Education as environment have for us, seems to me to be this: The enadjustment to tire educational period after the physical adjustment has been made, after the child can walk alone, can feed itself, can use its hands, and has therefore acquired physical and bodily independence, is an adjustment to what may be called our spiritual environment. After the physical adjustment is reasonably complete, there remains yet to be accomplished the building of harmonious and reciprocal relations with those great acquisitions of the race that constitute civilization; and therefore the lengthening period of infancy simply means that we are spending nearly half of the life of each generation in order to develop in the young some conception of the vast acquirements of the historic past and some mastery of the conditions of the immediate present. In other words, the doctrine of evolution teaches us to look upon the world around us —our art, our science, our literature, our institutions, and our religious life—as an integral part, indeed as the essential part, of our environment; and it teaches us to look upon education as the plastic period of adapting and adjusting our self-active organism to this vast series of hereditary acquisitions. So that while the child's first right and first duty are to ad just himself physiologically to his environment, to learn to walk, to use his hands and to feed himself, to be physically independent, there still remains the great outer circle of education or culture, without contact with which no human being is really either man or woman. The child receives first, and in a short series of years, his animal inheritance; it then remains for us in the period of education to see to it that he comes into his human inheritance. When we compare the life of the lower animal, acting solely and entirely by reflex action and instinct, with the periods of infancy and of self-determined activity of the human being, developing by reflex action, instinct, and intelligence, we get some conception of the vast difference there is between what Descartes called the animal mechanism and what we may truly look upon as the activity of the human mind. This period of adjustment constitutes, then, the period of education; and this period of adjustment must, as it seems to me, give us the basis for all educational theory and all educational practise. It must be the point of departure in that theory and that practise, and it must at the same time provide us with our ideals. When we hear it sometimes said, "All education must start from the child," we must The spiritual the child add, "Yes, and lead into human civilization"; and when we hear it said, on the other hand, that all education must start from the traditional past, we must add: "Yes, and be adapted to the child." We shall then understand how the great educational systems of modern times, upon which every civilized nation is pouring out its strength and its treasure, rest upon the two corner-stones of the physical and psychical nature of the child and the traditional and hereditary civilization of the race; and how it is that the problem of the family, of the school, and of the home, is to unite those two elements so that each shall enter into and possess the other. We shall then have a conception of education which is in accord with the doctrine of evolution and which is in accord with the teachings of modern science and of modern philosophy. After the child comes into the enjoyment of inheritance of his physical inheritance, he must be led by the family, the school, and the state into his intellectual or spiritual inheritance. The moment that fact is stated in those terms it becomes absolutely impossible for us ever again to identify education with mere instruction. It becomes absolutely impossible for us any longer to identify education with mere acqui sition of learning; and we begin to look upon it as really the vestibule of the highest and the richest type of living. It was the seed-thought of Plato, that inspired every word he ever wrote, and that constitutes an important portion of his legacy to future ages, that life and philosophy are identical; but he used the word philosophy in a sense which was familiar to him and to his time, and for which we might very well substitute, under some of its phases at least, the word education. Life and education are identical, because the period to which we traditionally confine the latter term is merely the period of more formal, definite, determinate adjustment; yet, just so long as life lasts and our impressionability and plasticity remain, we are always adapting ourselves to this environment, gaining power, like Antæus of old, each time we touch the Mother Earth from which civilization springs. education? If education cannot be identified with mere What is instruction, what is it? What does the term mean? I answer, it must mean a gradual adjustment to the spiritual possessions of the race, with a view to realizing one's own potentialities and to assisting in carrying forward that complex of ideas, acts, and institutions which we call civilization. Those spiritual The scientific inheritance possessions may be variously classified, but they certainly are at least fivefold. The child is entitled to his scientific inheritance, to his literary inheritance, to his æsthetic inheritance, to his institutional inheritance, and to his religious inheritance. Without them all he cannot become a truly educated or a truly cultivated man. He is entitled to his scientific inheritance. In other words, he is entitled to go out into nature, to love it, to come to know it, to understand it; and he is entitled to go out into it, not only as the early Greek and Oriental thinkers went, with fear and trembling and worship, but he is entitled to go out into it armed with all the resources of modern scientific method and all the facts acquired by modern research. He is entitled to know how it was that we have passed from the world known to the heroes of the Iliad to the world as we know it to-day. He is entitled to know how the heavens have declared their glory to man, and how the worlds of plant and animal and rock have all come to unfold the story of the past and to enrich us with the thought and the suggestion of the intelligence, the design, the order that they manifest. There can be no sound and liberal education that is not |