, not because of its teaching on God, but for the same reason that passages from " In Memoriam " are included, because elevated ideas are expressed in stately, harmonious and simple language. On the same grounds passages from the Buddha legends might be included to advantage. Biblical passages, coming under this category, are found in school-readers. In high schools there could be no valid objection to the reading of the book of Ruth, for example. But all this would be simply the study of literature. Would that pure literary study content the advocates of the Bible in the schools ? The Bible and moral training. The second reason is a part of the public demand for a moral product from the schools. But there are serious fallacies in the argu- ment that we can depend on the Bible to accomplish the moral aims of the school. In the first place, morality is more a matter of training than of instruction ; it is principally dependent on the actions and habits of the life. One might have complete familiarity with the moral teachings of the Bible and yet be the veriest rogue and menace to society. Moral living does not develop from a study of the rules of behavior even in the most exalted books. To memorize canons of conduct will not make a gentleman. Literature does help in forming ideals but it does not insure conduct. Next, the morality of the Bible is not the morality of this age. Social ideals have developed. The moral conduct of Abraham or of Jacob would hardly pass muster to-day. Democracy demands more of men. Which would we commend to a young man to-day, the example of Jacob or that of Henry Esmond? The young find difficulty in modifying Abraham by his historic setting. It is true that lofty ideals, framed in sublime language, are presented in the Bible. They have passed over into our common life to such a degree that they owe their THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 199 authority not so much to the book which contains them as to the answer they quicken in our own breasts. They have the authority of conscience. Some of the characters have been idealized for our times ; they owe their force to this idealization rather than to any evident superiority to heroes more immediate to our lives. It is difficult to be more attracted by Samuel than by Lincoln, or Living- ston or by Florence Nightingale. And which would count for more to a boy to-day, Saul and David or Chinese Gordon, Theodore Roosevelt or Dr. Grenfell.'^ The latter are real, comprehensible; the former are entangled in historical data and oriental customs. The attempt to find nearer at hand material of moral value does not lose sight of what has been said on the place of the Bible in our spiritual heritage. But it is necessary to discrim- inate; there are degrees of value within the Bible. The Bible is essential but it is not the most convenient nor the most effective material for moral instruction. When its use in the schools is urged on grounds of moral teach- ings the school-men have consistent objections; they have other material, ample and free from divisive elements and historical difficulties. They say, moreover, that the churches which have entire freedom in the use of the Bible do not use it in teaching moral living. Those who are insisting on the Bible in the public schools for moral purposes are not organizing their own biblical courses in churches for moral ends. The Bible and religious instruction. This third and most common plea comes from those who regard the Bible as a book of explicit religious authority. They point to the large number of children growing up in ignorance of this book and urge that, since it is essential to their welfare, the public school is the one agency which can give it to them all. This propaganda commonly ignores the fact that much biblical material is already in many school-readers, that quotations from the Bible abound in SOO EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY English literature. Often it denounces the schools because they do not make a special subject of Bible-study. It is indifferent to what the schools are now doing with the Bible because they are not doing what is desired : teaching religious doctrines by its use. It would be impossible to meet their wishes, not only because religious doctrines lie beyond the province of the schools but, equally, because there is not and there cannot be agree- ment as to what doctrines should be taught nor as to how the Bible should be interpreted. PROBLEMS AND DIFFICULTIES A second group of problems arises from the nature of the schools as institutions of a state which is founded on freedom of conscience. The Bible has a unique place in Christianity ; it is a book of religious authority, officially so recognized by most churches. To many it is a book of supernatural authority, direct and explicit. It contains exact directions for conduct and for belief. To others it has authority in the degree that it speaks with power ; it is followed where it leads forward. What- ever the attitude of individuals may be the Bible has become peculiarly an ecclesiastical book, associated often with church ordinances and ceremonies. It has been differentiated from other literature, in part because it is difT'erent in many respects, but more because it has been historically associated with the founding of churches, with their conflicts one with another, and with their propaganda. It cannot be disassociated from these sec- tarian connections. It is still commonly used against faiths that are at home in the United States, and each group tends to use it in a sectarian manner. Parents desire their children to know it as the foundations of their own faith and the foe of other faiths. The sectarian character of the Bible, as it stands in popular usage and thinking, and the sectarian aim in THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 201 biblical instruction must be remembered whenever we consider a plea for its use in the public schools. The schools are public institutions and the public life of America is absolutely committed to the principle of the separation of church and state. When the state lends its power to support any particular creed it steps beyond its province, it passes from the civic realm into that of conscience ; it breaks the agreement of freedom of con- science upon which this democracy is established. When the public-school teacher treats the Bible as a book of religious authority, using it in worship or for dogmatic purposes, that teacher, while an agent of the state, is engaging in religious functions of an explicit character and is trespassing on the rights of the churches. He is offending against personal religious liberty. Even though we may agree entirely with the doctrines that are taught, though we may admire the worship, we must still insist that the state has no right to teach religion, as such, and that we have no right to depend on its power for the propagation of our own faith, for we would oppose the propagation of error by the same agency. It is easy to understand how many indorse the teaching of religion in the schools — meaning their own religion, but the plan is fair neither to the school nor to the churches. If it is urged that the schools can agree on a common body of biblical teachings, the answer is that it is not the business of the school to determine the content of religious teaching; it is not their duty to formulate a common American creed, nor have they the right to select any sort of literature for the schools on a doctrinal basis. That they can select and use parts of the Bible purely as literature no one questions, but any selections made upon a doctrinal principle would be offensive to nine-tenths of the people. So far as any attempt, as has been seriously proposed, to agree on a few simple statements of religious truth, is concerned, such a state- 202 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ment, no matter how simple, would constitute the creed of the public schools which adopted it. Whenever we find ultimate common ground in religion we get down to a substratum that is already commonly held, that has no special significance for life, a creed too thin for life's foundations. The public school is not prepared for the work of teach- ing religion. Teachers are not trained for that purpose. They are not selected with reference to their creeds, as a rule. Nor are we, on serious thought, prepared to com- mit the religious teaching of children to teachers who may have no effective religious life or who may be of faiths emphatically different from those in which we would train our children. The state has a right to engage teachers of any faith ; but usually parents are not quite ready to have religion taught to their children by Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Christian Scientists or what not. In fact the school system does not regard the teacher as a teacher of religion. If it did it would institute courses in teaching religion in the normal colleges ; it would engage teachers with reference to abilities in this field, and it would test their work by results in religious knowledge. Lacking the consciousness of this duty the state expects no professional training with reference to religion. The result is that any efforts in this direction are purely those of amateurs so far as teaching is concerned. State instruction in religion is an invasion of the rights of the churches. In the degree that we seek to lay this duty on the public schools we rob the churches of their greatest religious opportunity and privilege. When the church evades the duty of proper religious instruction and turns to the public schools, saying " You do this," she closes the door on her future. There can be no church to-morrow unless the church trains the children to-day. We have no right to relinquish the religious training of the young. It is a private duty that cannot be given to THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 203 public agencies. Primarily it is a duty of the family; here it must begin and be maintained. Then, as families are associated in churches, they are able to agree on suit- able teachers of religion for their children in the churches. This selection they cannot make with reference to public- school teachers. It is a careless, thoughtless attitude, one of indifference to the importance of religion, that leads to the demand that the school take over this duty ; it fails to see that this work calls for special training, for an atmosphere of religion and for spiritually minded persons. The agitation for direct biblical instruction in the schools is due to two causes ; first, it is an attempt to lay another duty on these public agencies, a part of the habit of extending the field of public activities, and, second, it is an attempt to import the customs of other countries having civic ideals and civil conditions different from ours. Now, in the United States, we cannot urge English methods for England still has a state church; also, England is by no means united as to the propriety of religious instruction in state schools. We cannot urge German methods because the German system of control down to the last detail of the content of instruc- tion was possible only under Prussianism. Even the prac- tices of New Zealand, Australia and Canada do not hold good for the United States, for these countries still follow the traditional ways of their mother land. PROPOSED SOLUTIONS Acknowledging the difficulties and limitations as to the use of the Bible in public schools it has been urged that it would be possible not only to exercise freedom in teaching the Bible but to extend into thorough religious instruction by one of the following plans: 1, Through pastors, priests or appointed church workers who would visit the schools at stated periods in order to teach religion. But this would be to ignore the principle of 204< EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY separation between church and state : it would take advan- tage of the power of the state to gather children ; it would use the equipment of the public agency for private purposes. Further, it would tend to disrupt the social unity of the school by injecting sectarianism, by quick- ening the consciousness amongst children of church lines of division. 2, By providing that schools be dismissed for one half day each week in order that students may go to their churches for religious instruction.^ This plan is without objection so far as questions of civil relation- ships are concerned. It could mean, however, nothing more than the erection of an extended Sunday-school program in the midweek. It has no special relation to the question of teaching religion or the Bible in public schools save as it would tend to make it less necessary. This plan is not the same as the so-called Gary system; here a regular schedule of classes is maintained by the united efforts of the churches and children are in at- tendance at religious instruction in a number of church- schools — in practically continuous operation — when they are free from the regular public-school program." Neither of these plans, nor the numerous forms of after- school instruction carried on by the churches in New York, must be confused with plans to teach religion in the public schools. These plans have no organic relation to the schools ; they use neither their time, money, forces nor authority. 3, It is proposed to teach religion indi- rectly in the schools, using the Bible in literature. But we ought to be honest, not attempting to crowd religion in surreptitiously; when the Bible is taught for its religious values — our religious values — it is dishonest to call that the teaching of Literature. 4, By the presen- 1 Proposed by Dr. G. U. Wenner in " Religious Education and the Public Schools," (Am. Tract Soc). 2 The Gary plan is discussed under " Community Organization." Full particulars may be obtained by addressing the Religious Edu- cation Association, 1440 E. 57th St., Chicago. THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 205 tation of religion as a subject of scientific study. This might be perfectly proper, but it would be devoid of religious value. Religion as a subject of knowledge is not necessarily religious. To master its history may not mean that one is mastered by its spirit. 5, By Worship. It is still the custom in many places to open public schools with religious worship. The practice is forbidden by statute in some states. The prevalence of the custom is due to its long establishment ; it comes to us from two sources, tradition first, the methods in vogue for so long in days when there was agreement on Christianity as the one faith, and also from the tendenc}^ to think of the school assembly in churchly terms. But a consideration of what is really taking place in public-school worship must give us grave thought. Selections from the Bible are read as selections from other books are not read; it is treated as a book of peculiar religious authority. Hymns are sung which were written to express and develop specific doctrinal concepts. The principal, or teacher, or visitor offers prayer, a distinct act of religion with definite doctrinal significances. In a word, the state here takes over the functions of a church. No matter how desirable it may seem to be to cultivate a spirit of wor- ship, is it really fair, is it honorable toward the Jew — to be specific — to use this school which he is compelled to support as a means of propagating a faith contrary to that which he holds ? Can any faith afford to advance itself by unfair means .^^ Arguments drawn from the custom of prayer in legis- lative halls will avail nothing here. The case does not rest on precedent but on right. It ought not to be decided either by legislative custom or enactment ; it ought to be decided by our own sense of justice. But the legis- lators do not engage in sectarian worship — nor usually in any sort of worship ; even that is beside the point, for legislatures may act unconstitutionally. Nor does 206 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY the case of chaplains in the army apply, for they are ap- pointed under an agreement between the different church communions. In both cases only mature persons are af- fected who can and do use their powers of mental inhibi- tion and their right to be absent. General exercises are a valuable part of school training, but they ought not to be ecclesiastical, nor doctrinal, nor, in the popular sense, religious exercises. The religion of the school finds expression in an ideal of citizenship. If you want to see school children really worship go to a general assembly focussed on patriotic ideals. Social aspiration and service give ample opportunity for common feeling and devotion for the school group. There is only one attitude for the religious citizen, one equally essential to the preservation of civic freedom and to the welfare of religious agencies : it is to stand uncom- promisingly on our spiritual principle of the necessary freedom of religion and the consequent separation of church and state. This attitude is no small contribution to democracy ; it is democracy expressing itself as to the relations of the state to the religious life and to religious thought. Doubtless it seems that we have only suggested diffi- culties and have offered no suggestion of a solution of the problem of religion in the schools of a democracy. This is inevitable : there is no solution, so far as formal relations are concerned, which will give religious teaching a place in the schools. We must remember that the prob- lem goes back of any question of religion in the schools ; it exists in this form simply as a phase of the under- lying problem of securing for religious teaching an adequate place in the child's program and experience. The problem to be solved is not, how can we get religion into the schools, but, how can we get religion into the child's life.'^ Before that problem it is worth while to clear the ground, to make up our minds as to certain THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 207 methods which cannot be used and certain agencies which are not available. Then we can take the next step of concentrating attention on the development of the means and the agencies which are available. If the schools cannot be used, if the Bible cannot be formally taught in public schools, why waste time over that issue.'' Would it not be well to go back to the original purpose and begin to improve the opportunities now at hand and open to us in which the Bible may be taught .'