Towards the Great Peace

by Ralph Adams Cram

At best, however, this seems to me but an indifferent substitute, an inadequate "extra," doing limitedly the real work of education by indirection. What we need (granting my assumption of character as the terminus ad quem) is an educational system so recast that the formal studies and the collateral influences and the school life shall be more coordinated in themselves and with life, and that the resulting stimulus shall be equally operative along intellectual, emotional and creative lines.

It is sufficiently easy to make suggestions as to how this is to be accomplished, to lay out programmes and lay down curricula, but here as elsewhere this does not amount to much; the change must come and the institutions develop as the result of the operations of life. If we can change our view of the object of education, the very force of life, working through experience, will adequately determine the forms. It is not therefore as a meticulous and mechanical system that I make the following suggestions as to certain desirable changes, but rather to indicate more exactly what I mean by a scheme of education that will work primarily towards the development of character.

Now in the first place, I must hold that there can be no education which works primarily for character building, that is not interpenetrated at every point by definite, concrete religion and the practice of religion. As I shall try to show in my last two lectures, religion is the force or factor that links action with life. It is the only power available to man that makes possible a sound standard of comparative values, and with philosophy teaching man how to put things in their right order, it enters to show him how to control them well, while it offers the great constructive energy that makes the world an orderly unity rather than a type of chaos. Until the Reformation there was no question as to this, and even after, in the nations that accepted the great revolution, the point was for a time maintained; thereafter the centrifugal tendency in Protestantism resulted in such a wealth of mutually antagonistic sects that the application of the principle became impracticable, and for this, as well as for more fundamental reasons, it fell into desuetude. The condition is as difficult today for the process of denominational fission has gone steadily forward, and as this energy of the religious influence weakens the strenuosity of maintenance strengthens. With our 157 varieties of Protestantism confronting Catholicism, Hebraism, and a mass of frank rationalism and infidelity as large in amount as all others combined, it would seem at first sight impossible to harmonize free public education with concrete religion in any intimate way. So it is; but if the principle is recognized and accepted, ways and means will offer themselves, and ultimately the principle will be embodied in a workable scheme.

For example; there is one thing that can be done anywhere, and whenever enough votes can be assembled to carry through the necessary legislation. At present the law regards with an austere disapproval that reflects a popular opinion (now happily tending towards decay), what are known as "denominational schools" and other institutions of learning. Those that maintain the necessity of an intimate union between religion and education, as for example the great majority of Roman Catholics and an increasing number of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are taxed for the support of secular public schools which they do not use, while they must maintain at additional, and very great, expense, parochial and other private schools where their children may be taught after a fashion which they hold to be necessary from their own point of view. Again, state support is refused to such schools or colleges as may be under specific religious control, while pension funds for the teachers, established by generous benefactions, are explicitly reserved for those who are on the faculties of institutions which formally dissociate themselves from any religious influence. I maintain that this is both unjust and against public policy. Under our present system of religious individualism and ecclesiastical multiplicity, approximations only are possible, but I believe the wise and just plan would be for the state to fix certain standards which all schools receiving financial support from the public funds must maintain, and then, this condition being carried out, distribute the funds received from general taxation to public and private schools alike. This would enable Episcopalians, let us say, or Roman Catholics, or Jews, when in any community they are numerous enough to provide a sufficiency of scholars for any primary, grammar, or high school, to establish such a school in as close a relationship to their own religion as they desired, and have this school maintained out of the funds of the city. This is not a purely theoretical proposition; after an agitation lasting nearly half a century, Holland has this year put such a law in force. From every point of view we should do well to recognize this plan as both just and expedient. One virtue it would have, apart from those already noted, is the variation it would permit in curricula, text books, personnel and scholastic life as between one school and another. There is no more fatal error in education than that standardization which has recently become a fad and which finds its most mechanistic manifestation in France.

