Education for Adversity [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674188358

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THE INGLIS LECTURESHIP
EDUCATION FOR ADVERSITY

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H e Inglis Lecture

1951

INGLIS IN TRENDS

LECTUBŒS

S E C O N D A R Y

IN A M E R I C A N

E D U C A T I O N

SECONDARY EDUCATION.

L.

V.

Koos.

1925. $1.00. O P P O R T U N I T Y A N D A C C O M P L I S H M E N T IN SECONDARY E D U C A T I O N .

P. H . Hanus. 1926. $1.00. Do A M E R I C A N S 1927. $1.00.

R E A L L Y V A L U E EDUCATION?

Abraham Flexner.

T H E U N I Q U E C H A R A C T E R OF A M E R I C A N SECONDARY E D U C A T I O N .

C. H. Judd. 1928. $1.00. T H E G R E A T INVESTMENT.

T.

H.

Briggs. 1930. $1.50.

T H E E V O L V I N G C O M M O N SCHOOL. H . C .

Morrison. 1933. $1.00.

Drury. 1935. $1.00.

T H E C A R E OF THE P U P I L . S . S .

T H E M O U N T I N G W A S T E OF THE A M E R I C A N S E C O N D A R Y SCHOOL.

J. L. Tildsley. 1936. $1.50. T H E T E A C H I N G OF CONTROVERSIAL S U B J E C T S . E . L .

Thorndike.

1937. $1.00. SCHOLARS, W O R K E R S , AND G E N T L E M E N . M . S .

MacLean. 1938.

$1.00. S E C O N D A R Y E D U C A T I O N AND L I F E . C . W O R K , W A G E S , AND E D U C A T I O N .

A . Prosser. 1939. $1.00.

A . W . Wüliams. 1940. $1.00. A . May. 1941. fi.oo.

E D U C A T I O N IN A W O R L D OF F E A R . M .

T H E R O L E OF THE F E D E R A L G O V E R N M E N T IN E D U C A T I O N . G .

F.

Zook. 1945. fi.oo. LABOR LOOKS AT EDUCATION.

Mark Starr. 1946. $1.00.

E Q U A L I Z I N G E D U C A T I O N A L O P P O R T U N I T I E S B E Y O N D THE SECONDA R Y SCHOOL. SOCIAL-CLASS

Ordway Tead. 1947. $1.00. INFLUENCES

UPON

LEARNING.

Allison Davis.

1948. $1.00. THE

C U L T I V A T I O N OF IDIOSYNCRASY.

Harold Benjamin. 1949.

$1.50. THE

SCHOOL IN A M E R I C A N

$1.40.

CULTURE.

Margaret Mead. 1951.

EDUCATION FOR ADVERSITY

EDUCATION FOR ADVERSITY JULIUS SEELYE

HARVARD

BIXLER

UNIVERSITY CAMBRIDGE

1952

PRESS

COPYRIGHT,

1952

B Y T H E P R E S I D E N T A N D F E L L O W S OF HARVARD œ L L E G E

DISTRIBUTED I N GREAT B R I T A I N B Y GEOFFREY

CUMBERLEGE

OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS LONDON

L I B R A R Y OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD N U M B E R

¡2-¡02¡

P R I N T E D I N T H E U N I T E D STATES OF A M E R I C A

T H E INGLIS

LECTURESHIP

To honor the memory of Alexander Inglis, 18-JÇ-IÇ24, his jrlends and colleagues gave to the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, a fund for the maintenance of a Lectureship in Secondary Education. To the study of problems in this field Professor Inglis devoted his professional career, leaving as a precious heritage to his co-workers the example of his industry, intellectual integrity, human sympathy, and social vision. It is the purpose of the Lectureship to perpetuate the spirit of his labors and contribute to the solution of problems in the field of his interest. The lectures on this foundation are published annually by the School.

EDUCATION FOR ADVERSITY

EDUCATION FOR ADVERSITY ' " p ^ H A T the uses of adversity are sweet we have been told on high authority, but that this sweetness is of a sort we are willing to forego our daily experience testifies. When it is examined carefully the toad of adversity sometimes reveals its jewel to the observant eye. Yet the ugliness is what we dwell on, and if we find the jewel at all it is only after we have become reconciled to the disagreeable circumstances that surround it. How can we train ourselves to see it from the start? Since adversity is bound to come should we not prepare for it beforehand? W e look ahead to old age, yet we know that only some will attain it, whereas adversity happens to all. W e try to get ready for death though we realize that when it actually strikes us we shall be unconscious of its presence. Adversity, however, shows no such mercy. Today we face a crisis that makes serious demands on our spiritual reserves. W e who are middle-aged and who in our lifetime have gone all the way from confidence to fear may well ask whether our education did what it should have to prepare us for it.

