EDUCATION—THE SCIENCE OF INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT
Eugenics provides the hereditary qualities of the Super Man; Social Adjustment furnishes the environment in which these qualities are to develop; there still remains the development of the individual through Education, a word which means, for our purposes, all phases of character shaping from birth-day to death-day.
The individual has been rediscovered during the past three centuries. He was known in some of the earlier civilizations, but during the Middle Ages the place that had seen him knew him no more. He was submerged in the group and forced to subordinate his interests to the demands of group welfare. The distinctive work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been a reversal of this enforced individual oblivion and the formulation of a demand for individual initiative and activity. The individual, pushed forward in politics, in religion, and in commerce has freely asserted and successfully maintained his right to consideration, until the opportunities of the twentieth century free citizen far exceed those of the convention-bound citizen of the middle ages. The twentieth century citizen is free because he makes efficient choices. The continuance of his freedom depends upon the continued wisdom of his choice.
The chief objective point of modern endeavor has been individual freedom of choice. The laissez-faire doctrine in commercial relations, democracy in politics, the natural philosophy and natural theology of the eighteenth century are all expressions of a belief in equality. When men are made free to choose, they are placed on a basis of equality, since they have a like opportunity to succeed or fail. The man who chooses rightly wins success—the man who chooses wrongly fails.
Thus the freedom to choose is for the average man a right of inestimable value, because it places in his hands the opportunity to achieve. Rights do not, however, come alone. The freeman is bound in his choices to recognize the law that rights are always accompanied by duties.
Each right is accompanied by a proportionate responsibility—there is no dinner without its dishwashing. To be sure, you may shift the burden of dishwashing to the maid, and the burden of voting to the “other fellow,” but the responsibility is none the less present. Garbage is still garbage, even when thrown into the well, and your responsibilities, shifted to the maid and the other voter, return to plague you in the form of a servant problem and of vicious politics. Men who have a right to choose have also a duty to fulfill, and this right and this duty are inseparable.
The eighteenth century began the discovery of the individual man; the nineteenth century—at least the latter half of it—was responsible for the discovery of the individual woman. Even to-day in many civilized lands, the woman is merely an appendage. Men innumerable write in the hotel register “John Edwards and Wife,” yet if the truth were told they should often write “Jane Edwards and John Edwards,” and perhaps sometimes “Jane Edwards and husband.”