^ The blame for ignorance of the Bible lies not with the public schools but with those who are directly responsible for religious instruction ; it lies with those who clamor to have the Bible taught in schools and who also crowd the children into basements, cut the time schedule, furnish untrained teachers and levy on the children for the sup- port of a school which they call a Bible school. We trifle with religious education in religious agencies and then ask civil agencies to take it seriously. We say that religion is the all-important concern for the child and for the welfare of civil life ; but there is no evidence that we mean what we say for religion is the last matter and the least to which we pay attention in the child's educational program. We have no right to criticize the public schools for any shortcomings so long as our own efforts are so feeble, so fainthearted. When the church takes the child with anything like the seriousness with which the state treats him, the new kingdom, the democ- racy of the spirit, will be much nearer at hand. There is no reason why the churches of a community should not fully and properly provide for all the religious instruc- tion needed by all their children. It will call for only as much thought and investment as is needed for our community provision for general education.^ 1 For a discussion of this point, and on the practical methods involved see " Religious Education in the Church," Henry F. Cope (Scribners, 1918). 208 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY Along with an adequate program in the churches, along with the acceptance of full responsibility for all direct religious teaching of the young, it is important that there should develop a sound opinion and social attitude as to the relationships between the churches and the public schools in educational matters. This necessity is the prime reason for what may seem to be a long discussion of a negative character. Every attempt to secure religious ends by means that are not wholly right defeats those ends. Every attempt to evade the law or to ignore the civil and social rights of all others — no matter how erroneous their creeds may seem to be — only stirs divisive strife, obscures spiritual purposes and hinders the realiza- tion of a united, spiritual society. Besides, the agitation which emphasizes the values of biblical instruction in the schools tends to create an opinion that this is the only way that religious values arise in school life and to lead teachers to forget those means of spiritual influence and leadership which do not raise controversial questions. If we are estopped from the use of the Bible as a special religious literature we are not estopped from spiritual results in the schools. All that training which democracy involves and requires is essentially a training of the spirit ; it may be given in the schools and it must be or they fail of their purpose. No one will accuse a school of sectarian influence because it leads children to love their neighbors and to follow the life of goodwill and service. No one will bring the charge of sectarianism because the school aids children to live the life of truth and goodness, to reahze the ideal of a spiritual democracy. The school is expected to be a force developing character by reveal- ing life, inspiring motives, training habits and quickening ideals. It cannot avoid these spiritual duties, for it is an educator of those who are spirits, and it either develops a certain spirit of life or it does not train for democracy. THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 209 Would we not do well, then, in the churches, to accept our own special share in religious training and to lend our energies to aiding the school in discharging their spir- itual mission? CHAPTER XVI ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY Education for democracy will involve the democratiza- tion of our entire experience of life under an education ideal so that all living will be a scheme of education ; a plan of education undemocratic in any particular cannot train for full democracy. Our institutions have been developed under political freedom; they have been modified by experience and in response, to some degree, to the public will. A vital, social aim is molding them to-day, but they are far from being truly democratic. For democracy implies more than freedom; it implies purpose, the united action of a people for a better society. No commanding, unifying purpose has been generally followed, nor have we recog- nized any common principles under which our varied edu- cational activities might be coordinated. Our endeavors are divided between homes, elementary schools, high schools, churches, community agencies, colleges and uni- versities. Some relationships have been established be- tween the formal schools which take the child on from the age of six to the end of a college career. But it would be a mistake to think of these schools as constituting an educational system. The public school gets the child when his education is half completed ; by the time he en- ters its doors his life has received its most significant development. The public schools have, as yet, little to do with the child's hours of leisure when the process of education is most active, and they are debarred from formal endeavors to develop him as a religious person. There are those who hold that the present situation is 210 ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 211 inevitable, that it inheres in our political freedom. Cer- tainly^ if unity meant uniformity, or if it implied central- ized control we would resist all efforts to coordinate edu- cation. In spite of the fact that popular education is the first duty of a democracy, in spite of the fact that educa- tion for democracy must include all the powers of life and, to be effective, must proceed in all its phases under unifying social concepts, we do well to make haste slowly in the organization of education. We are not willing, in its important, determinative activity, that there should be so much as the semblance of autocratic control. Even though we might have the power of selecting the educa- tional authorities we are not ready to commit unreservedly to them matters so vital. We fear the dead hand of tra- dition ; we fear the tendency of fixed boards to become dull and wooden, conservative and unresponsive to the public will ; most of all we fear the attempt to standardize processes, to establish arbitrary fixed norms in matters so vital as education where the elements of personality with all its differences enters in so largely. And, when we seek to include the elements of spiritual training, it is difficult to conceive how any board, no matter how broad its intellectual sympathies might be, could design and direct systems for all the children of all the people. Education affects so directly the ideals and the wills of people that a free nation will always regard with sus- picion any attempts to establish centralized control. Free schools must not only be free from fees for tuition, they must be free to respond to the public will. Germany established control with the indubitable purpose of mold- ing a nation to the inherited will of a predatory monarch and a military caste, making of a people a single intelli- gence and will, automatically registering in response to its rulers. The result has been the sacrifice of freedom, the loss of those spiritual qualities upon which freedom grows — free vision of ideals, virility of conscience and 21^ EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY sympathetic consciousness of common human rights — and the creation of the most serious problem the mod- ern world has faced. But centralized or autocratic control is not essential to a fairly complete system of education. Here, as else- where in a free society, the one thing needed is a common will based on intelligence and worthy purpose. This com- mon will would be the universal standard in education. It would grow out of an understanding of the social proc- esses of education, of the needs of persons and society in a democracy, and the gradual establishment of minimum standards based on the rights of those being educated and the needs of society. The next step would be unity of action in social units to see that in every detail the needs of society are met, that existing activities are coordi- nated and provision is made for whatever may be lacking in our present plans. The community is the unit in which it is feasible, and natural, to secure educational unity and comprehensive- ness. Communities have already learned to cooperate in providing instruction for children through certain years. The public schools are demonstrations of community pro- grams as far as they go. The group constituting a com- munity is a working unit, conscious of its own needs, re- sponsive to these needs and capable of meeting them. They may constitute the units of a larger and more gen- eral organization, the many communities finding ways of cooperation through their community of interests. The first step is for the community to discover a com- mon ideal and standard of education. It must answer the questions. What are the rights of our children? What are the functions of children in community life? ^ What, in view of the future of democracy, is a right program 1 A question answered in a special study made for the Religious Association by Professor George A, Coe, published in Religious Edu- cation for February, 1918, ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 213 for these children? It must establish standards of com- munity life determined by the rights of lives and the needs of democracy and not by the exigencies or the greed of business. In a word, the community must come to see itself as existing for democracy and as functioning by education. Every community goes through some of these three stages of progress : First, a recognition of exist- ence, the simple realization that a group is being formed; second, conscious purpose to enlarge, strengthen and organize the group ; that is the stage of most communities to-day, and, third, consciousness of function, an awaken- ing to the question. What is the ultimate purpose of this community? When that stage is reached they outgrow the old standards expressed in civic statistics ; they are not content with the aims of commerce and industry, nor can they rest satisfied with beautifying streets simply that they may be more beautiful than some other streets. Men do not care to live in " Spotless Town " if all the town exists for is to be spotless. Better to be in a mud- hole trying to grow men than on a marble slab in a grave- yard. THE PURPOSE OF A COMMUNITY The ideal community has specific purposes. It is a so- cial organization for the sake of people. Gradually it tends to interpret all its life in terms of their lives. Its programs of commercial development, schemes for the city- beautiful, parks and institutions, laws and ordinances, are all parts of its general plan of growing, strengthening and directing lives. It finds its function, a vital one — dealing with persons, an educational one — developing their lives, a democratic one — associating them in a com- mon life for the good and happiness of all. The first and greatest contribution a community can make toward education for democracy will be the develop- ment, in all its people, of the habit of looking out over 214 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY its entire life and asking, Just how does this or that make for the manhood and womanhood we need? Just how does this or that promote or retard the common social life of goodwill and goodness? This is the growth of a consciousness of function. It is to think of the township or village or ward as having a definite, controlling pur- pose, as existing in order that people may find the condi- tions most favorable, the stimuli most helpful and the opportunities of activity most effective for the realization of full social living. The commimity in a democracy, then, accepts an edu- cational function. The purpose which finds expression in the maintenance of public schools penetrates every activ- ity of the community. Where a sense of this responsi- bility exists it will organize itself. The local group has its machinery for civil government, but, at present, it lacks organization for larger social purposes. It has the means of syndicating its resources to secure common con- veniences and necessities, such as light, water, sanitation, policing and transportation. But its council, or govern- ing body, is concerned exclusively with these physical con- ditions and, usually, regards them apart from their rela- tionship to the higher life. Either the representative body must be directed by a full consciousness of the pri- macy of the interests of persons, or, since this is not likely to be possible because they are chosen for other ends, there must be created another body which will repre- sent the community in its interests in moral and spiritual well-being. Community direction for spiritual ends waits for the formation of representative bodies chosen for their wisdom and power in this field. At present, no matter how well- disposed the common council may be, it has been elected to administer public affairs on an economic basis. If it provides for welfare it does so, not because welfare is its ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 215 primary concern, but because to neglect it altogether would interfere with the orderly administration of eco- nomic affairs or might reflect on the city's fair name. Votes are seldom determined by any consideration of a purpose in civic life — except the purpose of keeping one administration in, or getting another in. So that we do not have an organization of community life, but only of certain interests. The larger task waits for fitting organization. The peculiar nature of the task, its height and breadth, seem to demand a special organization for direction. Just as the public has committed to special boards the care of the parks, to others the libraries and still others the schools, so it may well create a directing organization which will organize community life as a school of democracy. Such an organization might be called the Board, or Council of Moral and Religious Education. It would be better, as a rule, to be less exact and to call it simply The Community Council. Then it could direct its ener- gies toward moral and religious training. There is noth- ing new or startling about this suggestion. The writer advocated it over ten years ago and the plan has been adopted in a number of villages. It differs somewhat from the Maiden (Mass.) plan -^ since it calls for an organ- ization representative of all the ideal interests which will attempt the organization of all the common activities of the community so that they may form a unitary pro- gram designed to develop character. The plan would work in complete harmony with the Community Center organization, adding thereto a representative body which would become the agency through which the Center would carry forward its community programs for ideal ends. The Community Center is a helpful and simple form 1 Advocated and promoted by Professor Walter S. Athearn, notably at Maiden, Mass., at Lowell and a number of other places in Mass. 216 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY through which community organization may be realized. The Centers ^ are the natural development of many ef- forts to secure active neighborliness, growing out of Neigh- borhood Clubs, Open Forums, School-Centers, Parent- Teacher Clubs and the like. The plan is now being pro- moted by state organizations ; state universities are ap- pointing officers to develop its usefulness ; the United States Bureau of Education is aiding its application to educational problems, and the President of the United States wrote a letter urging the formation of community councils.^ The constitution proposed in the pamphlet is- sued by the Bureau of Education suggests the following specific activities: Forum, Recreation, Civics (informa- tion, education, service). Home and School, Buying Club, Community Bank. The Centers may be characterized as organizations to do together all things that can be done together. They are much like town meetings that func- tion all the time, that cover practically all common inter- ests and that carry out their own decrees. Their simple, democratic form, their high ideals and their practical emphases are rich with promise. They may be directed to an educational program for the entire life of the com- munity. They may be saturated with an educational consciousness which recognizes the spiritual needs of a democracy. A COMMUNITY COUNCIL The community needs democratic leadership. As the Center brings them together they will look for guidance in work, instruction in community principles and training in method. Guidance will be needed to coordinate the existing activities and to plan new ones. This work of iThey are described in Bulletin No. 11, 1918, of the U. S. Bureau of Education, " A Community Center, What it is and How to Organize it." Price ten cents. 2 Woodrow Wilson in a letter to the Councils of Defense in the different States, under date of March 13, 1918. ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 217 leadership and coordination would belong to the Council. It would plan careful surveys looking toward common programs, toward the suppression of social menaces and sources of moral contagion, to the development of friendly forces and agencies and to the provision of ample, happy healthful recreation, instruction and service. Can such a council provide for comrnwnity action in religious education? There is no doubt that it can se- cure community action in the most valuable forms of re- ligious development as it makes recreation, amusement and social living stimulating, helpful and a means of ideal social experience. This — the life of streets, playgrounds, homes and social mingling — counts more than all besides in actually developing character. To be surrounded with a moral atmosphere favorable to righteousness, to social goodwill, to see constantly the object lesson of a community devoted to the good of all is the most effective form of religious training. In all that follows this must not be forgotten. Yet children need more. They need that direct religious instruction which both enables them to interpret this atmosphere and example and to under- stand and practice its methods. This direct instruction the public schools cannot give, the homes either will not or cannot, and the churches, at present, devote less than an hour a week to giving small groups instruction at the hands of amateurs. The churches reach fewer than forty per cent, of the children ; their instruction in the Sunday schools is an antithesis of that to which they are accus- tomed and, being given in church groups, it tends to set off this instruction from the united community life. If we are to make democracy a spiritual experience for the child we must make his religious experience in instruc- tion truly democratic ; it must become a part of his com- munity life. It must have a larger share of his time, for it is manifestly impossible to learn anything in from forty to fifty periods of thirty-five minutes each a year, espe- 218 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY cially when, as a rule, these do not occur under school conditions. It must have a larger share of his active experience, for instruction standing alone can accomplish little ; it must be so organized as to become a part of his everyday living in the social group ; it must go on, under normal conditions, into his play and work. Adequate religious instruction is impossible under the program of the present typical Sunday school. It is as impossible as general education would be if all the children were divided into sectarian groups, limited to one period a week and left without financial support or proper su- pervision. Even though general education were possible in parish schools education for democracy would not be possible there. The young cannot learn the life of de- mocracy in caste and class institutions. It is as necessary that religious instruction be democratic as that general instruction should have that character. So long as the religious instruction is disassociated from a genuine com- munity experience there will be difficult}^ in carrying over that instruction into practical community living. The effect of confining the teaching of religion to churches is often an impression that the practice of religion is con- fined to the same area. The present Sunday school is wastefully inadequate. The system of independent small groups, each school teaching a series of smaller groups, each maintaining its own staff and equipment is not only bad as it divides social life but it is exceedingly wasteful. This is discov- ered as soon as it is attempted to place a church school on a plane of educational efficiency. It costs almost as much as though each school were attempting to meet the needs of all the children of a community. There is fur- ther waste in current plans as they lay on the community the strain of a peak-load of religious instruction on one hour of each week with absolutely no load all through the rest of the week. That is as economically wasteful as a ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 219 system of street cars designed to carry the entire popu- lation to Sunday morning service and to lie idle all the rest of the week. The inadequacy of the present Sunday school for the community's need for religious training is due largely to the fact that the school is an inheritance rather than a designed institution. It was planned for quite other work than it now seeks to perform. It has been devel- oped in a manner that carries over much obsolete ma- chinery and maintains impossible limitations. It is still conscious only of a duty to give the young instruction about the Bible rather than to give training in living a religious life in a democracy. It still lacks any con- sciousness of a community mission. It is conceived in ecclesiastical terms rather than in terms of a democracy of the spirit. Our complex social order makes vastly increased de- mands on children. Living is more complicated; life's moral strain is more intense. And, much more exacting than any current conditions, than any struggle for per- sonal goodness, are the demands of our own social ideals. This day calls for men and women who can make the kingdom of heaven a current reality. Our vision of a democracy of the spirit must come down to the practical terms of living, of industry and social intercourse. But that vision cannot become an actuality by means of gen- eralized hopes ; it requires both trained spirits and par- ticularized efficiencies in methods. The inadequacy of our present plans becomes evident when we realize that we seek, through religious training, the preparation of the child for the great problems of democracy, for life in this polarized world, that we hope he can learn to live on the plane of spiritual values with others and to make this a world guided by the life of the spirit. Can that be done by separating the children into little groups to listen to often aimless talks for thirty minutes every Sunday.? 220 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY In a word, we need a new religious education. Are we ready for its broader program? Are we ready, in the light of the needs of democracy, animated by the hope of a spiritual society, to take the steps necessary to furnish a full program of religious training? Are we ready to tear down and to build anew, instead of patching here and there, building now according to the demands of our day and the promise of a kingdom of God? Such a pro- gram is possible only as it is conceived in terms of the life of all the people and carried out on a common pro- gram for all who are willing to unite in it. CHAPTER XVII A COMMUNITY PROGRAM If the community is the unit through which we must seek to secure an extension of religious training in prepa- ration for the hfe of democracy what are the steps neces- sary to organize a community program? First, to convert the religious agencies to a democratic spirit. The churches are insisting that Jesus was the world's great democrat, but frequently they are more brahmanistic than democratic ; they tend to separate peo- ple into more or less self-satisfied groups ; they afford chil- dren only a special sect experience in education. If reli- gious experience is to be effective for democracy it must itself be democratic. Caste experience in training is not training for a common, social life. What can be done.^ Would our churches be any less attractive or their membership any smaller if, instead of planning the religious training of the young as a scheme of recruiting their own organizations, it should be ar- ranged primarily as a preparation for a spiritual society, a religious democracy? Such a plan would not only en- rich the curriculum as to its practical content but it would thoroughly socialize all the experience of children in their church schools. It would make the school of religion an actual experience in living in a common so- ciety. Even though the school could not include always the entire community — though that would be a desirable aim — it would be so representative that to be in it would be to realize community living. It is to be doubted if we can hope to spiritualize community life until we have thoroughly socialized religious life. 221 222 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY The religious organizations of the community need, next, such an impressive, intelligent understanding of the requirements of their village or neighborhood as shall com- pel the development or remaking of present methods un- til they shall be adequate to the task of reaching all the children and reaching all their needs in the spiritual life. If we really believe that it is essential for every child that he have proper religious training we will not permit tra- ditions, sectarian divergencies nor ecclesiastical interests to stand in the way of the children's rights. If we take rdigious education as seriously as we have taken general education we will find a way just as we have found a way in spite of all the difficulties with public education. If we have any regard for the fully sixty per cent, of the child population not now reached by the church schools we will confess our present failures and take up this prob- lem with open-minded seriousness. Moreover, if we have looked squarely at our present systems and have realized how little fruitage they bear in the realities of life, how little they have to do with the making of our social order or with determining the character of a community, we will be anxious to discover and apply plans of religious train- ing that will have some effect on life. The present situa- tion is that, in spite of many organizations, much serious effort and much money expended, we have a task but partially accomplished and that only for a few. Before a solution of the problem is possible, however, we need an awakened commimity, one with a sense of re- sponsibility for the spiritual in its life. Communities are accepting responsibilities for the lives of people ; can they evade responsibility for any part of life.'* If they are responsible for health, why not for health of mind.? If they accept responsibility for conduct can they avoid responsibility for character.'* This does not mean that communities will formally adopt religious professions or creeds. But they are adopting creeds which are essen- A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 223 tially religious. They even publish these creeds, such as " We believe it is our duty to make the best pos- sible place to live in. We place first the interests of our children, health before commerce," etc. Such professions, whether stated formally or not, imply the acceptance of responsibility for the full development of every life. When we stop to think we know that our communities exist for ends not to be expressed in statistics of the census, in wealth or in size. If they care only for our bodies of what worth is it to make us healthy brutes only to gore and devour in their rich and beautiful pas- tures.'^ The community has a cure for souls because it exists for persons. The religious responsibility of the community does not interfere with the freedom of the churches. It does not dictate their views or their tasks. It does not deprive them of their work of religious education. But it accepts a responsibility to make it possible for the spiritual agencies, whether churches or families, to do their full work. In its program of coordination of agencies it recognizes the churches and their functions and calls on the entire community to stand back of all agencies that support and develop the religious life. Community cooperation at feasible tasks is the next step ; there are things which all the people of a community can do together in the field of religious service. Just how easy it has been for all the people, regardless of creedal affiliations, or of none, to work together in social serv- ice, in deeds expressive of high religious purpose has been demonstrated during the period of the great war. In a like mood other needs are met when their seriousness is realized. One of the tasks at which it has been proven it is possible to secure community cooperation is that of week-day instruction of children in religion. Back of all efforts in this direction lies the long agitation for reli- gious teaching in public schools, and back of that even 2^4 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY the common custom of such teaching; then there is also the growing recognition of the inadequacy of the present church school even under the best of conditions. Seek- ing to provide a larger measure of instruction in religion schools have been established which meet during the week, often with programs of instruction providing from two to three hours of regular work for all pupils in the ele- mentary schools who care to attend. Some of the schools have trained, professional teachers devoting their entire time under regular salary contracts, their work being guided by expert supervisors. WEEK-DAY RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION Weelc-day instruction develops as a community enter- prise. At first it was assumed that all that was neces- sary was to extend the time program of the Sunday school into the week. But it soon became evident that this meant only spreading the present inefficient efforts over a larger area of time, with the same purely amateur workers and the same results as before. It involved, also, no exten- sion as to persons reached; the schools were simply Sun- day schools meeting in the week. We have abandoned the church-school extension plan and are now coming to think of week-day instruction in terms of the community, not only that all the children of the community may be reached but that we have here what may be a community enterprise. The two current general ideals have been well presented in two recent books. Dr. B. S. Winches- ter has presented the argument for one method,^ the fed- eration of the churches in a community so as to provide and conduct a school or schools, meeting during the week and giving religious instruction. Prof. W. S. Athearn 1 In " Religious Education and Democracy," a report presented to The Federal Council of Churches in America, Dec, 1916, published in book form by the Abingdon Press, 1917. A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 225 has presented another method/ that of organizing in the community a special Council of Religious Education, in- dependent of the churches. He has conducted a number of enterprises for the training of church-school workers under his plan. He especially urges the inability of the churches to carry forward common enterprises of an edu- cational character. Two things seem to be certain : First, that the local federations of churches cannot meet the needs of the communities in religious training; they have, usually, no developed educational expertness ; they represent only certain sections of organized religion in a community, and they have, as yet, no programs for re- ligious education. Second, a community enterprise in religious training must have the leadership of its churches. It cannot be conducted independently of them ; to attempt this is to ignore the basic principle of using the natural existing social groups ; it is to create another religious agency and to attempt to separate the churches from their most important task, the training of the young. Do we then stand at an impasse; the churches cannot do this work and no one else ought to do it.f^ Not at all. First, we have been confounding two parts of this enter- prise, the function of the church to train all its young lives and the function of the community to make it pos- sible for every life to receive religious training. The churches cannot leave to the community responsibility for instruction ; the community cannot leave to the churches its responsibility for conditions and social or- ganization favorable to instruction. Second, we are con- fused because we are still thinking of a Sunday school magnified into a week-day affair while we ought to go on to think of the community accepting its responsibility for the whole of life, making provision in plant and program 1 In " Religious Education and American Democracy," Pilgrim Press, 1917. n6 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY for all, while the churches accept the challenge of the community, enter into the program, use the plant and discharge the duty which is specifically committed to them. Where the community council is alive to the religious needs of life, to the place of the spiritual, it will be quick to furnish the plant and equipment for instruction. Where the churches are alive to their real work they will be able to forget differences and to work together in the use of the community plant. The important thing to do is to develop a sense of community responsibility parallel in this field to that which is now felt for general educa- tion. To be specific, we are recommending that when the Community Council has been organized, representing all the churches and higher interests, it begins to provide suitable buildings which can be used all through the week for instruction in religion and for such training as the churches may desire to give. Common provision for school plants would involve a community-organized pro- gram but it would not at all involve community control of teaching. Each church would be as free as ever in this respect. The community has no more dictation over the teaching of any church in its common building than it had when it provided separate buildings. Just as the community in furnishing common facilities of communi- cation in the streets cannot dictate our motives in walk- ing but leaves us free so long as we respect the social rights of others, so in the community school of religion there would be freedom under social obligations. It is not at all inconceivable that the community shall do three things : recognizing the child's need it shall so arrange its general time-schedule that all the young may have opportunity for religious instruction and training; next, provide the necessary facilities which shall be at the disposal of all, and, then, use its existing educational agencies, or, if necessary, provide others to give the A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 227 proper technical training to those who are to instruct the young. The time-schedule is no small part of the problem everywhere. The curriculum of the school has been so enlarged and its field of activities so extended that young people are likely to find every hour occupied with either school-work, home-work, school-supervised recreation or the school's social life. Now no single aspect of life ought to monopolize the child's program. Yet there are chil- dren who for five days from rising to sleeping have a schedule of nothing but school work. They are entitled to time for the free life of the family, for their own social groups, for the life of the spirit. The coordination and adjustment of the now overlapping and competing parts of a time program will be one of the first problems for the community council. It is quite possible for a neigh- borhood to come to an agreement that certain hours be- long to certain plans, to end the present wild competition for youth's leisure and to arrange and carry out a pro- gram which would leave no empty hours and none in which a dozen agencies distract our energies. A COMMUNITY BUILDING FOR RELIGION The matter of provision of facilities is not a difficult one. We already have community schools everywhere, and, in many places, community parks, recreation grounds, concert and lecture halls and film theatres. Is it im- possible to have a building with the necessary class rooms and meeting places which any religious body shall be free to use for purposes of instruction? Such a building ought to be the voluntary enterprise of the community, neither erected nor supported by taxation. None should be forced to pay ; the compulsion should be that of the democratic conscience. It would be erected and main- tained by the community council by funds freely con- tributed. The building need not be as large as the public 228 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY school because it need not receive all the children at any one time. If, for the sake of illustration, we agree that the time spent in classes in religion should be related to time spent in general education as one is to six then the community religious plant could have approximately one- sixth of the pupil accommodations needed in the other school. Some latitude would be necessary for maintain- ing a larger number of classes proportionately, while the ratio would depend on whether the public school had proper, modem facilities. But probably all the children in a sixteen-room building in the public schools could pass through four periods each a week in a four-room school of religion. This must not leave the impression that the only or the principal activity of the community school of religion will be instruction : classes may not be nearly as important as directed activities. Programs would be arranged by agreement so that the facilities of the building would be in use practically all the time. The building could be used for many com- munity purposes, such as night-classes, lectures, social gatherings, community dances, community sewing and re- lief work. Naturally it would be the home of the com- munity center, the plant from which all its work would be carried on. It would stand in the community the cen- ter of its life of spiritual purpose as the public school stands the center of its life of intellectual purpose; but the two purposes would never be separated. The need for a plant of this kind needs no emphasis, not only because of the inadequacy of church edifices for instructional purposes but from the present dispersion of the many activities of the community which should find a home here. The public school has opened its doors to the community center; in many places it will long be the center of neighborhood activities, but it has not been planned for the type of work advocated here ; it is free only in the evening hours and often it finds community A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 229 service an embarrassing guest. The community needs a special plant and, in securing the religious educational building, could design it with reference to the larger needs of the center and the cooperative work of the com- munity. Will the churches find it possible to agree in the use of a community educational building? If religion cannot exercise social coordination it needs conversion. But churches are agreeing to the common use of plants, even to using them for preaching and services of worship. In the instance proposed they know they would be the losers unless they could fit into the community plan. Indeed such a plan might prove to be a means of religious edu- cation to some churches. It would force them to look beyond their own groups ; it would make them conscious of all the children of the community and of other forces working therein; it would compel cooperation. It would be a simple but signal step toward that unity of purpose for which all long. This plan does not assume that only the so-called evan- gelical churches, or only the Protestant churches, or even only the Christian churches would have a share in the use of the building proposed. The community cannot distin- guish. It is responsible for the success of no particular group, but for the success of every group making good citizens. Its attitude should be the same to one as to another. Nor does any church in using this building sacrifice or attenuate its own faith. It simply respects the civil rights which all hold in a democracy and the consequent social obligations of respect which each must have for all others. It accepts the cooperation of the community in the discharge of those special responsibili- ties which it has in regard to the instruction of its own youth. Religious cooperation is much nearer than we some- times think. The old rancors and feuds lie in our mem- 230 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY ory more than in the hearts of religious leaders to-day. Perhaps churches assume a bellicose attitude toward one another because that is what we expect them to do. Groups are more likely to find cooperation possible in large enterprises than in trifling ones. In our new spirit of social unity in the face of great world problems there ought to be found the possibility of a cooperative spirit sufficient to make the community school ecclesiastically feasible. Provision for technical training of workers in religious education in the community school is not predicated en- tirely on the present program which calls once a week for a large number of unskilled workers. Given the com- munity plant and program, with the work of the school scheduled through the week, fewer workers will be needed by each church and it will be possible to use those who have had expert training and who are professionally em- ployed. But, just as we ought to have, in every com- munity, provision for the continuous training, the inspi- ration and professional development of public-school teachers, so we will need provision for the educational nurture of the staff of the proposed school. This task the community may attempt directly, for no creedal or sectarian differences enter into the science of education. No city would step beyond its proper province if it should provide a course of lectures or arrange a regular cur- riculum of classes for those who desired to learn how to guide the development of children in religious character. The principles of education would be the same for all teachers whatever church they might support, and the principles of ideal development would hold even for those who cared for none at all. It is too early to attempt all the details of this plan,^ 1 For a survey of experiments of this type see the various pub- lications of The Religious Education Association, and, for a succinct outline. Bulletin No. 13, Week-Day Religious Education, free, from The American Baptist Publication Society. A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 231 and one must remember Portia's words on the relative ease of telling how it were done compared with doing it, but certain it is that it never will be done unless we enter- tain the vision and make the attempt. The principal is- sue is that we shall recognize the responsibility of the entire community for the development of the spiritual life of all its people. Then we shall apply this principle at the point where application is now most feasible, and also most important, at that of training the young. We shall seek to move as united, cooperating communities and we shall expect all formal plans and mechanisms to grow out of the ideal of the organization of the entire life of the community for the purpose of developing spiritually minded citizens. CHAPTER XVIII THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE IN A DEMOCRACY Democracy constantly seeks the improvement of the type of life ; it is not blind to the biological law that the higher the type the longer its period of development. A fly reaches maturity in a few hours ; man allows his young many years and increasingly realizes that life itself is too short to attain full, all-round maturity. And civilization, that is man organized as society, sets aside ever length- ening periods for the preparation of youth for its life. The college and university are our modern extensions of the formal periods of youth's preparation. Democracy extends the period of infancy. Because de- mocracy exists that lives may develop it not only sets about those lives many forms of protection in their early stages of dependence but it extends the time in which development is fostered by society. The rapid develop- ment of colleges, their articulation with systems of public instruction and the increase in the proportions of the population receiving higher education all point to the ideal of democracy, a condition under which all persons shall be free to receive formal training through the entire period of youth. This does not imply that all will re- ceive the entire curriculum of the typical college; it does imply that society will provide for all youth training de- signed according to their needs. The college is one of democracy's mechanisms for directing personal develop- ment. Democracy expects that this e?xtension of training shall be for the enriching of its e'ntire life. It expects that those who are trained will become servants; it hopes for 232 THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 233 three experiences : the development of the powers of indi- viduals, their social awakening, adjustment and efficiency and the discovery of a social motive in the meaning of life. College life is more than an extension of the fields of learning; it is an experience in new ways of living. It affords a life under special stimuli and advantages. It affords freedom for the development of powers at the time when social consciousness is growing, when ideals are most potent. It should result in a life controlled by ideals and devoted to democracy's purposes. How can the college develop tlie motives and form the ideals of democracy? The college is the home of social idealism. A large number of instructors are democratic idealists. Its courses in social sciences are often regarded as dangerous by those whose interests demand the preser- vation of ancient forms of social injustice or who would hold society in status quo so that they might continue its exploitation. The principles and the methods of democratic living are both taught in college. Campus life is often a high demonstration of very simple democracy and frequently enduring social motives come to youth through this experience. All that is needed is to bring the social idealism of the college to its logical complete- ness, to see and apply it as a plan of life and to develop the motives and emotions sufficient to carry it over into life. For the purposes of democracy the social idealism of the college must be vitalized into action and unified under the ideals and habits of the life of love and service. College life must become a spiritual experience in devotion to democracy. The college student needs not alone to know the mech- anism of democracy, nor alone to see its ideals, but, also, to acquire its motives. The problem of higher education is less one of information than of motivation. How can we be sure that these young men and women, the social leaders of to-morrow, will retain their ideals, will return 234 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY to us fully willing to pay the price of democracy, so satis- fied of its high ends that to them the life of devotion to the good of all will be the only reasonable and possible life? The training of the spirit is the central purpose of the college in its service for democracy. Here we have a spe- cial application of the principle that, in view of the spir- itual aims of a democracy and the spiritual demands it makes on people, its first need is that of religious educa- tion. Nowhere is that training more needed than in the years of the extension of education in the college. Yet this is the aspect of life which the colleges have most neg- lected. Young people graduate alert, fairly intelligent, enthusiastic and idealistic, yet without consciousness of the religious meaning and motif of life. Their idealism does not carry over into the practice of democracy. They have converted industry to scientific methods much more successfully than they have converted society to democracy. They are not especially marked as a class in leadership in social service and progress. Is this not because the college leaves social training incomplete? It does not treat social studies as dealing with a mode of life and a faith for society. It gives youth a vision of so- ciety reorganized, but it fails to connect the program of reorganization to those ideals, devotions and activities which constitute the motives of life to the young. It does not connect their faith with a program of service. Yet the college years are peculiarly those in which train- ing for democracy must involve a religious experience. They are the years in which life gets its bent, in which men acquire motives deep enough to hold when the lesser prizes promise so much, the years when we establish hab- its of devotion to ends which are ideal but which no cold reasoning can ever take from us. They are the years of opportunity for true teachers to help youth discover life's meaning in terms of its highest values and life's THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 235 method as devotion to the realization of those values in the lives of all. If the college fails to do this it may be a great instructional agency but it is not an educational one; it is mistaking extension for elevation. It must re- veal the spiritual nature and the social method of de- mocracy or it is not carrying out its part in extending the period of life training for the young. It has to de- velop the lives of persons for social ends and these ends involve motives that must be based on spiritual meanings in life. The primary responsibility of the college lies, then, in the field of religious training. THE COLLEGES AND RELIGION Historically the American college grew out of religious convictions. The first colleges were organized by reli- gious persons for religious purposes. Their charters fre- quently expressly stated those purposes. The early col- leges were poor in money, limited in curricula and small in enrollment, but they were mighty in one respect, they stamped the leadership of America with idealism. To- day the colleges are rich, with widely inclusive curricula and with immense bodies of students — and one of the practical, puzzling questions of their executives is. What is the place of religion in the college? Here is a change that is at least worthy of consideration. How has it hap- pened that religion, once central to the life and purpose, now holds a debatable position? The widening of the field has made religion less con- sciously focal. The early college sought only to prepare leadership for the field of religion ; the modern college pre- pares leaders for every field. Meanwhile there has been an extension of the fields of leadership. Two hundred years ago the ministry was the one great profession, easily above all others in social distinction, commonly above the others, as law and medicine, in intellectual prep- aration. Then the parson was the person in each com- 236 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY munity. We have not lowered the intellectual demands for the ministry, but we have raised immensely the stand- ards of the other professions. This has been in response to a recognition of their developing social responsibilities. To-day in each of their fields these professions offer op- portunities for the same kind of leadership that once belonged exclusively to the minister. This enlargement the college has recognized and has, therefore, sought to provide general training for all who might hold leader- ship in any field. It has ceased to be a school for reli- gious workers and has become a school for all leaders. But this is not all. Democracy strikes out beyond the concept of a selected group of leaders. It is not con- tent to think that there should be peculiar opportunities reserved for a few. Whatever aids men in the develop- ment of powers of leadership is the inalienable right of every man. The college has followed the logic of de- mocracy in offering to every one those opportunities which once were reserved for a few. It has led the way in democratizing higher education. Now it needs to take the next steps, of making its method democratic and its message such as democracy needs to-day. No one can fail to see that the extension of the field of the college has taken from it an easily apprehended religious character ; but it is a question whether it has not, at the same time, developed its religious quality. No single statement will cover all cases. There are col- leges in which the total emphasis and impress is decidedly religious, in the sense here insisted on, to a degree that we believe was not surpassed in any of the earlier institu- tions. But there are others in which, even though they bear ecclesiastical names, it would be difficult to discover even so much as a reminder of religion. Speaking gen- erally, the extension of the field of the college has not operated to attenuate its religious influence but it has THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 237 markedly reduced the place of religion in the curriculum and in college activities. More elaborate organization has obscured religious 'purpose. The change has been due in part to the transi- tion from personal leadership to academic organization. There cluster about the earlier colleges the memories of great personages, chosen to their positions because of religious qualities. The modern college does not depend on the over-shadowing personality of any individual, nor does it choose its head for the earlier reasons. Com- monly it counts on an aggregation of scholarly powers, on the total impress of a learned faculty, on high standards and ample facilities and on the organizing power of an executive. It was the outstanding, personal, religious figure that drew men to early Princeton, Harvard, and Yale and to many smaller schools. Their presidents were great men and pronounced religious leaders. Since the special field of the college, then, was religion the academic leaders were those who towered above their fellows in religious knowledge and religious life. Our modern lead- ership is just as likely to rise in any other field, in physics or economics. Changes in curriculum have affected the place of re- ligion. The principal change has been that which has taken place as the college has moved from