Means and Ends of Education

by John Lancaster Spalding

Interest is aroused and held by need, which creates desire. If we are hungry, whatever may help us to food interests us. Our first and indispensable interests relate to the things we need for self-preservation and the perpetuation of the race; and to awaken desire and stimulate effort to obtain them, instinct is sufficient, as we may see in the case of mere animals. But as progress is made, higher and more subtle wants are developed. We crave for more than food and wife and children. The social organism evolves itself; and as its complexity increases, the relations of the individual to the body of which he is a member are multiplied, and become more intricate. As we pass from the savage to the barbarous, and from the barbarous to the civilized state, intellect and conscience are brought more and more into play. Mental power gains the mastery over brute force, and little by little subdues the energies of inorganic nature, and makes them serve human ends. Iron is forced to become soft and malleable, and to assume every shape; the winds bear man across the seas; the sweet and gentle water is imprisoned and tortured until with its fierce breath it does work in comparison with which the mythical exploits of gods and demi-gods are as the play of children. Strength of mind and character takes precedence of strength of body. Hercules and Samson are but helpless infants in the presence of the thinker who reads Nature's secret and can compel her to do his bidding. If we bend our thoughts to this subject, we shall gain insight into the meaning and purpose of education, which is nothing else than the urging of intellect and conscience to the conquest of the world, and to the clear perception and practical acknowledgment of the primal and fundamental truth that man is man in virtue of his thought and love.

Instruction, which is but part of education, has for its object the development of the intellect and the transmission of knowledge. This, whether we consider the individual or society, is indispensable. It is good to know. Knowledge is not only the source of many of our highest and purest joys, but without it we can attain neither moral nor material good in the nobler forms. Virtue when it is enlightened gains a higher quality. And if we hold that action and not thought is the end of life, we cannot deny that action is, in some degree at least, controlled and modified by thought. Nevertheless, instruction is not the principal part of education; for human worth is more essentially and more intimately identified with character and heart than with knowledge and intellect. What we will is more important than what we know; and the importance of what we know is derived largely from its influence on the will or conduct.

A nation, like an individual, receives rank from character more than from knowledge; since the true measure of human worth is moral rather than intellectual. The teaching of the school becomes a subject of passionate interest, through our belief in its power to educate sentiment, stimulate will, and mould character. For in the school we do more than learn the lessons given us: we live in an intellectual and moral atmosphere, acquire habits of thought and behavior; and this, rather than what we learn, is the important thing. To imagine that youths who have passed through colleges and universities, and have acquired a certain knowledge of languages and sciences, but have not formed strongly marked characters, should forge to the front in the world and become leaders in the army of religion and civilization, is to cherish a delusion. The man comes first; and scholarship without manhood will be found to be ineffectual. The semi-culture of the intellect, which is all a mere graduate can lay claim to, will but help to lead astray those who lack the strength of moral purpose; and they whom experience has made wise expect little from young men who have bright minds and have passed brilliant examinations, but who go out into the world without having trained themselves to habits of patient industry and tireless self-activity.

Man is essentially a moral being; and he who fails to become so, fails to become truly human. Individuals and nations are brought to ruin not by lack of knowledge, but by lack of conduct. "Now that the world is filled with learned men," said Seneca, "good men are wanting." He was Nero's preceptor, and saw plainly how powerless intellectual culture was to save Rome from the degeneracy which undermined its civilization and finally brought on its downfall. If in college the youth does not learn to govern and control himself,—to obey and do right in all things, not because he has not the power to disobey and do wrong, but because he has not the will,—nothing else he may learn will be of great service. It seems to me I perceive in our young men a lack of moral purpose, of sturdiness, of downright obstinate earnestness, in everything—except perhaps in money-getting pursuits; for even in these they are tempted to trust to speculation and cunning devices rather than to persistent work and honesty, which become a man more than crowns and all the gifts of fortune. Without truthfulness, honesty, honor, fidelity, courage, integrity, reverence, purity, and self-respect no worthy or noble life can be led. And unless we can get into our colleges youths who can be made to drink into their inmost being this vital truth, little good can be accomplished there. Now, it often happens that these institutions are, in no small measure, refuges into which the badly organized families of the wealthy send their sons in the vain expectation that the fatal faults of inheritance and domestic training will be repaired. In college, as wherever there are men, quality is more precious than quantity. The number of students is great enough when they are of the right kind; and the work which now lies at our hand is to make it possible that those who have talent and the will to improve themselves may enter our institutions of learning. But those who are shown to be insusceptible of education should be eliminated; for they profit not themselves, and are a hindrance to the others.

