A Million for the Morrow
A MILLION FOR THE MORROW "1X7"HATEVER else stops moving, the education of ' » children does not. As a matter of fact it strides ahead too rapidly, from the point of view of quantity as well as...
...From this point of view the campaign launched by the National Education Association is most interesting...
...Winchell is the highest paid of our authors and that popular journalism is absurdly bad...
...Ahead of them are the crowds who have arrived at various educational stages with varying success...
...But normally it has the advantage of appealing to a solid body of traditions and connections which nothing else in the world can supplant...
...The school process is really very much like the weather...
...For the reason that its underlying conception of authority is extrahuman, extra-individual, it can teach "service" how to put the right stress in the right places...
...The banker not only sees his son cast for a different part from that which will fall to the lot of the carpenter's boy, but contributes all he can to render the atmosphere in which his son is brought up as distinctive, possibly as bankerish, as possible...
...We should like incidentally to know just why teaching millions to read and write results in such anomalous facts as that Mr...
...We have always held that the Catholic educational system is, in theory, the best possible coordination of the family and state points of view...
...But after all this means loving themselves and their own interests by indirection...
...Now again a school year has begun, sending a myriad tiny tots off on their long journey toward at least a minimum of preparation for life's tasks...
...A nation as racially chaotic, as nomadic, as spiritually detached as ours is apt to suffer heavily from the circumstance that one tradition rubs another to bits...
...Thus Catholic parents give their children not merely schools in which religion rules, but the whole background of religious practice which has characterized the family life, possibly for generations...
...To conceive of the child primarily from the point of view of society means reckoning in the first instance with what the family neglects to supply...
...And it is unfortunately a lot easier to love and serve oneself directly...
...It is likewise obvious that all vocational training is not necessarily practical...
...But when they are properly adjusted to the whole educational process their value is not to be questioned...
...Nor can one fail to note that solid homes are almost the best exemplars of patriotic and social service...
...But if ever a practical enterprise needed the kind of inquiry into possible coordination now being inaugurated by the National Education Association, the Catholic school system in the United States needs it...
...A violent shake-up is often as beneficial to pedagogy as a seemingly destructive storm...
...What outcome shall we expect for the individual and the community...
...We need to adjudge our educational future as a whole, so that we shall know how to meet the human needs of civilization...
...Society can therefore draw up a bill of its educational rights and desires, going on then to build up a corps of teachers able to promote these effectively...
...Economic and intellectual handicaps tend, indeed, to dissolve the family as an influence even when they fail to destroy it as an institution...
...and that we cannot look to an artificial process to inculcate virtues which will be born only of contact with life and reality...
...In extreme cases this attitude can be accused of snobbery...
...When this point of view is overemphasized, the resulting school fare will be pretty meagre...
...We want to know just the things specified: articulation of our education with other community activities, the function of the parent in the child's training, the proper relationship between general and vocational knowledge...
...As a matter of fact it strides ahead too rapidly, from the point of view of quantity as well as that of quality, to enable one to say where it is at any given moment...
...One set of fathers and mothers will never desire quite the same things for their children as another set of fathers and mothers...
...Both rain and education fall upon the unjust as well as the just...
...The first necessarily seems to make for disparity and even isolaton...
...One may, for example, keep on telling children that they must understand, love and serve their country...
...Men and money for this inquiry are two endowments for which one cannot yearn too often or too long...
...It is hoped that the sum of $1,000,000 can be raised for the purpose of endowing studies, on a national scale, of such problems as the articulation of education with other community activities, the function of parental education and the intertwining of general and vocational training...
...We need to realize, for instance, that instructing a far larger body of teachers than we can use is bad economy, unless the oversupply can be made to have a desired effect upon the quality of pedagogy...
...They should...
...Fundamentally the cleavage in modern conceptions of education seems to rest upon whether one views the child from the point of view of the family or from the point of view of the state...
...The reigning social ideology and methodology therefore often seem frightfully meagre and monotonous...
...that training all girls to be stenographers is advantageous only to the silk-stocking industry...
...Even so what we most desire in both is serenity—a succession of clear, steadfast days which make for fertility and pleasure...
...Dependent upon general conditions and principles, existing to serve definite purposes, both can nevertheless seldom be taken for granted, counted upon, estimated practically...
...If the fund to be gathered by the Association will help America to do some of these things, we are for it...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 24
