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THE PRESS

Education of the Future

The education needed in the days before us is an education calculated to fit men to live together, to work together and to understand themselves and each other and their diverse individual, mutual, and common problems as they arise in the intricate, incessant interplay of life; to understand and utilize, too, the environment in which that life must be lived. There will be diminishing place for any arid or ornamental "scholarship" (that is, mere erudition for its own sake out of books), for any complacent self-exclusion in a life of purely intellectual contemplation. Before anything worthwhile is written, something must be done, something must be lived! Men and women will be too busy, too much occupied with exploration into fields hitherto beyond even imagination, to tolerate the existence of--much less to support by their labor--any detached, privileged class of "Thinkers". The aim of education all along the line, and unceasing from the cradle to the grave, will be to train Thinkers who Do; Doers who Think. The two kinds of activity cannot be separated without disaster. The Thinker who knows nothing of Doing is no guide for anyone; the Doer who has not learned to Think is no safer. The fact is that only through Doing can one learn rightly to Think. Through definite activities, useful in their own right and evidently respectable because they are useful, as well as through the written records of doing and thinking in the past, and talking and listening to talk, and reflection upon these, the student of any age gains that cultivation of all of himself which develops the intelligence which is nothing more or less than all of himself. With that kind of education in college, he will "find himself" during his college course if he has not done so before, instead of wasting some of the best years of his life, as so many college graduates do, in discovering his aptitudes and interests, and drifting or blundering into his place in the world; or perhaps missing it altogether. John Palmer Gavit, "College"

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