would be eminently proper for you to omit the chaperone, but if you have the necessary amount it would be better to take her along. Our advice is that you refrain from such methods of squander ing your money, and your career at this institu tion will be materially lengthened. EDUCATION AND LIFE. The dogma has been proclaimed for ages, cation is a preparation for life.” Upon this text two representative schools have discoursed. On the one hand, the advocates of the classics have so far elevated education as relatively to ignore its relation to life. On the other, the cry for “preparation” has given birth to such practical ef forts as to cease to deserve the term education. As a result (if we wish to be slightly cynical), we have all education pitted against all life : the ultra classicist, so educated as not to be prepared for life as not to be educated. In short, we have separated by abstraction and embodied in institu tions what should be conjoined. So also in work and happiness, religious and secular, private and official, life here and hereafter, we have falsely ab stracted from the real unity avid solidarity with which we live our’days. The one thought, then, which I would seek to impress is this : Education is very life itself. In partial justification, the following may be noted : Divergencies in character and living are owing not so much to external factors, as to internal fac tors, A fish is not “fishy” because it inhabits the sea; nor would man (barring physical impossibili ties) be a fish could he place himself in fish envi ronment. The Chinamen is such whether in Can ton, London, Paris or San Francisco, while the Irishman of Cork is still a Cork Irishman, even though he may be a policeman of Gotham. That is, it is just as true that we make ourselves what we are to become, as that we are made what we are. The real power to be' insisted upon in edu cation and life is self-determination. We are not chameleons, reflecting the colors with which we THE FREE LANCE. come into chance contact. We are not wholly creatures of circumstance ; circumstances are our creatures. Not always are we waiting for some thing to turn up, we are frequently engaged in turning something up. It is this latter conception of life—that is, that conception in which man is recognized as playing the chief role—that we affirm to be equivalent to education. Man molding himself, choosing and altering his environment, establishing society and institutions, realizing moral and religious truths— this is education and this is life. “Edu- An oyster is forever an oyster because of oyster nature, —that is, the oyster is simply what it is ; man on the contrary, is simply what he is not. Education, then, might be defined as a process of making an individual what he is not. When such a process ceases, not only education ends, but life as well. A “finished” education is soul-suicide, more disastrous by far than the destruction of the body. 'Even plants must be improved by cultiva tion, animals by domestication ; but man is the only being in all creation that is subject to educa tion. Any other use of the term is a misuse of it. Passivity marks the two former, self activity char acterizes the latter. Education, then, is life’s dealing with life. Life is conquest of itself. As Gcethe has so truly said, —■ “110 only earns bis freedom and existence, Who daily conquers them anew.” - There is a whole theory of life and education in these words. Free existence by daily conquest, self-mastery by self-discipline, the continued mak ing of the “ought” and the “is” in one’s life meet as friends, in short, self-obedient and self regulative personality, such is the aggressive pur pose and mission of life and of education as well. “Man shall not live by bread alone” is an educa tional principle, as well as a gospel utterance, and any conception of education which fails to recog nize and make provision for the growth pf man’s real self—that is, his legal spontaneity—is radic-
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers