p Many do not
investigate because they do not wish to believe. p
EDUCATION AT THE
CROSS-ROAD
One need not say “I told you so” to feel
the satisfaction of seeing evidence on all sides of developments long
anticipated by one’s own views and efforts.
I have preached educational simplification for many years, and have
brought up two sons from babyhood by teaching them how to think instead of what
to think. If any of you who are my
friends attended the annual congress of
I need not repeat what I have so often
declared, but call your attention to Dr. Reynolds’ statement that educators not
only taught too many non-essentials, but often “lied” to their pupils. Quoting from the associated Press report of
his talk: “Educators make education
altogether too complicated. They evolve
complicated formulae and concepts. They
teach things that are not worth knowing.
They do not teach the truth. They have lied to their student.”
Dr. Reynolds’ criticism of the
unreliability of history text books is well founded. He is right in stating that teachers have
wasted millions of hours of study for American boys and girls because they have
taught various things for no other reason than that their teachers taught the
subject to them.
“Dr. Reynolds suggested pupils be taught
to think, not what to think, and added that ‘if the American nation could bring
up one generation and teach it to think in the face of evidence, it would
transform civilization.’”
p
Is it fair to teach a child what it cannot
retain, by the order of a few who themselves failed at what parents tried to
force upon them, wasting valuable time and brainforce to memorize a calibre
that did not, nor does it, fit the rifle:
expecting to shoot big game with a “22” calibre bullet, and a chipmunk
with a cannon?
Don’t you think your boy, in the intense
studies of “technique,” shapes his reason according to what he has memorized? Is this memory which is taught him ideal and
self-evident, to conform to the environments he will be forced to meet? Have his original natural tendencies been
made concrete, causing him to lose the adaptability to shape his opinion in any
other form save that which he has been taught, influencing the spiritual by
material, or reason by facts that cannot be understood from that
viewpoint? The other extreme is just as
bad, teaching him only religious subjects and not material reasoning.
Is the night not as important as the day,
the left hand as the right hand, in order to see in perspective the length and
breadth, drawing a conclusion as to its thickness?
Why are young graduates “materialists” in
the majority of cases, often rank atheists:
why, if not that their faculties of sensing the abstract are as yet
unknown to them? These faculties, far
from being awakened and cultivated, are more often than not stunted beyond
repair in a process of mental abortion under educational auspices.
Today we know these things. We know that they will later be known as
facts, if recognition is tardy today, just as we now admit things that our
fathers would not have dared to believe.
Should we not keep open certain faculties, as a new plot of ground,
suspecting that possibilities are probabilities?
Why do extremely religious students ignore
reasonable problems, necessities and progress of our earthly development? There must be two banks of a river, if we
expect to bridge them into union. A body
without a soul is inanimate matter. A
soul without a body is spirit of magnitude.
Can we not accept the fact that all animals possess a living spirit that
governs action, and an eternal, regulating soul that governs the regulation of
that spirit? Go into the chemical
laboratory and pour a little glycerine into some permanganate of potash. Watch
the generation of heat as they unite.
Watch the spirit of the chemicals in contact ignite into flame,
releasing the sunlight originally absorbed and preserved in the separate chemicals. Man’s reason and intelligence is the soul
that created the experiment for the sake of results involved. In this little experiment is a chemical
symbolization of the creative power of a God, as well as the principle and
necessity of Immortality.
Do
not destroy or strangle your natural instinct of centuries by the “what to
think” of a so-called “education” that was born but yesterday, or you may find
yourself helpless tomorrow by today’s attempt to exist. Eyes, ears and reason are not all there is in
life’s problems. Go into the chemical
laboratory again to learn that there may be virtue in two individual chemicals,
which would destroy you if combined.
Likewise there may be chemicals each deadly in themselves, which create
a third, if combined, which is a life-saver; not only safe, but life
itself: male and female with child.