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-