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Still more important is the question whether we are now doing for our students what they have a right to expect. As we ask this question we cannot help wondering whether the presuppositions of education are the same today as when we were young. Our teachers took it for granted that they were preparing us for the more abundant life. Can we make the same assumption about our work? Certainly we are not ready to educate for death. Yet if life has turned out to be more precarious than was once thought and if we are less sure about its creative possibilities should we not take this into account? How can it be done without destroying the confidence that eager effort requires? The Bible teaches that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward and that his strength is but labor and sorrow. Yet in one sense the ease with which we shrug off statements like this is itself a sign of health. The hypochondriac who fixes his attention on possible difficulties is not always the person best prepared to meet them when they appear. However accurate the insight of pessimism may be it fails to arouse our respect. "The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche," William James once remarked, "though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth." W e recall also Henry

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James's satire on unreasoning fear in the short story called "The Beast in the Jungle," where the young man by fearing the worst actually causes it to happen. Certain it is that by making too much of our problems we can cut the nerve of effort. Yet it is just as true that careless indifference may make us sluggish. Bland hope is as much to be avoided as blind fear. "The deepest definition of youth," says Professor Whitehead, "is life as yet untouched by tragedy." "And the finest flower of youth," he adds, "is to know the lesson in advance of the experience, undimmed." Is it possible for our youth to know in advance what the touch of tragedy must be like and yet to retain undimmed their faith that life is good? This is the problem faced by all teachers today. I Let us first ask about those features of our way of living which either gloss over the fact of suffering or tend to make us approach it with sentimentality instead of with authentic emotion. A devastating exposure of the wrong attitude is found in Evelyn Waugh's well known satire on some of our burial customs. The picture is cruel and unfair, but it contains at least a modicum of truth about ourselves. Because we are unprepared for such an experience as bereavement, and in the

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nature of the case must always be in large measure unprepared, we are apt to fall back on the only two buffers against disaster that we know. It is an unhappy comment on our way of life that these are money and gadgetry. There is a tendency to think that money can buy comfort in time of sorrow and to resort to modern gadgets as if they could be of help in the presence of death. Another illustration of the ease with which we call on material devices when actually the issues are spiritual is found in the popular use of the word security. As a goal for our effort it is of course both natural and legitimate. But too often we talk as though it could be bought and paid for. To what extent can we really believe the advertisements that promise us a care-free retirement in Florida at the price of a few annual premiums? Is not the phrase "financial security" itself misleading? What is secure, for example, when inflation comes? And how deceptive are the hopes for emotional assurance that are based on financial independence alone! The man who said to himself: "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years," was not, after all, to be envied. Even if we could get it, economic security would not necessarily bring contentment. What we really crave is peace of mind or peace of soul.

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Yet the rate at which books with these titles are selling suggests not only how widespread is this longing but how confused are our efforts to satisfy it. Are we not crying Peace, peace, when there is no peace? How many of the readers of these volumes will be able to take their truths to heart? And how many seek in them the kind of peace our fathers understood but which we should realize will never be ours? The generations that immediately preceded us lived in a world with regular outlines dominated by one increasing purpose. Our world has jagged edges, fulfilments that are only partial, and crosscurrents of purpose that clearly are at war with one another. We must bring ourselves to face the fact that the complete and all-inclusive security we want is no longer to be found, and that the partial security that is available, the kind the brave man finds in facing life squarely, eludes us because we have not made up our minds to look for it. The truth is that life is hazardous, full of risks, offering only special types of security, and these not the types usually talked about. W e must find some way of facing this fact without becoming morbid about it. W e must also find a way of presenting it to our students without blunting the keenness of their desires or interfering with the buoyancy of their hope. But can we impress on

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them that the battle is worth while unless we ourselves know what we are fighting for? Opposed to the gospel of security, and especially to that form of it which is linked with largesse from the state, is the goal so often hailed in our youth and still so influential, that of success. As a matter of fact, the supposed antithesis of social security on the one hand and individual success on the other is itself a sign of our confusion. Even on the economic plane the parts played respectively by society and the individual are not always easy to define. Much of what an individual is assumed to do for himself is actually done for him by society. How, then, do we know what lies back of success, or of what success consists? If the kind of security we seek is impossible, the kind of success we extol is in part a sham. The truth is that our students gain from us a wrong appraisal and a false goal. To have "success" in the ordinary meaning of the word will not prepare them for adversity because so much of the time it comes as a result of shrewdness rather than wisdom. W e should ask also whether it is wise to put so much stress on success in a competitive sense when by doing so we raise expectations that we cannot satisfy. A couple of years ago Professor Raphael Demos wrote an article in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin in which he pointed out that

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while we hope, of course, to avoid defeat we ought to prepare ourselves to deal with it when it comes. Indeed one feels like asking whether in addition to all our education for success it might not be well to have a few schools or a few parts of each school devoted to education for failure. Of course we want our students to be ready to meet life's problems adequately. But we have taught them, by example if not by precept, to strive for the success which comes from taking advantage of others. Whether or not this is justifiable morally, is it even expedient? Should we encourage all of our students to expect the first prize in each contest they enter? Are there not other types of reward? And are we as sure as we were even fifty years ago that a social system which puts so much emphasis on the acquisitive instincts is the best we can devise? I mention these questions in passing simply to ask whether some of the general presuppositions by which we live as a society are not themselves barriers to effective education for adversity. Competition in its place is good. Some forms of economic competition are undoubtedly necessary. But our own healthy eagerness to match our strength with those around us may have led to extremes that our children now find unhealthy. It has been said that our greatest educational dilemma comes from the contrast between what

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the schools teach and what the parents do. Students know that their parents want them to "make good" in the classroom, on the athletic field, in a career. If the phrase meant simply doing a job well, no fault could be found. But too often it points to our fear of falling behind the crowd or of being unable to forge ahead of it in some spectacular way. How can we expect our children to understand the rewards of a good conscience, or the satisfactions of creative work, or the joy of attachment to a cause if the only appeal we know how to make is to their feeling of rivalry? "What has success got to do with art anyway?" asks the artist Louis Bouché. "Everybody can't be top man. If you love painting, the only reward you need is to paint." In the same vein we may well ask what either security or success has to do with the motives that allow us to send our sons to war. Youth today is asked to pay a debt it never promised. How can the obligation be made clear? One of the leading Swiss journals reported recently that a correspondent who had visited the fighting was struck by the greater sureness of purpose on the North Korean side. The boys from the United Nations, including the United States, said this observer, didn't seem to know what they were fighting for, where their opponents knew definitely.

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N o w of course it does not do much good to be sure why you are fighting if your assurance has a false basis and your ideas are mistaken. That some of the ideas proclaimed by the North Koreans and the Chinese are of the sort a reasonable man should be ashamed to utter is clear. But second in seriousness only to having mistaken ideas is the state of having no ideas at all. One does not have to go overseas to Korea to find American youth who approximate this condition. Anyone who is well acquainted with students today knows that too large a part of their response to the present emergency is stereotyped and unimaginative. Prominent is a fatalistic way of accepting dumbly what comes and trying to go along with it. The word "trapped" as applied to their own situation is one which turns up too often in student conversations. By contrast there is the hedonistic attitude of those who still have an eye for the main chance. "There will be many changes before I get back," remarked a youth just drafted, "but this country will always have a place for a man who can turn a slick dollar." One would think that in the white light that flashes from Las Vegas the aims appropriate for our times should stand out more sharply than this. The testimony is unanimous that when they are faced by actual physical danger our youth respond with magnificent courage. W h y

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do they seem so much less able to meet with adequate ideas the intellectual problems the war poses? The reason is that we are unsure ourselves. Is it not high time that we formulated our own convictions and learned how to share them with others? If I am not mistaken, what we really want is that our students shall win a rational faith in themselves, in their society, and in the life situation to which they have been born. In place of cheap security or selfish success we want them to learn to look for the rewards that come from the application of reason to human affairs and to expect the sacrifices that reason will demand. If this is true it means first of all that on the college level we must do more to bring out the positive quality in the rational approach to life. Reason does not always call for suspended judgment, although sometimes we act as though it did. I remember vividly, for example, a college teacher who was a most charming gentleman but who gave the impression of never being able to make up his mind. The effect on us his students was particularly serious because we honored and liked him very much as a man and we knew how desperately hard he was trying to be fair. But our tendency to imitate him, as students will imitate a teacher they admire, led us to confuse

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honesty with indecision and to think that we were being impartial when actually we were lazy. T o offset dogmatism doubt is needed of course. But prolonged skepticism accomplishes nothing. Too often we allow what should be a temporary suspension of judgment to turn into a final failure to decide, and forget that reason questions and hesitates not for the sake of doubting but as a part of a great affirmation. This affirmation, that life can be brought into harmony with defensible standards of truth and justice, is one that we need to make explicit, to ourselves and to those we teach, now more than ever before. For today we have a magnificent chance to show that democracy, rightly understood, means the apphcation of reason to social experience. The contrast with totalitarianism is so clear that it cannot be missed. T o say that the end justifies the means, that individual liberty is incidental, or that torture and deception are permissible in the service of the state, is to fly in the face both of the reasonable and the democratic ideal. That our own practice of democracy is imperfect is only too sadly true. But that democracy itself is part of a reasonable creed expressing our deepest convictions we should keep in the forefront of our attention. In college we should use every means we have of driving this message home. As

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part of a liberal education we should indeed tell our students that they may freely choose what they will believe, but we should not tell them that what they believe makes no difference. W e should make clear that reason chooses the free, the true, the just, and that it excludes the petty, the cruel, the false, and the tyrannical. And we should be ready to show why this is so. In grade school the end will be the same though the means may differ. Here we should make more use of vivid examples and of a direct appeal to the emotions. For example, can we not find more ways of linking the ideals of sportsmanship, fair play, and team work which are so prominent in our games with the notion of justice and cooperativeness in society? Can we not also do more to bring out the essential unity of the ideas which school, church, and home are trying to express? I believe we can by emphasizing the dominance of reason in the work of each and doing more to show how each supplements the work of the other. If, therefore, we want our students to be ready for the terrible experience of fighting we must teach them what is worth fighting for. If we want to prepare them for adversity we should give them a philosophy worth suffering for. And if we are to do this we must first clear our own minds of false gods and goals and convince ourselves that a rational

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good is attainable both in the life of society and in our lives as individuals. This means that we must make a special effort to emphasize the ends of an acquisitive society less and those of a rational democracy more. II Let us next note that as a matter of fact changes in our conception both of the aims of society and the nature of adversity are taking place before our eyes. The theater is an example. "What the American public vv^ants," said William Dean Howells fifty years ago, "is a tragedy with a happy ending." But today whether the subject matter be salesmen or cocktail parties or streetcars with strange names the ending is apt to be neither happy nor tragic in the genuine sense. W h e n Shakespeare's heroes die we do not feel that they have died in vain. In Shakespeare's mind man was often miserable but he was not small. As A. C. Bradley tells us, we cannot read these plays and remain cynical. Webster defines tragedy as that quality of life or art which gives nobility or sublimity to catastrophe. Do our modern plays treat disaster in this way? Too often we feel that they bring humiliation rather than humility, that the conflicts have been psychiatric rather than truly of the psyche, and that the end has indeed come not with a bang

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but a whimper. The actors have found themselves wresthng not so much w^ith a problem as with a disease. Commenting on this trend Delmore Schwartz asks in The Partisan Review whether it means that we as a people are more mature and less given to wishful thinking or whether in a crisis so intense we achieve purgation through despair. My own impression is that the appeal to the neurotic and disordered marks a last desperate effort to give the devil of denial his due. It represents an active eagerness to see the absolute worst and to envisage a condition where reason and goodness are not only ehminated but actually declared irrelevant. Yet in this effort, negative as it is in itself, one senses the stirring of a courageous realism. Just as underneath the trivialities of much of modem art we feel an eagerness for a new and more significant view of form, so amid the negations of modern drama we see more than just a rebellious cry of protest. A generation which abhors hypocrisy, has no patience with sentimentality, shows skepticism about the worship of money and bitterness over racial inequities is revealing a consistent pattern of affirmation in its own revolt. The pattern has only to be revealed further to show its kinship with the requirements of a rational faith. For the fact is that you cannot reasonably hold to the irrele-

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vanee of reason. The claim of our contemporary theater that reason does not work is made by men who are trying to put it to work. Their very speech bewrayeth them. Ill Our society is gathering moral strength by seeing evil for what it is — this lesson the theater appears to teach us. But if facing the worst is a source of strength, may not the same be true of facing the best? Have we ever taken sufficient account of the relation of the life of inquiry to the development of the will? If we are to prepare for adversity must we not be strong and should not our strength include the special contribution the mind can make? Reports from the last war suggest that three types of men showed unusual courage under fire. The first type apparently were born with a lack of sensitiveness to danger. Because they were created with special temperaments, education has less interest in them than in the others. The second type included members of rather obscure sects who were accustomed to being thought of as nonconformists and who were devoted to their beliefs sometimes to the point of fanaticism. Here again we seem to deal with a type of conditioning that is outside the usual educational processes. But the third group throw more light on our present situation.