a school of preparation for the ministry, a simple theological sem- inary, to take its place in general culture. Since reli- gious studies were included on professional grounds they have been dropped because their relation to the life-needs of students have no longer been clearly evident. Studies in religion have only formed the vanguard of a long pro- cession retreating from the campus under the exigencies of the practical demands of the age. Moreover, religion has often been held back while other studies have gone forward. Has there been any change in the method and 238 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY content of teaching In religion which would in any degree correspond to the changes in the teaching of chemistry, for example, in the last century? Or, to take a closer analogy, consider the development in the teaching of lit- erature. Progress has been made in religion ; in instances one feels that it compares favorably with any other de- partment in college. At least this is true as to the teach- ing of one aspect of the subject, its literature and his- tory, and here the results have been such as to indicate a solution of the whole problem. Democracy has clarified and elevated the purpose of the college. The tendency of a true democracy will be to regard all human affairs with spiritual vision and to think of all life in religious terms. Its high purposes with per- sons in society converts all social life into a spiritual enterprise. Therefore it regards all forms of social lead- ership with the same reverence that our fathers felt for the ministry and the leadership of the churches. It feels responsible for every form of leadership, since in every department of life we need both the same expertness and the same spirit that the early colleges were designed to give to the ministry. The modern college discharges a spiritual responsibility in all fields, giving not only intel- lectual training but, what is vastly more important, vision of the meaning and motive of life and leadership in a de- mocracy. The purpose of the college to-day is to serve democracy, this kingdom of the spirit, through all its leaders just as the early college sought to serve through a few. So that, even though religion may seem to hold a debatable place in the curriculum, it is possible to think of the college as distinctly a religious agency. In so far as it makes life in a democracy mean fullness of living, fullness of service and devotion to the fullness of life for all, it serves religion. The spiritual function makes the college a religious in- stitution. It is folly to talk of training leaders unless we THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 239 hold ourselves responsible for leaderships, for the vision, motive and ideal that must lead the leaders. The prime quality of leadership is spiritual ; power to lead is a mat- ter of the spirit. Faith is the leader's loyalty to an ideal that compels him to step forward in untrodden paths, to attempt the unprecedented, to follow the vision wherever it may lead. Faith is that loyalty to truth thai trans- lates its concepts into action and makes them the common possession of the world. Religion is the life based on its faith; it makes men live for the abiding values. It re- veals the only possessions a person, as a person, can have and the only ones he can share unreservedly with all others. It makes the leader's life possible ; it furnishes him his food for desert days, his sources of strength for all tasks. These are the needs of men, the demands of their inner life, which any institution of leadership must enable them to possess. The college needs a new interpretation of its 'problem of religion, a setting in terms of a democracy of the spirit. Whenever the matter of religion in the American college is discussed four focal points appear; they are: courses, worship, voluntary activities and local churches. These seem to limit the vision of religion's function in higher educational institutions. It is assumed that the problem is to be solved by one or the other of these means. The emphasis shifts from time to time ; not long ago it was almost wholly on services of worship, later it passed to voluntary classes and activities ; to-day it is on courses of study. These various devices indicate a failure to face the full problem ; they are attempts to meet special phases as they appear. If the college could discharge its whole duty toward learning by its courses in a prescribed series of subjects it might, conceivably, discharge its religious duty by courses in religious knowledge. But the college does not think that its work is done when a body of knowledge mo EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY has been tested and found not wholly wanting in the student's mind. By directed activities it develops habits and powers ; by ideals expressed in buildings, in forms of art, in the characters and habits of persons, by its whole life it seeks to cultivate habits of mind, to lead youth to certain levels of living and into certain power. It recog- nizes a responsibility toward life, toward persons and toward society. Its courses are means and not ends. So should it be in the matter of religion. The college discharges its spiritual function hy furnish- ing an experience in religion. We are in danger of re- peating with the college student the mistake we have made in the religious education of children in the church school, that of assuming that the problem was simply one of providing the materials of religious knowledge. Almost exclusively current discussions on religion in the college center on courses in the Bible and other religious subjects. At first this was natural as an attempt to restore these subjects to the area of the student's academic interests; the prevailing exclusion of religion was so striking an anomaly as to call for protest. But no one seriously supposes that the introduction of these subjects would of itself secure the ends of religious education. That cannot be, first, because there is no assurance that religious re- sults flow from the academic study of religion, and, sec- ond, college class-work does not have any marked tend- ency to carry over into action and immediate living ; on the contrary it often tends to place the subject in the category of so-called purely intellectual interests. Col- lege Bible study can easily mean placing the Bible on a mental academic shelf. It is worth while to have clearly in mind the end that is sought. We assume that the college is a religious in- stitution in that it was organized by religious persons and is being conducted as a part of a program which Jooks toTvard a religious social order. Its function is to THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 241 give society trained persons, developed in their general powers, who will become effective leaders in developing a religious social order. The end, then, looks far beyond any body of knowledge ; it is directed immediately to the lives and conduct of persons and ultimately to society. It implies habits of mind, habits of conduct, ideals and abilities. Now this must not be conceived simply as a matter of training for an experience into which the student will enter later ; there is no such thing as a separa- tion between training and the experience for which it is designed ; the experience is the training. If these young men and women are to make a religious world, they must live in one now. Modern education assures us that this is the right emphasis, that all schooling is really a partici- pation in life in which the doctrines are discovered through doing. The great need of the college student is the opportimity to experience religion as the normal life of his own society. The very fact of going to college and of doing its work, living its life may express his ideals and his faith, may be his religious experience. The college may say to him, " To be here and to do well your work is the highest re- ligious life you can live now." If he can see that, it will make religion much more real than it could be as a matter of historical or philosophical inquiry. It will make it a matter of the present, of the daily life of campus, of class room and of comradeship. College living may be an ex- perience in religion when it is saturated with ideals of worth and service. Religion must he first of all a positive active experience. It will rise in the wills of men and find ways out through their actions before it will be a reality in their thinking. It will come out of their own aspirations rather than from overhead authorities. It will not come out of abstract thinking. But finding itself in the concrete, in action, it will be saved from the purely speculative attitude. One 242 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY of the dangers of student life is a negative critical atti- tude toward all things ; this may be only an assumed attitude, but it easily leads men into thinking that criti- cizing the game from the bleachers is the same as playing the game on the field. It tends to satisfy with an analysis instead of an experience and to substitute a definition for the deed. Thinking about religion is not necessarily re- ligious; the academic habit develops the critic who never creates. It helps to account for the failure of college men and women to take an active part in the work of the churches. The common rejoinder that the work of the church is not worthy of their attention is simply a fur- ther indication of this critical attitude, for, to trained men and women, the deficiencies of an institution ought to be an invitation to the enlistment of their services. If the records of college graduates are examined it is usually found that whenever they devote themselves to social service it is to those forms in which they had some experience while in college. Whenever service stepped out of books into the student's activities it became his per- manent possession. College politics have been a school of political service. But the college relation to philanthropy is almost entirely bookish, with the result that it does not carry over into after-life. So long as college religion is purely a bookish aff*air the same will be true here. The intellectual aspects will be the only vital ones in the col- lege period. On this plane the actualities of everyday religious life have no chance; the preaching in the home church cannot compare with college chapel, the teaching cannot hold a candle to college class work, the level of intelligence in the pra3^er meeting will remind only by extreme contrast with the groups in college. But this is not the plane of reality ; on the level of life and action the village church will be able to take care of itself and, on this level, college training will carry over into after- life experience. The student who has had experience in THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE MS religion as service in his college days will find ample scope for exercise later. Of course all this is only another way of saying that in the college religion is one of the subjects for which a laboratory is indispensable, and that the laboratory is that of the college life and its avenues of service. BIBLE STUDY IN COLLEGE What is the place of Bible study? Does a program of the character suggested involve the abandonment of col- lege courses in the history and literature of the Bible .'^ Have we, then, been developing so many efficient depart- ments of the Bible, and of Religion, only to find them useless? Not at all; courses in religion have their place, an essential and important one. But they are only a part of a program of religious training. They have the same relations here as in other departments. Courses in the Bible belong in the college, first, on the same ground as courses in any ancient literature, because it is part of our spiritual heritage. But the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are part of our heritage in a pecu- liarly distinct and valuable degree. They have entered, more than any other, into our thinking, they determine our ideals, they mold our current philosophy and they are so much a part of our every-day speech that it is im- possible to understand the language of our times without some knowledge of the Bible. It has guided our institu- tions and saturated our literature. Every teacher of English knows the difficulties that arise through popular ignorance of this well of English undefiled. This has been so often stated that we accept the fact complacently to- day. And yet we can hardly claim that any youth has had a fair chance to possess his world from whom this part of it has been held back. Second, biblical courses have their places in social studies. The college years are peculiarly suitable for the 244 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY study of the Bible ; the mind is then ready to take the historical point of view. While it would seem that much of the general knowledge of the Bible which seems so la- mentably lacking in the college ought to have been ac- quired in earlier years, the greater wealth of this litera- ture is not within the appreciation of children. But in college it is possible to trace the rise and development of moral ideals and social-religious institutions, to trace religion in its development and to see the inter-action be- tween social life and spiritual ideals. These are studies in moral evolution, in the development of social ideals which should precede any study of our own times. Third, biblical courses have values of leadership. With the historical background there appear the great charac- ters, men who are ideals personified, who sweep on the stage of time majestically, thrilling and persuading us, compelling our heroic worship. Youth needs to know them. They are the very soul of literature, for what is literature but a social experience with the great? To live an hour with them may change a life. Biblical courses belong in the college because they may minister to its spiritual purposes. The spiritual purpose of the college in a democracy is, then, first of all, one that cannot be readily exhibited in catalogues. It implies the saturation of the college pro- gram as a whole with spiritual purpose. It means that the college is conceived as a religious institution, and that all its work looks forward, with religious purpose, to a spiritual world order. CHAPTER XIX TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE It is not difficult to understand the spiritual mission of a college in a democracy ; but for the college worker, the immediate problem is to see how the spiritual power and purpose of a college may be definitely precipitated in a college program. In that problem are several elements which may be stated briefly: The college is no longer classified as a religious insti- tution. A religious purpose is no longer taken for granted. The change from professional training for re- ligious work to one embracing all general culture grad- ually stripped from the college its special theological character. Being divorced from religion on a vocational basis it has not been easy to maintain relations on a basis of cultural interest and human need. Civil relationships have limited religious freedom. The relations of colleges to the states, as through endowments and support, at first had no effect on religious teaching. But, as the United States became the home of many faiths and questions of conscience rights arose, the day passed when the state could support a single faith. One of two things happened to the colleges in most instances ; either they became state institutions, disavowing all sectarian connections and any special religious purpose, or they ceased to accept the support of the state and were free to teach religion. In either case, however, the status of religion had been affected. In the case of the State Uni- versities great care is always exercised to avoid even the appearance of sectarianism. In a few instances this is 245 246 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY carried to the extreme in the refusal to recognize even the fact of religion. In any case their strictly non-sectarian policy makes the recognition of religion, which usually ap- pears in the form of some particular faith, quite difficult, and this tends constantly to modify their academic prac- tice. The leadership of the state university affects all the colleges of a state and, without knowing just why, they are likely to follow the path marked out by this institu- tion, a path determined by many considerations which do not affect the greater number of smaller or more free institutions. The free colleges have failed often to see and to use their freedom. Church relationships have limited religion. Many church colleges have serious difficulties with ecclesiastical control. If the churches determine the content of the re- ligious teaching of a college it loses its spiritual leader- ship. It becomes simply an echo, its notes determined by voices speaking in the past. That condition is much more common than we are apt to confess. There are colleges which never have a free thought ; every word and act is determined by one of two considerations — often by both, by the desire to stand well with the churches and the fear of offending the patron who has sinned against human rights. In such institutions the fear of the brebhren exercises the spell of a general inhibition in the class rooms, especially those in biology, philosophy and eco- nomics. Here two grim shadows haunt the executive, the loss of financial support and a heresy trial. This is not a general picture; but it is so sad and striking in the instances where it is true that one cannot escape from its horror. Religion cannot breathe in an atmosphere such as that ; that college is not a prophetic voice ; it is a hireling, peddling the petty wares made in darkness. Last, the introduction of pre-vocational studies has complicated the situation. The question arises. Shall re- ligious studies be confined to the pre-vocational purpose. TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE S47 designed for those looking forward to a religious profes- sion? And, in any case, how difficult it is to place reli- gious studies in any other category seeing that religious knowledge has been systematized on a vocational basis, by colleges preparing for the ministry and by theological teachers. What is the way hack? The college is a religious in- stitution ; religion has a place in the