THE CHAUTAUQUA PLAN.
The eleventh Assembly has wrought its work, and it is safe to say no Assembly ever made more converts to the Chautauqua Plan. Among the number, too, were many of the best thinkers and ablest educators in the country. Many left Chautauqua this summer convinced of the possibilities in the work, and resolved to spread its influence. One of these, the Rev. Dr. A. A. Livermore, president of the Unitarian Theological School at Meadville, Pa., a man widely known as a ripe scholar, has published an article analyzing the Chautauqua plan. This article explains most clearly the strong features of the work. After describing the enthusiastic Commencement the writer says of the C. L. S. C.: “College education, as it has been hitherto carried on, has been largely a forced concern; students have been sent to school, rather than gone on their free and spontaneous will. The pupils of Chautauqua are voluntary agents, and engage in their work with a will. It is the difference between task work and love work. Almost all schools and colleges are handicapped by the compulsion necessary to bring their pupils up to the mark. But here all goes like clock work. There is a vim and abandon which argue the best results. Not knowledge, but the love of knowledge, is the best of accomplishments, and that is breathed into the Chautauquan graduates.
“The religious element is made a leading principle in the Chautauqua education, and it is the true one. Intellect for intellect, taste for taste, study for study, lacks the genuine inspiration, but put on the annex of religious faith in God, Christ and immortality, and you have got an effective leverage to raise the whole nature of man. The Chautauqua Idea is not so much to make specialists; as for example, engineers, editors, ministers, doctors, lawyers, but well instructed men and women. Human nature is a diamond in the rough, and it is worth polishing and setting for its own sake. God having bestowed such a magnificent treasure on man, he is guilty who does not put it to its intended purpose, and return it to its author improved and developed to its best extent.
“Another fine idea of the Chautauqua University is to educate people at their homes. Massing students together in great monastic institutions is dangerous business. Humanity heats and moulds and corrupts when put into crowded institutions, be they prisons or colleges. Some of the worst disorders perpetrated in society take place in schools and universities where young people are herded together in great numbers with the restraints of home and society largely thrown off. This scheme is to carry on the work at the fireside, on the farm, at the shop, by the work bench. Carry education to the people, instead of carrying the people to education. And still further it is the idea not to take people from their usual occupations after they are educated, not to take farmers, mechanics, housewives from their present callings and put them in the learned professions, but to leave them still where they are, and start them on a course of mental and moral improvement which they can conduct all their lifetime at their homes, and while still engaged in their several industries. This is a capital merit of the system, and deserves especial commendation.
“So planned and so engineered, Chautauqua is the university of the common people, of the great middle class that constitute the strength and glory of every country, and especially of ours. Its numbers are prodigious, its extent is world wide. It sets a splendid example for all nations. It strikes the keynote for the education eventually of the whole human race. In our land it is destined to do more for the perpetuation of our free institutions than many another time-honored school or college that limits its benefits to some privileged class, sex, color or section. Chautauqua blows a trumpet to every quarter of the compass, and says to all, ‘Come ye and buy wine and milk without money and without price.’”