The teaching of international morality and universal interests, and the development of a world-consciousness depend fundamentally, we may suppose, upon experiences which are perhaps not specifically moral in form at all. It is rather even by the aesthetic experience than the moral that the social consciousness will best be expanded and made to encircle the world. If we can make the world seem vividly real to the child we shall have the intellectual content for the making of moral feelings. The unmoral nature of international relations and of the feelings of peoples for one another are due in great part precisely to the lack of power of imagination and of that concrete knowledge and experience which would make the foreign seem real. That which is remote from us and different in appearance seems shadowy and ghost-like. The internal meaning of that which is thus far away in space cannot be perceived. Everything that is foreign tends to belong in our categories merely to the world of objects. Moral feeling towards objects is manifestly impossible. International law fails to have moral force because nations are in general aware of one another only in these external ways. The world of foreign objects must be changed to a world of persons having history and internal meaning. When we can interpret and understand international law in terms of relations within human experience and as affecting individuals, it will begin perhaps to seem real and hence morally obligatory.

There is another aspect of the work of creating and directing the wider social consciousness and giving it ethical purpose and form, which is still more fundamental, and at the same time, to casual thought, perhaps still more remote from definite moral improvement in the world and from all the immediately practical problems of internationalism. It is the mood of our social life which we call the democratic spirit, and which, made universal, is the substratum of internationalism that most of all needs to be controlled and educated. At the same time this democratic spirit is least of all susceptible to definite and routine discipline, of all the factors of internationalism. This democratic spirit contains possibilities of the greatest good and of the greatest evil. Out of it may grow international order, or international anarchy and internal disruption. How to keep this democratic spirit progressive and constructive in its temper, broad in sympathy and full of enthusiasm, how to free it from infection by all the poisons that are prone to attack the popular consciousness is one of our great problems of education.

This democratic spirit is the real power behind internationalism. It is as the mood of the city, the whole spirit of the modern urban life, that it is most significant. The mood of the city contains on one side the possibility of an internationalism which is nothing more than a surrender of all patriotism, and is at heart only a mass interest in rights and needs. On the other hand all the interests and impulses that make internationalism necessary and possible seem to have their origin in the city. The city represents, with all its evil, the higher life and the line of progress. Progress passes through the city. The city is the symbol of creativeness and achievement. Industrialism, the essential spirit of the city, is the condition, normal and necessary we must conclude, out of which the necessity of international order arises. It is a phase of the process by which nations become dependent upon one another by being specialized and becoming densely populated. It is also a factor in the cause of wars without and revolutions within.

The mood of the city is thus in a sense the essence of life, but it is also the source of disease and death in the national life. It is the price that is paid for civilization that the city tends to become the hardened artery of national life. The control of the city moods by educational forces we may believe is one of the most fundamental of all the problems of conscious evolution. It is the control at the fountain-head of the forces out of which internationalism is to be made that we undertake when we try to educate the life of the city, with reference to its good and its evil. The too rapid urbanizing of the life of nations, the production, in the cities, of powers too great and too rapidly growing to be controlled by the civilizing forces in a country is the great danger in modern life. So great indeed are the dangers in the accelerated growth of industrialism in all the great countries and the increased specialization in the industrial life, that something radical must be done, in our view, to counterbalance this movement, and especially to control and to raise to higher levels the psychic factors of city life.

Our educational work is serious. We are trying to save democracy from itself—from being destroyed by forces which accumulate in the cities. We must keep life from becoming sophisticated before its time. We must prevent enthusiasm from degenerating into mob spirit, and from becoming attached to wholly material interests. There must be found, in some way, means of causing counter-currents to set in against the tide that flows so strongly from country to city. Germany's fate should teach us the dangers of this city life, and show us how the forces that gather in the great cities can be turned in the direction either of fanatical nationalism or toward the lowest of all forms of internationalism, in which all form of government is thrown down. It must teach us also how to catch the note of new "dominants" that are concealed in the roar of city life, and to make these prevail.

The control of the formation of the city moods, and the direction and utilization of the great energies contained in them, now require, if ever anything were demanded of conscious creative effort, more power on the part of all our educational factors. The school appears now to be at the parting of the ways, we say, when it must either settle down to its routine and limited occupation of preparing children for life, or become a far greater power in the world than it has as yet been. We must decide whether the school is to control, or to be controlled by, the political and industrial forces of the day. We must see whether the school is going to reflect the culture and the moods of the environment, or whether the school shall exert a creative influence upon its surroundings.