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These men were highly educated and apparently found that the mental discipline they had undergone was a source of moral strength. Woodrow Wilson is reported to have said that solid intellectual work is the basis of character. Whether or not the statement is exaggerated, I think we can see what it means. Intellectual effort means concentration, and concentration requires discipline of the will. T o be able with the mind to see through a problem helps the will to see a problem through. The right kind of intellectual education, that is, should develop moral strength. It should also bring the kind of steadiness that comes from the larger over-all view. Says Sadhu Sundar Singh: "The man who suiïers against his will speedily becomes a physical wreck; but if he suffers of his own free will, impelled to do so by his ideal, there is hardly any limit to his powers of endurance." "It is not so much things which bother a man," said Montaigne, "as the opinion he has about things." Jesus summed the matter up in an apocryphal story when he said: "If thou knowest what thou art doing, blessed art thou." Do our students know what they are doing? And are we helping them to know? I think we are if our own minds are clear about the essential nature of the intellectual quest. In particular it seems important that we understand what we may call the absolutism of

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the intellect. The fact is that the man who takes reason as his guide bases his life on a foundation that is able to withstand all attacks. For reason cannot be denied without at the same time being affirmed. T o attempt to question it is in the act of questioning to presuppose it. W e cannot fail to appeal to it because the effort to talk or think or even to doubt assumes this appeal. Our minds are constructed in such a way that it is impossible for them to act otherwise. They can go wrong, but they cannot mean to go wrong. T o understand this, it seems to me, is to gain moral as well as intellectual assurance and to realize that there are some things that simply must hold good for the will as for the mind. If we follow where reason leads we shall find out what these things are. And if we persist in our inquiry we shall discover more and more signs of the unity that reason provides for experience. Our job as teachers thus becomes that of tying together for our students what we may call the loose ends of rationality that they are apt to see as disconnected. Actually so much that we hold dear, including democracy, the scientific method, the belief in freedom, and even faith in God, stems from the appeal to reason and goes back to reason for its sanctions that we appear to have no more important task than that of exposing the meaning of rational life and faith. T o do so will be to

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provide the basis for the loyal devotion and action that our times require. If they understand this, our students will be ready for adversity because they will have a means of putting it in its place and seeing it as the incidental feature of life it really is. IV I would therefore plead with all urgency for a deliberate effort to make our students aware of the reasonable nature of the view we wish them to take. And I would also plead that we help them to understand its religious nature. Here I think we should be sure in the first place that the religion we teach is itself free from any appeal to arbitrary dogma. This means that we should be ready to teach religions of varied and if necessary unconventional types so long as their basic philosophy is one that a rational mind can accept. What does religion mean? The word opens up so many floodgates of association on the one hand and seems on the other to close the door so abruptly to analytical inquiry that it gives us pause. It is undeniably true that religion signifies different things to different men. Does it then have no definable content? It would be rash indeed to say this. Our religious ideas may lack the precise outlines of those based on sense experience and it may be hard to fit them together in a well

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articulated creed. But the same is true of our poetic ideas and of those that come from music and art, to say nothing of friendship and love. Its indefiniteness, that is to say, is shared with all the experiences by which we most deeply live. W e should notice that since the real power of religion derives from the richness of its emotional content rather than the exactness of its formulas its help in time of trouble may appear in a variety of ways. Let us take as examples what we may call three different planes of religious experience. First there is the plane of rhetoric. Logan Pearsall Smith, a skeptic about creeds but an artist in words, illustrates this for us. "Is there, after all," he asks, "any solace like the solace of language? When I am disconcerted by the unpleasing aspects of existence, when for me, as for Hamlet, this fair creation turns to dust and stubble, it is not in Metaphysics nor in Religions that I seek assurance, but in fine phrases. The thought of gazing on Life's Evening Star makes of ugly old age a pleasing prospect; if I call death mighty and unpersuaded, it has no terror for me; I am perfectly contented to be cut down as a flower, to flee as a shadow, to be swallowed like a snowflake on the sea. These similes soothe me and effectually console me." W h y was this author able to gain assurance from fine phrases? In spite of his denials was it

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not because his own responsiveness to beauty had at least a touch of both metaphysics and religion? Back of the appeal of the language is the suggestion of a deeper truth. I think it is that of the presence of value in our world. The religious suggestiveness of the words comes from their power to drive home the wonder of a universe in which gradations of value exist. How amazing is the distinction between beauty and ugliness, between honesty and falsehood, and how Godlike is a world where this distinction is found! Rhetoric, like the other arts, reminds us that we live in an environment where form counts. Such an environment has a religious quality. When language not only suggests the presence of form, but has religious connotations, and when the words are drawn from a book like the Bible where some of the deepest insights of the race have found expression, the religious significance is even greater. How shallow does our demand for literalness seem in such a setting! In the presence of cosmic truth why should we expect our cramped and limited verbalisms to be adequate! Why should we not open ourselves to channels of communication that are aesthetic and imaginative as well as those that are exclusively intellectual? Often we hear it said that if we study the Bible as poetry or as literature we miss its point as religion. But may not poetry be an

