We in Canada are a composite sample of life. We have come to us Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Gallic, Teutonic, Slavonic and others. All these streams of blood flow over Canada and mingle in us. It is not any longer with us merely a toleration of an individual or of an idea from Russia—or the States—but an appreciation of the person and the idea, to make them serve our people better. There is conservation in that. The best we have inherited is the quality of life. Our more immediate ancestors loved liberty, prized intelligence and cherished justice. These they had won by courage, by struggle, by patience and by privation. They left them to us to be improved by education. Concepts such as these are what count in the great issues of life.
Let me without any offense or bad taste be personal and speak of one of my ancestors. He has been dead a long time. I didn't know him. But not infrequently I can feel the thrill and the efforts at domination of his convictions and his habits. I remember a dog biting me. I could have strangled the creature with my hands. I did not learn that in school, but I had the instinct in me from that old ancestor. I can think of him in a cave, living a bare coarse life. But he conserved the chance for the babies; and the lion and the wolf and the bear could not stand against the club and the fire which he used for the protection of his wife and children. Coarse! Of course he was. A thing of paws and claws and jaws! But he conserved his concepts of duty, his ideals of protection for the young and the weak. His concepts and the labors and struggles they involved by and by refined his body. Then, ages afterwards, 20,000 or 30,000 years afterwards, we had Lord Lister. Two hundred and fifty thousand women saved annually through the service of his refined brain and his trained hands, and his large concepts of duty. And we had Florence Nightingale; and you had Abraham Lincoln. And we all have everybody and anybody that conserves concepts of joy and glory through duty discharged by constructive, contributing labor, social service and abiding good will. In these and others innumerable we have a heritage, not made with hands.
Time fails me even to name all our other heritages which are not in material resources. There are customs, institutions, laws, manners, ideas, traditions, standards, ideals, art, songs, language and books. Books are more than material things. They are material humanized into food for the mind and spirit as soil and air may be glorified into apples and flowers for the senses. Sometimes produced with immense pains, they bring infinite joys. The Kingdom hath come to us for such a time as this when a new day dawns for happiness and well-being on earth.
Some of the means under modern conditions through which further advances in the formation and conservation of character are to be looked for are,—first those which lead young people to the achievement of joy through the processes of labor as distinguished from its wages or other rewards. Every child who is given a fair chance can manage that. In this a little child may lead us. Secondly, those which produce the pleasure of working together for some end believed to be good for all. Will not school pupils and older students work themselves into social efficiency, by co-operating in productive labor, as well as play themselves into ability by means of team games? Both together are better than twice as much of either alone. Thirdly, those which yield gladness through creative work whereby each individual strives to give expression to his own concepts of utility and beauty in concrete things as well as in words and other symbols. The insistence, by school and college, upon passive receptiveness for prolonged periods may have disciplined the mind for the perception of symbols, and the understanding of theories and rules. But has not the heaping of instruction upon enforced passivity led to an atrophy of the love of constructive creative labor? Immobility in classes all day long is not goodness. That sort of thing is the one persisting attribute of the dead or the nearly moribund. Every man who actively conserves these constructive, co-operative, creative powers, and achieves joy and satisfaction through their exercise, saves himself and becomes a saving factor in his community. In doing these things he transfuses the routine of life by a spirit of trained intelligence, cultured ability and habitual good will. The use of books and book-information are a helpful aid to the growth of mental power, the development of moral ideas and the progress of education. Books furnish some of the food and stimulus to thought. But when these are not turned into service through action, they become so much cloying debris upon vitality.
I have happily seen enough in the last few years to bring me to the conclusion, that, in less than ten years on this continent, all children from rural homes will come to the schools at 6 or 7 years of age able to speak better than they speak now, and able to write and read and to figure up to division. They will come to school able to do all that, having played themselves into ability. We have been on wrong lines in making a child take up a book at six, and so far as schooling is concerned, stay under the domination of a book until he is sixteen. Then he has been liberated into a laboratory, or into life, and says, "Thank the Lord that book business is done!" That is not wise, that is not safe. How the book has menaced humanity in recent years, on all sides, by its insistence that reading is the end of education, the main means and object of culture, instead of being merely a contributing means toward the larger end of living. You people concerned with books must take the bread of life in your hands and minister to life, not under the guise of book-learning, but for the formation of habits and standards and fine ideals.
