III

WHAT THE COLLEGE STANDS FOR 1

At the beginning of the nintieth year of this old college, I give you hearty greeting. It is a greeting which seems to me to belong not to the present year only, but to all the years preceding, of which this new year is the crown and consummation. Standing near the close of a century of our history, filled with the sense of the duty of the present, and not, I hope, unquickened by the thought of the future, I wish to speak to you upon the great question of what the college stands for. It is a question elemental and fundamental.

The first truth or fact for which this historic college stands is that it stands for a training under liberty, unto liberty in individual judgment and conduct. Liberty is rather a condition than a force, rather a state than a goal. It is man's war cry, man's peace cry, it represents humanity's lengthy struggle. Yet liberty does nothing. It is not a cause. Like time it has no force; like space it represents no achievement, but like both time and space all things are done under it. This college gives to its students liberty. Few and slight are the restraints which it makes, large and wide is its freedom, few are the rules which it lays down, few also are the principles, but the rules are not for the use of one who observes the principles. A primary reason for the adoption of the principle of liberty is this: Soon you are to go out into life, where you are to be the guides of your own conduct, the philosophers of your own character, the masters of your own destiny. The best method of preparation for such freedom in character and conduct is found in freedom itself. Freedom under guardianship which is neither remote nor parental is the best preparation for freedom absolute.

One reason that leads some people to sympathize with England in the great war is found in the fact that with all of 1 Address given at the opening of the college year, 1917-1918.

her excellencies, and they are many, she stands for liberty; Germany stands for autocracy, for an autocracy founded upon military force. England stands for individual liberty.. In Germany whatever is not expressly permitted is forbidden; in England and the United States, whatever is not expressly forbidden is permitted. In the one case restraint is the rule, which indeed has advantages unto forcefulness. In the other case freedom is the rule, which indeed has certain disadvantages of intellectual and other dissipation, but which on the whole represents the training of character. In this college the Anglo-Saxon method prevails. It seeks to prepare for full freedom under the large freedom of these years.

A second fact for which the college stands is the training under responsibility unto responsibility. At least three responsibilities each of you will finally assume. First, the headship of a home; second, the guidance of your own character and destiny; third, a share in the well-being of the community. The headship of a home is a purpose which every man and woman should seriously entertain as a worthy aim. The coming into that headship is often surrounded, and, perhaps, almost necessarily, by certain emotional elements. These elements sometimes sink down into the petty and the sillythey should be elevated into largely human and divinely noble relationships. The home is the fundamental unit of society. Into a home you were born, in a home you live, from a home you at last go forth, not to return. To be born not into a home is an event which merits equal degrees of scorn for the offending and of pity for the child who is thus born, belonging to no one. To be the head of a home is a glorious responsibility to which you should look forward with holy desire. Of course, you should have the responsibility of yourself, you want it (and nobody else does); and also you should prepare yourself for assuming your share in the common responsibilities of the community. This community represents civilization. It is the result of all the strivings and struggles, the lives and the deaths, the wealths and the poverties, the triumphs and the bankruptcies of the past. To it you are a debtor. All you are you have received from it. For it you

have not toiled-it is the unearned increment-it is more, it is the unearned treasure, civil, social, political, moral, economic, intellectual, human. Being debtor you are not simply to pay a debt, you are to increase the treasure, to give over more than you have received. You are to seek to become a creditor.

Now for bearing these responsibilities in and of life, the college lays on you responsibilities; the chief of the responsibilities to which I now refer is the responsibility for the communal academic life. Into this life you have come. The wealth of almost a hundred years of it you inherit-use this wealth well, increase it, transmit it to your successors, enlarged and refined. In particular, I desire to call to your serious reflection one important matter. It is the conduct of all the community affairs—the weekly paper, the direction of various associations, dramatic, musical, debating, literary, political. The conduct of all class and fraternity and all similar affairs should be managed with forethought, with judgment, with taste. The officers of the college would not interfere; they would help. Yours is the responsibility, responsibility for the present. This responsibility and all these responsibilities should be so borne as to prepare you for the three great responsibilities which await.

The college also stands for making you catholic in your relations to men. The catholic man is the universal man. He is the over-soul that comes down and blesses. He is the under-soul who at once supports and is enriched and is blessed. He is the around-soul who embraces all human conditions and is embraced by them. Each man knows more than you do about some things: Be a learner. You know more than any other man about some things: Be a teachera humble teacher indeed to the high and the low, to the broad and the narrow, to the poor and to the rich, to the obscure and the conspicuous, to the remote and the near. They each have their lesson and their influence. The college does away with the local, the provincial, the narrow, the transient. The humanistic was narrow, the humane less narrow, the human is broad. The college stands for universal relations: it re

ceives men from all parts of the earth, it sends them forth into all parts of the earth.

This college also stands for the precious thing we call wisdom. And what is wisdom? The most profound of all English statesmen has called it the application of knowledge to affairs. The college gives knowledge, but the knowledge the college gives you are to apply. How is the college to aid you in transmuting knowledge into wisdom? The answer is two-fold: The college is itself a microcosm, it is a world, even tho a small one. The college prepares man to apply his knowledge, it prepares him to apply his knowledge by obliging him to do things. Wisdom is the comprehensive word, it stands not only for the intellectual, it stands also for religion and for ethics, for a sound relation to the supreme, and also for a right relation to humanity. It stands for learning, but more for the spirit of learning. Its symbol may be the book, but it is free from bookishness. If its symbol is the owl, the symbolism is not ironical, for it seeks to discover the reality of things even in the dark. It means a point of view; yet it is never a point, it is a plane. It stands for a proper intellectual valuation and a just moral assessment. It begins with the type of mind which we call intuitive, but it continues with the type which we name logical. It is sometimes conservative, for it does not neglect the past; neither does it refuse to be called progressive, it faces the future. It belongs to all governments, to the monarchial as well as to the republican and the democratic, and its home is among all societies and all orders of humanity. It discriminates, separates the unlike, unites the similar. It throws its force rather into light than heat, and hence what it lacks in the picturesque it gains in permanent and solid values.

WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

CLEVELAND, OHIO

CHARLES F. THWING

IV

FIELD WORK AS A NEW EDUCATIONAL

PRINCIPLE

[This paper was awarded first place in the annual contest (1917) for the Tomlinson Prize, established by Mr. I. C. Tomlinson, class of '80, now of Boston, Mass., at the Municipal University of Akron. The writer is a member of the Class of 1917.]

Education seems now to be at the parting of the ways. It is trying to adjust itself to the demands of a new age, and at the same time it is unwilling to depart from the purpose and ideal of education in the past, namely the rounding out of a life and the increasing of the content of existence. In a sense we may see a sort of Armageddon of educational principles in the conflict now raging thruout the world, in which the English ideal is that education is concerned with developing character, foremost; the German, that education should subserve performance. Of course, the German system makes for character, too, in that it inculcates scholarship, which must have a deep influence for good on the character; but the essential ideals of each are as I have pointed out. We in this country have been eclectic and pragmatic in a certain sense. We desire to select the best ideals of both systems and embody them in a new system if possible. It is by a mingling of both strains thru a process of cross fertilization that we believe we can make of education the most potent agency in developing group prosperity and individual welfare, moral and material.

There are those who still believe that if education establishes a character, makes a man's interests as broad as the various ramifications of civilization, and makes him a gentleman in the true meaning of the word, he may, with such a character as the basis, be trusted to acquire as much of this world's goods as he needs. This branch of educators, while it does not oppose practical training and field work, still re