In place of myopic ideas, democratic modern thought uses clear vision. Clear vision leads to straight thinking, sound thinking to sane action, sane action to beneficent results that shall endure.
In this sense of sound thinking and clean action all sciences, all arts, all activities, become sentimentally, emotionally, dramatically and constructively imbued with the stirring, the self-propelling impulse of the democratic idea. Therefore they will all hold in common a thought whose inexhaustible power will shape a common end which shall signify in the solidity of its logic fruitful peace and joy on earth, as equally the romance of goodwill toward men.
Now that we have a clarifying idea of the nature of man and his powers; now that we behold in him that which lies deepest and surest in ourselves, we may suggest the nature of a democratic education.
These things it shall do:
It shall regard the child body, the child mind, the child heart, as a trust.
It shall watch for the first symptom of surviving feudal fear and dissolve it with gentle ridicule while it teaches prudence and the obvious consequences of acts. No child that can toddle bravely is too young to know what choice means, when presented objectively and humanly. Thus it shall teach the nature of choice at the beginning.
It shall allow the child to dream, to give vent to its wondrous imagination, its deep creative instinct, its romance.
It shall recognize that every child is the seat of genius; for genius is the highest form of play with Life’s forces.
It shall allow the precious being to grow in its wholesome atmosphere of activities, giving only that cultivation which a careful gardener gives—the children shall be the garden.
It shall utilize the fact that the child mind, in its own way, can grasp an understanding of things and ideas, supposed now in our pride of feudal thought to be beyond its reach.
It shall recognize that the child, undisturbed, feels in its own way the sense of power within it, and about it. That by intuition the child is mystic—close to nature’s heart, close to the strength of Earth.
The child thus warded will be a wholesome, happy child. It will forecast the pathway to its maturity.
As from tender age the child grows into robust demonstrative vigor, and ebullition of wanton spirits, the technic of warding will pass by degrees into the technic of training or discipline—bodily, mentally, emotionally; the imagination, the intellect, organized to work together; the process of coordination stressed. The idea of the child’s natural powers will be suggested a little at a time and shown objectively.
The child by this time is passing out of its reveries; life is glowing, very real, very tangible. So shall its awakening powers be trained in the glowing real, the tangible, the three R’s, made glowing and real to it as a part of its world. It is here the difference between welcome work and a task comes into play; the difference between a manikin and a teacher.
Now arrives the stage of pre-adolescence—unromantic urge of hastening vegetative growth; the period of the literal, the bovine, disturbed at times by prophetic reverie. This is the time for literal instruction.
Now comes the stage of adolescence, when the whole being tends to deliquesce into instability, vague idealisms, emotions hitherto unknown or despised, bashfulness, false pride, false courage, introspection, impulsiveness, inhibitions, awkward consciousness of self, yet with an eye clairvoyant to that beauty which it seeks, a stirring in the soul of glory, of adventure, of romance. The plastic age of impressionability, of enthusiasms. Also the Danger Age; the age of extreme susceptibility under cover of indifference in self-protection: The age when thoughts and musings are most secret. The age that makes or breaks.
This is the crisis where democratic education, recognizing it as such, shall attain to its first main objective in fixing sound character, in alert intensive training of the native power to feel straight, to think straight, to act straight, to encourage pride in well-doing, to make so clear the moral nature of choice that the individual may visualize the responsibilities involved in the consequences of choice. To train the imagination in constructive foresight, in the feeling for real things, in the uses of sentiment, of emotion, in the physical and the spiritual joy of living; to stabilize the gregarious into the social sense; to set forth the dignity of the ego and all egos.
This is the time to put on the heavy work, to utilize to the full this suddenly evolving power, the recrudescent power of instinct, to direct this power into worthwhile channels, to prepare adolescents to become worthwhile adults, free in spirit, clean in pride, with footing on the solid earth, with social vision clear and true.
The later technical trainings shall be imbued of the same spirit. The varied kinds shall all be set forth as Specialized yet Unified social activities. Science shall be thus understood and utilized, the fine arts shall be thus understood and utilized, the industrial arts, the arts of applied science, and most urgently the science and the art of education, all shall thus be understood and utilized as social functions, ministering to the all-inclusive art of creating out of the cruel feudal chaos of cross purposes, a civilization, in equilibrium, for freemen conscious of their powers, and with these powers under moral control.
Such civilization shall endure, and even grow in culture, for it shall have a valid moral foundation, understandable to all. It will possess a vigor hitherto undreamed