Put into the language of everyday life the main steps in every complete educational experience are: observing, thinking, feeling and managing towards and into some form of expression. It appears to me that the closer in point of time the steps are taken together, the greater the growth of power and the surer the formation of habits. Frequency of experience is what forms habits and not repetitions of instructions or information. In so far as these experiences can have close relation to the threefold activities demanded by life, so much the better for the culture of the student, even if not so complimentary to a subject or its professor. I mean the activities which we explain as those of body, mind and spirit in the individual's capacity as an earner, a member of society and a trustee in the scheme of life. No doubt this runs counter to the common notion that culture—even real culture as a process and as a result—develops and implies a certain aloofness from the practical work done by men and women to earn their living, and a sweet, or sour, sense of superiority to utilitarian questions of bread and butter. But we must not forget that invigorating toil—invigorating bodily toil—is the only known road to health, strength and happiness. Nowadays culture is becoming a term almost as elusive as education itself. Agriculture was doubtless the root, the root word as well as the fundamental process, of human culture. The man on the farm gets some light on its intrinsic nature from his occupation. To him culture stands for crops, the best in quality and the largest in quantity that can be obtained, for the suppression of weeds, insects and disease, and for the increase of beauty and fertility. Culture has no origin in idleness, indolence or sloth. These make for the corrosion of all the vigors of the physical and mental and moral nature. Culture means plowing and harrowing and sowing and hoeing. It means labor and sorrow as well as play and flowers. It means the ripping of the iron share as well as the genial affection of the sun. Culture is far deeper than the polite polish on the skin of manners and speech. It is not gained by the mere learning of languages, living or dead, or the acquisition of knowledge, scientific or superstitious, in the poetic meaning of that word. It is the residuum, the leftover, such as it is, in character—in body, in mind and in spirit—after every completed educational experience. From actual practice comes skill in the finest of all fine arts, the fine art of living happily together while working for some good end. Alike in school and college, on farm and in factory, in shop and office, in home duties and public affairs, that kind of life develops a quick sense of responsibility, it establishes good standards close by which are understood, it nourishes conscience and strengthens the will-energy towards further culture, better work and happier living. These things we seek to conserve, using our material resources for the enrichment of the quality of life we have inherited, in order to pass it on undiminished and unimpaired.
On What We Stand For
This end of an educated people, cultured in character, which itself is only a means towards the largest end, is worth striving for and worth living for. All life is an unceasing struggle. The point is to choose the right objects and means. In the past, humanity has been winning all along the line with an occasional setback such as threatens the present. Its warfare is ever against ignorance, helplessness, poverty, disease, vice and ill-wills. Education is to train individuals for that warfare. Its endeavors are most successful when the experiences which it provides for each individual are in themselves a vital part of the hard campaign. It must ever vary its strategy and tactics and weapons, as the field of operations is moved forward. Times change and we change with them. The need of the times is education to qualify us all to achieve satisfaction through labor and service and good will.
Finally, I present to you the more excellent graces of conservation as earnestness, cheerfulness and the habit of cherishing and following high ideals. At first these are rather traits of character in embryo than fixed attitudes or habits of mind. The particular and specific disciplines of life and of good books are to correct softness, to promote gentleness and to develop a capacity for enduring and enjoying hardness as a good soldier of truth, beauty and goodness in everyday life. In reality, each individual disciplines himself in liberty, by self-government, by diligence, by rational obedience to authority and by co-operation. The discipline which develops character and power is administered from within; external regulations are like the finger posts to indicate the open path and also the place where trespassing is forbidden. In the choice and in the action is discipline. "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve" is at the parting of the ways every morning, and is seldom displayed in prominence at the dramatic crises of life. Habits are grown in quiet ways, like the shapes of trees and the budding and ripening of fruit. They become the destiny "which shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." The librarian and every other citizen who lives and moves and has his being in an atmosphere of earnestness, cheerfulness and high ideals, is ready for his best work. Such men and women go through life with open minds, with broad sympathies, and appreciative respect for all the worthy achievements and attainments of men and women, of boys and girls. Their patriotism, their humanity, in brief, their conservation of character, finds its best accomplishment in making and leaving a better place, with a better path, for better children, to carry the torch of life onward and upward, clearer and stronger, because of what they have been and done.
From one of yourselves (Ella Wheeler Wilcox) we have beautifully expressed one of the great dominating purposes which I think animates all Canada today: