estness and devotion on the part
of student and teacher, and how soon it becomes a scholastic machine,
positively oppressing the mind and spirit.

There is a true sense in which the universe exists momentarily by the
grace of God. Take light away, and you have darkness. Take darkness
away, and you have not necessarily light; you might have chaos. Take
health away, and you have disease. Take disease away, and you have not
necessarily health; you may have death. Take virtue away, and you have
vice. Take vice away, and you have not necessarily virtue; you might
have negative respectability. Thus it is the continual affirmation of
the good that keeps the heritage of yesterday and takes the step toward
to-morrow.

Nevertheless, if there is no easy solution of the problem, there are
certain big lines of attack. If we are right in our diagnosis, that the
problem of democracy is a problem of education, then our whole system of
education, for child, youth and adult, should be reconstructed to focus
upon the building of positive and effective moral personality.

American education began as a subsidiary process. Children got organic
education in the home, on the farm, in the work shop. They went to
school to get certain formal disciplines, to learn to read, write and
cipher and to acquire formal grammar. With the moving into the cities,
the industrial revolution and the entire transformation of our life, the
school has had to take over more and more of the process of organic
education. If children fail to get such education in the school, they
are apt to miss it altogether.

With this entire change in the meaning of the school, old notions of its
purpose still survive. Probably no one is so benighted to-day as to
imagine that the chief function of the school is to fill the mind with
information; but there are many who still hold to the tradition that the
chief purpose of education is to sharpen the intellectual tools of the
individual for the sake of his personal success. This notion is a
misleading survival, for tools are of value only in terms of the
character using them. The same equipment may serve, equally, good or
bad ends. Only as education focusses on the development of positive and
effective moral character can it aid in solving the problem of
democracy.

Need it be added that this does not mean teaching morals and manners to
children, thirty minutes a day, three times a week? That is a minor
fragment