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approach to faith? Of the verse "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I w^ill give you rest," Gamaliel Bradford remarks: "How many who have fought the long battle and fainted in triumph or defeat have found in those words the consolation that triumph could not yield them and defeat could never take away!" And William James, whose Christianity did not fit comfortably into any standardized pattern, writing anonymously of an experience now known to be his own, says that at one time in his life he felt a fear "so invasive and powerful that if I had not clung to scripture-texts like 'The Eternal God is my refuge. . . I am the resurrection and the life' I think I should have gone really insane." Beside the plane of poetry and rhetoric there is what we may call the plane of philosophy as a vehicle for religious feeling. I am thinking here not so much of the actual truths philosophy propounds or the conclusions of its arguments but rather of the hints afforded through the w a y it goes about its job. To engage in philosophizing is to be continually reminded of the timeless formal relations which subsist apart from the realm of fact but give the latter meaning and color. W e know, for example, that there is a quality in friendship which does not disappear when my friend betrays me or I him, just as the ideal

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of proportion remains a standard for beauty even when denied by some forms of modern art. Says Arthur Hugh Clough: "It fortifies my soul to know that though I perish truth is so." The souls of our logical positivists may not be fortified by this assertion, but the fact is that their spirited denial of its significance springs from their own loyalty to it, coupled with their mistaken idea of how such loyalty should be expressed. To know that Truth is, that the excellent not only becomes the permanent but implies here and now qualities and relationships that are permanently valid, that the rational is at least part of the real, and to feel confident with Gamaliel that if any counsel is actually of the Truth and of God it cannot be overthrown is to have a source of help in time of trouble. When we mm from the somewhat rarefied atmosphere of the plane of abstract ideas to the more familiar patterns of orthodoxy the healing powers of religion are even more obvious. Such a book, for example, as E. Stanley Jones's Christ and Human Suffering gives us vivid examples of the familiar truth that religious faith can triumph over catastrophe even of the most terrible sort. Dr. Jones says that Jesus's teaching is "that we are to take up pain, calamity, injustice, and persecution, admit them into the purpose of our lives and make them contribute to higher ends —

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the ends for which we really live." The book gives some affecting illustrations — the European girl who caught the dread disease of leprosy in India and during her last days transformed the lives of her fellow sufferers through her remarkable personal qualities, the physician who heroically shielded his associates from the knowledge of his own imminent death, the children of missionary parents who carried out their resolve to educate themselves in America and to return with a ministry of healing to the people at whose hands their parents had suffered martyrdom. We should remember, I think, that on whatever plane it comes religion is essentially devotion to that which as an intrinsic value frees us from slavery to our own petty purposes and from immersion in private grief. The chief end of man is to glorify God, not to use him, to enjoy him forever, not to employ him for a time. We respond to his demands because in themselves they are reasonable and right. The person who worships God with the idea of turning divine power to his own account would do better to put his trust in magic. W e understand this essential quality in religion more clearly when we look at other cases of intrinsic value. Friendship, for example, also brings an experience of that which is an end in itself. If I regard my friend simply

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as a means to the realization of purposes of my own I have failed to understand what friendship is. Beauty is such an end, loved for its own sake. Justice may have originated as a way of attaining social stability, but we have learned to revere it as that whicb must be obeyed though the heavens fall. Reason is both means and end. As Professor Whitehead has remarked, Ulysses shared his type with the foxes, Plato his with the gods. Our students know what reason is like as a means. We must show them in what sense it is an end. Sometimes a boy comes to college intent upon learning the truth so that he can use it as a means to his own ends. Once in a while the same boy wakes up during college to the purposes the Truth has for him. When that happens education has done its job. It has given the student an intrinsically good and reasonable ideal that takes him out of himself. V I have referred to the indirect influence of the social environment on our preparation for adversity, to the developing realism in the public temper, to the need for a philosophy that is consciously and aggressively rational, and to some of the forms that a reasonably religious view may take. Let me now try to be more specific about a few of the moral qualities required in hard

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times. W e turn first to self-reliance. Has progressive education been a help here? The answer is that it has in so far as it has encouraged initiative, cultivated an interest in the job, enabled a student to see what he is doing and stimulated him to carry a task through. But just as surely the attention paid to supposed needs and interests of the moment can be overdone. Sometimes, for example, a high school student leans so heavily on his various guides, counsellors, and friends, that in college he can hardly find his way alone to the office of the dean of admission. If we are not careful we shall discover that the studentcentered curriculum makes the student feel not only that he is but that he should be the focus of all attention both in school and afterward. It is a healthy sign that so many of our leaders in progressive education are talking today about the tension that should obtain between the student and his task. Presumably they refer to what used to be called the discipline of hard work. There is truth in Aristotle's teaching that a man becomes virtuous by repeatedly performing virtuous acts, difficult as they may be. Strength may come through joy but it comes also through struggle. Our students must learn to welcome each rebuff and we must learn not to be too protective. How often have the fathers' sins of overindulgence been visited upon the children unto

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the third and fourth generation! And how ironical it is that the fathers who talk most about what they owe to hardship are so often the slowest to give their children its advantages! Of course we should make our children's tasks interesting when we can but we must not let them think that only what is interesting is important. And certainly we must free them from dependence on ourselves. Modern psychiatry confirms the wisdom of the proverb which awards the prize whether ribbon or throne to him who is able to go it alone! In the next place we should make sure that our students are freed from dependence not only on ourselves but on any limited set of interests. The person tied to a particular outlook is the one who feels lost when the window through which he observes life is closed. To be able to turn easily to a new point of view and to have a widely ranging imagination is to have a better chance of being freed from immersion in one's own difficulties. W e are helped to meet adversity by diversity of aim. Have we made the use we should of biography? To present it to a student with the comment that this is an example of life as it should be lived is, of course, to defeat our purpose from the start. Moral education, especially at the college level, must be implicit rather than explicit.

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Our students will not listen to preaching. In general if the college wishes to instruct them morally it must provide an environment where moral values are made so appealing as to be taken for granted. But biography seems to furnish an exception. It may be that we can introduce our students to it in such a way that in it they wiU find for themselves what they are seeking. After all, do we not learn heroism by example? And does there not come a time in everyone's life when he longs for assurance that others have triumphed over difficulties similar to his? Biography is important because it introduces us to ideas that have taken on flesh and entered into the living stream of experience. Let us ask ourselves in the next place whether we have done all we could to make our students receptive to the forces of healing at work in themselves and in the world around them. So much of life is spent in feverish activity, and today, alas, in the feverish activity to destroy, that we forget the more passive processes of growth which follow their less conspicuous but no less constructive course. Mark Rutherford speaks of "that silent promptitude of nature which rebels not at a wound but the very next instant begins her work of protection and recovery." How pervasive this influence is and yet how often we fail to take it into account! It

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shows not only in the rhythm of seedtime and harvest but in the maturation of ideas in the deep currents of the unconscious and in the progress toward agreement in the hfe of a community. Whitehead speaks of the tenderness of the creative power which produces order and reveals instability as itself the principle of evil. All of us have much to learn about the healing influences at work in both physical and human nature. We seem particularly unimaginative in our failure to treat religious experience as our response to the creative and strength-bringing factors our larger environment affords. If it is important to study the remedial influences that overcome adversity, it is also important to know the forms under which adversity itself appears. Our colleges are rightly criticized for emphasizing life's graciousness instead of its hazards and for setting themselves apart not merely from workshop, factory, and mine, but also from hospital, courtroom, and jail. Field trips and social surveys are helping to bridge this gap but it is still far too wide. Work camps and the right use of summer time should help, especially through their appeal to the natural rhythms of life. Today we are asked the searching question whether peacetime education can prepare for war. As we try to answer we face the striking fact that in some cases war has

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actually prepared for peacetime education. Many of our veterans showed the maturing effects of their war experiences and found themselves able to grapple with the problems of the mind more effectively than their younger brothers who had been spared a career at arms. If suffering prepares men to think, may it not be true that thinking prepares them for suffering? The mind must wrestle with the issues raised by suffering — this at least is true. Education must accept the challenge war makes to its realism and its courage. I have said nothing directly about the aid we may receive from psychiatry because it seems to me that what specific help it gives is for the sick rather than the healthy mind. Quite correctly it tells us to face reality as mature beings and to free ourselves from the influence of hidden motives. But because its first interest is in the irregular and its attention is directed toward the irrational I am inclined to think that it runs the danger of suggesting abnormality where there is none. In focusing attention on the unconscious, psychiatry has shown us at our worst. It explains what happens when we rationalize but does little to throw light on what we do when we reason. So great has been its concern with secret desires that it leads us to wonder whether any of our purposes can be reputable. Furthermore, it has placed so much emphasis on the internal and

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subjective parts of the truth-seeking process that we are apt to forget how important the external element in any truth situation is. Truth is a relation between our ideas and objects outside ourselves. Our ideas are true when they conform to the objects, whatever our definition of the difficult word "conform." W e gain the truth just as we win moral victory by literally getting out of ourselves and discovering what is beyond. If psychiatry can expose our irrationality and subjectivity without focusing our attention on it in too fascinated a way, let us of course use it. For, as we have seen, it is in our chance of becoming reasonable that our best hope of conquering adversity lies. VI T o talk of being reasonable in days like these may seem like whistling to keep up our courage. At times we find it easy to believe that the light of reason is destined to disappear entirely. The shadow is blackest over our schools because they seem so much like symbols of our inability to give our children what they ought to have. But it is well to recall that dark skies are no new experience for mankind and that each age has been tempted to suppose that its own is the darkest of all. As a matter of fact men have always suffered beyond their deserts. To vast numbers life has

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been unjust. When we think not of the contrast between what men cheaply want and what they get but between what they reasonably and heroically want and what they actually achieve we can but feel an incommensurability in the human situation which makes reason itself seem beside the point. But there are two things to remember. The first is that the times appear so black to us just because some parts of the picture are so bright. Many of our aims were and still are on the verge of fulfillment. World unity, for example, was almost within our grasp, and if we can combine patience with intelligence we still may win it. And let us not forget that education is now more widespread, disease more nearly conquered, poverty more nearly overcome than ever before. The second thing to remember is that often we take the word reasonable in the wrong way. Reason is a fighting creed. Our inability to find the total scheme as rational as we should like ought not to undermine our satisfaction in such types of rationality as are here. Reason is not merely a process of measuring and arranging what has already happened. More significantly it is an active effort to bring order progressively out of chaos. Frustration accompanies it and incompleteness dogs its footsteps. But to deny the

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rightness of the effort is to deny the integrity of life itself, and to this length none of us in his normal moments is willing to go. Nor should we allow the diíEculties of the present hour to obscure the vision of the God who is fighting at our side and in whom we may have a rational faith. As the great WiUiam James has taught us, to live with energy, though energy bring pain, is to live as though the universe were such as to demand energy, and is therefore to see a Godlike element at work in the struggle of humanity to build a better world. Adversity is indeed a sober fact, and failure on a colossal scale may be with us at any time. But to take this as the last word is to surrender too soon. Let us remember that we belong to a race of high achievement that has not ceased to achieve even at the present hour. And let us not forget that, though complete attainment may be beyond our grasp, pursuit itself has a worthwhileness of its own. "If I held truth captive in my hand," said Malebranche, "I would open my fingers and let it go, that I might pursue it once again." Experience without pain would be experience lacking quality. "Whilst man sits on the cushion of advantages," says Emerson, "he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something." The most challenging truth our time presents is that common suf-

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feting can be made to lead to common love. Our present disillusioned fear could easily have a debasing influence, bringing out the combative elements in us, increasing our jealous rivalries, and splitting us into warring groups. To prevent this we must free the forces of love that come from awareness that as human beings we face a common problem and share a common lot. The teacher must learn, as we hear that he is learning in some foreign lands today, to participate in the actual ordeal his students are going through. Education needs rational faith, it needs creative hope, it needs the love that suiïereth long. Would not the great teacher who himself learned to endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ still tell us that the greatest of these is love? How often has it been said that education stands at the crossroads — yet how uniquely true the statement appears today! Are we leading our youth to expect a type of success that will not come and sending them out to an even greater disappointment than would naturally be theirs? Or are we letting our own fears dampen the hope they have always been able to call to their support? Do our students learn from our example that education is but a tool for the use of the shrewd man in the competitive struggle? Or are they seeking with us a rational faith that will enable them to take both joy and pain in their

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stride, to rejoice in the shared aspect of their lot as human beings, and to see in the clash of forces that are temporal a chance to align themselves with goals that are eternal? Whatever the answer, we must face our task with realistic courage, refusing either to be daunted by the times or to be lured into a complacent unawareness of the threat they contain. "We are lovers of wisdom without unmanliness," Pericles once told the Athenians. May our own wisdom be based on courage and may our insight be led through suffering to love! Whether or not the uses of adversity are sweet, we must have confidence that they can be made creative and that education can provide the means for bringing this about.