COEmiGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
THE TEACHER'S IDEALS 
 
 OF 
 
 LIFE AND HAPPINESS 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM HENRY PYLE 
 
 THE 
 
 MISSOURI BOOK COMPANY 
 
 COLUMBIA, MISSOURI 
 
 1920 
 

 COPYRIGHTED, 1920 
 
 BY 
 THE MISSOURI BOOK COMPANY 
 
 ©CI.A570778 
 
 *T>. 
 
"For that day a large wisdom came to me. 
 There was a great light, and I saw clear, and 
 I knew that it was not for money that a man 
 must live, but for a happiness that no man can 
 give, or buy, or sell, and that is beyond all 
 value of all the money in the world." — Jack 
 London. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The aim of this little book is to help my fel- 
 low teachers to think deeply about the serious as- 
 pects of human life. After spending tweuty-iive 
 years of my life as a teacher, I have reached the 
 conviction that what teachers most need is not 
 more theory or more method, but a wider out- 
 look, a clearer vision, and deeper convictions 
 concerning matters of great importance to the 
 lives of the children which the}^ try to influ- 
 ence. 
 
 I have written as simply, as plainly, and as 
 briefly as I could. I have not the least doubt 
 about the truth or the importance of the prin- 
 ciples which I have tried to emphasize. If these 
 chapters, through the teachers who may read 
 them, contribute in ever so small a way toward 
 a larger life and greater possibilities and op- 
 portunities for children, I shall be happy. 
 
 The selections from Emerson and Bryant in 
 Chapter III are printed with the permission of, 
 and by special arrangement with, Houghton 
 Mifflin Co., and D. Appleton and Co. 
 I'niversity of Missouri W. H. P. 
 
 (vii) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 1 
 
 II. Ideals of Literature 17 
 
 III. Ideals op Nature 28 
 
 IV. Ideals of Work 43 
 
 V. Ideals of Play. . . . . . . .57 
 
 YI. Ideals of Democracy 69 
 
 VII. Ideals of Home and Children. . . 80 
 
 VIII. Ideals of Art and Beauty. ... 88 
 
 IX. Ideals of Morals and Religion. . . 98 
 
 (IX) 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE TEACHER'S PHILOSO- 
 PHY OF LIFE 
 
 In a teachers' examination, questions are asked 
 to determine the applicant's knowledge of geog- 
 raphy, history, arithmetic, and the other sub- 
 jects taught in school. No questions are asked 
 to determine what kind of person the applicant 
 is; no questions are asked to determine the 
 teacher's philosophy of life. The fundamental, 
 controlling principles of a teacher's life are of 
 far more importance than her knowledge of the 
 school subjects. Of course, a teacher should have 
 a broad and thorough knowledge, for she is 
 the leader of the children who are learning 
 about the world and forming habits. But knowl- 
 edge and habits are not ends in themselves, they 
 are only means to an end. There is no intrin- 
 sic virtue in arithmetic or grammar or reading 
 or spelling or writing or any other bit of knowl- 
 edge or skill. It is a blind and shortsighted 
 view that considers school subjects as ends in 
 themselves. 
 
 (1) 
 
2 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 
 
 AVhat is the end which we hope our children 
 may reach, at least in part, by pursuing certain 
 courses of study? What kind of men and wo- 
 men do we wish them to become? What am- 
 bitions and aims and principles should guide 
 their lives ? What kind of life should they live ? 
 A teacher's position on these questions is of 
 the highest importance. Whatever other quali- 
 fications she may have, however learned she 
 may be, she should not be a leader of children 
 unless her principles of life are sound, unless 
 she has the highest conception of the aims and 
 purposes and meaning of life, of duty, of serv- 
 ice, of loyalty, of love, and of home. 
 
 Teachers should be of the highest type which 
 our civilization affords. If a teacher is deficient 
 in some branch of knowledge, hard and earnest 
 study will soon make the deficiency good; but 
 if she has reached maturity without having ac- 
 quired a sound philosophy of life, this defect 
 cannot be made good by a few nights or months 
 of study. A correspondence course or a night 
 school will give little help ; for a sound philoso- 
 phy of life is not a matter of knowledge merely,, 
 but a matter of ideals. Ideals are not things 
 to be learned by rote, but are guiding principles 
 to be incorporated into our being as the moving 
 forces of our lives. A teacher skilled in knowl- 
 
The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 3 
 
 edge, but knowing not what the knowledge is 
 for ; skilled in the arts of teaching, but knowing 
 not why she teaches; knowing only immediate 
 ends, but seeing not the higher purposes, has no 
 right to be in a school room. 
 
 What are the higher ends? What are the 
 true aims of life ? Can we go to some wise man, 
 ask him the meaning of life and get the true 
 answer? No, there is no one answer to the 
 question. There is no absolute aim or purpose 
 of life. Each individual must answer for him- 
 self. We find ourselves here; we are alive. 
 What shall we do with our lives? We can do 
 what we will. We can live one kind of life or 
 another, just as we please. But what kind of 
 life is best for us to live ? We have wants ; we 
 have desires; we are always trying to s»itisfy 
 them. Our life is spent in trying to get what 
 we want. 
 
 We must first of all supply the physical needs 
 of our bodies. These wants are most pressing 
 and must be constantly satisfied or we die. The 
 primary aim of all education, therefore, as well 
 as of all our efforts, must be to maintain physi- 
 cal life. There can be no disagreement on this 
 point. The training of school and of home 
 should fit the child to make a living. But Jioiv 
 is one to live? What is one to do with his life? 
 
4 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 One works to live, but what does one live for? 
 This brings us again to the question, what should 
 be our aim in life? After we have satisfied the 
 physical needs of our bodies, what desires still 
 remain? To make the question concrete, let us 
 suppose a man's day^s work is done, he has had 
 his supper, and it is several hours till bedtime, 
 what shall he do ? He has desires which we may 
 very well call spiritual. The man wishes to be 
 happy. He does not wish to be unhappy. He 
 will do what brings him happiness and not pain, 
 or at least what he thinks will do it. The pos- 
 sibilities are many. He can read books, listen 
 to music, go to the theater, take a walk, smoke 
 his pipe, play with his children, talk to a friend. 
 What ought he to do? Again the answer mast 
 come from the individual; there is no absolute 
 answer. There is no one who can tell him Avhat 
 he ought to do. Truly, there is no ought about 
 it. 
 
 The solution of the problem, however, is not 
 hopeless. While the man whose day's work is 
 done can find no one capable of telling him what 
 he ought to do, by studying the lives of those 
 about him, he can learn much concerning the 
 outcome of any course that he may pursue. Let 
 us, then, make such a study of the life about us, 
 and the lives of those who have lived before us. 
 
The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 5 
 
 to see if we can reach any sound conclusion as 
 to what course man should pursue to attain hap- 
 piness. 
 
 The question will at once be asked whether 
 men should seek happiness, whether seeking hap- 
 piness should be the aim of life. With such a 
 question we have little concern. Whatever may 
 be the aim of life, men wish to be happy ; and it 
 is well that they know something of the condi- 
 tions under which the highest happiness may be 
 attained. There are those who say that mak- 
 ing happiness the aim of life is hedonism, and 
 seem to think that when they have given such 
 a course the name of 'hedonism,' that condemns 
 it forever. They say to us that to be happy 
 we must not seek happiness directly; we must 
 seek truth, or justice, or ideal values, then we 
 shall be happy. Very well then, if we are to 
 be happy through something else, we shall seek 
 these other things ; but it is happiness after 
 all that we want, and these other things are of 
 importance to us only as they have a bearing on 
 human happiness. Neither justice, nor truth, 
 nor ideal values, nor anything else concerns us 
 except as we think it will affect human happiness. 
 No one but a fool would voluntarily and per- 
 sistently pursue a course that he thinks would 
 bring only pain. Every act of our lives is 
 
6 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 to escape pain of some kind or to attain pleasure 
 of some kind. This, in spite of the empty words 
 of philosophers, is the primal law of life. Any 
 philosophy that is sound must be in accord with 
 the laws of life. What, then, can we do to be 
 happy ? 
 
 The answer to our question may now seem 
 very easy, and to be something like this: Let 
 each man do what he pleases, whatever makes 
 him happy. No one can tell another how to be 
 happy. What brings happiness to one may not 
 bring it to another. And indeed, this answer is 
 in a measure the true one, but there is more to 
 be said. A man may not know ; he may not have 
 tried many plans; it may be that what does 
 not bring joy might have done so if the man had 
 had different experiences in life. It may be that 
 we can be trained to get joy in ways not pos- 
 sible otherwise, as in music or art or literature 
 or nature. It may also be that we can classify 
 happiness into high or more desirable and low 
 or less desirable. Such indeed will prove to 
 be the case. 
 
 Let us see if some happiness is more desir- 
 able than other happiness. We can find the 
 truth by observing life. There is happiness 
 that is brief, evanescent, that exists for the 
 moment only. There is happiness that is fol- 
 
The Teacher's PHmosoPHY of Life. 7 
 
 lowed by pain, and happiness that brings pain 
 to others. There is other happiness that is last- 
 ing, that is pleasant in memory, and that does 
 not bring pain to us or to others. There is hap- 
 piness that may be shared by many. It is there- 
 fore desirable to seek those things that will 
 bring us the highest happiness and no unhap- 
 piness to others. 
 
 Wise men teach us that the highest happiness 
 comes from service, from making others happy. 
 And this is true. Indeed, a high type of man can- 
 not be happy if others near him are unhappy. 
 The hearts of men should be so knit together 
 in human sympathy that their joys and sorrows 
 will all be mutual. Socrates and Jesus, our 
 wisest teachers, not only spent their lives in 
 helping others to find truth and through truth, 
 happiness, but gave their lives for their ideal. 
 This fact may seem fatal to our doctrine that 
 we should seek those things that make us happy, 
 but it is not. On the contrary, it is in harmony 
 with that doctrine. Men have ideals for which 
 they are willing to endure any mere bodily pain, 
 even death. So it was with those two great 
 teachers. Socrates' friends pointed out to him 
 a way by which he could escape death, but he 
 preferred death to life obtained by such a course 
 as they advised. It may even be that the rule of 
 
8 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 our life should be not to ask whether a given 
 course will bring happiness or unhappiness but 
 whether it is right. For a noble man, doing 
 right is one of the highest sources of happiness. 
 But what acts are right? In a general way we 
 may say that those acts are right which do not 
 bring pain or unhappiness to others. There 
 can be no other criterion. There is no absolute 
 right. Acts have been labeled right or wrong 
 according to their happiness effects on people. 
 Ethical values are subordinate values, and de- 
 pend entirely upon their effects on human hap- 
 piness, human well-being. 
 
 Happiness is a result ; it is an emotional state 
 of mind that comes from what we see or hear or 
 from our acts or from the thoughts that we 
 think. Let us consider now some of the neces- 
 sary conditions of true happiness. We shall dis- 
 miss at once all consideration of the sensual plea- 
 sures, and consider only the sources of the higher 
 joys. 
 
 First of all, there is Nature. We live in a 
 world that throbs and pulsates at every point 
 with energy, from the atom and molecule to 
 the larger earth and moon and sun and stars 
 and planets ; everything in its place ; everything 
 related to all the others; each obedient to the 
 laws of its being; law everywhere; all things 
 
The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 9 
 
 united into a unitarj^ whole. There is also the 
 world of living things — the animate world. We 
 have our choice. We can exist in these various 
 worlds of infinite variety and beauty, without 
 seeing them, without feeling them, without 
 knowing them; or, they can indeed become our 
 worlds, ours to study and understand, ours to 
 enjoy. Rich and full is the life of him who goes 
 forth each day in the hope of learning more of 
 the world. All that science has yet learned 
 about it is relatively little. Every day can re- 
 veal to us something that was before hidden. 
 Everything has its secret which it will yield up 
 to the student, — the tiny flower in the meadow 
 grass, the leaf that sways on its bough, the bird 
 that sings in the apple tree, the grasshopper on 
 the blade of corn, the pebbles and grains of 
 sand on the creek bottom. Truly infinite are the 
 objects of nature, each waiting for the student 
 and ready to reward his efforts. There is no 
 copyright on nature. She is everywhere and for 
 everybody. The joys she gives us are not ex- 
 clusive joys. She reveals her truths to me and 
 to all who seek. Let us study nature. Let us 
 have the joy that comes from understanding her. 
 Let us learn to see the beauty that nature every- 
 where shows. Let us lift ourselves out of the 
 darkness of ignorance, out of the sordid triviali- 
 
10 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 
 
 ties of a narrow existence, and possess the higher 
 wealth that nature has to give. Let us every day 
 feel the thrill that comes from understanding, 
 from discovery. Each day we can be a Colum- 
 bus and sail on a voyage of discovery. If in our 
 lifetime we can master all there is to learn in 
 our backyard, we shall know more than Newton, 
 Darwin, Kepler, Galileo, Gray, or Agassiz. To 
 know the world is to love it and to enjoy its 
 beauty. Everywhere we find law, organization 
 harmony; everywhere, cause and effect; every- 
 where, the universal law of evolution. Every- 
 thing is dynamic, and the more we study the 
 world, the more it seems that it is all alive, and 
 the more we feel our kinship with it. Close 
 study of the world that surrounds and envelops 
 us makes it seem a different world, and makes 
 our life seem a different life. It gives us a new 
 perspective, a wider outlook. Our life in a real 
 sense becomes a larger life. 
 
 Over against the world of nature we may 
 place the worlds which man has created — those 
 of literature, art and music. In sculpture and 
 painting, the artist embodies his conceptions of 
 beauty. Every city and town should have their 
 art galleries, the possessions of all the people, 
 where the people could go at any time and have 
 the enjoyment that comes from studying the 
 
The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 11 
 
 great paintings. Every home should have pic- 
 tures on the walls, pictures as good as the people 
 are able to afford. 
 
 If education does nothing else for us, it should 
 make possible the joys that come from books. 
 The poet, the novelist, the dramatist, have been 
 at work through the centuries, for us. Their 
 books may be on our shelves at a trifling cost. 
 We can spend the winter evenings with Homer 
 and Virgil, Dante, Milton, Tennyson, Byron, 
 Wordsworth, Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, 
 Browning, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, George 
 Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, or Bret Harte, as we 
 like. 
 
 Then, there is music, a source of enjoyment to 
 all — music, creations of beauty in sound. A 
 home without music is no home at all. Music 
 has a power over our souls that few other things 
 have. Its rhythms, its harmonies and melodies 
 seem to reach and touch our higher natures as 
 few other things can do. In every home, there 
 should be a piano ; some one in the home should 
 be taught to play it; every child in the home 
 should be taught to sing. Every morning all 
 the family should gather around the piano and 
 begin the day with a song. And when the day 
 is done, all should again gather around the 
 
12 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 piano and sing the dear old melodies that have 
 brought comfort and gladness to many a soul. 
 
 While man can find the higher joys in litera- 
 ture, nature, art, and music, there are also other 
 sources of happiness, sources of a different kind. 
 They do not bring a particular joy at a partic- 
 ular time, but give a permanent color or atti- 
 tude to our lives. These are truth, justice, and 
 sympathy. Anyone who studies the lives of 
 men can see that there can be no permanent 
 happinesss or contentment among men, without 
 truth, justice and sympathy. Human life is so 
 interrelated, we are so dependent upon others, 
 that human relationships are more important as 
 they affect happiness than is any other factor. 
 The first and most important factor of this re- 
 lationship is truth — sincerity, honesty. The 
 social fabric is rotten unless held together by 
 truth. If every child could be taught to speak 
 the truth and to he true, much misery, pain and 
 sorrow would disappear from the world. 
 