life-training of all men and women ; the world properly looks for religious persons as a result of higher education, and the college has neither time nor a program for religion. The first step will be to distinguish between two sets of problems, first, to determine the function of religion, in its various aspects, in the process of the college, and, second, to se- lect the necessary elements and means, rejecting, electing and coordinating the traditional religious parts of the college curriculum. Many are still attempting to fit the theological curriculum inherited from an institution de- signed to train ministers into an organization which has outgrown that purpose and passed it on to a specialized institution. Of course it is true that to a large extent the program of the college is determined by custom rather than by function; much remains by the sanction of the yesterdays alone. In the field of religion, where the hand of the past has been absolute, is the finest place to estab- lish the practice of a thorough examination of purpose as predicatory to any program. Such an examination involves a study of the precise social function of a college ; that is too large a task to attempt here, but it seems worth while to consider briefly the part of religion in that social function. COLLEGE PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION The program of religious education in the college will have three principal elements : the discovery of a reli- gious interpretation of life, training in the habits of the U8 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY religious life, and the development of efficiencies in reli- gious social realization and self-expression. First, the discovery of a religious interpretation of life. It is an axiom of everyday thinking that the college fails, no matter what else it may accomplish, if it has not en- abled the student to get a grasp on life's meaning. Of course this is not done either by chapel talks or by any sort of dissertations on the subject. It is accomplished commonly indirectly, by establishing habits of thought, by developing interest in the great subjects of human philosophy, by stimulating thoughtful minds one with an- other, and by the vision caught through ideal persons, purposes and concepts either met at first hand or discov- ered in history, literature, science and, most of all, in ex- perience. Such a conscious purpose makes the academic respon- sibility primarily a spiritual one. The most helpful for- ward step in religious education in the colleges would be the awakening of the staff to consciousness of responsi- bility for ideals. That would mean setting first things first. It would not mean the abandonment of any aca- demic standards, the lowering of any professional ideals nor the attempt to make a college a compromise between a university and a prayer meeting. Rather a sense of re- sponsibility for the ideals of students will make the most exacting demands on professional duty and professional skill. But the college professor must see that even his all-absorbing and all-important specialty is but a means to an end, and that end is personal, social and spiritual. He is a teacher not of subjects but of persons. His suc- cess will be measured not by monographs but by men. Whenever this responsibility is active in the staff it will be keenly felt in the student body ; its existence will be more effective than any homilies on the subject could be. Like all great ideals it will be caught and each genera- tion of students will hand it down to another. Do we not TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE 249 know colleges where this is true, where, high though the standards of scholarship are, the greatest heritage of all has been that of high and splendid lives who have accus- tomed men to thinking worthily of life? Students are aided to their interpretation of life in many specific ways ; perhaps at no point does a more specific evaluation appear than in the choice of vocation. This commonly takes place, for those who have higher edu- cation, during the college years. It is influenced tre- mendously by the traditions of the institution but even more by the opinions of instructors or professors. Not only are opportunities sedulously cultivated by older students to secure the professor's opinions on the profes- sions but they watch and repeat his less formal judgments. Their choices are fundamentally based on theories, thus acquired, of what is most worth while. They choose the law, for example, because it offers one an opportunity to lead and serve his fellows, because it promises fair financial returns with large opportunities for a few — of whom the student is one, — or because it offers a digni- fied profession with some scholarly aspects. The reason for choice is really an evaluation of life. The basis of choice is gradually developing through the years before it is determined. It is a way of thinking determined by the example of parents, the tone of public opinion and, markedly, by the attitude and judgments of teachers. So that vocational direction has a marked influence in form- ing the student's ideals and his theory of the meaning of life. Every study is likely to have open avenues to life's meaning. The study of the Bible is an excellent example, but what is true here is just as likely to be true elsewhere when the life purpose is held in mind. Where the study of the Bible is more than mere pedantry it determines one's ideals by revealing great spirits. It does more than instruct in the geography, history and archaeology of a 250 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY remote people; it develops these fields only to form the life-setting of great souls, of those who found life as a way to God. No one can really study the Bible without feeling the reality of those impressive personalities, and no one can know them without learning something of their secret of life. But there have been great souls in every field of human knowledge. History is dead information without its spiritual heroes and its compelling motives, science is dead without some vision of the vigor and faith of Kepler, Cuvier and Huxley, literature without Dante, Milton and Homer, politics without Plato, Mazzini and Burke. It is not learning only to know what they did but to know them, and this is to know what life is. INTERPRETING EXPERIENCE IN SPIRITUAL TERMS The college aids students to know the meaning of life by directing their experience. This is the application in the college of the method now accepted as a fundamental principle in religious training. But the difficulty is to see just how experience may be organized and directed. Yet the situation is very simple if we put it into other terms and ask. Is it possible to take the life of the college as a religious life, to lead young people into its full meaning, so that they will freely and happily live this life, and then to make them see that in so living they have had a religious experience .? Our task is not so much to give them something new as to aid them to a right interpreta- tion of the life that is already theirs. They must come to know the spiritual possibilities of the present. They come to college thinking of religion as something sep- arated from everyday life. To them the religious people were a separate group. They need aid in realizing their place in a religious order, in apprehending the normality of the religious and in recognizing the religious quality in acts and ideals. How is this knowledge to come to TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE 251 them? College preachers can help by revealing the spir- itual nature of the student's everyday experiences ; teach- ers can help by taking religion as a matter belonging as normally in life as any other interest, but, most of all, this knowledge will filter down through personal contacts, through leaders in the student's group. Close friends •can take us by the shoulder and say, " Wake up I religion is not something apart from you ; it is this life you are now living. God is not in the world outside alone ; He is in this commonplace round of tasks and joys." As a social experience college life may reveal life's spir- itual meanings. Friendship is the great revelation of life's abiding values, and its extension through the wide fellowship of a common society may be simply a mar- velous revelation of the possibilities of joy in life. It is not strange that graduates look back and say that the best of college life was the fellowship ; they are right, for this revealed human values, it opened practically the world of personality and it was, commonly, an experience in an ideal community, one which realized a democracy of the spirit, bound in free affection. Often college authorities affect to ignore the social life of the campus, to ridicule student friendships. But the educators watch these lives discovering life, learning that a man's value lies in what he is, getting down to the basic terms of a true democracy. The second general factor in college religious training is the estahlishment of the habits of religious living. Habit-formation through the direction and organization of experience is one of the normal processes of religious education. Surely amongst the desirable habits we will place prominently those of affectionate regard for the good of all men, full hearted devotion in service to the good of all, the control of the powers of one's own life, steady and insistent search for truth and reality, sympa- thetic adaptation to the needs and even the weaknesses of 252 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY men, the cooperative mind that can work with others for ideal ends and lojalt}^ to our own highest standards. These are characteristics of democratic living. Such habits are formed by living in these ways and doing these things. But how is it possible, in the highly mechanized life of the college, to provide for so many and varied experiences.? It is not possible if each experience is taken by itself. But they do not need to be so taken; they do not rise under any special program for they are but parts of wider experience. They must be acquired as habits, as parts of a variety of activities. Children do not acquire the habit of truth-telling by exercises in con- sciously telling the truth; it is learned through the prac- tice that comes in play, in social relations and in all du- ties. Courtesy is not an exercise which can be called for ten A. M. on the college program — often it seems to be postponed until graduation — but actually it is a habit formed by social thoughtfulness at all times. Social serv- ice is not that which is reserved for the Social Service Club and set on the program to begin after dinner on Friday night ; it is that attitude of mind and consequent activity which finds expression on the campus and in class rooms as well as in the city slums. Thus all college life is a school of habits. The college is responsible for " college life.^* The de- velopment of such habits as have been mentioned cannot be left entirely to student initiative any more than the habits desired in the elementary school are expected to rise in the child's will alone. There is desire there, and the power is there, but it needs stimulation and direction. " College life," we often say, " is the largest part of edu- cation." Why then is this largest part left without di- rection.'^ In what sense are college leaders educators if they have no care for that which plays the largest part in education .^^ When, in the face of high standards of schol- arship, slovenly habits of living are permitted, when men TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE 253 crowding through class-rooms and halls become discour- teous to women, when dormitory life becomes slip-shod and dirty, what are the ultimate educational effects? It is said that it is beneath the dignity of college pro- fessors to give these young people lessons in personal cleanliness, courtesy, truth-telling and truth-living. This is the rankest kind of childish pedantry. It could be maintained only by the dignity of purposeless pride of eimdition. It might be true if the college had no respon- sibility for the future which is to be determined by the life habits of graduates. But, as it is, instead of training in living, we exhaust our interest in conduct by leading the class in ethics through dry analyses of the bases of group beha^dor. If nowhere else, here is an opportunity, in- stead of developing an analytic interest in human behavior as a remote affair, to fix attention on the problems nearest at hand. Why not treat the college life as a real life involving real ethical situations. It is very real to the student, as real as any world ever will be ; it is his imme- diate opportunity of learning the art of living.^ If the college is to train for a democratic society it must be done by actual training in the arts of social life as they must be practiced in the college. TRAINING FOR SERVICE The third general element is the development of efftcien- cies h religious self-expression and social service. Can the college impart such instruction and develop such forms of exjerience as shall send young men and women out to live t\e life of a democratic society, one that calls for de- voted and efficient cooperation in the common good? Can it adc to the vision of a world organized for spiritual ends the abilities to realize that world? This is true vo- 1 As an example of this method see the excellent text book by Profesjor Bernard C. Ewer on " College Study and College Life " (Badger, 1917). i 254 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY cational training, for men are called to that which is greater than their professional callings, to serve and en- rich their world. The sweeping vision must, however, come down to practical details. This is the difficult mat- ter ; youth glows with the vision but it easily chills before the small tasks that alone can make the vision real. Their ardor will certainly die if our preparation is purely theo- retical. Here practice must go on step by step ; they must be guided into service and their ideals must find immediate application and expression in practice. The college can train in practical religious usefulness. Looking forward to their lives the college must see them living in communities where religious enterprises are in operation and where they wait for efficient workers. Much of this will be work in churches ; this is not to as- sume that church-work is the only or the most important form of religious service. But it is certainly a very nat- ural one with which to begin and it is one which is already fairly well organized. It has a broader claim than we sometimes think. If the total society is to be governed by spiritual ideals we must preserve this smaller society which is specifically organized as a spiritual group. If the community of to-morow is to be one in which children will have their full rights and men may find their measure of happiness we must aid those societies which are organ- ized for ideal ends to function effectively in society to- day. The church needs those who know how to make her social force count for social development and righ:ness. The college is the one institution which can train for com- munities workers capable for this task. Such a purpose will lead to courses of instruction and to the direction of experience in the actual work ;vhich churches have to do. These courses would not lo^k to serving an institution ; they simply accept the fact of social groups in communities organized for religious ends and they seek to train young people to eflcient TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE 255 service through these groups. The courses look for- ward to lay service ; they have no professional intent. Up to the present the application of this principle has been largely in the field of the educational work of churches. It has developed from the definite plans pro- posed by the Religious Education Association.^ It is found in chairs of Religious Education, with courses on Church-school history, organization, worship, child-psy- chology, methods of teaching, materials, community work and in the adaptation of biblical courses to this field. An excellent beginning has been made which needs no justifi- cation so far as its practical value is concerned. Sometimes objection is made to practical training on the ground that such courses lower college standards, be- ing foreign to cultural purposes. Strange to say the col- leges that insist most on these cultural standards have not hesitated to devote themselves extensively to pre-vocational work in the field of general education ; their catalogues show their intent to prepare young people for public- school service.