Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn.
The sources of our facts are and always have been the same, namely, the learning of what men before you have observed and recorded, and the advance only through the observation of new truth, that is, old to nature but new to man. The handling of this knowledge has always been the same, namely, through human reason. The giving forth of this knowledge and thus the furthering of ideas and customs has and always will be the same, namely, through expression, vocal, written, or manual, that is, in symbols and in design.
It follows that the all round liberally educated man, from Palæolithic times to the time when the earth shall become a cold cinder, will always be the same, namely, the man who follows his standards of truth and beauty, who employs his learning and observation, his reason, his expression, for purposes of production, that is, to add something of his own to the stock of the world's ideas. This is the author's conception of a liberal education.
One cannot too often quote the rugged insistence of Carlyle: "Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then."
Now note that whereas there are the above six powers, namely, truth and beauty, learning and observation, reason, and expression, which subserve the seventh, production or constructive thinking, and whereas the giving out of ideas is the object to be attained, only one power figures prominently in our modern system of college and school education, namely, the learning of facts and the memory thereof. It is no exaggeration to say that this makes up 95% of modern education. Who are the meteors of school and college days? For the most part those with precocious or well trained memories. Why do so many of these meteors flash out of existence at graduation? The answer is simple if you accept my conception of education. Whereas it takes six powers to make a liberally educated man or woman, and seven to make a productive man or woman, only one power has been cultivated assiduously in the 'centripetal' education; whereas there are two great gateways of knowledge, learning and observation, only one has been continuously passed through; whereas there are two universal standards of truth and beauty, only truth has constantly been held up to you, and that in precept rather than in practice. For nothing is surer than this, that the sense of truth must come as a daily personal experience in the life of the student through testing values for himself, as it does in the life of the scientist, the artist, the physician, the engineer, the merchant. Note that whereas you are powerless unless you can by the metabolism of logic make the sum of acquired and observed knowledge your own, that kind of work-a-day efficient logic has never been forced upon you and you are daily, perhaps hourly, guilty of the non sequitur, the post hoc ergo propter hoc, the 'undistributed middle,' and all those innocent sins against truth which come through the illogical mind.
"That man," says Huxley, "has had a liberal education ... whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind."
Note that whereas you are a useless member of society unless you can give forth something of what you know and feel in writing, speaking, or design, your expressive powers may have been atrophied through insufficient use. In brief, you may have shunned individual opinion, observation, logic, expression, because they are each and every one on the lines of greatest resistance. And your teachers not only allowed you but actually encouraged and rewarded you for following the lines of least resistance in the accurate reproduction, in examination papers and marking systems, of their own ideas and those you found in books.
May you, therefore, write down these seven words and read them over every morning: Truth, Beauty, Learning, Observation, Reason, Expression, Production.
In the wondrous old quilt work of inherited, or ancestral predispositions which make your being you may be gifted with all these seven powers in equal and well balanced degree; if you are so blessed you have a great career before you. If, as is more likely, you have in full measure only a part of each, or some in large measure, some in small, keep on the daily examination of your chart as giving you the canons of a liberal education and of a productive mind.