 After truth, comes justice. If every man 
 could be fair and just; if every laborer could 
 receive the due reward of his labor, then hap- 
 piness would increasingly prevail. At this 
 moment the w^orld is in turmoil. Anarchy and all 
 manner of ' isms ' that threaten to destroy civiliza- 
 tion and throw us back into chaos, are every- 
 
The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 13 
 
 where raising their threatening voices and lift- 
 ing up their bloody hands. The present state of 
 disorder is in large measure because of injustice. 
 "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless 
 thousands mourn. ' ' Let us be just. Let us teach 
 the child from infancy to be just. Let us em- 
 body justice in our laws ; let us found our busi- 
 ness and industries on justice ; let us be just in 
 our opinions and judgments, and we shall in- 
 crease the sum of human happiness. 
 
 Sympathy is the greatest source of happiness 
 because it includes the other social virtues. 
 Sympathy means literally a feeling tvith another. 
 It means that we identify our own lives with 
 the lives and interests of others. Sympathy is 
 the very heart and core of religion as it affects 
 man's actions; it is the central principle of 
 ethics; it is the main element of culture. The 
 truly cultured man is he who can take an ob- 
 jective view of himself, who can see himself 
 and his petty world through the eyes of others, 
 and who can see in others their worth and their 
 rights. Sympathy takes us to the bedside of the 
 sick, cheers the brokenhearted and the disap- 
 pointed, wipes the tears from the eyes of the 
 bereaved, takes the sinner by the arm and gives 
 him strength, cheers the feeble footsteps of the 
 
14 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 
 
 aged, and fills the hearts of children with joy. 
 
 Selfishness brings most of the pain and sor- 
 row into the world; sympathy and love are the 
 only means yet discovered that enable us in any 
 degree to keep pain and sorrow out of the world, 
 and to alleviate and soften that which in the 
 ver}^ nature of things we cannot keep out. What- 
 ever we may say of life, and whatever of hap- 
 piness may come into it, it is still hard and filled 
 with pain. As youth passes into old age, hope 
 and ambition die, cherished desires are unful- 
 filled, one by one we bury our friends and loved 
 ones; each life is a daily tragedy and at last 
 ends in a tragedy. Sympathy, the feeling for 
 us that our brother has as he takes us by the 
 hand and whispers his word of cheer, mingling 
 his tears with ours, gives us strength and bright- 
 ens our way. 
 
 Sympathy reaches its highest state in true 
 friendship and in the home. What is there like 
 a true friend, our other self, for whom we could 
 gladly die, and who, we know, would die for us? 
 To have a friend who thinks of us each day, 
 who suffers when we suffer and rejoices when 
 we rejoice; to walk with him in the summer 
 afternoons, and to sit with him under a tree 
 by the brookside, listening to the birds and talk- 
 ing in full understanding of nature and her 
 
The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 15 
 
 works, of man and his ways ; to sit with him on 
 winter evenings by the open fire — to have such 
 a friend makes mere existence pass into life. 
 
 Sympathy reaches its highest fruition in the 
 home where it becomes love. Home, love, father, 
 mother, children — these are the sacred words in 
 our language. In a home where there is love; 
 where each thinks first of the others; where all 
 rejoice together and sorrow together, happiness 
 exists in its highest form. Home is the first and 
 necessary condition of all the other sources of 
 happiness. Nature, literature, art and music are 
 usually ineffective unless there is a home. With- 
 out a home, life itself is incomplete. A house 
 does not make a home, nor even a house and 
 people. Only members of a family who love one 
 another, with mutual interests and with hearts 
 in accord, make a home. To make such a home 
 is the highest achievement of man, and to have 
 such a home is the source of his greatest hap- 
 piness. 
 
 It seems that this world is such, and the 
 nature of life is such, that most good things cost 
 their price. It is so with happiness. The great- 
 est happiness lies not along the path of least 
 resistance; it costs us pain and labor. First of 
 all, we have our inheritance of selfishness to 
 subdue, our baser passions to control. To live 
 
16 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 a higher life, a life of truth and justice, re- 
 quires courage and strength, patience and per- 
 severance. To enable us to live such a life, there 
 must be years of training. Moreover, to be able 
 to get happiness from the sources which we have 
 discussed, also requires training. Neither books 
 nor nature give up their secrets and reveal their 
 beauties to us until we have learned how to 
 make them do so. To get much pleasure from 
 music we must be trained. It therefore is quite 
 true that there can be a training in happiness, 
 and this training the home and school must 
 give. 
 
 From these considerations, it is evident that 
 the work of the teacher is of the highest signifi- 
 cance. She should be the true philosopher, wise 
 in her knowledge of the world and of human life, 
 striving ever to lead her pupils to acquire the 
 highest conceptions and ideals of life, and to 
 prepare them for the fullest possible realizations 
 of these ideals. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 IDEALS OF LITERATURE. 
 
 We spend much time teaching children to read, 
 eight years in the grade schools, four years in the 
 high schools, to say nothing of the time spent in 
 college and university — but who reads? The 
 manager of a book store once told me that when 
 students had finished a course in the university 
 they brought their books to him and sold them 
 for whatever he was willing to give — sold their 
 Shakespeare, their Homer, their Virgil, for a 
 few pennies ! This is a sad commentary on our 
 teaching of reading. If the right attitude were 
 developed in the students, the literary text would 
 be kept through the term, almost as good as 
 new at the end, with carefully made notes and 
 commentaries in the margins. When the course 
 is finished, the book would not be sold, but kept 
 and cherished through life as one more dear 
 friend. 
 
 Our teaching of reading and literature often 
 develops in the pupils a hatred for books. I 
 have often heard high school students speak of 
 the greatest treasures of literature as ''stuff." 
 The causes of this state of things are many. All 
 
 (2) (17) 
 
18 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 are due to our methods of teaching. I know a 
 nine year old boy who will probably never like 
 poetry. He will not voluntarily read anything 
 that looks like poetry, nor allow it to be read to 
 him. Why? His teacher requires him to com- 
 mit to memory all the poems in his reader. Few 
 of these poems are within his comprehension. 
 Not one out of five appeals to his experience 
 or interest. This teacher is unwittingly creat- 
 ing in all the pupils in her room a distaste for 
 poetry. Between the first year of grade school 
 and the last year of high school some teacher 
 usually manages by some method or other — usu- 
 ally as foolish as the one mentioned — to destroy 
 in the pupils all taste for literature. 
 
 It would be interesting to take a census of 
 the people of a community to ascertain how 
 many men and women read. Such a census has 
 never been taken, as far as I know. My observa- 
 tion leads me to believe that not more than one 
 man or woman out of a hundred reads. More 
 time is spent in the teaching of reading than in 
 teaching anything else, still no one reads. This 
 teaching, therefore, is a great waste of time and 
 energy. 
 
 I say no one reads. Of course, all read the 
 morning paper and the Saturday Evening Post, 
 but who reads books? Yes, I know everyone 
 
Ideals of Literature. 19 
 
 reads the Shepherd of the Hills, but who reads 
 good hooks f Who reads Homer, Sophocles, 
 Shakespeare, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson? 
 
 AVhat constitutes a good book ? AVhat makes a 
 good book so valuable? The man who writes 
 a book puts into it his best thoughts. As the 
 ages have gone by, some of the wisest men, men 
 who have observed most closely and thought most 
 deeply, have written books. By reading these 
 books, we therefore gain access to the best 
 thoughts of the wisest men, their reflections upon 
 human life, its highest aims and purposes, human 
 sin, human sorrow, human joy. Some of the 
 world's best and greatest men have not written 
 books. The two wisest men of aU time, Socrates 
 and Jesus, wrote no books. Fortunately, how- 
 ever, we get their teachings through the writings 
 of others. To some it may seem a wonder that 
 a book could come down to us through hundreds 
 and even thousands of years. It does not seem 
 possible to them that a writing could or would 
 be preserved so long. But when we read these 
 books we no longer wonder why they have sur- 
 vived. When we read the dialogues of Plato, 
 we can understand why they have been read and 
 preserved these twenty-two centuries. As long 
 as there are men who think and read, Plato will 
 have readers. 
 
20 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 The greatests writings are usually the plainest 
 and simplest. There is in some quarters the 
 mistaken notion that a great book is difficult, 
 hard to understand, and therefore inaccessible 
 to the ordinary man. Such is not the case. 
 Rather the reverse is true. The Bible needs no 
 interpreter, neither does Plato nor Shakespeare. 
 When the reader finds it difficult to understand a 
 book, he may be sure that the writer did not 
 understand himself, that he did not himself see 
 clearly nor think sanely. Especially is this true 
 when the writing is about human life. Human 
 experience is much the same in all ages, in all 
 countries. The human heart has not changed 
 in historic times. Love and hate and envy and 
 jealous}^, sin and selfishness, joy and sorrow, 
 pain and death, are much the same in all places 
 and at all times. The man who writes clearly 
 and understandingly to the human heart at any 
 time or place, speaks understandingly to the 
 people of all time. Homer wrote of prehistoric 
 Greeks and Trojans, but how modern are the 
 characters I We seem to know Agamemnon and 
 Menelaus, Achilles and Hector. The events nar- 
 rated in the Iliad seem to have just taken place. 
 Solomon and Job and Paul are modern though 
 dead these thousands of years. However, I 
 would not be misunderstood. To understand a 
 
Ideals of Literature. 21 
 
 great book on any aspect of human life, we must 
 ourselves have had experience and thought 
 deeply about our experience. 
 
 There is also a mistaken notion that to get a 
 foreign literature, we must read the books in 
 the original language. This is not true as far 
 as the ideas of literature are concerned. Ideas 
 are universal and can be expressed in any kind 
 of characters or symbols. Love is love whether 
 expressed as amo or ayaTzdd) or love. Death is 
 death by whatever symbols represented. The 
 Bible is a good illustration of this fact. Of all 
 books, it is most universally read. Few books 
 contain so much that is as good, perhaps none, 
 anything that is better. No one book contains 
 so much wisdom. No message is more important 
 than its message, yet we do not think it is 
 necessary for all our children to learn Hebrew 
 or Greek in order that they may read and under- 
 stand the Bible. Still we require millions of 
 boys and girls to study Latin, when the returns 
 are only a few score pages of Caesar, Cicero, and 
 Virgil that could be read at a few sittings in 
 the English translation. 
 
 The great books are few because the great men 
 are few. Genius is rare. There is a definite law 
 governing the distribution of ability among us. 
 
22 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 There are a few idiots, a few geniuses, the rest 
 of us come somewhere in between. It is some- 
 thing of a genius to be one among a hundred; 
 more, to be one among a thousand; more still, 
 to be the best man of a million. Emerson and 
 Lincoln stand out as the foremost of all Ameri- 
 cans; Shakespeare, Socrates, and Jesus, as the 
 foremost of all time. "When we speak of great 
 books, then, we mean the books containing the 
 wisdom and the artistic creations of those men 
 who were first among the men of their time, 
 who gave us the message of their age. In their 
 works, we read the history of the world. 
 
 Let it not be thought that all good books are 
 for instruction. We read some books for the 
 same reason that we look at paintings or listen 
 to music. They appeal to the emotions. Homer 
 and Virgil, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, 
 Dante, Milton, and Tennyson wrote poems and 
 tragedies that have been sources of pleasure to 
 numberless generations of men. The poet is a 
 creator. He paints in words the passions of the 
 human soul, or the beauties that he sees in the 
 world of nature. In the pictures we see our- 
 selves. The poet may be said to reveal us to 
 ourselves. In Oedipus, or Antigone, Hamlet, 
 Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Eichard the Third, or 
 King Lear, we find ourselves, and see our own 
 
Ideals of Literature. 23 
 
 sins and inmost natures portrayed, our emotions 
 analyzed by the master mind of Sophocles or 
 Shakespeare. But life is not all tragedy. The 
 lyric poet sings for us our song of love. 
 
 We must not forget the novelist, who weaves 
 the same threads into a different form, and in 
 one fabric, gives us the epics, the lyrics, the 
 tragedies, and the comedies of life. The world 
 of literature would be different without Nicholas 
 Nickleby and Oliver Twist, Eomola, Vanity Fair, 
 and Ivanhoe. 
 
 Such is the nature of good books, but why read 
 them? Every book which we have mentioned 
 deals with some aspect of human life. Instead 
 of reading dead books why not study living men ? 
 This question has been so well answered by 
 Emerson and Ruskin that it is both superfluous 
 and presumptuous to try to say more. Indeed, 
 no more can be said, but their answer can be re- 
 peated in other words. 
 
 Why not, then, study men rather than books? 
 By all means, let us study men. Indeed, if we 
 do not study men we shall study books to little 
 purpose. But most of us know only the men 
 of our neighborhood, the men whom chance has 
 thrown into our way. Thankful may we be if 
 among them there is one much above the others 
 
24: The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 in wisdom and judgment. We can know a few 
 men in our own time, in our own country. Some 
 of us are so fortunate as to know men of other 
 countries, but even so, are limited in our ac- 
 quaintance to the men of our own time. Even 
 if very wise men are living in our own day, it 
 is impossible for many of us to know them 
 personally, and be able to speak to them face to 
 face. Most of us, then, cannot know men of 
 other lands, and none of us can know men of 
 other days. However, we can go to our book- 
 shelves and command the wisdom of all the 
 ages. 
 
 One of the most remarkable things in the 
 world is that the past can be made to live again 
 for us; that we can summons before us the 
 
 men of the greatest intellects, and put our ques- 
 tions to them. It makes no difference who we are 
 
 nor where we live, if we wish to know what the 
 great teachers have to say about morals and 
 religion, we can call Confucius, Socrates, Solo- 
 mon, Moses, Jesus, and Paul, and put our ques- 
 tions to them. The answers which they give us 
 are not based merely upon a moment's reflec- 
 tion as would likely be the case if we should ask 
 a living friend, nor are the men affected by bias 
 or interest or prejudice. They give us their 
 deliberate judgment based upon years of ob- 
 servation and mature reflection. 
 
Ideals of Literature. 25 
 
 In the trials and sorrows of life we can al- 
 ways find some consolation and counsel in books. 
 Whatever may be our mood, we can always find 
 a book to speak to us in that mood. If the 
 world seems unkind and unjust to us, if our 
 cross seems more than we can bear, remembering 
 Socrates and Jesus, we read the Phaedo, or the 
 account of the trial and^ crucifixion of Jesus. 
 If we are bereaved, some comfort is to be found 
 in Lycidas and Adonais. If we wdsh merely 
 to be amused or pleased, some one is ready in 
 his book to sing to us or to tell us a story — 
 Cervantes, Tennyson, Kipling, Mark Twain, Bret 
 Harte, Scott, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Long- 
 fellow, Lowell, Byron. When we become tired 
 reading one author, we replace the volume on its 
 shelf and there is no offense. We can take 
 down another. They are there waiting to help 
 us if they can. Fortunate are we, indeed, if we 
 have been so trained that we can command their 
 services. How unfortunate, if the world of 
 books is a dead world to us ! 
 
