Sometime there will be many great unattached teachers, who will choose their own pupils because they want them and not merely because the applicants have satisfied certain arbitrary tests. The students may be graduates of colleges or they may be others. They will pursue their work not for credit or for any other reward. We shall yet come back to the masters, and there will be teaching in the market-places.
We are now in the epoch of great organization not only in industrial developments but also in educational and social enterprises, in religious work, and in governmental activities. So completely is the organization proceeding in every direction, and so good is it, that one habitually and properly desires to identify oneself with some form of associated work. Almost in spite of oneself, one is caught up into the plan of things, and becomes part of a social, economic, or educational mechanism. No longer do we seek our educational institutions so much for the purpose of attaching ourselves to a master as to pursue a course of study. No more do we sit at the feet of Gamaliel.
In government, the organization has recently taken the form of mechanism for efficiency. We want government and all kinds of organization to be efficient and effective, but administrative efficiency may easily proceed at the expense of personality. Much of our public organization for efficiency is essentially monarchic in its tendency. It is likely to eliminate the most precious resource in human society, which is the freedom of expression of the competent individual. We are piling organization on organization, one supervising and watching and "investigating" the other. The greater the number of the commissions, investigating committees, and the interlocking groups, the more complex does the whole process become and the more difficult is it for the person to find himself. We can never successfully substitute bookkeeping for men and women. We are more in need of personality than of administrative regularity.
This is not a doctrine of laisser-faire or let-alone. The very conditions of modern society demand strong control and regulation and vigorous organization; but the danger is that we apply the controls uniformly and everywhere and eliminate the free action of the individual, as if control were in itself a merit.
In some way we must protect the person from being submerged in the system. We need always to get back of the group to the individual. The person is the reason for the group, although he is responsible to the group.
It is probably a great advantage to our democracy that our educational institutions are so completely organized, for by that means we are able to educate many more persons and to prepare them for the world with a clear and direct purpose in life. But this is not the whole of the public educational process. Some of the most useful persons cannot express themselves in institutions. This is not the fault of the institutions. In the nature of their character, these persons are separate. For the most part, they do not now have adequate means of self-expression or of contributing themselves to the public welfare.
When we shall have completed the present necessity of consolidation, centralization, and organization, society will begin to be conscious of the separate souls, who in the nature of the case must stand by themselves, and it will make use of them for the public good. Society will endow persons, not on a basis of salary, and enable them thereby to teach in their own way and their own time. This will represent one of the highest types of endowment by government and society.
We begin to approach this time by the support, through semi-public agencies, of persons to accomplish certain results or to undertake special pieces of work, particularly of research; but we have not yet attained the higher aim of endowing individuals to express themselves personally. There are liberated personalities, rare and prophetic, who are consumed only in making a living but who should be given unreservedly to the people: the people are much in need.
Never have we needed the separate soul so much as now.