Gladly I turn from them to you, young gentlemen, who have persevered in the pursuit of knowledge and virtue, and to-day are declared worthy to receive the highest honor Notre Dame can confer. The deepest and the best thing in us is faith in reason; for when we look closely, we perceive that faith in God, in the soul, in good, in freedom, in truth, is faith in reason. Individuals, nations, the whole race, wander in a maze of errors. The world of the senses is apparent and illusive, that of pure thought vague and shadowy. Science touches but the form and surface; speculation is swallowed in abysses and disperses itself; ignorance darkens, passion blinds the mind; the truth of one age becomes the error of a succeeding; opinions change from continent to continent and from century to century. The more we learn, the less we know; and what we most of all desire to know eludes our grasp. But, nevertheless, our faith in reason is unshaken; and holding to this faith, we hold to God, to good, to freedom, and to truth.

Goodness is the radical principle; the good, the primal aim and final end of life; for the good is whatever is helpful to life. Hence what is true is good, what is useful is good, what is fair is good, what is right is good; and the true, the useful, the fair, and the right are intertwined and circle about man like a noble sisterhood, to waken him to life, and to urge him toward God, the supreme good, whose being is power, wisdom, love without limit. The degree of goodness in all things is measured by their approach to this absolute Being. Hence the greater our strength, wisdom, and love, the greater our good, the richer and more perfect our life. There is no soul which does not bow with delight and reverence before Beauty and Power; and when we come to true insight, we perceive that holiness is Beauty and goodness Power. Genuine spiritual power is from God, and compels the whole mechanic world to acknowledge its absoluteness. The truths of religion and morality are of the essence of our life; they cannot be learned from another, but must be wrought into self-consciousness by our own thinking and doing,—by habitual meditation, and constant obedience to conscience. Virtue, knowledge, goodness, and greatness are their own reward: they are primarily and essentially ends, and only incidentally means. Hence those who strive for perfection with the view thereby to gain recognition, money, or place, do not really strive for perfection at all. They are also unwise; for virtue, knowledge, goodness, and greatness are not the surest means to such ends, and they can be acquired only with infinite pains. The highest human qualities cease to be the highest when they are made subordinate to the externalities of office and wealth. The one aim of a mind smitten with the love of excellence is to live consciously and lovingly with whatever is true or good or fair. And such a one cannot be disturbed whether by the general indifference of men or by their praise or blame. The standpoint of the soul is: What thou art, not what others think thee. If thou art at one with thy true self, God and the eternal laws bear thee up and onward. The moral and the religious life interpenetrate each other. To sunder them is to enfeeble both. To weaken faith is to undermine character; to fail in conduct is to deprive faith of inspiration and vigor. Learn to live thy religion, and thou shalt have little need or desire to argue and dispute about it. Truth is mightier than its witnesses, religion greater than its saints and martyrs. Learn to think, and thou shalt easily learn to live.

In the presence of the highest manifestations of thought and love, of truth and beauty, nothing perfect or divine is incredible. Men of genius, philosophers, poets, and saints, who by thinking and doing make this ethereal but most real world rise before us in concrete form and substance, are heavenly messengers and illuminators of the soul. Had none of them lived, how should we see and understand that man is Godlike and that God is truth and love? We cannot make this high world plain by telling about it. It is not a land which may be described. It is a state of soul which they alone comprehend who have been transformed by patient meditation and faithful striving. But once it is revealed, a thousand errors and obscurities fall away from us. If not educated, strive at least to be educable,—a believer in wisdom, and sensitive to all high influence, and eager to be quit of thy ignorance and hardness. As the dead cannot produce the live, so mechanical minds, however much they may be able to drill, train, and instruct, cannot educate. The secret of the mother's specific educational power lies in the fact that she is a spiritual not a mechanical force, loves and is loved by her pupils. The most ennobling and the most thoroughly satisfying sentiment of which we are capable is love. Until we love we are strangers to ourselves. We are like beings asleep or lost to the knowledge of themselves and all things, till, awakening to the appeal of the pure light and the balmy air, they look upon what is not themselves; and, finding it fair and beautiful, learn in loving it to feel and know themselves.