 Teachers can be of service to children in many 
 ways, but it is doubtful whether they can do any- 
 thing better than to lead them to know and love 
 books. When children are very young, long 
 before they are old enough to go to school, their 
 parents should read to them. Soon the child is 
 
26 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 able to read for himself. Then, teachers and 
 parents should place into his hands, books that 
 he can understand and enjoy, and should help 
 him to an understanding of them. By the time 
 a child has reached high school, he should have 
 heard or read all that is best and within his 
 comprehension. At least one-fourth of the time 
 spent in the high school should be devoted to 
 reading. In the reading, the teacher is the 
 leader, the guide, the adviser. The pupils are 
 to read for enjoyment and for instruction. The 
 reading for one child need not be the same as 
 that for another. We are different ; authors are 
 different. What one of us likes, another may 
 not like. What is good for one of us may not 
 even be good for another. But we must like 
 something, and it is best for us if we like some- 
 thing that is good. Anything that helps us is 
 good for us. The school should develop taste and 
 good judgment. But in trying to do this, it 
 must be careful not to destroy all taste. There 
 is no value or virtue in mere reading. Unless we 
 read what profits us or gives us lasting pleasure, 
 we may as well not read. Our public schools 
 have, therefore, largely failed of their purpose, 
 unless the pupils, when they leave the schools, 
 have learned in the truest sense to read. No 
 
Ideals of Literature. 27 
 
 child should be given a high school diploma un- 
 til he has studied Shakespeare and come to 
 some degree of comprehension of him. 
 
 Of course, teachers must be readers. They 
 must know all the good books. There are not 
 many. In the long evenings of two or three 
 winters, one can read most of the books that art 
 worth reading, those that make us better men 
 and women after we have read them. There is 
 not more than one great writer for each century 
 for the last twenty-five hundred years. Any 
 teacher can know and read these twenty-five 
 authors. The high school graduate can know 
 them and may well have read many of them. 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
 IDEALS OF NATURE. 
 
 The world of books is the creation of man. 
 There is another world, older, infinite in beauty 
 and variety, the World of Nature. By nature 
 we mean the inanimate world and the world of 
 life below man. This is an arbitrary distinction, 
 for man is a part of the world of nature. 
 
 While it is a pity for a man to go through life 
 without the help and inspiration that come 
 from books, it is, perhaps, more pitiful to live 
 without seeing, understanding, and appreciating 
 the world of nature. When we enter on our 
 journey from birth to death, there are two pos- 
 sibilities open to us. On the one hand, we can 
 exist, take our food, breathe, perform all the 
 vital functions necessary for mere physical life, 
 but be blind and deaf and feelingless to all the 
 objects and forces about us which make up the 
 world in which we are immersed every moment 
 of our lives. Such an existence is on a level of 
 that of the pig or even of a fishworm, for they 
 do as much. On the other hand, we cannot only 
 exist, but live. The world can be a meaningful 
 world to us. We are endowed with a dozen or 
 
 (28) 
 
Ideals of Nature. 29 
 
 more types of sense organs. From our brain the 
 tiny nerves go out to every inch of the surface 
 of our bodies, ending in delicate sense organs. 
 They are the hands and fingers of the soul which 
 reach out with their delicate touch to feel the 
 world. In the skin they give us sense of pres- 
 sure, cold, warmth, and pain; in the joints, of 
 movement; in the mouth, they touch our food 
 and give us taste ; in the nose, they feel of the 
 currents of air and give us smell; in the ear, 
 their sensitive touch feels of the waves of the 
 air and gives us sound ; in the eye, the delicate 
 nerve-fingers respond to the vibrations of ether 
 and give us sight, revealing to us not only ob- 
 jects nearby, but suns and planets millions of 
 miles away. This sensory endowment, the pig 
 also has. It can see the sun as well as we, but 
 it cannot know on what day and hour and 
 minute the moon will be between the sun and the 
 earth and hide the sun from our view — ^we can. 
 And there lies the great difference between us 
 and the pig. The world can he to us a world of 
 meaning. Of course, the difference here is only 
 one of degree, for some things have meaning to 
 the pig. To the pig, water is to drink; corn 
 is to eat; a dog is to run from; a mudhole is 
 to wallow in on a hot day. But how varied and 
 infinite in meaning the world can be to us ! From 
 
30 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 
 
 the stars, on the one hand, immeasurably big 
 and inconceivably distant, to bacteria, on the 
 other, uncomfortably close, innumerable in num- 
 bers and microscopically small, the objects ot 
 the world fall into their proper places in the 
 mind of man. 
 
 The world of nature is here. It has always 
 been here. It will always be here. We find our- 
 selves in it, a part of it. We shall be here a 
 little while. Shall vs^e make it ours through un- 
 derstanding and appreciation, or shall we spend 
 our short existence in it with the traditional 
 eyes that see not and ears that hear not? 
 
 We should understand nature in order to be 
 able to control her forces and use them for our 
 practical ends, but I am not thinking here of 
 this practical side of the matter. Our considera- 
 tion now is merely from the point of view of 
 appreciation and enjoyment. Whatever other 
 functions schools and teachers may have, surely 
 one important function is to help children to 
 discover the world. 
 
 First of all there is the inanimate world, out 
 of which all living things come and to which they 
 return when they die. The earth is truly our 
 mother Earth. We call it inanimate, we say it 
 is dead and lifeless, but in the sense of being 
 inert, inactive, static, it is not dead but full of 
 
Ideals of Nature. 31 
 
 motion and ceaselessly active forces. Its face is 
 being sculptured, the mountains daily carved 
 away, its hills leveled down by chemical action 
 and the eroding power of frost, air and water. 
 The rocks are being ground down into soil from 
 which comes all vegetation. The mountains lift 
 their granite peaks high into the air which 
 forever battles with them, inch by inch lowering 
 their proud heads. The rivers flow on through- 
 out the years and centuries, carrying always to 
 the sea the tribute of the hills and mountains 
 which it gathers by means of its myriad creeks, 
 brooks, and rivulets. The rocks themselves of 
 the all-but-everlasting hills are at once the monu- 
 ment and tomb of the early life of the earth. 
 In them we can trace our genealogy through 
 starfish and crinoid. The inscriptions were 
 carved by the animals themselves and the plants 
 in the long ago, when they laid themselves down 
 in the mud and slime of the primeval sea to 
 be entombed for uncounted centuries. At last 
 their resurrection comes. The hills give them 
 up ; they live again on the wide plain far from 
 the sea, in wheat fields and meadows of clover — 
 a transmigration of souls undreamed of by the 
 philosophers. 
 
 In glacial drifts and moraines we have a still 
 more interesting story for him who can read it. 
 
32 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 The great continent-wide ice mountain, during 
 the long geologic winter crept slowly down from 
 the north, chiseling, hewing, scraping, gathering 
 its titanic load of earth and rock and lifeless 
 forms of animals and plants, carrying all far to 
 the south. At last under a warmer sun, it 
 gives up its load of giant boulders, polished peb- 
 bles, mountains of sand, all mingled with the 
 lifeless forms of the fauna and flora of all the 
 Northland. It gives them up and leaves a new 
 earth with new rivers and lakes and hills. The 
 eternal processes go on, ceaseless, inevitable ; on 
 a large scale in making and unmaking mountains 
 and oceans and continents ; on a small scale, but 
 jast as effectively, in a single drop of water or 
 grain of sand. No ! the earth is not dead but full 
 of life for the mind that can see and understand. 
 Above the earth are the sun and moon, the 
 planets and stars. They are far away, and 
 except for the sun and moon, have little effect 
 on our earth. We need not bother much about 
 them unless we wish ; they do not much concern 
 us. But they too can be added to our world of 
 undei^tanding and enjoyment, if we choose. 
 Although they are so far away that we can form 
 no proper conception of their distance, they are 
 better understood by science in their movements 
 and mutual relations than are many things close 
 
Ideals of Nature. 33 
 
 at hand. The heavenly bodies meant much to 
 primitive man who lived in the open, under the 
 wide sky. He knew them and gave them names. 
 To most of us they are unknown and without 
 interest. But why not add the astronomical 
 world to our possible worlds of pleasure? 
 
 In the animate world, w^e have first the world 
 of plants, which take the first step from rock 
 toward man. They embed their roots in the 
 soil, the graveyard of the past, and in the air 
 above unfold their green leaves to the sun. In 
 the leaves under the action of sunlight, living 
 matter is made out of simpler material. Upon 
 the green leaves of plants, all living things 
 directly or indirectly depend. All the processes 
 of the plants are interesting, none more so than 
 those that go on in the flower, whose function is 
 reproduction. 
 
 We can manage to live in almost complete 
 ignorance of the plant-world, if we wish, but in 
 its beauty and variety it can become of intimate 
 interest and importance to our lives. The proc- 
 esses that go on in individual plants, the means 
 which they use for survival, their interrelation- 
 ships, their dependence upon their surround- 
 ings — all become of great interest when we study 
 them. To the close student, plants become of 
 almost human importance. 
 (3) 
 
34 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 In the great cities where men raise sky- 
 scrapers instead of corn, plant-life is not of 
 such immediate concern; but in the country, if 
 the farmer will become a life-long student of 
 plants, he will gradually open the doors to a 
 world that rivals any of the other worlds in its 
 possibilities for endless study and enjoyment. 
 
 What a joy to know the trees, whether the 
 giant Sequoias of California that were old when 
 Jesus was born, and that have stood on their 
 sentinel hills through thousands of years, or 
 the oaks in our back yard that began their 
 sturdy existence about the time when our re- 
 public w^as born. The lover of trees feels like 
 saying with Lowell : 
 
 I care not how men trace their ancestry, 
 To ape or Adam; let them please their 
 
 whim ; 
 But I in June am midway to believe, 
 A tree among my far progenitors. 
 
 The love of flowers can become a passion in 
 our lives. The flower-lover is on the hills ere 
 the snow has receded from the shaded recesses, 
 watching for the first Anemone and Hepatica. 
 When the Springbeauty blooms, he is there; 
 he greets the Maybell and Columbine and Lady's 
 
Ideals of Nature. 35 
 
 Slipper; he rejoices in all his flower friends as 
 the season goes by till at last in its gorgeous 
 red he finds the Cardinal flower, in its shaded 
 background of green. It comes late in the fall 
 in its richness of color to mark the summit and 
 climax of all the painting of nature. 
 
 The student of animal life is never without 
 something interesting to study. The earth is 
 covered with animals; the sea and the air are 
 filled with them. They vary in size from the sin- 
 gle-celled protozoan to the elephants and whales 
 whose weight is to be measured in tons. They 
 are infinite in variety; one species is different 
 from another; no two animals of the same 
 species are exactly alike. Though each is dil- 
 ferent from all the others, still all are alike m 
 many ways. Protoplasm, the physical basis of 
 life, is essentially the same in all. The life 
 processes of all animals are the same funda- 
 mentally, the same in principle, though infinitely 
 varied in details. The structure of the verte- 
 brates is always the same in type, but the adap- 
 tations range from that of the fish to that of the 
 birds. The adaptations of typical and similar 
 structures to varying functions are well nigh 
 innumerable. 
 
 All animals have the same problems to 
 solve; they must get food and escape enemies; 
 
36 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 all must reproduce or the species goes out of 
 existence. One could spend a lifetime in the 
 study of a single species of animals and never be 
 without an unsolved problem concerning them. 
 If one becomes interested in animal life, he can 
 find animals for study wherever he may be. 
 Every pond is a theater of animal activity, and 
 will furnish many a pleasant hour through the 
 summer days to him who will study it. Insects 
 and birds afford a large field for study; the 
 insects, because of their number and variety; 
 and the birds, because of their beauty and song. 
 
 The insects are everywhere, in the air, water, 
 earth, wood, decaying matter, in our houses, on 
 every plant — ceaselessly and eternally making 
 their little fight for life. Their life processes and 
 developmental changes are of extreme interest. 
 Every boy should be introduced to the insect 
 world and those who choose to spend their 
 leisure hours in the study of insects will al- 
 ways find something to think about besides their 
 neighbors' faults. 
 
 Of birds we hesitate to speak, not because 
 there is nothing to say, but because there is so 
 much to say. Why should a person be allowed 
 to go through life without adding to his possible 
 worlds of enjoyment the world of birds? In 
 winter or in summer, in city or in country, one 
 
Ideals op Nature. 37 
 
 cannot step out of his door without seeing a 
 bird. All of them are interesting, many are 
 beautiful, many make music than which there is 
 no better in the world, the orioles, the bobolink, 
 the catbird, and the thrushes. In the pear tree 
 beside our window many of them build 
 their homes and enact their little dramas. 
 From the economic point of view as well as from 
 the aesthetic, it is a high duty of the schools to 
 teach the children to know the birds. 
 
 He who studies animals soon comes to see the 
 unity of all life and to recognize his kinship with 
 it. The amoeba slowly moving its microscopic 
 form about in the slime of the brook bottom, the 
 fish swimming above it, the dog running along 
 the bank, the bird flying high in the air — all 
 are bent on the same mission. Each is fighting 
 out in its own way the battle of life, searching 
 for food, fleeing an enemy, hunting a mate. 
 
 The beginning of every animal is a single cell. 
 Whether it spends its whole life in this simple 
 form as do many of the lowest, or whether it 
 grows to be an aggregation of millions of cells, 
 is of little importance. The lives of all are 
 essentially the same. After a few hours or 
 days or months or years, each animal in its 
 own way acting out its life-drama, the same 
 end comes to all, the life of each ends in a 
 
38 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 
 
 tragedy, in death. A study of animals enlargas 
 our conception of life and broadens our sym- 
 pathies. 
 
 Let us who are teaching the young, take them 
 by the hand and lead them through the different 
 avenues of nature. Let us go down to the brook- 
 side and help the children to read the story 
 of the pebble, to learn the biography of the 
 frog and the legends of the trees. We shall let 
 the birds teach them their songs, and the bees, 
 their secrets. The drama of life is everywhere in 
 progress. The old owl in the sycamore tells an 
 interesting story about the crows that eternally 
 bother him, but he is silent about how he spends 
 the long hours after the sun is down. We must 
 learn this from other sources. The mink, the 
 muskrat, the groundhog, the blacksnake, the 
 cricket — all have interesting stories for the chil- 
 dren and for us, if we will master the language 
 which they speak. 
 
 All the lifeless things have their stories too. 
 The boulder beneath our feet — if it could speak, 
 what stories it could tell ! What comedies, what 
 tragedies it could unfold! But it does speak, 
 and the child can be taught its language. It 
 is criminal for us to allow children to grow to 
 maturitv without learning to read what is every- 
 
Ideals of Nature. 39 
 
 where written. Let us open their eyes that they 
 may see, their ears that they may hear, and their 
 minds that they may understand. 
 
 Some of the wise men who have written books 
 help us to understand the book of nature and 
 give us inspiration to read it. Among American 
 writers, those who show the keenest appreciation 
 of nature are Thoreau, Burroughs, Emerson, 
 Bryant, and Lowell. The following lines from 
 Bryant are familiar to all lovers of nature : 
 
 To him who in the love of nature holds 
 Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
 A various language; for his gayer hours 
 She has a voice of gladness, and a smile 
 And eloquence of beauty, and she glides 
 Into his darker musings, with a mild 
 And healing sympathy, that steals away 
 Their sharpness ere he is aware. 
 
