Means and Ends of Education

by John Lancaster Spalding

Although we know that the earth is not the centre of the universe, that it is but a minor satellite, a globule lost in space, our deepest thought still finds that the end of nature is the production of rational beings, of man; for the final reason for which all things exist is that the infinite good may be communicated; and since the highest good is truth and holiness, it can be communicated only to beings who think and love. Hence all things are man's, and he exists that he may make himself like God; in other words, that he may educate himself; for the end of education is to fit him for completeness of life, to train all his faculties, to call all his endowments into play, to make him symmetrical and whole in body and soul. This, of course, is the ideal, and consequently the unattainable; but in the light of ideals alone do we see rightly and judge truly; and to take a lower view of the aim and end of education is to take a partial view. To hold that God is, and that man truly lives only in so far as he is made partaker of the divine life, is, by implication, to hold that his education should be primarily and essentially religious. Our opinions and beliefs, however, are never the result of purely rational processes, and hence a mere syllogism has small persuasive force, or even no influence at all, upon our way of looking at things, or the motives which determine action.

As it is useless to argue against the nature of things, so we generally plead in vain when our world-view is other than that of those whom we seek to convince; for those who observe from different points either do not see the same objects or do not see them in the same light. Life is complex, and the springs of thought and action are controlled in mysterious ways by forces and impulses which we neither clearly understand nor accurately measure. What is called the spirit of the age, the spirit which, as the Poet says, sits at the roaring loom of time and weaves for God the garment whereby He is made visible to us, exercises a potent influence upon all our thinking and doing. We live in an era of progress, and progress means differentiation of structure and specialization of function. The more perfect the organism, the more are its separate functions assigned to separate parts. As social aggregates develop, a similar differentiation takes place. Offices which were in the hands of one are distributed among several. Agencies are evolved by which processes of production, distribution, and exchange are carried on. Trades and professions are called into existence. As enlightenment and skill increase, men become more difficult to please. They demand the best work, and the best work can be done, as a rule, only by specialists. Specialization thus becomes a characteristic of civilization. The patriarch is both king and priest. In Greece and Rome, religion is a function of the State. In the Middle Age, the Church and the State coalesce, and form such an intimate union that the special domain of either is invaded by both. But differentiation finally takes place, and we all learn to distinguish between the things of Cæsar and the things of God. This separation has far-reaching results. In asserting its independence, the State was driven to use argument as well as force. Thus learning, which in the confusion that succeeded the incursions of the Barbarians was cultivated almost exclusively by ecclesiastics, grew to be of interest and importance to laymen. They began to study, and the subjects which most engaged their thoughts were not religious, in the accepted sense of the word. The Protestant rebellion is but a phase of this revolution. It began with the introduction of the literature of Greece into Western Europe. The spirit of inquiry and mental curiosity was thereby awakened in wider circles; enthusiasm for the truth and beauty to which Greek genius has given the most perfect expression, was aroused; and interest in intellectual and artistic culture was called forth. New ideals were upheld to fresh and wondering minds. The contagion spread, and the thirst for knowledge was carried to ever-widening spheres. It thus came to pass that the cleric and the scholar ceased to be identical. The boundaries of knowledge were enlarged when the inductive method was applied to the study of nature, and it soon became impossible for one man to pretend to a mastery of all science. And so the principle of the division of labor was introduced into things of the intellect. Of old, the prophet or the philosopher was supposed to possess all wisdom; but now it had become plain that proficiency could be hoped for only by lifelong devotion to some special branch of knowledge. This led to other developments. The business of teaching, which had been almost exclusively in the hands of ecclesiastics, was now necessarily taken up by laymen also. As feudalism fell to decay, and the assertion of popular rights began to point to the advent of democracy, the movement in opposition to privilege logically led to the claim that learning should no longer be held to be the appanage of special classes, but that the gates of the temple of knowledge should be thrown open to the whole people. To make education universal, the most ready and the simplest means was to levy a school tax; and as this could be done only by the State, the State established systems of education and assumed the office of teacher. The result of all this has been that the school, which throughout Christendom is the creation of the church, has in most countries very largely passed into the control of the civil government.

