So to organize our educational system that it shall be thrown wide open to all new and good influences; so to conduct the school that it shall be immediately responsive to these influences, is one of the most urgent needs of the internal life of the nation. This, rather than the introduction of any new content into the school is now our chief need. Some of these influences must be personal, belonging to the present. Some belong to the past. We must make American history, poetry, oratory, science, art and philosophy serve more completely than they do now the ideals and the right ambitions of the nation. This is the way we must both bring the past to fuller realization and also create new life which shall make amends for the deficiencies of the past.
III. Practical Interests
The foundation of internationalism, in our view, is the recognition of the legitimate desires and needs of peoples. The desires of peoples when educated should become interests in the performance of all normal functions of national life. The functions are practical; they take the form of many commonplace and daily activities. The recognition of the legitimacy of the desires of nations implies, or at least naturally leads to, coöperation in their accomplishment. It is very probable, therefore, and it appears to be required in any internationalism that is more than a name, that there shall be in the future wide coöperation in the performance of various activities by international organizations and agreements. If this is to be the order of the future, new educational efforts will be demanded, and there must be different methods and different points of view in several phases of our educational system, for now all education is devised with reference to an autonomous state of the nation.
If practical coöperation becomes a part of our plan of international organization in the future, we shall see many problems in applied economics and industry taken up for far more serious consideration than has been possible hitherto. Some of these problems, attacked even on a national scale, have seemed hopeless, but when viewed in their international aspects and with a prospect of international interest and effort they seem very different. There are many such problems toward the solution of which education must contribute a large part. We might mention the food problem of the world as typical, and point to the present world-wide interest and coöperation as an indication of what may come in the future in regard to all the problems of production and distribution of necessities, if we really mean anything by our internationalism. Apparently we hold within our hands the means of alleviating most, if not all, the destitution of the world. Organization and education in efficiency are the necessary and the sufficient weapons.
So we may conclude that an efficient method of educating peoples in the work of food production, and in the habit of conserving necessities would make a wide change in the economic condition of the world. Organization which shall include in some way the service of all children, will add still more to efficiency, and will contribute an educational factor of great importance. In such ways we may to an unlimited extent increase the available energies of the world, and make possible, if we will, the further increase and expansion of the human race. Such a possibility and such an ideal give a totally new meaning to much of the fundamental work of education. All our departments and accessories of the educational system that have anything to do with the elemental occupations acquire a new interest and importance from this point of view.
The whole field of industry offers now, indeed, a broader educational opportunity. Children's hands are ready to do many things that will increase the happiness and the powers of the children themselves and at the same time add to the world's prosperity. Children must, of course, not be exploited in tasks that belong to the adult, but there is a proper place for practical organization of children in the world's work, and a potential helpfulness in children in the larger affairs of society that has not yet been drawn upon, although surely we have seen, during the years of the war, what children might accomplish. It is above all in its relations to universal social feeling that such practical education and use of childhood are most significant. Out of the practical activities, moral results could hardly fail to come. It is not too much to expect that the children of the world may sometime be so organized that the power of childish enthusiasm, raised to we know not what degree by the suggestive force of such world-wide relations as are now possible, may quickly be turned to the accomplishment of great tasks,—doing its part in the service, the conservation, the self denial, that any serious interest in internationalism will in the future with but little doubt make necessary.
Education that shall take into account the principles of efficiency and economy as applied to universal problems will be a great advance upon any teaching hitherto done in the interest of internationalism. It is through practical activity and interest, suggesting and requiring restraint and coöperation, arousing imagination and the dramatic impulses, that fruitful and permanent social affiliations of nations with one another will be likely to be made. We may safely assume, in fact, that firm affiliations can be made only in some such way. Internationalism, from this point of view, is at bottom not a political problem, but an educational problem. The world will be united only through the mediation of its daily practical needs. The motives for such union are themselves commonplace. Moral intentions are represented also, and world crises make the conditions ripe for such coördination of interests, but they do not alone produce the definite organization without which the world will continue to be, as Dickinson calls Europe, a society in the state of anarchy.