 Stranger, if thou hast learned a truth which need 
 No school of long experience, that the world 
 Is full of guilt and misery, and hast seen 
 Enough of all its sorrows, crimes, and cares, 
 To tire thee of it, enter this wild wood 
 And view the haunts of Nature. The calm shade 
 Shall bring a kindred calm, and the sweet breeze 
 That makes the green leaves dance, shall waft a balm 
 To thy sick heart. 
 
40 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 The things, oh life! thou quickenest, all 
 
 Strive upward toward the broad bright sky, 
 
 Upward and outward, and they fall 
 Back to earth's bosom when they die. 
 
 All that have borne the touch of death, 
 
 All that shall live, lie mingled there. 
 Beneath that vale of bloom and breath, 
 
 That living zone 'twixt earth and air. 
 
 There lies my chamber dark and still. 
 
 The atoms trampled by my feet 
 There wait, to take the place I fill 
 
 In the sweet air and sunshine sweet. 
 
 Well, I have had my turn, have been 
 
 Raised from the darkness of the clod, 
 And for a glorious moment seen 
 
 The brightness of the skirts of God. 
 
 And in different mood, the following : 
 
 Is this a time to be cloudy and sad. 
 When our mother Nature laughs around; 
 
 When even the deep blue heavens look glad. 
 And gladness breathes from the blossoming ground 1 
 
 There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren, 
 And the gossip of swallows through all the sky; 
 
 The ground-squirrel gayly chirps by his den, 
 And the wilding bee hums merrily by. 
 
Ideals of Nature. 41 
 
 The clouds are at play in the azure space 
 And their shadows at play on the bright-green vale 
 
 And here they stretch to the frolic chase, 
 And there they roll on the easy gale. 
 
 There's a dance of leaves in that aspen bower, 
 There's a titter of winds in that beechen tree. 
 
 There's a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower 
 And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea. 
 
 And look at the broad-faced sun, how he smiles 
 On the dewy earth that smiles in his ray; 
 
 On the leaping waters and gay young isles; 
 Ay, look, and he'll smile thy gloom away. 
 
 Emerson takes us close to the heart of nature. 
 There are no more beautiful lines in literature 
 than the following: 
 
 For Nature beats in perfect tune. 
 
 And rounds with rhyme her every rune, 
 
 Whether she works in land or sea, 
 
 Or hide under ground her alchemy. 
 
 Thou canst not wave thy staff in air. 
 
 Or dip thy paddle in the lake. 
 
 But it carves the bow of beauty there 
 
 And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake. 
 
 In The Apology, Emerson tells us what is to be 
 gleaned from Nature besides the material har- 
 vests : 
 
42 The Teacher ^s Ideals op Life. 
 
 Think me not unkind and rude. 
 
 That I walk alone in grove and glen; 
 I go to the god of the wood 
 
 To fetch his word to men. 
 
 Tax not my sloth that I 
 
 Fold my arms beside the brook; 
 
 Each cloud that floated in the sky 
 Writes a letter in my book. 
 
 Chide me not laborious band, 
 For the idle flowers I brought; 
 
 Every aster in my hand 
 
 Goes home loaded with a thought. 
 
 There v/as never mystery 
 But 'tis figured in the flowers, 
 
 Was never secret history 
 But birds tell it in the bowers. 
 
 One harvest from the field 
 
 Homeward brought the oxen strong 
 
 A second crop thy acres yield, 
 Which I gather in a song. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 IDEALS OF WORK 
 
 Work! The most glorious word in our lan- 
 guage is ivorh, for through work comes the only 
 salvation of the soul. Instead of shirking and 
 avoiding work, let us be thankful each day for 
 it. Much of the trouble of the world comes 
 through people trying to escape work. Some of 
 us are all the time hunting for an easier job. 
 We think our lot is hard. We see others making 
 a living much more easily than v»'e. We think if 
 we only had their place, life would be quite 
 y/orthwhile. Particularly widespread is the no- 
 tion that some kinds of labor are much more de- 
 sirable than other kinds, more honorable, and 
 that those who do this more honorable work 
 should be accorded more respect. This is a 
 false notion and leads to much, very much, of 
 the pain and sorrow and even sin of the world. 
 Work is work. We live a social life. There are 
 many kinds of work that must be done if society 
 is to exist. Coal must be mined, transported on 
 the trains, and delivered to the consumer. Some 
 one must go down into the earth and mine it; 
 
 (43) 
 
44 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 
 
 some one must run the train that hauls it ; some 
 one must throw it out of the car and deliver it 
 to the consumer. Wheat must be raised, thresh- 
 ed, hauled to the mill and ground into flour, then 
 the flour must be delivered to the consumer. 
 Some one must raise our hogs and cattle ; some 
 one must butcher them; some one distribute 
 them to the consumer. Roads and streets must 
 be built and kept in repair. Some one must 
 build our houses ; some one, our railroads. Others 
 must keep the railroads in repair. In connection 
 with distribution, some one must run the stores ; 
 others, the banks; others must work in the fac- 
 tories that make our shoes and our clothes and 
 our tools. Each work is necessary; being neces- 
 sary, each kind of work is as important as any 
 other. It is dangerous to society for any other 
 view to be taken. It matters little what part you 
 do or what part I do. The important thing is 
 that each does some part, some necessary part. 
 It would, perhaps, be best if each should do what 
 he could do best, but apart from this, it makes 
 little difference what we severally do. 
 
 There is a tendency among some people to 
 look with condescension upon those who work 
 with their hands. If any distinction at all is to 
 be made, the greater honor should go to him 
 who has made with his hands some needful thing, 
 
Ideals of Work. 45 
 
 who has in a sense become a creator. He who 
 raises a fine tomato, or chicken, or hog, or field 
 of wheat; he who builds a good and beautiful 
 house, or makes a good, substantial road or street, 
 is the real creator, not he who buys and sells the 
 produce, or he who keeps other peoples' money 
 to loan to actual producers. I say, if there 
 should be any distinction whatever, the greater 
 honor should go to him who produces, who cre- 
 ates. But there should be no distinction among 
 those who do any necessary work, whether in 
 production or distribution. 
 
 Work conquers all things, and few possessions 
 worth having come without labor. 
 
 ''At the devil's booth are all things sold, 
 Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of 
 gold." 
 
 The price that must be paid is so much labor. 
 If every man and woman who are not at work 
 doing something that needs to be done, would 
 go to work at some useful production or take 
 some part in the necessary distribution of com- 
 modities, much of the misery and sin of the world 
 would disappear. Idleness is the gate that 
 leads to sin, and sin is the road to hell. It is 
 true there is much injustice in the social and 
 
46 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 economic world. Many worthless and lazy crea- 
 tures live upon the labor of others. The great- 
 est crime is idleness. He who does not do his 
 proper part of work is a criminal and has no 
 right to sustenance. If society ought to hang 
 any man, it should be the one who, without 
 working himself, lives upon the labor of others, 
 for he is both a thief and a murderer. He is 
 stealing the fruits of others' labor, and in a 
 sense taking their lives. 
 
 The schools should glorify labor, and should 
 do something definite, specific, and direct toward 
 fitting the young for some honest, needed kind of 
 work. To some extent a few schools do this, but 
 it is too common for them to do the reverse, 
 namely, encourage children to strive to be clerks, 
 lawyers, doctors, anything, in short, save a good, 
 honest producer. Of course some should be en- 
 couraged to become lawyers and doctors, but 
 not all. These two professions are already over- 
 crowded by persons who might, some of them, 
 be able to make an honest living digging ditches 
 or sweeping streets. It is as necessary that 
 ditches be dug as that the sick be cured, and if 
 one can dig ditches better than he can cure the 
 sick, then he ought to dig ditches. And society 
 should give the ditchdigger his proper reward. 
 
Ideals of Work. 47 
 
 What joy is there like that which comes from 
 labor? From a good day's work well done? 
 Who enjoys his supper so well as he who has 
 earned it by hard labor? Who sleeps so well 
 or enjoys that sleep so much as the man who has 
 followed the plow all day, or who has been busy 
 with hammer or saw or ax°? Our bodies are 
 motor machines and keep in best repair when 
 used in manual work. Those of us who forget 
 this, pay for our neglect very dearly through 
 the trouble and discomfort of one or more func- 
 tional disorders. Every one, whatever his oc- 
 cupation, should do some physical work each 
 day, if for no other reason, in order to main- 
 tain health. If we are ever to be a race of 
 people who live by brain work only, we shall 
 have to evolve into a different sort of physical 
 being, have a different kind of body. Those we 
 now have are made for physical work. The cities 
 are filled with professional men — men trying to 
 escape hard manual labor — who, for the most 
 part, sit on chairs all day. Their bodies are 
 not made for that kind of existence, and nearly 
 all the organs of the body are soon out of func- 
 tion. The men become a prey to ignorant doc- 
 tors, who are also hunting the easy road to 
 happiness. 
 
48 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 Let us glorify work, but especially good work. 
 We must develop in children high ideals of 
 workmanship. We must so train them that they 
 cannot be satisfied with a poor piece of work. 
 Poor workmanship is one of our American sins. 
 We build poor houses, make shoddy clothes, 
 cheap and poorly bound books, poor tools, ' ' rag- 
 time" music, and ephemeral literature. Let 
 us develop and train workmen who will be 
 satisfied with only the best that they can do, who 
 will be unwilling to do a poor piece of work. The 
 schools must develop high ideals of work as of 
 everything else. 
 
 There are today educational tendencies which 
 not only throw manual labor into disrepute, but 
 all kinds of hard, honest work. There are edu- 
 cational reformers who try to find an easy road 
 to learning, an easy road to success. Men have 
 been hunting this road as long as they have been 
 searching for the fabled fountain of immortal 
 youth. There is no such road. There is no pos- 
 session worthwhile that comes without labor, and 
 usually the more worthwhile, the more the labor 
 that is required. He who teaches the doctrine 
 that a child should receive his education in 
 homeopathic doses, in the form of sugar-coated 
 pellets, and be anaesthetised besides during the 
 process of administration, is an enemy to society 
 
Ideals of Work. 49 
 
 and destructive to civilization. Such teaching is 
 in part responsible for the growing discontent 
 and lawlessness, socialism and anarchy. The boy 
 who receives a training which develops onl„v 
 flabbiness, grown to maturity, finds the bitter 
 pills awaiting him are not sugar-coated, and no 
 anaesthetics are provided. The only way we 
 can be trained to master difficulties is by master- 
 ing difficulties. 
 
 While work is important for men and women 
 it is more important for boys and girls, because 
 it is an absolute necessity for their proper educa- 
 tion and training. We are getting far away 
 from primitive conditions under which civiliza- 
 tion developed, and under which it has existed 
 until very recent times. The present tendency is 
 for the population to become aggregated in cities. 
 Boys cannot be properly reared in cities because 
 there is nothing there for them to do. How can 
 a boy be trained when there is nothing for him 
 to do? He cannot be trained in a vacuum. 
 The most important aspect of education comes 
 not in dealing with books, which are about 
 things, but with things themselves. The child 
 needs that contact with things which he gets on 
 a farm, where he can have connections with 
 animals and plants, where he can have intimate 
 relations with hogs and horses, cows, fowls, 
 
50 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 machinery, trees, corn, potatoes, weeds, hoes, 
 plows, shovels, hammers, and axes. It is dif- 
 ficult to find enough suitable work in the cities 
 for the boys. 
 
 There is a certain stamina necessary to char- 
 acter that comes only from contact with duty 
 and with arduous responsibilities. A proper 
 training includes learning to stick to a task, 
 though the task bring pain, to stick to it 
 ''through thick and thin." It is hard to find in 
 the large city, work that gives such training as 
 well as following the plow all day, or hoeing all 
 day, or pitching hay all day, in fact, doing any 
 hard manual work all day beneath a hot summer 
 sun. When one has learned to go on though the 
 legs ache, though the back aches, though every 
 bone and muscle in the body seem to ache, he 
 has a form of training that is indispensible in 
 a strenuous life. Such a training is best sup- 
 plied by manual work. 
 
 In the cities, about the only possibility for 
 work is in the factories. But our state legis- 
 latures have passed laws forbidding child labor. 
 Their purpose is to free the young from labor 
 so that they may get an education. An educa- 
 tion indeed ! It is the smallest part of an educa- 
 tion that can be got in school from books alone. 
 It would be better for the state to compel the 
 
Ideals of Work. 51 
 
 boys to work and to find suitable work for them, 
 more suitable than filling glasses at a soda 
 fountain. 
 
 The only possibility for proper training of 
 the young in cities, it seems to me, is a union of 
 the schools and industries, so that children may 
 spend a part of the day, or a part of the week, 
 in factories, in actual productive work, and the 
 rest of the time in school. The school work itself 
 must be reorganized in order to meet better the 
 industrial needs of the child. It is a pity to 
 allow the child of the city to grow to maturity 
 without having done any productive work, with- 
 out having learned the meaning of the words 
 diity and responsibility . 
 
 The motive underlying the laws preventing 
 child labor is sound and wise. Children should 
 not be employed for long hours, nor should em* 
 ployment keep them out of school entirely. But 
 the cure is almost as bad as the disease ; it may 
 be worse. For a boy to go to school and study 
 books till he is nearly, a man, without having 
 meanwhile, the training that comes from pro- 
 ductive labor, is as bad as working all this time 
 without having opportunity to learn what is of- 
 fered at school. We should have neither extreme. 
 We should have both the training that comes 
 from books and the training that comes from la- 
 
52 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 bor. Our cities have few graver problems than 
 that of finding suitable work for the young. A re- 
 organization of the work of the schools would 
 partly solve the problem. The work of the 
 school is now too abstract, too bookish, too far 
 from reality. The world outside the school room 
 is throbbing and humming with activity. In 
 comparison, the work of the school is dead. It 
 deals too much with a dead past. When it 
 deals with the problems of today, it treats them 
 in much the same way as it does the problems 
 of the past. As a consequence, the present be- 
 comes dead also. We cannot educate the young 
 in a cemetery. In some way or other, the in- 
 dustries must be taken into the schools, or the 
 schools taken to the industries. 
 
 Work is real; it deals with realities; it is 
 not make-believe as school work too often is, 
 School work does not become sufficiently incor- 
 porated into the child's real world. The boy 
 who grows to maturity, without learning to la- 
 bor with his hands, without learning what it is 
 to expend a certain amount of energy in re- 
 turn for a dollar ; without having learned what 
 it means to earn his shoes or his hat or a meal or 
 a book, by actual labor has failed to get one 
 of the essentials of a true education. The boy 
 
Ideals of Work. 53 
 
 who has not learned to produce something has 
 missed an important essential in education. 
 
 Of the work of girls and women, I hesitate to 
 speak. I find myself out of sympathy with 
 what seem to be present tendencies. The home 
 that was formerly the place of manifold activi- 
 ties, now in the cities is largely a place of idle- 
 ness. The industries have all left it. The wo- 
 men, some of them, are going out after the in- 
 dustries; othei^ go out for Bridge; others to 
 run the world of politics and business; others, 
 to reform the world generally. AVhen the wo- 
 man leaves the home, there is no home left. 
 With no home, there will be no civilization. The 
 proper work of woman is to make a home, and 
 that is no small task. Let her claim again the 
 work which she can do best and that ought to be 
 done in the home. If she can find nothing else 
 to do, she might educate her children. Of 
 course, if she chooses so to do, she need not have 
 a home nor children. She can live her free and 
 independent life in the active busy world, out- 
 side. Fortunately^ each woman who so chooses 
 thereby ends the line of descent of her kind. 
 She cannot give her privilege to posterity be- 
 cause she leaves no posterity. This world needs 
 nothing more than it needs happy homes. May 
 wise women turn their attention toward making 
 them. 
 