^ No one objects to this, but all the argu- ments that hold for general education as a subject in the college curriculum hold for religious education. And so far as " culture " is concerned, what is culture but the growth of life, and life grows not for itself but for and through service. Culture for culture's sake is worse than art for art's sake. It is an end that turns inward and defeats itself. Culture must have purpose. The higher the purpose the greater the reach of the life upward. Training in the realization of spiritual ideals through so- ciety gives the ideal vigor and reality ; it secures its steady development. To deny the student training in the ex- pression of spiritual ideals through social activity is to 1 See the Memorial addressed to the heads of departments of education in colleges and universities throughout the United States by the Council of the Religious Education Association in 1913, 2 See the survey by W. S. Athearn in Religious Education for Peb., 1916^ Vol. XI, No. 1. ^56 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY refuse him an essential part of his means of growth, to shorten the radius of his graduate experience and, in prac- tice, to deny that religion is a real part of life. More important then than all courses dealing with the theories of religion, as a means of developing men and women of religious spirit, the college will recognize the necessity of simply accepting religion as a part of life, as a real experience in college life and a reality in the life which the graduate will live. Then religion can be made integral in the student's life, in his school experience, in his course of training, in his social living and service so that as all life grows his total life grows as a religious life. CHAPTER XX THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY Men stand to-day on tip-toe. It is an hour of tre- mendous possibilities. The whole world is awake with ex- pectation. All who look forward speak of a new world. And there are more looking forward than ever before. We know that every day in the past has held the con- sciousness of the possibility of change, but we have more; we witness vast social changes ; we see peoples in the mak- ing. The terrible struggle for the rights of humanity against the powers of the flesh and the desires of the devil has given us a new sense of the worth of those ends for which democracy exists. The high price that all have paid and are paying for freedom not only makes freedom itself more valuable, it gives it new and more spiritual meanings. We cannot but believe that this is the crisis of an age-long process in which the world has been finding itself, that we shall see the day when men will live for those values which are eternal, that when we speak of and work for freedom we are thinking of only one part of a greater process, one which appears with growing clearness, the emergence of the spiritual aims of existence. But the far-seeing warn us that our high hopes will not be realized without further struggle ; they warn us of the danger of reaction. We have been forced to at- tempt our spiritual ends with material means. Our em- phasis on the power of things may easily give the phys- ical and material the ascendancy. Unless we are pre- pared to defend and nurture the spiritual fruits of the struggle they will be snatched from before our eyes. De- mocracy will not be realized until we are ready for it, 257 258 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY The problem is not alone one of making the world safe for democracy, now it is rather one of making ourselves ready for democracy. The spiritual conflict knows no end, for the minds and wills of men are ever battling between desire and duty, between the immediate satisfactions and the far-ofF ideals. This is the conflict in which all issues are really settled. We have thought much on plans which would insure the conditions of human freedom ; are we thinking sufliciently on plans which would insure the will to use that wisdom wisely.'' We made tardy preparation for our share in making the world safe for democracy ; are we now making timely preparation of the minds of men to realize democ- racy.'' The ultimate issues are in the souls of men. Not on battlefields but in our wills the future is being formed. The real victories are being won to-day in homes and churches and schools. Democracy will be but an empty word unless we ourselves are democrats, unless our eyes are open to see what it means and our hearts are ready to walk in its ways. The immediate duty is that of edu- cating a generation who know and love and will the ways of democracy. A sense of these needs has been coming over the American people. In the fall of 1918 the President of the United States sent a letter to the Depart- ment of the Interior urging the necessity of maintaining at their highest efliciency the schools and colleges ; the Commissioner of Education sent a circular to every min- ister of religion in the country calling attention to the need " to fit ourselves and our children for life and citizen- ship in the new era which the war is bringing in." The colleges of the country organized themselves for a plan by which the immediate needs of the nation might be met and at the same time a larger number of young people might have higher educational training. Believing that a new and larger democracy is possible we must turn our- selves to preparation of mind and heart therefor. THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 259 BASES OF PREPARATION Preparation depends on the development of vision through education. First, a vision of democracy. Do we know what it means? The word is current on all tongues. To many it seems to be some concrete blessing to be dropped from the skies. To more persons it is simply a form of political organization, the one we use — and therefore the best. And yet the world knows it would not pay the tragic price it has paid for any par- ticular form of civil government, and it sees many forms of government uniting for this common ideal. It is pos- sible to make the vision clear. Children in the schools, youth in their varied ways, men and women through the churches and the press must have the full spiritual and social meanings of democracy explained to them. " Where there is no vision the people perish." The vision of many comes through the teaching of a few. It depends on clear and explicit statements. It is the duty of the responsible agencies, the school and the church particu- larly, to teach the people. Education for democracy must mean, first of all, instruction in the meaning of democracy. A vision of democracy will depend, however, on that which goes deeper than instruction. It arises in our own souls slowly through experience. All training in life as an experience of devotion to the good of all, and every experience of sacrifice for common spiritual purposes becomes a revelation of the worth and glory of democracy. We believe in that to which we learn to give our lives. Just as we purposively instruct in the meaning of democ- racy, so we must definitely organize its experiences. The spiritual significance and character of democracy appears when it becomes a personal experience. Through the organization of the life of the family, the school, the church and the city so as to effect full social cooperation 260 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY we can lead young lives into the knowledge of democracy. A democratic society teaches democracy. Through such teaching and experience we discover democracy as a social order and a spirit of life. Second, a vision of the meaning of education. This will follow from an understanding of democracy. We shall see the school as the child's experience in democracy on one side and as the people's work in democracy on the other. But, also, in answer to the tremendous spiritual demands of democracy, we shall see that education is principally a process of the development of the spiritual life. A people prepared for democracy will be a people who have rejected life's lower aims and have found spir- itual unity in common seeking for its higher values. Education will become the experience through which men learn what are the ends worth while in life and how to attain them. It will disclose life's values and train in life's social methods. The machinery of instruction will take its proper and subsidiary place ; children will go to school that they may learn to live. Life will make learning its servant in the curriculum. Schooling will mean the socializing of persons. Education will become the right of all and the concern of all because it will be the method by which society instructs its growing mem- bers in the meaning of life, trains them in the habits of the common life, and develops the motives and vision which sustain through that life. Then education for democracy will become, not a special course or a single subject, but the interpretation of all life in educational terms and the direction of life's educa- tional processes in the light of man's spiritual needs and his social aspirations. All the organization of life will be controlled by an educational consciousness, a recogni- tion of what is taking place in the changing characters of persons at all times. Home, school, church and com- munity will be recognized as educational factors ; they THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 261 will be organized to educate. The new education will be the direction of the orderly development of the whole of lives in their social setting and for their social functions. Third, a new vision of religion. If democracy is a society of the spirit it depends, most of all, for its perma- nence and growth, on the development of the life of the spirit. As the spiritual conception of democracy devel- ops the life and service of democracy will become the prac- tical and social expression of religion, and its sentiments and hopes will become the aspiration and shining goal of spiritual faith. Either our old religious ideals and our old religious forms will carry their force over into this new life or men will find new forms. A spiritual passion is sweeping over men to-day. It is the passion for a social order in which the soul has freedom and dominion. Somehow religion — that which lies in our concepts as churches and creeds — appears unrelated to the vision of the age. Religion must become spiritual. It must again reveal man as a spiritual being. It must again associate men for the rights of the spirit. It must again call man to himself, to this life of a spiritual universe of which he is part, and aid him in bringing into subjection to its purposes and its fullness all other powers and activities. Democracy really waits for the realization of Christi- anity. When the churches teach and practice Christianity they will reveal a social order existing for spiritual pur- poses ; they will demonstrate the life of social groups wholly devoted to the coming of the kingdom of God, the reign of love, goodness and truth. They will believe in the possibility of their prayers being answered, that men may in a common life of love do the will of God together. But spiritual ends seem to be very vague to almost all persons, and it is the function of religion to make them clear. This is possible, not by explanation, but by experience. Our new vision will reveal religion, not as 26^ EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY something that we teach and discuss, but as a way of life which discloses life's quality and meaning. It is a social way of life, a way of living together the experience of which leads men to realize the true worths and purposes of living.^ Religion, like education, has hidden its pur- pose under its mechanisms. Its means have become too largely its ends. It is not in churches nor in creeds ; it is in life. It is life as lived for spiritual ends. It is that range of values in life which makes us men and women and, most important of all, makes us social beings. It is the common life we can and must share together. It must appear as the basis of democracy, its underlying philosophy, its sustaining motive and its ever enlarging ideal. Then we shall have religion everywhere. It will not be a matter of places or days. It will so saturate all life that apart from it no part of true living in a democracy will be possible. It will be so common it cannot be sectarian. It will be in all our toiling together, all our social organizing, all our pleasures, all our schooling, all our common experiences, the life of democracy. Preparation demands organization. Society is not yet organized for social ends. Democracy can never be realized under social mechanisms designed for individual- ism. But the reorganization necessary cannot be imposed on our life as a ready-made scheme. It will be effected as in every form we seek to direct our plans to the purposes of democracy, as each group is organized for the experi- ence of social living and for the purpose of training for the life of a spiritual society. The changes may come slowly but come they must until men who toil know that they are not working by the sufferance of an over-lord 1 For an adequate treatment of this too-briefly stated position see "The Psychology of Religion" (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1917) and "A Social Theory of Religious Education" (Scribners, 1918), both by Prof. George A. Coe. THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 263 for wages to keep body and soul together, but they are working as their part in complete social living; they are sharing life. Changes will come until the home is not simply a stall and manger to gain strength for toil ; it is the place of the group-life devoted to the growth of lives through sharing a common social life of joy and service. Changes will come until the church is the common social organization of the spiritual life of its community, until the school is the socialization of the child and youth life of the community so that it may be directed to discover the wealth of joy and life and the ways of common living. The changes will come until all living becomes a spiritual, educational experience of common living, of social devo- tion, of religion. But the changes will come as the results of social intent on our part. Our dreams must lead to deeds. Children must be taught by courses in church-schools and community schools ; parents must be trained ; teachers must be prepared. On the other side there must be organization to secure conditions which make possible the common social life and cooperation of democracy. Prep- aration includes legislation, direction and organization to make the world a place in which democracy can be prac- tised. Tlie realization of democracy waits for leadership. We have been discussing ideals that seem to be very far off. They are the ideals of leadership. Many may criticize them as impractical; others may object that they do not sufficiently deal with methods and details. But details always follow vision ; methods are discovered when men seek to achieve. All who see the ideals must declare them even though the means be not yet in sight. The leadership of ideals, of vision, precedes all else. If there are prophets of democracy to-day woe be to them if they are silent ! Woe be to the preachers who wait for the people to indicate a pleasing theme when their hearts are 264 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY burning with a message on life! Woe be to the teachers who lead youth in a treadmill when their own eyes see a vision afar off, while the youth are hungry of heart for that which the teacher sees and does not tell ! We dare not be " afraid of that which is high." But all leadership is the result of training. Democ- racy must train its leaders in democracy. We are train- ing leaders ; but are we training them to lead toward our spiritual goals.? Are the colleges and universities schools of leadership in democracy.? Do we definitely plan that the young men and women who graduate shall be able to show the way to the better social order.? We train a leadership for the church but what consciousness is there in that training of the function of religion in the realiza- tion of democracy.? ^ Is the ministry trained to lead the churches in making their communities spiritual democ- racies .? And yet democracy is fast coming. No one can fail to see its signs, not alone in national and political move- ments but in the every-day ways of men. It is coming through the new attitude toward the child. It is clearly presaged when the national government sets up a depart- ment of child-welfare. More and more communities think of themselves in terms of the life of the child. We would save the children ; we would enrich their lives ; we would give them all that our life affords, not because they are so interesting, nor alone because they tug at our heart strings, but because they so clearly stand for the simple values of life, because they are our coming society, because they are our supreme opportunity to express democracy in giving our lives to the development and enriching of their lives. Democracy is coming fast through education. The 1 See " The Seminary and Democracy " by Owen H. Gates, in Religious Education, June, 1918, Vol. XIII, No. 3, page 193, also published by The Religious Education Asspciation as a pamphlet. THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 265 emphasis on social principles, social rights and social duties is its promise. The old intellectualism is going as an ism and becoming the servant of the life of all. The college and the university are conscious of the total life in which they stand; they are the servants of society. Their attitude of devotion to the good of all is the most effective means possible to develop in students a like personal social attitude. Religious education is the promise of democracy. It is our social endeavor to train all persons, as spiritual beings, for a spiritual world-life. What, then, is educa- tion for democracy but religious education, the training of persons for living in a social order which is guided by religious motives, is conscious of present religious values and looks toward religious ideals? That religious ideal involves an interpretation of all life in spiritual terms. It calls the family back to its function of nurturing spiritual beings. It calls the church to train and instruct persons in the ways of a democracy of the spirit. It calls on our organized social life to realize its undeveloped educational powers, to make all life an experience in common living, in the splendid joys of common service and of self-devotion to all. It calls us all to learn to love one another; it invites to the discovery that life is our great chance to love and serve. It would lead each one to declare, in all humility and all faith, " I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly." The life of each is found in the life of all. CHAPTER XXI DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR Our faith in democracy served us well in the long period of growth, under the strain of settlement, organ- ization and development; but what of these days of a world distraught, what of days when mankind is in a high fever and breaking out all over in eruptive spots of political revolution? Where despotism has reigned anarchy takes its place and emphatically proclaims its political philosophy as the ultimate gospel of social well- being; and where democracy has been developing seething discontent scoffs at it as an out-worn, unworkable idealism. It demands its overthrow and the forcible establishment of control by the class that has been so long exploited. We sit at home and imagine that the revolutionary con- flict will be confined to the areas where protest has long been inevitable and to peoples crushed under the heel of the oppressor. If we hope this we do so only by closing our doors and pulling down the shades while we bask by our firesides. And that we cannot do for long; the crowd presses at our doors and no police force will long avail. For our democracy this is the great hour of decision ; is our faith adequate for such times and is it strong enough to go forward and fulfill itself.? Is Bolshevism the logical fruitage of a genuine and thorough loyalty to the democratic principle? Is this new way, either in its mild and theoretical form, or in its hideous menace as a wild, unrestrained, brutal creature of hatreds and lusts, the natural and riper realization of democracy .