These speculations seem at first sight to have little bearing upon the problems of education. But they are in reality intimately connected with it: for their consideration leads us back to the central fact out of which they have arisen—namely, the abiding truth that man’s deepest exploration of his own nature gives again and again this threefold result, that he feels that his real self-hood and real possibilities are not wholly exhausted by the terms “body” and “mind.” He knows in his best moments another vivid aspect of his being, as strong as these, though often kept below the threshold of his consciousness: the spirit, which informs, yet is distinct from both his body and his mind.
Now the question which all serious educationalists are called upon to ask themselves is this: To what extent does that three-fold analysis of human personality influence our educational schemes? The object of education is to bring out the best and highest powers of the thing educated. Do we, in our education, even attempt to bring out the best and highest powers of the spirit, as we seek to develop those of the body and the mind?
The child as he comes to us is a bundle of physical, mental, and spiritual possibilities. He is related to three distinct yet interpenetrating worlds; all accessible to him, since he is human, and all offering endless opportunities of adventure to him.
“Heaven lies about us in our infancy,
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
About the growing boy.”
Why should they close; whose fault is it that they do? Does not the fault lie with the poor and grovelling outlook of those to whom this sensitive, plastic thing is confided? Who so badly select and manipulate the bundle of possibilities offered to them, that they often contrive to manufacture a creature ruled by its own physical needs and appetites, its mental and emotional limitations; instead of a free, immortal being, master of its own body and mind. Here is this child, the germ of the future. To a great extent, we can control the way that germ develops; the special characters of the past which it shall transmit. We can have a hand in the shaping of the history that is to be when we have gone: for who can doubt that the controlling factor of history is the physical, mental, or spiritual character of those races that dominate the world? It is in the interplay, tension, and strife of these three universes that history in the last resort consists.
Now, on the eve of a new era, is it not worth while to remind ourselves of this terrific fact? To see whether our plans are so laid as to bring out all the balanced possibilities of the coming man; all his latent powers? We recognize the fact that body and mind must be trained whilst still in a plastic state. We are awake to the results of allowing them to atrophy. Where we find individuals with special powers in one of these directions, we aim at their perfect development; at the production of the athlete, scholar, man of action. But it cannot be said that we are equally on the lookout for special qualities of spirit; that when found, we train them with the same skill and care. Yet if we do not, can we expect to get the very best out of the race? To explore all its potentialities; some, perhaps, still unguessed? We know that the child’s reactions to life will be determined by the mental furniture with which he is equipped. His perceptions, his choice from among the welter of possible impressions surrounding him, will depend on the character of his “apperceiving mass.” Surely then it is our first duty so to equip him that he shall be able to lay hold on those intimations of spirit which are woven into the texture of our sensual universe; to lead him into that mood of receptivity in which the beautiful and the significant, the good and the true, stand out for him from the scene of life and hold his interest. A meadow which to one boy is merely a possible cricket field, to another is a place of romance and adventure, full of friendly life.
The mischief is that whatever our theoretic beliefs, we do not in practice really regard spirit as the chief element of our being; the chief object of our educational care. Our notions about it are shadowy, and have very little influence on our educational schemes. Were it present to us as a vivid reality, we should surely provide our young people with a reasoned philosophy of life in which it is given its place: something which can provide honest answers to the questions of the awakening intelligence, and withstand the hostile criticism which wrecks so much adolescent faith. For ten parents who study the Montessori system of sense training, how many think of consulting those old specialists who taught how the powers of the spirit may be developed and disciplined, and given their true place in human life? How many educationalists realize that prayer, as taught to children, may and should be an exercise which gently develops a whole side of human consciousness that might otherwise be dormant; places it in communication with a real and valid universe awaiting the apprehension of man? How many give the subject the same close, skilled attention that they give, say, to Latin grammar on one hand or physical culture on the other? Those subjects, and many more, have emerged from vagueness into clarity because attention, the cutting point of the human will, has been concentrated upon them. Gradually in these departments an ordered world has been made, and the child or young person put in correspondence with that world. We cannot say that the same has been done for the world of spirit. The majority of the “well-educated” probably pass through life without any knowledge of the science of prayer, with at best the vaguest notions of the hygiene of the soul. Often our religious teachers are themselves no better instructed, and seem unable to offer the growing and hungry spirit any food more heavenly than practical ethics and dogmatic beliefs. Thus a complete world of experience is habitually ignored by us, and one great power of the human trinity allowed to atrophy.
We are just beginning as educators to pay ordered attention to that fringe-world in which sense, intellect, and spirit all have a part: I mean the world of æsthetic apprehension. It cannot be denied that the result has been, for many of the young people now growing up, an immense enlargement and enrichment of life. Look at one of the most striking intellectual characteristics of the last few years: the rapid growth of the taste and need for poetry, the amount of it that is written, the way in which it seems to supply a necessary outlet for young Englishmen in the present day. Look at the mass of verse which was composed, under conditions of utmost horror, on the battlefields; poetry the most pathetic in the world, in which we see the passionate effort of spirit to find adjustment, its assertion of unconquerable power, even in the teeth of this overwhelming manifestation of brute force. There is the power of the future: the spirit of beauty and truth seeking for utterance. There is that quickening spring, bubbling up afresh in every generation; and ready, if we will help it to find expression, to transfigure our human life.