54 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 Tbe problem of work for girls in the cities 
 must surely be easier of solution than that of 
 work for boys. A home can be so managed as 
 to have plenty of work for the girls in helping 
 their mother. Home industries should be re- 
 stored to the home in sufficient number to fur- 
 nish plenty of work for the girls, such work as 
 cooking, washing, sewing, keeping the house in 
 order, and even gardening. 
 
 While work has important intrinsic values, its 
 chief value for adults at least, is as a medium 
 of exchange. It may be likened to money. Gold 
 and silver have certain intrinsic values but 
 their chief use is to be exchanged for something 
 valuable in itself. I want food to eat, a coat 
 for my back, I must work for them. I want a 
 book to read, a piano to play, a picture for my 
 room, I must work for them. I wish for a house, 
 a home, a fireside, I must work for them too. 
 
 Now let us see what can be said for mental 
 work. In what has been said I may seem to 
 have been unfair to him who does mental work. 
 I have not meant to be so. There is a training 
 from physical work that seems difficult for the 
 young to get from mental work, but apart from 
 this fact, any needful work is as honorable as 
 any other. We need nothing any more than we 
 need good thinking. For the happiness of all, 
 
Ideals of Work. 55 
 
 we need good books, good music, beautiful pic- 
 tures. In the carrjdng out of any enterprise, 
 in the running of any factory, there is thinking 
 and planning that must be done or the actual 
 physical work will not be effective or profitable. 
 The head and the hand must co-operate. Often 
 the man who can plan the work cannot do the 
 work, and the man who can do the work can- 
 not plan the work. Either man without the 
 other is to a large extent helpless. The task 
 needs them both; they must co-operate and 
 share equally in the rewards and honor. The 
 men who invented the telephone and telegraph 
 did a great service to us, so do the men who 
 put up the poles and string the wires. The men 
 who write great books make us all their debtors, 
 SG do the men who set the type and print the 
 books. In all the history of the world there 
 has been but one Plato, but one Shakespeare. It 
 may be that he who in his field of work excels 
 all others should have most praise. But in a 
 sense any one of us can do as well as Plato or 
 Shakespeare, or in other fields as well as New- 
 ton or Darwin or Kepler. We can do our best. 
 They did no better. No one can transcent his 
 nature. It will be best for the happiness of all 
 of us if we count all necessary work as of equal 
 
56 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 
 
 value. It may be that within any given field 
 of work, it will do no harm to give more praise 
 for the better work. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 IDEALS OF PLAY. 
 
 Work is a means to an end; play is an end 
 in itself. Work is important because in work 
 Vv^e must pay for valuable possessions. Play is 
 the antithesis of work. We work because we 
 must; we play because we can not help it. 
 I*lay is the free expression of our nature, our 
 inmost and oldest self. In play we more truly 
 and fully live than in any other activity, be- 
 cause more of our nature goes into play. We 
 work in order that the fruits of our labor may 
 supply our bodily and spiritual needs; play it- 
 self supplies many of these needs directly. 
 Work is great because through it come many of 
 the good and necessary things of life; play is 
 great because it is a good thing itself. 
 
 While work is the most glorious word in our 
 language, play and childJiood are the sweetest. 
 After our early days are over, throughout all the 
 years of toil, trouble, sorrows, and disappoint- 
 ments of our mature life and old age, sweet 
 are the memories of infancy and childhood. 
 Treasured, holy and hallowed are the recollec- 
 
 (57) 
 
58 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 tions. How often in memory we live that early 
 life over again. 
 
 The world of our infancy was small, a house, 
 a yard, a eat and a dog, father and mother. In 
 this world we lived and played. From morn- 
 ing till night we were ceaselessly busy, explor- 
 ing the virgin mysteries of our little world. The 
 tools of our craft were a stick, an old pan, a 
 ball, and some blocks. Every day, every hour, 
 presented some new mystery, some new prob- 
 lem. We gradually enlarged the boundaries of 
 our world which in childhood came to include 
 the barn and barnyard with their wonderful 
 inhabitants — horses, cows, hogs, and chickens. 
 What is childhood without a barn with its hay 
 mow? No palace in a city can equal a country 
 bam for childhood. 
 
 Our little world of infancy grew fast. It 
 soon extended to the creek, the hills, the woods, 
 with their interesting wild creatures. In this 
 larger world, our life expanded. The days were 
 not long enough. What day could be long 
 enough for us to learn all we wanted to know 
 about the fishes, the frogs, the snakes, the crows, 
 the jaybirds, and the squirrels? We came to 
 possess a knife and at once gained a new con- 
 trol over the world. We carved our name on 
 the old sycamore, cut switches from the birch, 
 
Ideals of Play. 59 
 
 made whistles from the elm and hickory. At 
 last we made a bow and arrow, and became a 
 full-blooded Indian. We made a trap, set it in 
 the thicket by the creek and caught quail and 
 rabbits. We posse.ssed a gun in early youth, and 
 in the deep snows, over the fields and through 
 the woods we trudged, with our bellowing 
 hound, hunting rabbits. Across the years that 
 intervene, I hear that deep, bass bellow still, and 
 on its sweet notes my soul is carried back to 
 those dear days that are no more. 
 
 How intense are the experiences of early life. 
 Every day something transpires that makes its 
 indelible impression. The world is to us then a 
 virgin world. Each experience is new. Later, 
 life becomes monotonous ; each day like the one 
 before. We search often in vain for new ex- 
 periences. Not so with childhood and youth. If 
 we could prolong childhood; if we could retain 
 its spirit through life, the world would be dif- 
 ferent. In a measure this can be done. The se- 
 cret lies in play. Let us play all our life. Let 
 us go down to our graves with a toy in our 
 hands, and all our lives we shall be as children. 
 
 Beautiful is the play of children about the 
 family fireside. In all the scenes of life from 
 birth to death, there is none so sweet, so divine, 
 so holy, as that of a happy family in the home, 
 
60 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 gathered around the lamp before an open fire, 
 reading, talking, and playing games. Such, 
 scenes are as near heaven as any we have on 
 earth. There is the dear grandmother, filling 
 her honored place in the easy chair, holding on 
 her lap the infant grandson. The father inter- 
 mittently reads the newspaper, the mother 
 brings in the doughnuts and the apples, and 
 joins in the games of the children. 
 
 Parents should live with their children and 
 play with them much more than they do. In 
 the country the relations of fathers and sons, 
 mothers and daughters, are still very intimate; 
 but in the city, this is often not the case. The 
 city home frequently is no home at all. Family 
 relations are loose or non-existent. Civilization 
 rests upon the home. There can be no home unless 
 the members of the family are bound together 
 b}' the strongest and most intimate of ties. In 
 the country the members of the family can both 
 work together and play together; in the city 
 they can at least play together. When the day 's 
 work is over, the family should be united for 
 the evening 's entertainment, for the family play. 
 The evening should be planned for. We make 
 plans for everything else, why not make plans 
 for our family life? If we are in the poultry 
 business, we make extensive plans and take great 
 
Ideals of Play. 61 
 
 precautions in the rearing of chickens; why 
 should not parents plan at least as carefully for 
 the rearing of their children? This planning 
 should fall largely to the mother, and for this 
 work she should be trained. The training should 
 be as extensive, as careful, as scientific, as that 
 given to a physician. What greater career 
 should a woman want? We are concerned here 
 only with the play and entertainment side of 
 the family life. For this the mother's training 
 should include music, story telling, reading, 
 games, and an intimate knowledge of flowers, 
 birds, insects, trees, and indeed the whole won- 
 derful world of nature. 
 
 When the day's work is done, then, the fami- 
 ly comes together for play. The possibilities are 
 great. There can be reading and stories, music, 
 and dancing by the children, and games in great 
 variety. Care should be laid aside. The school 
 should not send home large assignments of 
 school work to be done. The evening should be- 
 long to the home and not to the school. No out- 
 side interests should dominate the home in the 
 evening. The music should include songs. Ev- 
 ery girl should learn to play the piano and to 
 sing, as part of her professional preparation. A 
 girl should no more think of marrying without 
 being able to play the piano and sing than she 
 
62 The Teacher's Ideals of Life, 
 
 should, without being able to sew and eook, and 
 manage a household. 
 
 In the summer there can be much play out- 
 of-doors. The day is much longer. After sup- 
 per there are two or three hours of daylight, time 
 enough for an excursion. Saturday afternoon 
 and part of Sunday should frequently be de- 
 voted to picnics and outdoor activities. In these 
 the father should, of course, participate. A fa- 
 ther's evenings, and in fact most of his time 
 when he is not at work, belong to his family, 
 particularly to his boys. With them he should 
 play, frequently taking trips with them to the 
 woods and to the streams. He should be versed 
 in the lore of woodfolk. If he is not, let him 
 learn with his children. If parents will iden- 
 tify themselves with the lives of their children, 
 it will not only be to the great joy and advantage 
 of the children, but to the parents as well. It will 
 keep them young, drive their cares away, and 
 give them strength and courage for their work. 
 It should be a joy during the hours of work to 
 look forward to the evening of play with the 
 children. 
 
 The school is a place for work ; it should also 
 be a place for play. The teachers should be as 
 well prepared to direct the play of the children 
 as to direct their work. Every school building 
 
Ideals of Play. 63 
 
 should have at least one man among the teachers 
 so that there will be a proper leader for the plays 
 of the boys. Suitable games of all kinds should 
 be provided for, especially ball games. As soon 
 as a boy can throw a ball and use a bat, he 
 should play base ball. There should be frequent 
 games between the grades and between different 
 schools. Athletic contests of all kinds should be 
 frequent. Proper physical play will not only 
 bring joy but a well developed body. If we 
 are not to become a race of physical degenerates, 
 we must take as much care in the proper train- 
 ing and development of the body as of the mind. 
 Not only should there be the athletic play out- 
 side, but other kinds of play inside the school 
 room, some of it as part of the school work, some 
 purely for play. Dramatization can form a 
 very vital part of the regular school work and 
 bo a great source of enjoyment. In all grades 
 there should be much music ; and literary exer- 
 cises of all kinds should be at least weekly oc- 
 currences. Pageants should be frequent. School 
 life should be rich and varied. There should be 
 plenty of hard work, but also abundant play 
 and joy. The school should be a happy place, 
 where children would delight to be. 
 
 The school house and grounds should have 
 a wider use for play and entertainment purposes 
 
64 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 
 
 than is now the case. They belong to the com- 
 munity and cost great sums of money, but dur- 
 ing the summer months are not used. Why 
 should not the people of the community gather 
 there on summer evenings for story telling, for 
 music, pagents and other dramatic exercises? 
 Many schools have a victrola, bought with the 
 peoples' money. All summer it serves only to 
 accumulate dust. On summer evenings this vic- 
 trola should be taken out on the school grounds, 
 where the people are gathered sitting on the 
 grass under the trees to listen to its music. It 
 would not cost much to employ a director for 
 these summer activities. The teachers might 
 take turns directing these activities. The results 
 would be pleasure and profit, and the saving of 
 many a child from perdition. 
 
 The play needs of the country are somewhat 
 different from those of the city. Country chil- 
 dren have enough activity for health and growth. 
 Sometimes the activity is not sufficiently varied. 
 The play at school could be very much enriched 
 and diversified. The country school needs a 
 teacher skilled in the science and art of play. 
 The country school should have even a larger 
 place in the life of the people than the city 
 school. The school house in the country is the 
 only one that can be used in common for gen- 
 
Ideals of Play. 65 
 
 eral purposes of entertainment. Through the 
 winter all the people should meet there at least 
 one night a week for literary and musical enter- 
 tainments, spelling matches, lectures, as well as 
 for mere social talk and pleasure. Through the 
 summer months, they should meet there at least 
 on Saturday afternoons and have a base ball 
 game, or a pageant, or some other kind of play 
 by the children. Such a use of the school would 
 unite the people, bind them together, unify 
 their interests, and be a source of great pleasure 
 to all. The community should take pride in 
 the building and the grounds, and develop this 
 pride in the children. The building should be 
 the most beautiful in the whole district. The 
 grounds should be large, with shade trees, shrubs, 
 and flower beds, and plenty of room for all kinds 
 of games. 
 
 Men and women, as well as children, should 
 play. It is natural for children to play, and 
 play makes up a large part of their lives. It 
 is also natural for adults to play, but we become 
 engrossed m our work, lose our youthful spirit, 
 and forget to play. We pay dearly for this 
 course. We pay for it in loss of health and 
 vigor, and in loss of joy. We grow old before 
 our time and approach our graves with indiges- 
 tion and pessimism. The visions and hopes and 
 (5) 
 
66 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 ambitions of youth die, one by one. There is 
 nothing left to look forward to but the end of 
 the journey. Our face lengthens out, becomes 
 furrowed with wrinkles, our eyes become luster- 
 less and lose their fire. This is all unnecessary. 
 We can remain young ; we can still be boys and 
 girls at eighty if we will only play. Play for 
 adults is recreation in the true sense of re-cre- 
 ation. Our work, particularly professional 
 work, uses up our nervous energy at too fast a 
 rate. We need to fall back upon our older self 
 for a part of the time each day, renew our youth, 
 and let the ancestral man within come forth and 
 express himself. It is not enough that we take 
 an annual vacation; we should take a vacation 
 each day. For at least a short time each day wo 
 should throw off the age that is trying to grow 
 up within us, forget the grey that is coming m 
 our hair, laugh and romp and play with children 
 and with our fellows, and be young again. 
 Whenever we play, we are children; if we al- 
 ways play, we shall remain children in spirit. 
 
 We should take a lesson from the ancient 
 Greeks, in whose lives play was an important 
 factor. It is no accident that the Greeks, the 
 greatest of all peoples, were the greatest players. 
 In those ancient days, whole populations would 
 
Ideals of Play. 67 
 
 come together for athletic and intellectual 
 games. Their many and various festivals were 
 important events in their lives. 
 
 It is as important that a man have a life-time 
 play interest as that he should have his profes- 
 sional or occupational interest. Every man 
 should have some sort of play or hobby into 
 which he can, for a part of each day, throw 
 himself with the vigor, enthusiasm, and abandon 
 of youth. For a city man this can be gardening, 
 poultry raising, or some line of investigation, an 
 interest in insects, or flowers, or trees, or birds. 
 It makes little difference what it is, if it is an 
 interest that can wholly possess him and last 
 through his life. 
 
 We have opposed work to play ; we have con- 
 sidered them as antithetical, and in a measure 
 they are. There are certain characteristics that 
 inhere in work that set it apart as different from 
 play. Nevertheless, our work is never very ef- 
 fective unless we can throw into it some of the 
 spirit which is characteristic of play. As long 
 as our work is drudgery, as long as we approach 
 it with distaste and aversion, we never do our 
 best. It is only when we approach it with the 
 same feeling that a boy has in his base ball gamxC 
 that we do our most effective work. In other 
 words, our best work is done when it is play, 
 
68 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 when we can delight in the work itself. This 
 outcome will be the result of two factors. By 
 remaining young through play, we are able 
 to approach our work in the play spirit. We 
 can also study our work, find ways to improve it, 
 increase our skill in it, and get the joy that 
 comes from work well done. 
 