It is plain that nothing less than a radical change in the school can now greatly alter its position, and release it from its bondage to politics and from the overwhelming influences of its environment, and prevent the leveling downward and the stereotyping process that is taking place in the school, both as regards its intellectual and moral product and the training and selection of teachers. Nothing less than a movement which shall break up some of the deepest and most firmly rooted habits and conventions of the school and throw the school back, so to speak, upon more generic and primitive motives than those that now control it will be sufficient. The school needs more than anything else a change of scene—a change of venue, if a legal term be allowed. The school everywhere, but especially the school of the city, is surrounded by influences that prejudice it to fixed habits of thought and keep it true to a type which has long since ceased to be necessary. The school is causing an in-breeding of the city spirit in all the great industrial countries.

No single change in any institution, in our view, could strike closer to the roots of our whole educational problem of the future than the bodily transfer of the city school far out into the open country. Such a move seems wholly practicable, economic from every point of view, even the financial, and it would place the school in a position in which profound changes in its whole plan and organization could hardly fail to follow almost automatically. With our present facilities for transportation, the daily exodus of children from the surroundings in which are being produced the elements of our civilization that are hardest to control would be entirely possible. The effects upon the whole of education, and upon all the future life of countries like our own could hardly fail to be profound. The fundamental moods of childhood would be changed, and everything contained in child life would be more amenable to control. Schools would become more variable and more experimental, and new selective influences would be exerted upon teachers presumably in the direction of raising the social and intellectual average of the profession. A much larger field would be opened up for all those methods of work in education that may be designated as aesthetic—that is, that contain qualities of freedom, activity and creativeness.

VI. Idea of World Organization

Some form of organization of nations having definite representation, constitution, and laws, and with a certain degree of centralization and embodiment in visible institutions and locations will exist, we may suppose, for all future time in the world. The existence, even in idea, of such organization presents to us inevitable educational problems. Instruction in a general way and universally in world politics, familiarizing all with the meaning of these laws and political bodies, is but a part, although a necessary part, of the work. Our democratic principle demands that more and more interest and participation in all forms of government be acquired by the people, that peoples and not merely governments shall be the units which are brought together, that there be more organizations of the people performing group functions. If the loyalty of nations to one another is to be secured, as seems necessary, by establishing practical relations among them, the education of the coming generations in these relations and organizations and in all practical affairs seems unavoidable. The people must have a proper appreciation of common interests as implying common work, and not be encouraged to believe that rights of representation are their chief concern. All must know the power of organization. All must see that the international structures of our own day, however complete in form, are but a beginning and basis of function, and that there must be put behind these forms all the energies of the people, young and old, made effective through organization for practical efforts.

It is through participation in activities that are international in scope that, in our opinion, the best education in the idea of internationalism will be obtained. This is the way to the good will without which political ideas will be likely to remain nationalistic in fact whatever political cooerdinations may exist among nations. It is as a practical idea that internationalism needs now to be impressed upon the minds of all. An international organization must be looked upon as something useful, which will remain only if it performs functions in which all are interested and in which all can in some way take part. It is a sense of living in the world rather than of belonging exclusively to one locality that must be taught. It is the idea of a world of nations in organic unity rather than a world of nations attached to one another by political bonds that we need to convey.

It is active participation in the business of a world that must be regarded as the necessary basis for education in the idea of internationalism. World government must be conceived in terms of world functions. But we must also provide for the most dramatic possible representation of everything contained in the idea of internationalism and represented in its laws and forms. The most vivid possible presentation must be made of everything that is done internationally, if we wish to keep alive the spirit which now prevails in the world. We must lose no opportunity to make current history impressive; we must bring out all its dramatic features in order to fixate once for all the idea of the organic unity of the race, and its necessary cooerdination in tangible forms. International law must be made intelligible to very young minds, and now that we are to have an international seat of congresses and courts the utmost must be made of its existence to give reality to the idea of internationalism.