Of course this need for the fortifying of education by religion is recognized even now, but the only plan devised for putting it into effect is one whereby various ministers of religion are allowed a certain brief period each week in which they may enter the public schools and give denominational instruction to those who desire their particular ministrations. This is one of the compromises, like the older method of Bible reading without commentary or exposition, which avails nothing and is apt to be worse than frank and avowed secularism. It is putting religion on exactly the same plane as analytical chemistry, psychoanalysis or salesmanship, (the latter I am told is about to be introduced in the Massachusetts high schools) or any other "elective," whereas if it is to have any value whatever it must be an ever-present force permeating the curriculum, the minds of the teachers, and the school life from end to end, and there is no way in which this can be accomplished except by a policy that will permit the maintenance of schools under religious domination at the expense of the state, provided they comply with certain purely educational requirements established and enforced by the state.

I have already pointed out what seems to me the desirability of a considerable variation between the curriculum of one school and another. This would be possible and probably certain under the scheme proposed, but barring this, it is surely an open question whether the pretty thoroughly standardized curriculum now in operation would not be considerably modified to advantage if it is recognized that the prime object of education is character rather than mental training and the fitting of a pupil to obtain a paying job on graduation. From my own point of view the answer is in a vociferous affirmative. I suggest the drastic reduction of the very superficial science courses in all schools up to and including the high school, certainly in chemistry, physics and biology, but perhaps with some added emphasis on astronomy, geology and botany. History should become one of the fundamental subjects, and English, both being taught for their humanistic value and not as exercises in memory or for the purpose of making a student a sort of dictionary of dates. This would require a considerable rewriting of history text books, as well as a corresponding change in the methods of teaching, but after all, are not these both consummations devoutly to be wished. There are few histories like Mr. Chesterton's "Short History of England," unfortunately. One would, perhaps, hardly commend this stimulating book as a sufficient statement of English history for general use in schools, but its approach is wholly right and it possesses the singular virtue of interest. Another thing that commends it is the fact that while it runs from Caesar to Mr. Lloyd George, it contains, I believe, only seven specific dates, three of which are possibly wrong. This is as it should be—not the inaccuracies but the commendable frugality in point of number. Dates, apart from a few key years, are of small historical importance; so are the details of palace intrigues and military campaigns. History is, or should be, life expressed in terms of romance, and it is of little moment whether the narrated incidents are established by documentary evidence or whether they are contemporary legend quite unsubstantiated by what are known (and overestimated) as "facts." There is more of the real Middle Ages in Mallory's "Mort d'Arthur" than there is in all Hallam, and the same antithesis can be established for nearly all other periods of history.

The history of man is one great dramatic romance, and so used it may be made perhaps the most stimulating agency in education as character development. I do not mean romance in the sense in which Mr. Wells takes it, that is to say, the dramatic assembling and clever coördination of unsubstantiated theories, personal preferences, prejudices and aversions, under the guise of solemn and irrefutable truth attested by all the exact sciences known to man, but romance which aims like any other art at communicating from one person to another something of the inner and essential quality of life as it has been lived, even if the material used is textually doubtful or even probably apocryphal. The deadly enemy of good, sound history is scientific historical criticism. The true history is romantic tradition; the stimulating thing, the tale that makes the blood leap, the pictorial incident that raises up in an instant the luminous vision of some great thing that once was.

I would not exchange Kit Marlowe's

"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"

for all the critical commentaries of Teutonic pedants on the character and attributes of Helen of Troy as these have (to them) been revealed by archaeological investigations. I dare say that Bishop St. Remi of Reims never said in so many words "Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian; destroy what thou hast worshipped, worship what thou hast destroyed," and that the Meroving monarch did not go thence to issue an "order of the day" that the army should forthwith march down to the river and be baptized by battalions; but there is the clear, unforgettable picture of the times and the men, and it will remain after the world has forgotten that some one has proved that St. Remi never met Clovis, and that he himself was probably only a variant of the great and original "sun-myth."