 It is evident that if play is to be a large part 
 of the life of a community, the teachers should 
 be the greatest of players. They should not only 
 be skilled in all the games and participate in 
 them, but should be young in spirit, and should 
 be in sympathy with childhood and youth. 
 Teachers should be strong and perfect in body; 
 this is quite as important as is the matter of 
 their intellectual fitness. After teachers have 
 lost their youthful spirit and youthful sympa- 
 thies, they should not remain in the school room, 
 for they will destroy life instead of creating it. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 IDEALS OF DEMOCRACY. 
 
 The American public schools should be the 
 temples of democracy; the teachers, its high 
 priests. No one who is not sound in his de- 
 mocraej^ should be allowed to teach our chil- 
 dren. The spirit of democracy is equality. 
 When will the world learn the true meaning of 
 the word? It has been nearly a century and a 
 half since the founders of our republic de- 
 clared that "all men are created free and equal." 
 It has been nineteen centuries since Jesus 
 taught that we should love one another. The 
 unthinking may wonder why ethical progress 
 is so slow, but the reason is not far to seek. The 
 inborn nature of man today is essentially the 
 same as that of the men who listened to the 
 words of Jesus. We are the same at heart as 
 our ancestors of long ago. And at heart we are 
 selfish. The teaching of the Bible that we must 
 be born again is true. Our natures must be ma- 
 terially changed before we are fit to live to- 
 gether in any degree of harmony and happiness. 
 All the virtues on which democracy rests must 
 be developed in us or strengthened by training. 
 
 (69) 
 
70 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 Nearty all the pain and suffering and sorrow 
 in the world arise directly or indirectly out of 
 selfishness, unkindness and lack of sympathy. 
 
 In one sense, the Declaration of Independence 
 is wrong — we are not created equal. To the 
 student of human nature, nothing is more con- 
 spicuous and striking than the fact of individual 
 differences. Some of us are tall; others, short; 
 some of us have good eyes and ears; others, 
 poor. So also, we differ in every aspect and 
 detail of our minds. Nature has been kind to 
 some of us, unkind to others. No, we are not 
 equal, nor can we be made equal, but in a de~ 
 mocracy^ we should have equal rights. 
 
 Every child has the right to be trained, edu- 
 cated, nurtured physically and mentally so as 
 to attain the highest manhood possible. Every 
 man has the right to life, liberty, and the pur- 
 suit of happiness in whatever manner he may 
 desire, if the attainment of the desire does not 
 involve the unhappiness of others. Every man 
 has the right to be treated as a man, whatever 
 may be his occupation or station in life, what- 
 ever the kind of clothes he may wear. Ever>' 
 man has the right to his beliefs and convictions, 
 and the right to carry them out in his actions 
 so long as they do not interfere with such equal 
 
Ideals of Democracy. 71 
 
 rights of others. Every man has the right to 
 the sympathy and co-operation of others. 
 
 Equality and justice should be the foundation 
 of a democracy, but the most casual observation 
 shows us that inequalit}^ and injustice cause ev- 
 erywhere sorrow and suffering. There is de- 
 veloping in this country a caste system more 
 dangerous than any the world has seen, a sys- 
 tem based on money alone. Society is becoming 
 stratified into numerous distinct layers, from 
 what is thought to be the highest to what is 
 called the loivest. There are numerous indica- 
 tions of the stratum to which one belongs — house, 
 furniture, clothes, number and splendor of par- 
 ties given, the amount of money the person can 
 afford to waste. Among the many uses of the 
 automobile is that it indicates station in life. 
 First there are those people who have none, 
 then come the thousands who ride in the kind 
 that starts with a crank, then a well differentia- 
 ted array of those riding in higher and higher 
 priced cars. Finally come the few who ride in 
 cars costing many thousands of dollars. The 
 extreme fineness of social distinctions is well 
 illustrated by the marriage of a certain house- 
 maid who refused to invite to her wedding a 
 close friend whose station in life, forsooth, was 
 
72 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 only that of waiter in a restaurant ! A girl who 
 works in a restaurant cannot belong socially to 
 that group of girls who work in private homes. 
 
 When we give a party we invite as guests peo- 
 jjle who belong in our own stratum or layer, not 
 those below; but are happy indeed if we can 
 secure the presence of anyone from a layer above 
 us. If the governor condescends to dine with 
 us, we proclaim it from the housetops, and fear- 
 ing that some one may not know it, we drive him 
 about town showing him off — as they do the big 
 elephant in the circus street parade — as exhibit 
 number one in our claim for social distinction. 
 If some humble friend in shabby clothes comes 
 to dine with us, we keep it a secret ; the fact 
 does not appear in the social column of the 
 city daily ; and when he leaves, we drive him to 
 the train in a closed carriage after dark. 
 
 While social stratification is bad, worse still is 
 the fact that everyone in any given stratum is 
 trying to get into the layer supposed to be next 
 higher. Devices innumerable are used to se- 
 cure notice from those in stations above. Nor 
 a day passes on which crimes are not committed 
 whose sole purpose is to enable some one to as- 
 cend to a higher social level. The crime itself is 
 commonly committed by husband or father. The 
 person for whose benefit it is committed is usual- 
 
Ideals op Democracy. 73 
 
 ly wife or daughter. The crime itself is usually 
 some form of theft or robbery. The wife wants 
 a home or furniture or a dress or a car finer 
 than those of her neighbors. The husband 's in- 
 come is insufficient to afford it, so he steals. 
 
 It is not enough that we have possessions, but 
 we want to be known to have them, as the emi- 
 nent Ruskin long ago pointed out. It is not the 
 absolute value of things that pleases us, but their 
 relative value, their being better than the things 
 that others have. We can be quite content with 
 little, provided that none of the neighbors has 
 any more ; for indeed, we are at the top. That 
 the top is low does not matter. This eternal 
 rivalry arises out of aspects of our nature that 
 are strong and deep. Envy and jealously are 
 rooted deep in our inborn nature. If we are 
 to have any mutual happiness in this life, envy 
 and jealousy must be in large measure sup- 
 pressed. 
 
 A democracy should be saturated with a feel- 
 ing of brotherhood. The longer one lives and 
 reflects upon life, its deeper meanings and pur- 
 poses, the stronger becomes one's belief in the 
 essential unity of all things, particularly in the 
 oneness of all mankind. In nature, everything 
 fills its place. There is no great and no small. 
 Our vision is too nearsighted. We see things out 
 
74 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 of proportion, out of perspective. A broader 
 view enables us to see unity in the midst of va- 
 riety, eacb tiling filling its place. And it is as 
 important, in the general scheme of things, that 
 a small place be filled as that a large one be fill- 
 ed. The broader view enables us to see in every 
 man, a mari. Nature puts some men under a 
 handicap of body or of mind, or of both body 
 and mind. All of us are subject to the accidents 
 and circumstances of life, which are favorable 
 to some, but unfavorable to others. As a re- 
 sult, some of us have a rich experience, and are 
 able to perform a life of service, full of achieve- 
 ment. Others have a lowly existence, bare of 
 vital experience, empty of achievement. Judged 
 by ordinary standards, such men are very un- 
 equal, but in each case, they are men; the life 
 of one is as much the outcome of invariable and 
 inflexible laws as is the other. Each is what he 
 is, and under all the circumstances, could not 
 have been otherwise. From this point of view, 
 one is no more worthy of praise or blame than 
 is the other. Truly, if we could choose which 
 kind of life we would live, all would choose life 
 rich in experience and full of achievement. But 
 there are all degrees of both achievement and 
 experience. He who, on account of nature and 
 circumstances, can attain only a low level, suf- 
 
Ideals of Democracy. 75 
 
 fers bitterness enough without having added 
 the scorn or contempt or hatred or the lack 
 of sympathy on the part of the more fortunate. 
 We are alike in that we all suffer and rejoice; 
 the same end awaits us all. In the grave the 
 prince and the pauper sleep side by side. 
 
 Whether or not we choose to consider all 
 men our brothers, the welfare of each is much 
 dependent upon the welfare of all the others. 
 We are bound together by ties which we can- 
 not break if we would. We are related by na- 
 ture and bound together by the laws of life. If 
 we would be happy, we must live a life of mu- 
 tual helpfulness and sympathy. If we are to 
 have social distinctions at all, they should be 
 based on true w^orth, on real achievements, not 
 en accidents of birth or superficial distinctions, 
 least of all on money. We need to use a better 
 criterion of values than is usually common. IH 
 we had perfect and full social and economic 
 justice, success in life would be a fair criterion 
 of innate worth. If we were all trying to ac- 
 cumulate worldly goods, then the amount ac- 
 cumulated would be a measure of our relative 
 worth. But we do not have social and economic 
 justice and some of us are not trying to ac- 
 cumulate wealth ; we have other aims and other 
 values. An aristocracy of brains would be bet- 
 
76 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 ter than an aristocracy of money, but even an 
 aristocracy of brains would be undesirable if it 
 did not accept the principle of the brotherhood 
 of man. 
 
 Our democracy is afflicted with innumerable 
 organizations, secret societies, clubs, cliques, and 
 religious organizations. In a measure they are 
 dangerous to democracy, dangerous because of 
 a false sense of values. There is nothing wrong 
 in being a Mason or a member of any one of the 
 hundreds of similar organizations, but it is 
 wrong to think that all virtue exists in our par- 
 ti'^ular society or club. There is nothing wrong 
 in being a Presbyterian, but it is wrong to think 
 tiiHt all goodness is in the Presbyterian church 
 and that Baptists and Methodists are on the road 
 to perdition. Democracy must mean freedom. 
 It must mean that we grant to all others the 
 liberties which we claim for ourselves. When 
 a stranger knocks at our door we should not 
 ask whether he is a member of this club or that 
 lodge or of a certain political party, but what 
 manner of man he is. Good men are found ev- 
 erywhere, in all kinds of organizations and out 
 of them. So are bad men. A group of men 
 come together, organize a society, call them- 
 selves the elect, admit such others as they choose 
 
Ideals of Democracy. 77 
 
 to admit. The virtue of the society is no higher 
 than that of the men who compose it. 
 
 It is also dangerous in a democracy to believe 
 that good men are found only in certain pro- 
 fessions or occupations. Since accidents, in a 
 large measure, determine our vocations, it fol- 
 lows that good men are found in all trades, pro- 
 fessions, and occupations. The genius is found 
 in the blacksmith shop, on the farm, in the 
 factory, as well as in the bank and grocery 
 store. The particular way in which one makes 
 his living is a trivial matter. What kind of 
 thoughts he thinks and what actions flow from 
 his thoughts are the important matters. True 
 worth should be our criterion, if we wish to 
 measure one's station in life. 
 
 In a democracy, the individual is the end. All 
 other things are means. We praise a democracy 
 because in a true democracy, there would be 
 the fullest opportunity for individual achieve- 
 ment and happiness. The highest possible de- 
 velopment should be open to everyone. There 
 should be no restrictions or barriers. Not only 
 should the way be freely open, but society should 
 provide for each one every possible opportunity 
 and facility. Certainly each should receive the 
 rewards of his labor. The individual is sacred. 
 Society and every institution of society exists 
 
78 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 for him. But as a means, society and its insti- 
 tutions are necessary. Individual life is incon- 
 ceivable without them. 
 
 If our democracy is properly to serve its high 
 purpose, there must be a certain unity of feel- 
 ing, aims, and ideals among us. There must be 
 a certain solidarity and permanence. This can 
 be achieved through education. It will come in 
 part through a common literature, a common his- 
 tory, through the development in every child of 
 the highest ideals of democracy. Children in our 
 schools must study the institutions of our coun- 
 try, their development and their spirit. Love of 
 country must become a sacred emotion. The 
 young should study the lives and works of men 
 who have been prominent factors in our national 
 development. Why could we not have in the 
 schools a course on Lincoln ? He did more than 
 any other for our democracy and was the truest 
 and highest embodiment of its spirit. Why 
 could we not also have a course on Franklin? 
 An intensive study of the lives and times of a 
 few such men would do much toward develop- 
 ing a true spirit of democracy in our young 
 people. 
 
 It must be evident that our largest hope for 
 achieving a true democracy lies in the public 
 schools. Here the children from every family. 
 
Ideals of Democracy. 79 
 
 from all kinds of homes come together, and side 
 by side are trained for the lives that lie before 
 them. Here they play together and work to- 
 gether. Here there should be absolutely no 
 social distinction. Here true worth, real effi- 
 ciency, and merit should receive their full recog- 
 nition. Here every child, whether from the home 
 of the banker, the blacksmith, the farmer, or 
 from no home at all, should have the fullest op- 
 portunity for development and preparation. In 
 each child there should be developed the same 
 love of country and its institutions ; in each, the 
 same high social ideals. The state through the 
 schools should help each child to live the high- 
 est life possible. The schools should be a place 
 for training in mutual social service and co- 
 operation. Each child should be led to live the 
 highest life that is possible for him, a life not 
 centered wholly in self but including the lives 
 of others. The school is a social institution 
 whose function is to train the young for their 
 lives in a democracy. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 IDEALS OF HOME AND CHILDREN. 
 
 In the history of the world, the greatest thing 
 that has ever been made by man is a home. Ot 
 all his achievements, the home is the greatest, for 
 on it civilization rests. Without the home, civ- 
 ilization would sink back into the darkness and 
 chaos of barbarism. From the home, man goes 
 out each morning to his round of toil ; through 
 the day he carries his burden; in the evening, 
 he returns again to his home. About the home 
 his life revolves. In it he finds the motive for 
 his work; it is for the loved ones there that he 
 toils. The heat of the summer sun beats down 
 on him in vain ; the cold wind of the winter 
 storm cannot blow too hard for him, for he has 
 a home, and in that home are those whose lives 
 are dearer to him than his own. 
 
 The home furnishes the motive for man's 
 work; it also provides the inspiration and com- 
 fort which each day renew his strength and 
 courage. Whatever the day may bring to him 
 in pain or disappointment, the wife's welcome 
 waits for him at night, and the baby's arms 
 
 (80) 
 
Ideals of Home and Children. 81 
 
 around his neck and its kiss upon his cheek 
 will heal and comfort his sore heart, so that on 
 the morrow he can go forth again. 
 
 The tender est ties are those of the home ; the 
 strongest bonds are those that bind us there. As 
 the evening sun of our life nears its setting, and 
 in retrospect we live our lives over again, of all 
 the memories that come to us, the sweetest, the 
 holiest, are those of childhood and its home. The 
 vision of that home and its life stand out ever 
 clear before us. It lives in our hearts. The 
 house itself is a holy place ; its fireplace an al- 
 tar where sv/eetest incense burnt; before its 
 blazing hearth on long winter evenings we lived 
 the earthly heaven of childhood. 
 
 "Backward turn backvvard oh Time in your flight, 
 
 Make me a child again just for tonight." 
 
 Give me again my death mother's embrace; 
 
 Kindle once more in the old fireplace 
 
 The fire as it burned in the long ago, 
 
 When the hills v/ere all covered with Christmas snow. 
 
