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Understanding then the term general or comprehensive aim simply in the sense of a broad survey of the field of present activities, we shall take up some of the larger ends which have currency in the educational theories of the day, and consider what light they throw upon the immediate concrete and diversified aims which are always the educator's real concern.
In proportion to the value we set upon perfect acquirement of them will be our willingness to spend much labour upon foundations. By this road we arrive again at the fundamentals of an educator's calling, love and labour. The value to the mind of acquiring languages is so great that all our trouble is repaid.
"Even if there had been no fatal lapse of our race if our children were not naturally depraved, nor inclined to evil in the slightest degree, still they would need religious as well as physical and intellectual guidance and discipline. It is true, the educator's task would be infinitely easier and pleasanter than it now is, but they would need instruction.
Miss Denison, the boy's teacher, who had been trained in one of the London Special Schools, was a little round-faced lady with spectacles, apparently without any emotions, but really filled with that educator's passion which in so many women of our day fills the place of motherhood.
To grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid and simple understanding of the psychological machinery. The 'nature, the 'character, of an individual means really nothing but the habitual form of his associations. To break up bad associations or wrong ones, to build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into the most fruitful channels, is the educator's principal task.
And so we arrive at the end of the Socialist's dream of "the socialization of the means of production and exchange," of the Positivist's dream of moralizing the capitalist, and of the ethical professor's, legislator's, educator's dream of putting commandments and codes and lessons and examination marks on a man as harness is put on a horse, ermine on a judge, pipeclay on a soldier, or a wig on an actor, and pretending that his nature has been changed.
The educator's part in the enterprise of education is to furnish the environment which stimulates responses and directs the learner's course. In last analysis, all that the educator can do is modify stimuli so that response will as surely as is possible result in the formation of desirable intellectual and emotional dispositions.
Why, I think that's awfully romantic of you; like Chateaubriand, you know." Then, dreamily, "He used to go out and lean on a pedestal and let the moon shine down on him through the trees. I think Nancy is a little that way herself." There was a pause, during which the young educator's difficulties were brushed aside. "Do you realize that I haven't seen Nancy since leaving college?"
But the increase that occurs through more efficient methods in productive enterprise is not a real increase; it does not relatively affect the social or economic position of the wage earner. In the last analysis, the wage return is not an educator's criterion, in spite of the pragmatic recommendation of the Cleveland Survey.
Meantime Germany stands now, ruthlessly, for the dedication of Man to the State. One can understand why a Prussian minister forbade the teaching of Froebel's ideas in Prussia during the latter period of the educator's life. So one understands the hatred of Goethe because he refused allegiance to a narrow nationalism and remained cosmopolitan in his world-view.
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