^^ Many believe so, for, they argue, what is Bolshevism but the free and complete action of the will 266 DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR 267 of the mob, without restraints of custom, precedent or law? To them it seems as though the shameful, blood- stained and lurid episode of Bolshevik dominance in Russia, with its overflow to many other lands, stands out as a fearful warning of what will happen to any govern- ment that goes beyond praising liberty to practice it by giving power to the undisciplined will of the proletariat. It is an exhibition, they say, of the extreme form of popu- lar government which is no government at all and only the anarchistic violence of a mob. But Bolshevism is not the fruitage of democracy ; it is the direct result of blind autocracy. It is not the logical outcome of popular freedom and self-government; it is the inevitable ultimate of autocratic control and repression. Even the children who have lived through the 3'ears of the great war know that Russia sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. No one could expect that the bitter school of cruel repression would furnish the disciplines for a restrained democracy. Wherever the methods of old Rus- sia have been applied they have brought forth similar fruit. It makes no difference whether the serfdom be applied in a state or a factory, whether the oppressing class be hereditary nobles or industrial barons, their view of life and, especially, of the lives of others results ulti- mately in developing in men a distrust of all systems of government, a hatred of all forms of power and an habit- ual impatience with all legal and social methods of secur- ing their rights. Under the exploitation of their op- pressors they have seen these methods fail too often ; they have seen the social processes of life subverted to the ends of employers. So steadily and successfully have they been deprived of their social rights that, having ceased to experience them for themselves, it is not strange they cease to regard them or to believe in them for any one. Wherever the methods of old Russia have been applied they have made possible the Russia of the past few years. 268 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY That accounts for one kind of Bolshevik, the fruitage, not of democracy, not of any sort of a social theory held in his mind, but of greedy, selfish, class oppression. There is another source from which the ragged ranks are re- cruited, the incapables and socially subnormals, the ones who because of physical and mental inefficiences and defects never would win to a fair share of goods in the current social system of competition. Up to this day our world has paid little attention to this class. It has been willing that the deficients should breed their kind in greater pro- fusion than efficients. It has regarded laziness as a mental state, a matter of the imagination and feelings, and it has felt no responsibility for those who must live on short rations simply because they lacked the good sense or the grit to stand up in the fight and gain a full share. Such persons welcome a social upheaval as promising bread without work. They have so long nursed a sense of injustice, so long cherished grudges against the suc- cessful and so long laid to the social system the inequal- ities in possessions of men that they feel everything is to be gained and certainly nothing to be lost by sweeping changes toward which they have only the irresponsible attitude of beneficiaries. Surely the remedy for the existence of this class is not so very hard to find though it may take a long time to effect a change. It lies in the more thorough applica- tion of democracy. A truly democratic society will feel an inescapable responsibility for the defectives and the inefficient. It will not be satisfied until every life has a full chance to be all that it might be. It will not leave to chance the fitting of these incompetent persons into their places in life. It -will not thrust on the refuse heap of social failure thousands of its people by trying to make mechanics out of farmers and ministers out of mar- iners. It will not be satisfied to charge physical handi- caps to Providence but, in the light of its primary func- DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR 269 tion to develop lives, it will seek to remove these handicaps. It will decrease discontent by removing deficiencies. How many of our " under dogs " are really lame dogs, blind, under-nourished, embittered by early experiences of misery and driven into lives of snarling, bickering over refuse and bare bones of social neglect ! Then we must remember that these are days when the methods of the Bolshevik are likely to gain currency. Overturning and upsetting has been the order of the day. We have been forced into rebuilding a world. We who are conscious of our sanity could hardly hope to be granted a monopoly on rebuilding nor were our efforts so professionally rounded out in proficiency that we might hope to discourage amateur rebuilders. Then, think how much we have prated about reconstruction, until the word is frayed and obsolete ; it is not strange that some who always tend to scorn mere words should try their hands at a little practical reconstruction and should find many ready, willing aids in those who certainly could not find things rearranged any worse for them. MORE DEMOCRACY OUR HOPE The hope for this hour lies in more democracy, in carry- ing out our principles to their full and logical conclusions. The menace of what we popularly generalize as Bolshevism lies in the fact that it is simply a rabid application of class control. It does not disguise that fact ; it freely asserts that it is the control of all by the class that has hitherto been controlled by a few. And the dangers of our current methods of combating this new class menace are, first, that of subverting the processes of democracy by the artificial control and manipulation of public opin- ion, and, second, a falling back on the Bolshevik method of an appeal to class consciousness. The only differences between the methods of Bolshevism and the forms to which some of our saviors of society would resort, are that the 270 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY former does not pretend to be democratic ; it uses no screen of the general benevolence to hide its purposes of benefiting its followers. Its orators do not prate about the public good while they control legislatures for private gain, and the Bolshevists use weapons less refined, more concrete and evident than our class politicians. The latter are skilled in effecting their purposes by innocent- appearing laws, by controls of markets, prices and con- ditions of living. But when the whole thing is summed up, it is not likely that the world has been robbed of more life by the rough-and-ready method of the sword and flame than by the smooth Marchiavellian " gentle- manly " tactics that have stolen strength from the workers and made large fortunes by robbing the helpless infants of ice and milk. Much that many indiscriminately label as Bolshevism, Anarchy and Socialism — some to intensify their indigna- tion place all three labels on such as they would excom- municate — is simply inchoate resentment against our modem juggling with democracy. Blind Samson knows he has been shorn of powers and rights and fain would tear something down. Economic changes have given the under dog a new position. He is not an angel either because he is under or over. But he is likely to try on others some of the tricks long practiced on him. His methods are all wrong; explaining them does not justify them. But the wrong and failure is not to be charged to democracy. Our social chaos is due, in the main, to two causes, that we have neither prepared persons for the life of democracy nor have we really practiced it, and that, under the pressure of a world strain, we called a practical recess on democracy as a political method. If democracy has failed it has been because it has not been tried. It has failed because it has not depended on the wills of all; it has not depended on the development of a common goodwill in all and it has not applied the DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR 271 will of all to the well-being of all. The situation, even in the face of so many outbreaks of violence, even when the mob seems to have thrown all restraints to the wind and to have demonstrated its utter unreliability, calls for more faith in humanity, for a more direct and generous dependence on the will of the many. The greatest mistake we can make at this moment is to lean on autocratic con- trol for our protection. Our danger is that having tasted the efficiencies of autocracy in the manipulation of the forces of the nation through the crisis of the war we shall depend on the same force to shield and guide us through reconstruction. Dependence on the " strong arm of the government," as it is now construed, is only a relapse into feudalism. Being unable to work out our own salvation we place ourselves under the ward of bureaus and autocratic groups. Accepting a medieval political serfdom we grate- fully depend on the forces organized for control while our own powers of social organization and direction degenerate into flabby uselessness and final paralysis. The corollary of this political serfdom is submission to the undemocratic control of public opinion by overhead manipulation and propaganda conducted by the con- trolling forces. The possibilities of propaganda have been demonstrated by the war. A group can gather in a committee room and determine what the nation shall think. A campaign of advertising, through the ordinary channels of publicity and, most pernicious of all, through the creation and coloring of news, can start and control a tide of feeling that passes for thought and determines action throughout the nation. A bureau can, through a censor, suppress facts or so distort and maim them, lopping off here and enlarging and luridly coloring there, that the passions of men are inflamed, hatreds are engendered without cause, opinions are created and the vast and splendid instrument of the public will is playecj 272 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY upon to any tune the manipulators wish. What Prussia did to control the wills of her people, by the direct and detailed control of the press, by the explicit direction of the content of the materials of education and the use of the pulpits as tools of her purpose, we have been doing in every particular. Our motives may have been the op- posite of hers, but our method has been the same in almost every particular. We count it a crime to use the force of clubs and steel but none to use the greater force of organized manipulation of public thought. We are in danger of preserving the externals and killing the essentials of democracy. Maintaining the trunk of this fair tree above the ground, in the superficial matters of the ballot, we are cutting off its life-roots by refusing freedom of thought. There can be freedom, the essential of democrac}^, only where thought is free. But, with all our vaunted faith in democracy we do not believe in freedom of thought. There were good reasons for the control of certain classes of information during the period of the war; but there is no justification for the control of the currents of popular knowledge; there is no justifica- tion, except that of autocratic expediency, for the manip- ulation of the facts upon which intelligent judgment must be based. Who knows, at this hour, what is really happening in Russia? Who knows what happened at Versailles? We, the people, who are supposed to deter- mine our own affairs, cannot be trusted with knowledge ; we must be fed like children too young for the real facts, with gooseberry-bush genetics and expurgated world politics. We who would have no Caesar over our bodies must submit to the Kaiserization of our minds. If these conditions were but a temporary phase, an accommodation to war conditions, we could wait for the return to the normal. But they are not a passing exigency ; they are the expression of a philosophy of social control that is as old as the hills. They are the spirit DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR 273 of class-control in action. They express the purposes which undermine democracy. They mark the methods of the groups which have always been able, despite any party lines, to unite for aristocracy — their own class being the aristocrats. The motto of " the people be damned " has been wiped out of business, but the politician simply enlarges it into " The people be damned by being fooled." The remedy lies in resistance, the resistance of men who are and must continue to be intellectually free. It lies in a full acceptance of the faith that an enlightened people may be trusted and in an acceptance of the cor- relative duty of both demanding fullness of light and diffusing whatever light we have. It calls for the work of education, giving the light and training and exercising the powers of all in living according to the light. The attempt to control and manipulate society is an abandon- ment of the educational method in the development of democracy ; that method must be fully restored. We cannot lie quiet, tamely submitting to the arbitrary con- trol of our very souls. But, specifically, what can be done.? We can demand freedom. We can reject from public trust all who do not trust the people. We can reject the subsidized press and support every organ of freedom of information and discussion. We can and must show up the facts ; let the scientific investigators of social phenomena throw a clear, cold, undimmed light on the present processes of propa- ganda. We can erect and conduct other agencies than these that have proven false to the democratic trust, not only new newspapers and journals but such effective means as public forums, discussion clubs and fearless pulpits and platforms must be encouraged. Any agency that is loyal to facts must be developed as a sustainer of democracy. We especially should protect the sources of the informing and training of the young; the public schools are still — at least until some current plans of 274 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY bureaucratic control get into operation ^ — subject to local control ; they must be protected. The churches, while they have largely yielded to the machinery of propaganda, have done so with good intent ; their free- dom can be maintained and their power for enlightenment and the development of the spirit of freedom can be strengthened. If they refuse to save their own spiritual freedom they must be allowed to die. And yet more, how much every man needs to fight against the tendency that grows with advancing years to give up the struggle of spiritual freedom and to accept the easy ways of external protection and control. The peace that Newman sought in the Church of Rome tempts us all. There is no rest for the spirit that seeks growth. And there is the tendency to seek stability in the status quo. Our material interests in things as they are make us fear the ferment of a changing world. Having a little holding it is so much safer, apparently, to be serfs, to accept the protection of our over-lords than to go on venturing all in the long struggle of freedom. The pass- ing years accentuate our dread of change ; thought habits have cut deep ruts and it is so much easier to travel in them than to try the new ways. The spirit of youth passes and we no longer feel the stronger attraction of pioneering. Against all these things we must fight, or cease to grow and live, or cease to be democrats. And such a fight we ought not to, indeed we cannot wage alone. By social means we must develop self-culture for democracy, strengthening the hearts of one another, enlarging the common vision and clarifying the common knowledge. Further, all who believe in democracy must be wholly loyal to their faith in these days. Many are the attractive short-cuts that open up to the desired ends of social well-being. The democrat is always tempted to depend on external controls to effect the social good he DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR ^75 desires. Legislation, social regulation and regimentation promise to do by compulsion that which education, work- ing through the will of all, can effect only in a much longer period of time. But whenever we take advantage of these short-cuts, every time we place our reliance on external compulsions we defeat the ends and short-circuit the processes of democracy. Nor is freedom all we need ; one other dominating prin- ciple of democracy must be put into practice and given larger power ; we need the controls that, rising and ruling in each man's breast, guide all into ways that are above our present conflicting aims and competing struggles. Society will be saved only as it is ruled by social ideals that set first for every one the aim of social good. Democracy is more than freedom of action; it is that freedom which ultimately liberates every man from the bondage of his lower purposes and gives him freedom of action in that range of interests where the enriching of one never means the impoverishing of another. In a word, democracy to-day needs a dominating spiritual purpose. It needs a religious ideal, one that will be freely discovered and adopted through religious education. Are we really democrats? This is, do we believe, first of all and most of all, in the personal-social values in life? Are these the ends for which we live? Do we organize our lives for these ends, test all our institutions and laws by their eff'ect on these purposes and constantly insist on social conditions which make possible the devel- opment of spiritual value? Do we interpret democracy religiously, as a spirit of life, as an ideal to be realized only through faith, sacrifice and self-giving, as a passion and hope, as a way through which the world will find its soul ? THE END PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA '<■■ %' -^ A^' X "o^ I/- 7 •^J- V s" ,.\ -A' " -f •) N ■■ ^\N ■^ >\ '"^^ c,^'' 1^^ ,c,'-N ./y>T^ "^ c •A ^^ o ^' - v^^ \^