 Place in the circle around its blaze 
 
 All who were dear to my youthful days. 
 
 Give me again the joys that I knew 
 
 In the home of my youth where hearts beat true. 
 
 Civilization rests upon the home. If the home 
 is in danger, civilization is in danger. There 
 (6) 
 
82 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 are today social forces at work which will even- 
 tually destroy the home if they are allowed to 
 continue. In our consideration .of social influ- 
 ences the first question which we should always 
 ask is, what will be their effect on the home? 
 The most dangerous of all such forces at present 
 are those centering in the so called "emancipa- 
 tion of women." When the woman goes out of 
 the home there is no home left. A home without 
 a woman is like a body without a heart, a solar 
 system without a central sun. The mother is 
 the magnet which holds together all the parts of 
 the home. Take her out of the home, fill her life 
 with outside interests, and at once the home dis- 
 integrates, its m^embers fly apart. 
 
 There are today too many outside interests 
 which tend to weaken the influence of the home. 
 The right kind of home should leave little room 
 for other influences. Its amusements and the 
 joys centering in the family life should bo by 
 far the strongest of all the forces which affect 
 the child. The home, in many places, has lost 
 its function. Not only is most of the work out- 
 side, but all its members go outside in search of 
 excitement and amusement. The city bakery 
 cooks our bread, the laundry cleans our clothes, 
 the milkman brings our milk, the moving pic- 
 ture show supplies the daily amusement. Dur- 
 
Ideals of Home and Children. 83 
 
 ing the day the members of the family are ofteu 
 at different places, engaged in different kinds of 
 work; interests and attachments grow up out- 
 side the family, whose members do not often see 
 each other. The result is that family ties are 
 weak. The true home disappears; there is left 
 a house where people meet for the night to 
 sleep. 
 
 A home will not make itself. It is made by 
 the united efforts of man and woman. The man 
 provides the material part, the house, the food, 
 the clothes ; but his duty does not end here. The 
 whole work of the management of the home and 
 the rearing of the children should be planned 
 and directed by both father and mother. How- 
 ever, the larger burden of making the home must 
 fall to the mother. The education of every girl 
 should include a training that will fit her for 
 making a home; a training in the science and 
 art of cooking, in sewing, in sanitation and hy- 
 giene, in nursing, and in all that science can 
 teach her concerning the nature of children. 
 Children go to school, but the greater part of 
 their education should come from the mother; 
 for this work, she must be prepared. She must 
 learn how to beautify the home, how to make it 
 a place where children and father will like to 
 be. She should be skilled in music : she should 
 
84 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 know books and be a good reader; she should 
 know stories and how to tell them. The whole 
 spiritual life of the children is in her keeping; 
 if she fails, the family life fails. This prepara- 
 tion is her professional training, corresponding 
 to the husband's professional training. This 
 Avork will occupy all the mother's time. She 
 should have no outside interests except in prob- 
 lems that bear on the home and its life. She 
 should realize that her profession is the great- 
 est of all professions ; on her shoulders she car- 
 ries the burden of civilization ; she is the maker 
 of home, the maker of men. 
 
 There cannot be much of a home without chil- 
 dren. The state maintains public schools for the 
 training of children ; and while the training of 
 the schools is important, it cannot compare with 
 the influence of the home. The school originated 
 as a supplement to home-training ; it can never 
 be more. This is especially true in the field of 
 morals. Ideals of work, of truth, of honesty, of 
 patience and perseverence, of duty, and of re- 
 sponsibility must come from the home. The 
 teacher is the mother's helper. They should 
 work in the closest co-operation, and mutual un- 
 derstanding. 
 
 The mother should plan for the daily life of 
 her children ; for their work and their play. She 
 
Ideals of Home and Childken. 85 
 
 should know where her children are and what 
 they are doing. She should especially know and 
 understand what the}^ do at school. She should 
 plan for their evenings, for their Saturdays and 
 Sundays. One serious difficulty in the rearing 
 of children is the difference in ideals between 
 family and family as to the manner in which 
 children should be reared. In some homes the 
 children are given the greatest of care, and great 
 pains are taken b}^ the parents to develop in 
 their children proper ideals and habits of con- 
 duct. And it may be that in homes nearby such 
 pains and care are not taken ; the parents them- 
 selves may hold quite different ideals of con- 
 duct. In one home the children may be allowed 
 great freedom, may go wherever they please 
 and when they please; some are allowed to 
 fight; some are allowed to go to parties and 
 dances at night, others are not. These great 
 differences in ideals and procedure make it dif- 
 ficult for parents to follow out their own ideals 
 in training their children. This difficulty can 
 be overcome, at least in part, by the common 
 training which girls should receive in school, 
 and by neighborhood co-operation. If a group 
 of people engage in any common enterprise they 
 study their problems and come to some unity of 
 purpose and of plans for the accomplishment of 
 
86 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 their purposes. They must follow a similar 
 course in the rearing of children. There must 
 be considerable unity of ideals and of practice 
 before individuals can live a common life as citi- 
 zens of the same state and country. We must 
 not destroy individualism, but there should not 
 be two opinions in fundamental matters of mor- 
 als. All children should receive the same train- 
 ing in matters of truth, honesty, integrity, in- 
 dustry, perseverance, sympathy, and civic spirit. 
 To bring this about there must be complete un- 
 derstanding and agreement as well as the full- 
 est co-operation among the homes. The place 
 for these conferences in child-training should be 
 the school house. There, parents should meet 
 often, formally and informally, to talk over 
 their common work, the making of men and wo- 
 men out of boys and girls. The school is their 
 school and should be so conducted as to give 
 them most help in the work of rearing and train- 
 ing their children. 
 
 The world today is in a state of ferment, of 
 unrest and disorder. Everywhere men are 
 searching for a plan of reconstruction, for some 
 panacea that will cure social and political evils. 
 The cure will be found only in the home and 
 its teaching. Let us have homes founded on 
 mutual affection and sympathy; in these homes, 
 
Ideals of Home and Children. 37 
 
 let us train children in those virtues on which 
 good citizenship must always rest. "We cannot 
 cure any serious social evils by the mere pas- 
 sage of laws; they can only be cured by mak- 
 ing right the hearts of men; and the hearts of 
 men will be made right only to the extent that 
 the home and the influences auxilliary to the 
 home succeed. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 IDEALS OF ART AND BEAUTY. 
 
 This is called an age of materialism. The 
 last century has witnessed a material progress 
 unparalleled in history. No thousand years be- 
 fore had seen man make such progress in re- 
 ducing the forces of nature to his control. Ev- 
 ery school boy is familiar with this progress. 
 Electricity and steam have given us the 
 telephone, the telegraph, electric motor, and 
 the steam engine with all its manifold uses for 
 power. We have seen the steamboat, the loco- 
 motive, and various machines such as the reaper, 
 the threshing machine, the sewing machine, the 
 
 cotton gin, the cream separator, the linotype, the 
 automobile, one after another, take their indis- 
 pensible places in our industries. In every 
 town there is a factory. We have gone down 
 into the earth for coal and metals, oil and gas ; 
 we have torn down the very mountains them- 
 selves. We have made nature give up her se- 
 crets. We know of the X-rays, the Hertzian 
 waves and radium. We have weighed the atom, 
 and measured the velocity of light. We sail 
 
 (88) 
 
Ideals of Art and Beauty. 89 
 
 under the sea or in the air above at will. The 
 railroads thread their endless ways through the- 
 country hauling the coal and minerals from tlie 
 mines, produce and grain from the farms, and 
 distributing the factory products of the cities 
 far and wide throughout the land. Everywhere 
 is the ceaseless hum of industry. But what of 
 art? Has it made such progress? The energy 
 of man is limited. During the last hundred 
 years, that energy in America has been expend- 
 ed in reducing the forces of nature to the uses 
 of man. The genius of our country has been 
 building railroads and mills instead of writing 
 poems and painting pictures. We boast of this 
 great material progress, but we may well ask 
 whether it profits man to harness all the forces 
 of nature and remain the same man he was be- 
 fore. Have we reduced human misery? Have 
 we increased human happiness? Have we gain- 
 ed in kindness and sympathy ? Do v/e use our 
 immense power to make the environment of man 
 
 more beautiful? What does it profit us to ride 
 over country roads at the rate of thirty miles 
 
 an hour and over the railroads at the rate oi 
 
 sixty miles an hour if our homes are no happier 
 
 than they used to be ? 
 
 The great poems were written long ago, also 
 
 the dramas, the epics, the novels. The great 
 
90 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 paintings were painted years ago. We speak 
 of Plato, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Dante, Angelo, 
 and Phidias. These men lived centuries ago. 
 They never talked over a telephone or rode in 
 a car, never received a wireless, although they 
 seemed to receive spiritual messages from the 
 gods. The plain and simple fact is that the 
 happiness and higher spiritual life of man are 
 largely independent of material things. It 
 sometimes seems as if material success actually 
 blunts the higher nature of man and makes him 
 less sympathetic, less sensitive to the finer in- 
 fluences that surround him. 
 
 The knowledge, skill, and power that man 
 now has, make it possible for him to beautify the 
 face of the earth. We should begin with the 
 home. Every family should live in a beautiful 
 home. Society should not allow any family to 
 live in an ugly, ill-constructed house. The house 
 should have a yard with trees, shrubs, and flow- 
 ers. Human life cannot flourish in the crowded 
 tenements, and unspeakable hovels of the large 
 cities. Inside, the house should be a cozy and 
 pretty nest for happy people to live in. Every- 
 thing in its should be good, substantial, beautiful 
 — the rugs, the furniture, the pictures. We 
 should train a race of people who will not be 
 satisfied with anything cheap and poor and ugly. 
 
Ideals of Art and Beauty. 91 
 
 Let us walk on the bare floors of our rooms un- 
 til we can put beautiful rugs on them. Let us 
 look at the clean, blank walls until we can hang 
 on them a picture that is a real picture, one that 
 will be a joy to look at and study as long as it 
 hangs there, a picture that will enter into our 
 lives and become a part of us, a picture in which 
 some true artist has embodied a bit of the beau- 
 tiful. If we can have only a print, a copy, let 
 it be of a really great picture. 
 
 The same ideal should extend to everything in 
 the home and in our lives, even to the dishes 
 and the table and the cooking, but on this sub- 
 ject, let us hear Ruskin: '^ Learn first thor- 
 oughly the economy of the kitchen; the good 
 and bad qualities of every common article of 
 food, and the simplest and best modes of their 
 preparation; when you have time, go and help 
 in the cooking of poor families and show them 
 how to make as much of everything as possible, 
 and how to make little, nice ; coaxing and tempt- 
 ing them into tidy and pretty ways, and plead- 
 ing for well-folded table-clothes, however coarse, 
 ^nd for a flower or two out of the garden to 
 strew on them. If you manage to get a clean 
 table-cloth, bright plates on it, and a good 
 dish in the middle, of your own cooking, you 
 may ask leave to say a short grace, and let your 
 
92 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 religiaus ministries be confined to that much for 
 the present." 
 
 The books on our table and in our book- 
 ease should be well bound, on good paper, well 
 printed, — books that are worth reading more 
 than once, and worth keeping. The books we 
 like, our favorites, — we save up money so that 
 we can buy them, one by one, in the best and 
 most substantial bindings; we treasure them 
 and keep them as long as we live. The^^ too, 
 like the good pictures, become part of our lives. 
 We go to them daily for joy, consolation, and 
 comfort. 
 
 Even our clothes should be the best we can 
 possibly afford. It is true that clothes do not 
 make the man; and we should never judge a 
 man by what is on his body but rather by what 
 is in his head. Nevertheless, we should have 
 an ideal of possessing only what is good, what 
 is suited for its purpose and function, and this 
 ideal should include our clothes. Of course, we 
 should have a sense of relative values. If we 
 must decide between a book or a picture and 
 a new suit of clothes, we should let the clothes 
 wait if that is possible. While we should try 
 to have beautiful houses, good and if possible, 
 beautiful clothes, it should not be to excel our 
 neighbors, but because we like good and beauti- 
 ful things. 
 
Ideals of Art and Beauty. 93 
 
 Into the possessions of ours with which wc 
 surround ourselves, we should put our individ- 
 uality. Our soul, our conception of what is 
 beautiful should be embodied in all we make or 
 have; and we should not forget that the first 
 element of beauty is that of fittingness, the ap- 
 propriateness of the thing to fulfill its function. 
 Lasting beauty cannot be a veneer. The mast 
 beautiful chair is a substantial chair made to 
 sit in; one that gives us such comfort during 
 the evening as we sit in it and read our favorite 
 author that it is a pleasant memory through the 
 day. The most beautiful house is the one best 
 suited to the life and work of the people who 
 live in it. The effect that substantial and beauti- 
 ful things have on the lives of people cannot be 
 overestimated. Our life is a unity. If we live 
 in cheap houses, eat poor food in a dirty kitchen, 
 read poor and ugly books, work with poor 
 tools, our life will be low and our work, poor. We 
 think more of ourselves if we are clean, and if 
 our dress is good and suited to the work which 
 v/e are doing. But let us not mistake or mis- 
 understand the facts. It is more important that 
 the soul be clean even though the body be 
 clothed in rags. As betvreen the beautiful and 
 the good, we should choose the good. It is 
 doubtful, however, that such a choice ever has 
 
94 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 to be made. The beauty that abides is in the 
 good, the thing that does what it is meant to do, 
 that fills its place. We should be able to dis- 
 tinguish the superficially beautiful, the ephemer- 
 ally beautiful, from the permanently beautiful. 
 If one should travel over the country, viewing 
 the various works of man, among the ugliest 
 things he would see are the school houses, par- 
 ticularly those of the country and small towns. 
 The main principle that seems to be followed in 
 their construction is a mathematical one, namely, 
 the relation of maximum volume to minimum of 
 inclosing surface. Some sacrifice to this princi- 
 ple is made in making the houses a little longer 
 than wide. It is common to see in the country 
 a school house and grounds so ugly, so desolate, 
 so forlorn, that even the pigs and wild animals 
 seem to avoid them. It should be unlawful to 
 build in any district a school house that is not 
 as good and as beautiful and as well furnished 
 as the best dwelling in the district. The house 
 should be built on the most beautiful location 
 that is at all central, one if possible containing 
 some large forest trees, for it takes a generation 
 to grow a tree. The school grounds should con- 
 tain several acres. The services of a competent 
 architect should be secured in planning the 
 house, and those of a landscape gardener in 
 
Ideals of Art and Beauty. 95 
 
 laying off the grounds for the trees and shrubs 
 and flower beds. The house and grounds should 
 be the pride of the community. Nothing cheap 
 or tawdry or ephemeral should find a place there. 
 Public spirit should be such that a boy would 
 rather cut his Sunday coat than a school desk 
 or the bark on a school-yard tree. If the people 
 are not able to have good furniture or pictures 
 in their homes, they should at least have them 
 in their school house, for all the children go 
 there. What they are not able to buy individ- 
 ually for themselves, they can buy collectively 
 for their common children. Everything in the 
 
 school house should be the best that money can 
 buy — books, maps, pictures, wallpaper, black- 
 boards. 
 
