[Chapter Eleven]
Loyalty
When the boy overhears a companion put a slight upon the good name of his mother, he does not deliberate but, like a flash, smites the mouth that defames. He may deliberate afterward, for the mind then has a fact upon which to work, but if he is a worthy son it is not till afterwards. Spiritual impulses are as quick as powder and as direct as a shaft of light. So quick are they that we are prone to disregard them in our contemplation of their results. We see the boy strike and conclude, in a superficial way, that his hand initiated the action, nor take pains to trace this action back to the primal cause in the spiritual impulse. True, both mind and body are called into action, but only as auxiliaries to carry out the behests of the spirit. When the man utters an exclamation of delight at sight of his country’s flag in a foreign port, the sound that we hear is but the conclusion or completion of the series of happenings. It is not the initial happening at all. On the instant when his eyes caught sight of the flag something took place inside the man’s nature. This spiritual explosion was telegraphed to the mind, the mind, in turn, issued a command to the body, and the sound that was noted was the final result. In a general way, education is the process of training mind and body to obey and execute right commands of the spirit. This definition will justify our characterization of education as a spiritual process.
Seeing, then, that the body is but a helper whose function is to execute the mandates of the spirit, and seeing, too, that education is a process of the spirit, it follows that our concern must be primarily and always with the spirit as major. It is the spirit that reacts, not the mind or the body, and education is, therefore, the process of inducing right reactions of the spirit. The nature of these reactions depends upon the quality of the external stimuli. If we provide the right sort of stimuli the reactions will be right. If, today, the spirit reacts to a beautiful picture, tomorrow, to the tree in bloom, the next day to an alluring landscape, and the next to the glory of a sunrise, in time its reactions to beauty in every form will become habitual. If we can induce reactions, day by day, to beautiful or sublime passages in literature, in due time the spirit will refuse to react to what is shoddy and commonplace. By inducing reactions to increasingly better musical compositions, day after day, we finally inculcate the habit of reacting only to high-grade music, and the lower type makes no appeal. By such a process we shall finally produce an educated, cultivated man or woman, the crowning glory of education.
The measure of our success in this process of education will be the number of reactions we can induce to the right sort of stimuli. In this, we shall have occasion to make many substitutions. The boy who has been reacting to ugliness must be lured away by the substitution of beauty. The beautiful picture will take the place of the bizarre until nothing but such a picture will give pleasure and satisfaction. Indeed, the substitution of beauty for ugliness will, in time, induce a revolt against what is ugly and stimulate the boy to desire to transform the ugly thing into a thing of beauty. Many a home shows the effects of reaction in the school to artistic surroundings. The child reacts to beauty in the school and so yearns for the same sort of stimuli in the home. When the little girl entreats her mother to provide for her such a ribbon as the teacher wears, we see an exemplification of this principle. When only the best in literature, in art, in nature, in music, and in conduct avail to produce reactions, we may well proclaim the one who reacts to these stimuli an educated person. It is well to repeat that these reactions are all spiritual manifestations and that the conduct of mind and body is a resultant.
To casual thinking it may seem a far cry from reactions and external stimuli to loyalty, but not so by any means. The man or woman who has been led to react to the Madonna of the Chair, the Plow Oxen, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will experience a revival and recurrence of the reaction at every sight of the masterpiece, whether the original or a reproduction. That masterpiece has become this person’s standard of art and neither argument, nor persuasion, nor sophistry can divorce him from his ideal. The boy’s mother is one of his ideals. He believes her to be the best woman alive, and it were a sorry fact if he did not. Hence, when her good qualities are assailed his spirit explodes and commands his right arm to become a battering-ram. The kindness of the mother has caused the boy’s spirit to react a thousand times, and his reaction in defending her name from calumny was but another evidence of an acquired spiritual habit.
Hence it is that we find loyalty enmeshed in these elements that pertain to the province of psychology. It must be so, seeing that these elements and loyalty have to do with the spirit, for loyalty is nothing other than a reaction to the same external stimuli that have induced reactions many times before. In setting up loyalty, therefore, as one of the big goals of school endeavor the superintendent has only to make a list of the external stimuli that will induce proper reactions and so groove these reactions into habit. His problem, thus stated, seems altogether simple but, in working out the details, he will find himself facing the entire scheme of education. If he would induce reactions that spell loyalty he must make no mistake in respect of external stimuli, for it must be reiterated that the character of the stimuli conditions the reactions. We may not hope to achieve loyalty unless through the years of training we have provided stimuli of the right sort.