A witty English writer once said: “If you chain a man’s head to a ledger and knock off something from his wages every time he stops adding up, you can’t expect him to have enlightened views about the antipodes.” Simply, if you immerse a man in a given undertaking, no matter how big that undertaking is, and keep him immersed for half a life time, you can’t expect him to see any horizon, you can’t expect him to see human life steadily or see it whole.
Means to Liberal Education
I once made this statement that a university was intended to make young people just as unlike their fathers as possible. By which I do not mean anything disrespectful to their fathers, but merely this, by the time a man is old enough to have children in college, his point of view is apt to have become so specialized that they would better be taken away from him and put in a place where their views of life will be regeneralized and they will be disconnected from the family and connected with the world. That, I understand to be the function of education, of the liberal education.
Now a kind of liberal education must underlie every wholesome political and social process, the kind of liberal education which connects a man’s feeling and his comprehension with the general run of mankind, which disconnects him from the special interests and marries his thought to the common interests of great communities and of great cities and of great states and of great nations, and, if possible, with that brotherhood of man that transcends the boundaries of nations themselves.
Those are the horizons to my mind of this social center movement, that they are going to unite the feelings and clarify the comprehension of communities, of bodies of men who draw together in conference.
Conference Always Modifies and Improves Thought
I would like to ask if this is not the experience of every person here who has ever acted in any conference of any kind. Did you ever go out of a conference with exactly the same views with which you went in? If you did, I am sorry for you, you must be thought-tight. For my part I can testify that I never carried a scheme into a conference without having it profoundly modified by the criticism of the other men in the conference and without recognizing when I came out that the product of the common council bestowed upon it was very much superior to any private thought that might have been used for its development. The processes of attrition, the contributions to consensus of minds, the compromises of thought create those general movements which are the streams of tendency and the streams of development.
Will Make Easier Solution of Great Problems
And so it seems to me that what is going to be produced by this movement,—not all at once, by slow and tedious stages, no doubt, but nevertheless very certainly in the end,—is in the first place a release of common forces now undiscovered, now somewhere banked up, and now somewhere unavailable, the removal of barriers to the common understanding, the opening of mind to mind, the clarification of the air and the release in that clarified air of forces that can live in it, and just so certainly as you release those forces you make easier the fundamental problem of modern society, which is the problem of accommodating the various interests in modern society to one another.