 The grounds should include a large lawn, with 
 beautiful and diversified shrubs and trees and 
 flowers, v/holl}^ apart from the playground. The 
 house, even in a country district, should have 
 several rooms, and a basement under the whole 
 house, and a good furnace. One room, even 
 though small, should be for a library and mu- 
 seum. This room cannot be filled in a day, but 
 
 as the years go by, the books, the collections, the 
 pictures, can be added to, until eventually they 
 will become priceless in value to the community. 
 Why should we go to all the expense neces- 
 sary to make such a school as we have pictured? 
 
96 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 Because it will pay. It will pay in better boys 
 and girls; better men and women. In having 
 only the best, only what is beautiful, at school, 
 higher ideals of worth and beauty can be de- 
 veloped in the children. These ideals will have 
 their effect on the homes and therefore raise the 
 aesthetic and ethical life of the community. The 
 beautiful school should simply be one of the 
 means used to develop beautiful lives and bring 
 a higher happiness to all the members of the 
 community. 
 
 But can we have these things? Are they pos- 
 sible ? Yes, if we want them. The money raised 
 by this country for carrying on the Great 
 War would be enough to put an ideal school 
 house in every district in the land and to fur- 
 nish each in the best of taste. Let us declare 
 war on ignorance and poverty and sin and ugli- 
 ness, and raise money by the billions for the 
 prosecution of this war, else the other war shall 
 have been won in vain. 
 
 Making the world beautiful must be largely 
 the work of women, at least in plan and con- 
 ception. In our common life together, what 
 men shall do and what women shall do is merely 
 a matter of the division of labor. In the very 
 nature of things, the woman must be the home 
 maker, and therefore the home beautifier. Her 
 
Ideals of Art and Beauty. 97 
 
 first duty is to beautify it by herself, by giving 
 her life to it, by earnestly taking up its duties 
 and responsibilities, and embracing its oppor- 
 tunities. She should strive to have a home beauti- 
 ful in every particular. In its material aspects 
 the home should be pretty, the house, the yard, 
 the garden. But more important still is the 
 spiritual side of the home. Circumstances may 
 limit the woman's power to make the home 
 beautiful materially, but they need never limit 
 her possibilities on the spiritual side. To be 
 clean, to be neat, to wear a smile are not expen- 
 sive. The humblest sort of home materially can 
 be made radiantl^^ beautiful by a woman. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 IDEALS OF MORALS AND RELIGION. 
 
 Of all the factors that influence the life of 
 man, bringing him sorrow and joy, by far the 
 most important are his relations with his fel- 
 lows. Our stronger emotions, love, hate, envy, 
 jealousy, grief, sorrow, joy are excited chiefly by 
 other men. The influence of nature and art and 
 books may be strong but are not to be compared 
 to the influences of our fellows. A human life by 
 itself is incomplete; it demands the lives of 
 others. We can get inspiration from a book, we 
 can get courage from it. The mountains, the 
 rivers, the shady woods in summer, or the snow 
 covered woods in winter, may give us joy, but 
 what is like the touch of a friendly hand ? What 
 is like a mother 's love ? On the other hand, what 
 crushes the human heart as does the unkindness, 
 the scorn, the contempt, the injustice of others? 
 What is so terrible as a mother's pain from the 
 injustice and ingratitude of her child? Our life 
 is through and through a social life. We are all 
 bound together by a thousand ties which we 
 could not break if we would. In this common 
 life together, certain types of action bring pain, 
 
 (98) 
 
Ideals of Morals and Religion, 99 
 
 sorrow and sadness ; other types of action bring 
 well-being, happiness and contentment. As the 
 ages have gone by, society has put its approval 
 upon these types of action which experience has 
 shown to be for the highest happiness of man; 
 it has put its disapproval on those types which 
 experience has shown to be detrimental to man 's 
 highest good. Racial experience has given us 
 our social standards of morality. These stand- 
 ards are an evolution ; they have changed some- 
 what from one age to another. The changes, 
 however, for the last two or three thousand 
 years, have been for the most part, in non- 
 essentials and unimportant details. Th^ funda- 
 mental bases of character as held by thinking 
 men have remained much the same, through- 
 out the ages since we have had historic records. 
 The oldest moral teachings in our Bible are 
 largely the same as the best teaching of 
 today. A few changes only have been funda- 
 mental. For example, Jesus said, ''It hath 
 been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for 
 a tooth : But I say unto you, That ye resist not 
 evil.^' 
 
 Man has been here a long time ; how long, no 
 one knows. For hundreds of centuries he has 
 been slowly making his upward way, from the 
 brute to the savage, from savage to man. Thou- 
 sands of years ago he lifted up his hands and 
 
100 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 his head. His fight with the elements and the 
 wild animals was a long fight. Man's road has 
 been strewn with blood. Our ancestors, brute 
 and savage, have been travelling this bloody road 
 for perhaps millions of years. Civilization is 
 but a matter of today and yesterday. The heri- 
 tage w^e carried out of the woods is akin to the 
 nature of the tiger. It is bred deep in our very 
 nerves and flesh and bones. Most of our failures 
 in the world of morals are due to the fact that 
 we do not take proper account of the age and 
 strength of innate human nature. This nature 
 cannot be transformed over night. It is not 
 changed by a person's learning a few moral and 
 religious maxims. It can be changed only by 
 our building up a new nature based on habit, a 
 building that in the case of each individual re- 
 quires some twenty years of the hardest kind of 
 work on the part of parents and teachers. And 
 the building must be erected on original human 
 nature. Underneath there always smoulder the 
 fires of the original man who was our father in 
 the woods. Under favorable circumstances, we 
 keep down this smouldering fire, but at any 
 moment it may break forth. Every day some- 
 where we see its blaze in angry flashing eyes, or 
 in the scorn of an upturned lip, or in a cutting 
 word, or perchance in the blow of a human hand. 
 
Ideals of Morals and Religion, 101 
 
 As the centuries have gone by man has learned 
 many things. He has learned that if he is to 
 live with his fellows in any degree of content- 
 ment and happiness, he and they must observe 
 certain rules of action, the most important hav- 
 ing reference to truth, honesty, industry, sympa- 
 thy and civic spirit. Out of the crucible of hu- 
 man experience have come five principles, tried 
 and tested through thousands of years — five 
 principles so essential to human happiness that 
 they are not only the basis of morality but of 
 religion as well, in so far as religion affects mor- 
 ality. 
 
 In our communication, we must be truthful; 
 in our dealings, we must be honest. There can 
 be no harmonious relations without these two 
 virtues. This we have known from the time of 
 Solomon, and much longer ; but how far we are 
 from living up to a high conception of these vir- 
 tues! The strongest efforts of the home and 
 school should be exerted to develop in children 
 truth and honesty. So necessary are they to our 
 social and individual well-being that they should 
 be ever held before the child as among the 
 highest goals of human ambition. 
 
 All should work. He who does not produce as 
 much as he consumes is a thief, he lives on the 
 labor of others. If each would do his proper 
 
102 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 share of work, it would lighten the labor of all. 
 To be an idler is a sin because it increases the 
 burden of all. 
 
 Civic spirit is necessary because of our com- 
 mon life in society. The institutional machinery 
 of society and government is -immense. Each 
 of us must do his part, and must always have 
 the proper attitude toward the social work. Roads 
 and streets must be built and kept up. Law^s 
 must be made and administered. They do not 
 make themselves nor administer themselves. They 
 are our lecws ; we make them. Making the world 
 a better world is our work, the mutual work of 
 all. He that will not do his part of the com- 
 mon work of society is a sinner; he is holding 
 back instead of pulling ahead. 
 
 In sympathy, we find the heart and core of 
 the Christian religion, the central teaching of 
 Jesus. We can work, tell the truth, and be 
 honest, but unless we love our brother, the world 
 is still a cold and bare world. The greatest 
 force in the world is love. It is human affec- 
 tion that binds the family together, gives us 
 strength and courage for our daily toil, and 
 inspiration for our highest efforts. As the poet 
 puts it: 
 
Ideals of Morals and Religion, 103 
 
 "It is the heart and not the brain, 
 That to the highest doth attain; 
 And he who followeth love's behest, 
 Far excelleth all the rest." 
 
 Truth, honesty, industry, civic spirit, and 
 sympathy are the cardinal virtues on which 
 civilization stands. There can be no satisfac- 
 tory social life without them. The civilization 
 of any time is high or lovv according as the people 
 stand high or low in their practice of these vir- 
 tues. Our ideals of these virtaes should con- 
 stitute our standards, our criteria, which we 
 should apply to all proposals for social reform, 
 to all social movements that are likely to bear 
 on morality. We should always ask : Will this 
 thing make for or against the fundamental vir- 
 tues? If the thing proposed will undermine 
 either of them, to the same extent it will under- 
 mine one of the necessarj^ conditions of civilized 
 life. Without truth and honesty, social and 
 business life is chaos; without industry on the 
 part of all, injustice is put upon some ; unless 
 all have proper civic spirit — unless all carry 
 their proper share of the common burdens — in- 
 justice is done to some and social progress is 
 retarded; and without a real and genuine sym- 
 pathy, a happy social life is impossible. 
 
104 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 So fundamental are these corner stones of 
 character and morality that they should be ever 
 held as the highest aims of teaching. They 
 should stand as primary, as taking precedence 
 over all other things. We should hold these vir- 
 tues in such high esteem that we should con- 
 sider all other characteristics or possessions as 
 worthless without them. Althought these vir- 
 tues are merely means to an end — the end being 
 a happy social life — they are such absolute and 
 necessary conditions of all decent and worthy 
 life, we should hold them and strive after them 
 as if they were really ends in themselves, be- 
 cause nothing worth having comes without them. 
 The whole experience of man bears testimony to 
 the fact that they are the sine qua non of all 
 desirable social existence. 
 
 In our religion w^e have been too much con- 
 cerned about the hereafter, and not enough 
 about the present life. We have been too much 
 concerned about the beliefs and doctrines and 
 not enough about practice. We want a religion 
 for this life and this world. It was such a relig- 
 ion that Jesus taught, but it has been so per- 
 verted that he would not recognize it in some of 
 its present forms. If He should appear among 
 us today and attend some aristocratic church, an 
 
Ideals of Morals and Religion, 105 
 
 usher would seat Him in some obscure corner, if 
 indeed he would give Him a seat at all. 
 
 What humanity needs more than anything 
 else, is kind hearts and a real and genuine feel- 
 ing of brotherhood. No one cares for pity; no 
 one cares for maudlin sympathy, nor sympathy 
 that is condescension. What all do care for is 
 the genuine love of a sincere heart. The world 
 needs no new religion; it needs to live its old 
 religion. It is a travesty to the Christian re- 
 ligion for a woman wearing a fifty-dollar hat 
 and a hundred dollar dress to go to church to 
 worship while some of her neighbors are suf- 
 fering for want of clothes or food. She prays 
 in the name of Jesus, but Jesus did not put 
 his approval on such practices. If we could 
 have social and economic justice, most of the 
 misery of the world would disappear; kindness 
 and sympathy would lessen the remaining mis- 
 ery. 
 
 Let the schools teach the true religion of 
 Jesus, the religion of love; let them teach thar 
 each man is our brother; let them teach that 
 whatever distinctions we make among men 
 should be based on real worth, not on surface 
 indications; let them condemn idleness, insin- 
 cerity, and unkindness ; and glorify work, truth, 
 and sympathy. 
 
106 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 Morality and religion are really two different 
 things. Morality grows out of man's relation 
 to his fellows; religion, out of his relation to 
 God. Religion is of practical significance only 
 in so far as it affects man 's life here. To the ex- 
 tent that one's belief in God, or in life here- 
 after affects his actions and his dealings with his 
 fellow man, his religion is identical with morali- 
 ty. But there is no necessaiy connection be- 
 tween religious beliefs and moral actions. One 
 can believe that there is a God and that the 
 human soul is immortal and be either a good man 
 01 a bad man. On the other hand, one can be- 
 lieve that there is no God and that the human 
 soul is mortal, and he be either a good man or 
 a bad man. The belief itself, no matter what it 
 is, makes one neither good nor bad. Religion is 
 effective in our lives if we believe there is a 
 God who wishes us to do right, and because of 
 this belief, we do right. It is also effective if 
 we believe in rewards and punishments after 
 death — heaven hereafter for those who are good 
 here, and hell for those who are bad — and be- 
 cause of this belief we do good here in order to 
 escape the punishments of hell and receive the 
 rewards of heaven. It is evident, therefore, that 
 religion is of practical value for this life to the 
 extent that it affects our actions here. 
 
Ideals of Morals and Religion, 107 
 
 The experience of men through the ages 
 teaches us that this life is hardly worth the 
 li\dng unless we are kind and just. In all our 
 dealings and associations with our fellows we 
 must, in a measure, identify their interests with 
 ours. If our neighbor is in trouble or in pain, 
 we must relieve him if we can ; if he is in need, 
 we should give him such help as is in our power. 
 We should not only try to make a living for our- 
 selves, but should work for the common good, for 
 better things, a better life for all. Precisely this 
 was the teaching of Jesus, and such a doctrine 
 is the basis of the ethical principles of the Chris- 
 tian religion. 
 
 This teaching is very simple and it is very 
 clear. Its soundness is founded not only on the 
 life and example of Jesus, but on those of other 
 great moral and religious teachers, and on the 
 experience of man. It need not be clouded by 
 theological dogma, superstition, or tradition. It 
 is the moral and religious voice of the ages. It 
 carries the weight and authority of the good 
 men of all races and of all times. 
 
 It is a great pity that the religious forces of 
 the world should be divided. The essential moral 
 principles embodied in all religions are included 
 in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as yoa 
 would have them do to you. There is little room 
 
108 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 
 
 for difference of opinion here. All men can ac- 
 cept this doctrine — a doctrine so simple that it 
 can be taught to children. But it must be re- 
 membered that no teaching is effective except 
 as it is incorporated into our practice. The mere 
 acceptance of a doctrine will not make us good. 
 Herein lies one of the causes of failure in the 
 work of some religious teachers; they too often 
 emphasize mere belief. An ideal held on Sun- 
 day is of no value unless it enters into the actual 
 life of Monday. 
 
 We should have a high conception of the sa- 
 credness and sanctity, as well as the possibilities, 
 of all human life. We should hold to no narrow 
 creed and to no restricted brotherhood. Ulti- 
 mately the fate of all humanity is bound up to- 
 gether. Lincoln said that this nation could not 
 endure half slave and half free. In much the 
 same sense, we may now say that the world can 
 not exist half slave and half free. The dis- 
 coveries and inventions of the last century have 
 brought us all together, and made us neighbors 
 in a truer sense than was ever the case before. 
 The peoples of all other lands are now our close 
 neighbors. Whatever may be their fate, is ulti- 
 mately ours ; what is ours, is also theirs. As long 
 as any considerable group of people have low 
 
Ideals of Morals and Religion, 109 
 
 ideals and customs of life, are hampered by 
 superstition, tradition, and ignorance, we are all 
 in danger. It must be our high ideal to free the 
 mind of every man whose life is shackled by 
 bonds that keep him from the truth and from 
 the highest things that are possible for him. But 
 let us not forget that while knowledge makes us 
 free, freedom has its responsibilities. The more 
 we know, the clearer we see the truth, the greater 
 is our responsibility, not only in making our own 
 lives harmonize with the clearer vision, but in 
 helping others to live the highest life possible to 
 them.