Increase of the power to love is increase of life. But love needs guidance. We first awaken in the world of the senses, and are attracted by what we see and touch and taste. The aim of education is to help the soul to rise above this world, in which, if we remain, we are little better than brutes. Hence the teacher seeks in many ways to reveal to the young the fact that the perfect, the best, cannot be seen or touched, cannot be grasped even by the mind; but that it is, nevertheless, that which they should strive to make themselves capable of loving above all things. And thus he prepares them to understand what is meant by the love of truth and righteousness, by the love of God. In the training of animals even, patience and gentleness are more effective than violence. How, then, shall we hope by physical constraint and harsh methods to educate human beings, who are human precisely because they are capable of love and are swayed by rational motives? There is no soul so gross, so deeply buried in matter, but it shall from some point or other make a sally to show it still bears the impress of God's image. At such points the educator will keep watch, studying how he may make this single ray of light interfuse itself with his pupil's whole being.

It is not possible to know there is no God, no soul, no free will, no right or wrong; at the worst, it is only possible to doubt all this. The universe is as inconceivable as God, and theories of matter as full of difficulties as theories of spirit. It is a question of belief or unbelief; ultimately a question of health or disease, of life or death. They who have no faith in God can have little faith in the worth of life, which can be for them but an efflorescence of death, a sort of inexplicable malady of atoms dreaming they are conscious. If the age tends irresistibly to destroy belief in God, the end will be the ruin of belief in the good of life. In the mean while the doubt which weakens the springs of hope and love is not a symptom of health but of disease, pregnant with suffering and misery for all, but most of all for the young. He who is loved in a true and noble way is surrounded by an element of spiritual light in which his worth is revealed to him. In perceiving what he is to another, he comes to understand what he is or may be in himself.

Our self respect even is largely due to the love we receive in childhood and youth. Enthusiasm springs from faith in God and in the soul, which begets in us a high and heroic belief in the divine good of life. It is thus an educational force of highest value. It calms and exalts the soul like the view of the starlit heavens and the everlasting mountains. It is, in every good and noble cause, a fountain head of endurance and perseverance. It bears us on with a sense of joy and vigor, such as is felt when, mounted on a high-mettled steed, we ride in the pleasant air of a spring morning, amid the beauties and grandeurs of nature. In the front of battle and in the presence of death it throws around the soul the light of immortal things. It gives us the plenitude of existence, the full and high enjoyment of living. On its wings the poet, the lover, the orator, the hero, and the saint are borne in rapture through worlds whose celestial glory and delightfulness cold and unmoved minds do not suspect. It is not a flame from the dry wood and withered grass, but a heat and glow from the abysmal depths of being. It makes us content to follow after truth and love in dark and narrow ways, as the miner, in central deeps where sunlight has never fallen, seeks his treasure. It keeps us fresh and young; and, like the warmer sun, reclothes the world day by day with new beauty. It teaches patience, the love of work without haste and without worry. It gives strength to hear and speak truth, and to walk in the sacred way of truth, as though we but idly strolled with pleasant friends amid fragrant flowers. It gives us deeper consciousness of our own liberty, faith in human perfectibility, which lies at the root of our noblest efforts; to which the more we yield ourselves the more we feel that we are free. It knows a thousand words of truth and might, which it whispers in gentlest tones to rightly attuned ears: Since the universe is a harmony whose diapason is God, why should thy life strike a discordant note? Yield not to discouragement; thou art alive, and God is in His world. The combat and not the victory proclaims the hero. If thy success had been greater, thou hadst been less. The noisy participants in great conflicts, of whatever kind, exercise less influence upon the outcome than choice spirits, who, turning aside from the thunder and smoke of battle, gain in lonely striving and meditation view of new truth by which the world is transformed.