The child says: “I am of things as they are. I am the fighter for the things that ought to be. I was the beginning of human progress, and I am the progress of the world. I drive the world on. I invent, I achieve, I reform. About me is always the glory of mounting. I have no fear of falling, of slipping down, down. I have no fear of being lost. I am truth. I am reality, and always I question chaos.”
When the child begins to question the wisdom of the group, its religion, its literature, its dress, its tastes, its method of government, its standard of judgment, that moment the group should begin to take heed. It should take the child’s questioning seriously. When the group fails to do this, it gives up its existence, it ceases to grow because it looks back, it worships tradition, it makes history in terms of the past rather than in terms of the future.
Belief in evolution is a belief in the child.
What the race needs is a principle of growth, spiritual growth, that can never be denied. Such a principle it will find in the child, because the spirit of the child is the one factor of the group existence that in itself keeps changing, growing. The child is nature’s newest experiment in her search for a better type, and the race will be strong as it determines that the experiment shall be successful.
We develop national characteristics in accord with our adherence to a common ideal. We must therefore surrender ourselves for the common good, and the common good to which we should surrender is epitomized in the child idea.
I feel that the attitude towards the school and the child is the ultimate attitude by which America is to be judged. Indeed, the distinctive contribution America is to make to the world’s progress is not political, economical, religious, but educational, the child our national strength, the school as the medium through which the adult is to be remade.
What an ideal for the American people!
When my father came to America, he thought of America only as a temporary home. He learned little or no English. As the years went by he would say, “It is enough; my children know English.” Then more years rolled by. One day he came to me and asked me to help him get his citizenship papers. He and I began reading history together. Month after month we worked, laboring, translating, questioning, until the very day of his examination.
That day I hurried home from college to find a smiling, happy father. “Did you get them?” I asked.
“Yes, and the judge wanted to know how I knew the answers so well, and I told him my son who goes to college taught me, and the judge complimented me.”