The education of the American citizen

Front matter

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Preface

In many of the political writiags of the day, there is a tendency to lay too much stress on the mechanism of government and of industry, and too little stress on the force by which this mechanism is kept at work. In recent educational movements, also, too much thought is perhaps given to the problem of preparing men and women to take their several places in a social machine, and too little to the development of that power and spirit upon which the perpetuation of our whole social order depends.

From my public addresses and magazine articles of the past few years, I have tried to select those which emphasize the more neglected side of these questions, and to arrange them in a continuous series. In a book thus prepared, it is inevitable that there should be some repetition and some apparent inconsistencies. If the reader is perplexed by any of these things, he will perhaps find the explanation in the date of the different utterances and the special conditions under which they were made public.

No sharp line can be drawn between those papers which are political and those which are educational. It is becoming evident that the really difficult political

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PREFACE

problems of the day can be solved only by an educational process. Not by the axioms of metaphysics on the one hand, nor by the machinery of legislation on the other, can we deal with the questions which vex human society. We must rely on personal character; and as new difficulties arise, we must develop our standard of character to meet them. It is also becoming evident that the real test of an educational system lies in its training of the citizen to meet political exigencies. If it accomplishes this result, it is fundamentally good, whatever else it may leave undone ; if it fails at this cardinal point, no amount of excellence in other directions can save it from condemnation.

This book is offered to the public in the hope that it may contribute something to the understanding of our political needs, to the growth of a public sentiment which shall give us power to meet those needs, and to the development of those educational methods which shall make for an increase of such power in the years which are to come,

Yale University, New Haven, April, 1901.

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Contents

Page THE DEMANDS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY . 1

An Address delivered before The New England Society of New York City, December 22, 1900.

An Address delivered before the Convocation of the University of Chicago, January 2, 1900.