This transference of control need not, however, involve the exclusion of religious influence and instruction; though once the State has gained the ascendency, the natural tendency is to take a partial and secular view of the whole question of education, and to limit the functions of the school to the training of the mental faculties. And, as a matter of fact, this tendency is found in men of widely differing and even conflicting opinions and convictions concerning religion itself. It is most pronounced, however, in the educational theories and systems of positivists and agnostics. As they hold that there is no God, or that we cannot know that there is a God, they necessarily conclude that it is absurd to attempt to teach children anything about God. This view is forcibly expressed by Issaurat, a French writer on education, in a recently published volume, which he calls "The Evolution and History of Pedagogy."

"All religion," he affirms, in the concluding chapter of his book, "impedes, thwarts, misdirects, and troubles the natural education of man, the normal and harmonious development of his physical, moral, and intellectual faculties; and since educational reform is not possible without reformation in the government, it is the duty of the State, not merely to separate itself from the church, but to suppress the church and to found the science of education upon biological philosophy, upon transformism—let us say the word, upon materialism." This view is manifestly the inevitable result of Issaurat's general system of thought and belief. In his opinion, matter alone really exists, and what is called spirit is but a phase of its evolution. The world of spirit, therefore, is illusory; and to bring up the young to believe that it is the infinite, essential reality, is to teach them what is false, and to give a wrong direction to the whole course of life. For practical purposes this is the view not only of materialists and positivists, but of agnostics as well, who, though they do not deny the existence of spirit, assert that only the phenomenal can be known, or become the subject-matter of teaching. They all agree in holding that the theological world-view was the primitive one, which, yielding to the metaphysical, has been finally superseded by the scientific, the sole basis of a rational philosophy. The ideas of God, substance, cause, and end, are metaphysical ideas, which, if we wish to understand nature, must be ignored; for the study of nature is the study simply of facts and their relations with one another. There is, so they think, no such thing as substance, any more than there is such a thing as a principle of gravity, heat, light, electricity, or chemical affinity. The vital principle too, which has played so great a part in physiological inquiries, must be given up; and therefore, while nearly all the philosophers, from Kant to our own day, have made psychology the foundation of the science of education, there is at present a marked tendency to have it rest solely on biology. Whether and to what extent these theories are true or false, is beyond the purpose of this argument. True or false, they fairly describe the views of a large number of thinkers in our day, and enable us to form a conception of their philosophy of education. "Why trouble ourselves," asks Professor Huxley, "about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing and can know nothing? With a view to our duty in this life, it is necessary to be possessed of only two beliefs: The first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent that is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events." Our volition counts as a condition, but it is after all only a part of the course of events, and, consequently, the only belief it is necessary to hold is, that the course of events is ascertainable by our faculties to a practically unlimited extent. Such is the brief creed of materialists and agnostics. The order of nature is the only known god, and man's sole end and duty is to make himself acquainted with it, that through obedience he may attain the highest perfection and happiness of which he is capable. This is the one true religion, and an enlightened people should forbid that any other be taught in their schools. Here we have an intelligible and well-defined position, and the one which, from the point of view of such men as Issaurat and Huxley, is alone tenable.

Every one now, who thinks at all, has some theory of the world, and hence the shades of unbelief as of belief are many; and since views of education are part of a more general system of philosophy, it is inevitable that those who disagree upon the fundamental questions of thought, disagree also in their notions as to what is the school's proper office.

Materialists, pantheists, positivists, secularists, and pessimists unite in denying that there is a God above and distinct from nature, while agnostics and cosmists affirm that such a being, if he exist, must necessarily lie outside the domain of knowledge. Positive religious doctrines, therefore, are superstition. As these views are reflected in a more or less vague way in the writings of the multitude of those who make the current literature, public opinion becomes averse to religious dogmas. A large number of cultivated minds turn from all definite systems, whether of thought or belief. Everything may be tolerated, if only the spirit of dogmatism is away. They recognize how great a thing religion is, how profoundly it touches life, how powerfully it shapes conduct. Without it, civilization is hard and mechanical, art is formal and feeble, and man himself but a shrewd animal. But, from their points of view, doctrines about God and Christ and the church have nothing to do with religion. To think of God as substance is to convert him into nature, to think of him as a person is to limit him. The only absolute is the moral order of the world. The religion of Christ is not a theory or a system of thought; it is a view of life, and its essence is found in belief in the reality of moral ideas. The supernatural may fall away,—even the notion of a Providence which rules the world in the interest of the good may be given up,—and we still have the method and the secret of Jesus, all that is of value in his life and teaching. All theology is an illusion, all creeds are a mistake. Religion rests upon the moral power, which is not a conclusion drawn from facts, but the fact itself,—the primal and essential fact in human life. Religion is simply morality suffused by the glow and warmth of a devout and reverent temper, and to teach doctrines about God and the church will not make men religious.

It is obvious to object that morality supposes belief in a Personal God and in the soul of man, as law implies a law-giver. This objection is meaningless, not only for the thinkers whom I have mentioned, but for others who find little interest in the literary and religious ideas of such men as Matthew Arnold. Morality, they claim, is independent, not only of metaphysics, but of religion as well. It is a science, as yet, indeed, imperfectly developed, but a science nevertheless, just as chemistry or physiology is a science. Human acts are controlled, not by a higher will or man's freedom of choice, but by physical laws. The peculiarity of this view does not lie in the contention that ethics is a science, but in the claim that it is a science altogether independent of metaphysical and religious dogmas. All forces, it is asserted, physical, mental, and moral, are identical; and morality, like bodily vigor, is a product of organism. It is, in fact, but an elaboration of the two radical instincts of nutrition and propagation, from which springs the twofold movement of conscious life, the egoistic and the altruistic. This theory is accepted alike in the German school of materialism, in the French school of positivism, and in the English school of utilitarianism. What the influence of modern empiricism upon American opinion may be, it is difficult to determine. Americans certainly are a practical people, but they are not devoid of interest in speculative views. More than any other people, possibly, they have faith in the marvellous things which science is destined to accomplish, and they willingly listen to men of science, even when they quit the regions of fact for those of opinion. Thus the various theories, to which the progress of natural knowledge has given rise, are received by them, if not with implicit trust, with a kind of feeling, at least, that they may be true.

There is even a disposition to treat doubts of the truth of Christianity as a mark of intellectual vigor, and sometimes as a sign of religious sincerity. Preoccupied with material interests, but yet finding time to read the thoughts of many minds and to hear the discussion of antagonistic opinions and systems, they find it difficult to trust with entire confidence to what they know or believe. It all seems to be relative, and another generation may see everything in a different light. Problems take the place of principles, religious convictions are feeble, the grasp of Christian truth is relaxed, and the result is a certain moral hesitancy and infirmity.

They are not hostile to the churches, but they are more or less indifferent to their doctrines. As each sect has its peculiar creed, the dogmatic position of the church is thought to be of little moment. The important thing is to promote intelligence and virtue. The distinctively sectarian view they look upon as narrow and false, and the good which ecclesiastical organizations do is done in spite of their characteristic doctrines. The note of sectarianism is to them what the note of provincialism is to a man of culture, or lack of breeding to a gentleman. The moral fervor, which sectarians more than others feel, is, they freely grant, a power for good. It has a wholesome influence upon character, and is a support of the virtues which make free institutions possible, and which alone can make them permanent. But it has no necessary connection with theological doctrines, since it is found in earnest believers, whatever their creed. It is the child of enthusiastic faith, and is nourished and kept living by worship, not by dogmatic asseverations. As the power of the churches does not lie in their creeds, to make these creeds a school lesson cannot be desirable, especially when we reflect that the method of religion and the method of science are at variance.

Such, I imagine, are the views of large numbers of Americans, who are not members of any church, but whose influence is strongly felt in political and commercial as well as in social and professional life. And numbers of zealous Protestants are in substantial agreement with them, since they hold that faith is an emotional rather than an intellectual state of mind, and that religion is not so much a way of thinking as a way of feeling and acting. They assume, of course, as the prerequisites of religious belief, the dogmas of the existence of a personal God and of an immortal human soul; but, for the rest, they lay stress upon conduct and piety, not upon orthodox faith. A church must have a creed, as a party must have a platform; but unhesitating confidence in the truth of the doctrines which it thus formulates is not indispensable. American churches tend to ignore creeds. This is due, in a measure, to the growing desire to form a union among the several sects; but it is none the less a sign of waning belief in dogmatic religion. Hence the increasing emphasis which preaching lays upon the moral, æsthetic, and emotional aspects of the religious life. Hence, too, the assumption that the soul of the church may live, though the body be dead.