The moral justifications of war are very numerous, and that this belief in war has some effect upon the spirit of war and helps to perpetuate it, and is not a mere reflection of the warlike spirit itself, may of course be admitted. Many believe that war accomplishes work in the world; war is a great organizing force. There is also a view that war is good as a moral stimulant, or as a creative moral force. War is often regarded as the means of moral revival of a people that has become sordid and dull. Schmitz (29) says that war gives reality to a country. War strengthens national character, some think. It purges nations. In war people grow hard but pure. Irwin (25) says that such war philosophy as this is to be heard broadly in Europe, chiefly in Germany, but also in France and in England. Mach (95) says that disintegration takes place in times of peace. Schoonmaker says that war has taught men socialization. Again we hear that wars are just and right because they are necessary. Redier (30) says that war is a way of giving back courage to the men of our times. This praise of war which comes from the depths of feelings, we must suppose helps to give continuity and force to these feelings.
Institutional Factors
If the spirit of war is to any extent educable, and is created in national life and is not merely something instinctive, it is presumably modified in one way and another by all those institutions that are educational in their effect. Perhaps one of the most pressing problems of education in the near future will be that of the relation of education to war. We shall need to know what the school has done to cause wars, what changes should be made in the future with reference to this influence of education upon the fundamental motives of national life. The schoolmaster has been indicted among other instigators of war. We must see how much truth there is in this allegation. We must understand also how the whole educational process, as we may see it now after the war, may be made if possible to become a greater factor in life than it has been in the past, if it is at all an important element in the development and the control of the psychic powers of nations.
Schmitz (29) says that the eighteenth century and the French Revolution were dominated by the phrase, the nineteenth by money, and that there was a danger that the twentieth century would be dominated by the schoolmaster and by the concept, but that this danger is past because life has become so full of realities. Russell says, we know, that men fight because they have been governed in their beliefs and in their conduct by authority. If this be true the authority exercised upon the mind of the child by all his teachers may be suspected of having been in one way or another an influence in creating the moral attitudes that prevail in regard to war and peace. We have heard the question raised as to whether in the past the teaching of history as the story of wars, and the presentation of the facts of history from the nationalistic point of view, have not been morally wrong.
German schools, and the method of public education the sinister effects of which we have abundantly felt—that is, the propaganda, show us educational phenomena that are psychologically of great interest and which are also unique from the educational point of view. The influence of schools seems in general so negative, and there is so little connection between what is learned as fact and conduct in the practical life that, even in the case of the German teaching of war philosophy we must suspect that this teaching has been successful only because it has gone with the strong tide of feeling in the popular mind. That the German schools have directly and indirectly fostered the development of ideas that lead in the direction of war there is no doubt. Even more influential than the specific ideas that have been implanted, is the spirit of these schools: it is their militaristic and routine life, the great authority assumed by the teacher, the specialization, that has helped to nourish the warlike spirit of Germany, quite as much as the fact, for example, that Daniel's Geography teaches that Germany is the heart of Europe, surrounded by countries that were once a part of Germany and will be again.
German education, we say, seems to be unique in the extent to which it influences public sentiment and national conduct. In general, education has appeared among the influences that lead to war rather by default of positive teaching than by anything positive it has done. Even in Germany, we should say, the spirit of war has been made to flourish less by the teaching of a narrow nationalism, by inculcating hatred, and implanting wrong conceptions of German history than by failing to provide youth with means of deep satisfaction, by failing to coordinate deep desires of the individual, and to organize individuals in a normal social life. This is true everywhere. Education has not affected life as a whole, and it has not thus far been an influence which, to any appreciable extent, has accelerated the development of peoples in their especially national aspects and relations. It has nowhere fostered any conception of the whole world as an object of social feeling. It has everywhere accepted a certain provincialism as natural and necessary, and has tacitly assumed that national boundaries are the horizon of the practical life of the child. The school has in fact failed to take advantage of its unmatched opportunity to use the imagination of the child to develop his social powers. Sociologists say that if sociologists had been more diligent in spreading abroad information about the social life, the great war would perhaps never have happened. That we may certainly doubt; something more profound must be done by education than to disseminate knowledge, if it would undertake to be a power in the world and to do anything more than add its influence to the tendencies of the day, or perhaps temporarily change the direction of these tendencies.