Those who plan for the future of the international idea will do well to take into account these pedagogical aspects of it. It is quite as important to make the international idea pedagogically persuasive as to make it politically sound. Such an idea must have a place and an embodiment if it is to seize hold upon the popular mind. An international city seems indispensable, and the further the thought of it can be removed from that of existing countries the more readily will it aid the young mind in making the abstractions necessary to conceive the true interests of all nations or all humanity as distinct from the interests of one nation. In this we are making beginnings to be realized perhaps in a far distant future. We want no unnatural and sentimental internationalism, but there is every reason now for wishing to plant the seed of a higher and more organic life than at the present time exists in the world.

The question of the possibility of an universal language arises again. The invention of a new language, if we may judge at all by the past, is not practicable. But the extension universally of some living language seems possible. This seems to be demanded in the interest of the international idea. It is desirable and quite possible to make all civilized peoples bilingual, for of course we should not expect anywhere to see a foreign language supplant the native tongue. It is not alone to facilitate intercourse and give a sense of solidarity that the possession of an universal language is to be desired. We think quite as much of the impetus thus given to the production of an universal literature, in which there will be expressed not only ideas about the world, but moods which will not be found expressed in national literatures at all. This literature might be the beginning of a solidarity in the world which is not now definitely conceivable. Such an extension of language, however, we should hardly expect to take place except in the course of development of practical relations which first stimulate the desire for such common language.

VII. The Philosophical Attitude

There is an element in the idea and mood of internationalism which we can call nothing else but philosophic. The ideality and universality of internationalism itself are expressions of the philosophic spirit. Internationalism, we might say, is a philosophic idea, although this might mean to some that we place it among the unrealizable and Utopian plans. But this is not the case. The philosophic spirit is, in our view, the most practical of moods, since it is the creative, liberal, and progressive attitude and the source of the most profoundly right judgments even in practical affairs. The philosophic spirit is a background, we may say, for all the more specific moods, thoughts and activities that enter into the idea of internationalism.

And yet, real and important as the philosophic spirit is, we cannot readily discuss it as a definite aspect of education. The reason is that it involves the educational foundations themselves. The spirit, the method and the content of the school are all involved in it. We can, however, find some concrete manifestations of this philosophic attitude. In the first place we might say that it is a religious mood in education. It is demanded of any school that hopes to play a large part in the affairs of the world that, in a broad sense, its whole spirit be religious. The school must be deeply touched by the sense of a spiritual world. The history of the world must be felt to be real—that is, as an unfoldment of purpose in the world. The values and the meaning of everything are to be appreciated and understood, according to this view, through a process of enrichment of the mind under the influence of the highest social ideals expressed in the most persuasive forms. Education thus centers in the work of developing the power to appreciate values in all experience. Anything, too, that sustains optimistic moods helps to create the philosophical spirit, and one function of this philosophic spirit is to forestall the cynical moods and the narrow and prejudiced ways of thinking which are among the most dangerous tendencies of the times. The tendency to form judgments upon insufficient evidence and to act according to narrow and one-sided principles is incompatible with the philosophic attitude.

It is of course by no means the actual teaching of philosophy to every one, or the spreading broadcast of any particular philosophical principle that one would advocate as a preventive culture or to cure existing evils. It is rather a mode of living and of thinking throughout society and in all the educational process that is wanted. What we need is a better quality of mental product, more capacity to penetrate into the heart and substance of experience, greater responsiveness to good influences, greater ability to judge values, and a more plastic and more freely flowing mental life. These are of course large demands and imply faith and an interest in a remote future. But a school which is religions through and through in its attitude toward life and is deeply touched by the influence of art in all its ways of dealing with the child will go a long way toward fulfilling the requirements of an education in the spirit of philosophy.

Such conclusions as these might at least serve, we should suppose, as a working hypothesis, upon the basis of which we may consider in detail a variety of questions of the day. New problems have arisen before the eyes of the teacher, and indeed obtrude themselves upon all who must take part in the practical life of others. Some of these problems are due to changed external relations of countries to one another. Some are problems of internal adjustment and reconstruction. At least they may so be classified for purposes of discussion. In reality all changes are too closely bound up with one another to allow us to treat them practically as independent. No nation any longer stands alone. Internationalism is an idea that penetrates all other practical ideas. And no internal problems of any nation can be wholly local. The world is in a peculiar but also an inspiring way at the present time a single field of labor for the educational thinker and indeed the teacher in every field of human life.



