The machine that is run to the extreme limit of its capacity splutters, sizzles, hisses, and quivers, and finally shakes itself into a condition of ineffectiveness. But the machine that is run well within the limits of its capacity is steady, noiseless, serene, effective, and durable. So with people. The person who essays a task that is beyond his capacity is certain to come to grief and to create no end of disturbance to himself and others before the final catastrophe. If the steam-chest or boiler is not equal to the task, wisdom and safety would counsel the installation of a larger one. Here is one of the tragedies of our scheme of education. The spirit is the power-plant of all life’s operations and in this plant are many boilers. Instead of calling more and more of these into action, we seem intent upon repressing them and thus we reduce the capacity of the plant as a whole. When we should be lighting or replenishing the fires under the boilers of imagination, initiative, aspiration, and reverence, we spend our time striving to bank or quench these fires and in playing and dawdling with the torches of arithmetic, grammar, and history with which we should be kindling the fires. Thus we diminish the power of the plant while life’s activities are calling for extension and enlargement. We seem to be trying to train our pupils to work with one or but few boilers when there are scores of them available if only we knew how to utilize them.
Hence, it must appear that reserve-power and serenity are virtually synonymous. The teacher who has achieved serenity never uses all the power at her command and, in consequence, all her actions are easy, quiet, and even. She is always stable and never mercurial or spasmodic. She encounters steep grades, to be sure, but with ease and grace she applies a bit more power from her abundant supply and so compasses the difficulty without disturbing the calm. She is fully conscious of her reservoir of power and can concentrate all her attention upon the work in hand. The ballast in the hold keeps the mast perpendicular and the sails in position to catch the favoring breeze. We admire and applaud the graceful ship as it speeds along its course, giving little heed to the ballast in the hold that gives it poise and balance. But the ballast is there, else the ship would not be moving with such majestic mien. Nor was this ballast provided in a day. Rather it has been accumulating through the years, and bears the mark of college halls, of libraries, of laboratories, of the auditorium, of the mountain, the ocean, the starry night, of the deep forest, of the landscape, and of communion with all that is big and fine.
Socrates drinking the hemlock is a fitting and inspiring illustration of serenity. In the presence of certain and imminent death he was far less perturbed than many another man in the presence of a pin-prick. And his imperturbability betokened bigness and not stolidity. While his disciples wept about him, he could counsel them to calmness and discourse to them upon immortality. He wept not, nor did he shudder back from the ordeal, but calm and masterful he raised the cup to his lips and smiled as he drank. His serenity won immortality for his name; for wherever language may be spoken or written, the story of Socrates will be told. History will not permit his name to be swallowed up in oblivion, not alone because he was the victim of ignorance and prejudice but also because his serenity, which was the offspring and proof of his wisdom, did not fail him and his friends in the supreme test. It is not a slight matter, then, to set up serenity as one of the goals in our school work. Nor is it a slight matter for the teacher to show forth this quality in all her work and so inspire her pupils to follow in her footsteps.
We hope, of course, that the boys and girls of our schools may attain serenity so that, even in their days of youth, urged on as they are by youthful exuberance, they may be orderly, decorous, and kindly-disposed. We would have them polite, as a matter of course, but we would hope that their politeness may be a part of themselves and not a mere accretion. They will have joy of life, but so does their teacher who is possessed of serenity. Joy is not necessarily boisterous. The strains of music are no less music because they are mellow. We would have our young people think soberly but not solemnly. And when all our people, young and old, reach the goal of serenity they will extol the teachers and the schools that showed them the way.
[Chapter Fourteen]
Life
Finally, we come to the chief among the goals, which is life itself. In fact, life is the super-goal. We study manual arts, science, and language that we may achieve the goals of integrity, imagination, aspiration, and serenity, and these qualities we weave into the fabric of life. Upon the spiritual qualities we weave into it, depend the texture and pattern of this fabric and the generating and developing of these qualities and the weaving of them into this fabric—this we call life. When we look upon a person who is well-conditioned and whose life is well-ordered, in body, in mind, and in spirit, we know, at once, that he possesses integrity, initiative, a sense of responsibility, reverence, and other high qualities that compose the person as we see him. We do not reflect upon what he knows of history, of geography, or of music, for we are taking note of an exemplification of life. Indeed, the presence or absence of these qualities determines the character of the person’s life. Hence it is that life is the supreme goal of endeavor. Life is a composite and the crown-piece of all the qualities toward which we strive by means of arithmetic and grammar—in short, of all our activities both in school and out.