“A NEEDED EDUCATIONAL REFORM.”
The Outlook of April 21, 1900, describes and urges “A Needed Educational Reform.” This reform is one that will make it possible that “religion can be preserved and promoted while education is being acquired.” Thus says the Outlook:— One problem of education sorely needs to be taken up by our educators, which we are persuaded has not yet sufficiently occupied their attention. It is sometimes considered under the aspect of education and religion—the problem how religion can be preserved and promoted while education is being acquired—but the problem is really larger than this. That which makes this reform so sorely needed, is the present educational processes. These are most aptly described by the editor of the Outlook; who on this subject is thoroughly qualified to speak. He says:— The educational processes of our time—possibly of all time—are largely analytical and critical. They consist chiefly in analyzing the subjects brought to the student for his examination, separating them into their constituent parts, considering how they have been put together, and sitting in judgment on the finished fabric or on the process by which it has been constructed. Thus all or nearly all study is analytical, critical,—a process of inquiry and investigation. The process presupposes an inquiring if not a skeptical mood. Doubt is the pedagogue which leads the pupil to knowledge. Does he study the human body?—Dissection and anatomy are the foundations of his study. Chemistry?—The laboratory furnishes him the means of analysis and inquiry into physical substances. History?—He questions the statements which have been unquestioned heretofore, ransacks libraries for authorities in ancient volumes and more ancient documents. Literature?—The poem which he read only to enjoy he now subjects to the scalpel, inquires whether it really is beautiful, why it is beautiful, how its meter should be classified, how its figures have been constructed. Philosophy?—He subjects his own consciousness to a process of vivisection in an endeavor to ascertain the physiology and anatomy of the human spirit, brings the soul into the laboratory that he may learn its chemical constituents. Meanwhile the constructive and synthetic process is relegated to a second place, or lost sight of altogether. Does he study medicine?—He gives more attention to diagnosis than to therapeutics, to the analysis of disease than to the problem how to overcome it. Law?—He spends more time in analyzing cases than in developing power to grasp great principles and apply them in the administration of justice to varying conditions. The classics?—It is strange if he has not at graduation spent more weeks in the syntax and grammar of the language than he has spent hours in acquiring and appreciating the thought and the spirit of the great classic authors. It has been well and truly said of the modern student that he does not study grammar to understand Homer, he reads Homer to get the Greek grammar. His historical study has given him dates, events, a mental historical chart; perhaps, too, it has given him a scholar’s power to discriminate between the true and the false, the historical and the mythical in ancient legends; but not to many has it given an understanding of the significance of events, a comprehension of, or even any new light upon, the real meaning of the life of man on the earth. Has he been studying philosophy?—Happy he is if, as a result of his analysis of self-consciousness, he has not become morbid respecting his own inner life, or cynically skeptical concerning the inner life of others. It is doubtless in the realm of ethics and religion that the disastrous results of a too exclusive analytical process and a too exclusive critical spirit are seen. Carrying the same spirit, applying the same methods, to the investigation of religion, the Bible becomes to him simply a collection of ancient literature, whose sources, structure, and forms he studies, whose spirit he, at least for the time, forgets; worship is a ritual whose origin, rise, and development he investigates; whose real significance as an expression of penitence, gratitude, and consecration he loses sight of altogether. Faith is a series of tenets whose biological development he traces; or a form of consciousness whose relation to brain action he inquires into; or whose growth by evolutionary processes out of earlier states he endeavors to retrace: forgetting meanwhile what is the meaning of the experience itself as a present fact in human life, what vital force and significance it possesses. Vivisection is almost sure sooner or later to become a post-mortem; and the subject of it, whether it be a flower, a body, an author, or an experience, generally dies under the scalpel. It is for this reason that so many students in school, academy, and college lose, not merely their theology, which is perhaps no great loss, but their religion, which is an irreparable loss, while they are acquiring an education. When the destructive nature of the educational processes of the present day are thus so clearly set forth by one who is not only friendly to that system, but is himself a part of the system; and when in view of this even he urges “a needed educational reform;” surely that people whom God has made the light of the world in these last days should not need to be urged to this “sorely” needed educational reform. And where any of these should need to be urged to it, the measure of the urging could be only the measure in which these themselves are blindly imbued with love of these destructive processes.