CHAPTER IV

PEACE AND MILITARISM

Among the many pedagogical questions raised and given new significance by the war, is that of the teaching about war and about peace. This is a question of ideals, and of values and the teaching of history. There are practical and superficial questions to be considered. There are also more profound problems, since all our teaching of good and evil is implicated. Shall we continue, in one moment, to assume that war is the greatest glory in the world, and in the next to condemn it as the greatest of evils? Shall we as teachers take the standpoint of pacifism? Or shall we be still apostles of the heroic order? This is really no simple matter, and it is not one to be laid aside, directly it begins to disturb us, as unimportant. No one passing through the experiences of the past four years can have wholly escaped this dilemma, or can have kept himself entirely aloof from the doubts and perplexities that must always be attached to religious and philosophical problems of good and evil. These doubts and hesitations are necessarily increased when we try to become consistent teachers and wise counselors of the young.

It would be of psychological interest at least to collect all the arguments and opinions that have been put forth about the good and evil of war. There is a tendency for moralists to go to extremes. The writers on war are likely to be either ardent pacifists or strong militarists. They do not try to strike a balance between good and evil, but war is either a great blessing upon mankind or the greatest curse of the ages. In general they do not seek to base their conclusions upon ultimate philosophical principles, but rather upon moral or biological principles, or, again, upon preferences for the activities of war or the arts of peace. How very different the good and evil of war and peace may seem from different points of view is well shown by the following excerpt from a daily newspaper:

A DEADLY PARALLEL

THIS IS THE WAY GERMANY TALKS THIS IS WHAT THE SCOUT TO YOUNG BOYS OF SCOUT AGE ORGANIZATION TEACHES AMERICAN BOYS From the "Handbook for Boys," 17th edition, page 454. "War is the noblest and "The movement is one for holiest expression of human efficiency and patriotism. It activity. For us, too, the does not try to make soldiers glad great hour of battle of boy scouts, but to make will strike. Still and deep boys who will turn out as men in the German heart must live to be fine citizens, and who the joy of battle and the will if their country needs longing for it. Let us them make better soldiers for ridicule to the utmost the having been scouts. No one old women in breeches who can be a good American unless fear war and deplore it as he is a good citizen, and cruel and revolting. No; war every boy ought to train is beautiful. Its august himself so that as a man he sublimity elevates the human will be able to do his full heart beyond the earthly and duty to the community. I want the common. In the cloud to see the boy scouts not palace above sit the heroes, merely utter fine sentiments, Frederick the Great and but act on them, not merely Blucher and all the men of sing 'My Country, 'Tis of action the Great Emperor, Thee,' but act in a way that Moltke, Roon, Bismarck are will give them a country to there as well, but not the be proud of. No man is a good old women who would take away citizen unless he so acts as our joy in war. When here on to show that he actually uses earth a battle is won by the Ten Commandments, and German arms and the faithful translates the Golden Rule dead ascend to Heaven, a into his life conduct and I Potsdam lance corporal will don't mean by this call the guard to the door exceptional cases under and 'Old Fritz' (Frederick spectacular circumstances, the Great), springing from but I mean applying the Ten his golden throne, will give Commandments and the Golden the command to present arms. Rule in the ordinary affairs That is the Heaven of Young of everyday life. I hope the Germany. boy scouts will practice truth and square dealing and "Because only in war all the courage and honesty, so that virtues which militarism when as young men they begin regards highly are given a taking a part not only in chance to unfold, because earning their own livelihood, only in war the truly heroic but in governing the comes into play, for the community, they may be able realization of which on earth to show in practical fashion militarism is above all their insistence upon the concerned; therefore, it great truth that the eighth seems to us who are filled and ninth commandments are with the spirit of militarism directly related to everyday that war is a holy thing, the life, not only between men as holiest on earth, and this such in their private high estimate of war in its relations, but between men turn makes an essential and the government of which ingredient of the military they are a part. Indeed, the spirit. There is nothing that boys, even while only boys, trades-people complain of so can have a very real effect much as that we regard it as upon the conduct of the holy." grown-up members of the community, for decency and square dealing are just as contagious as vice and corruption."

The praise of war takes many forms, and invokes many fundamental principles—ethical, aesthetic, biological, sociological. From Leibnitz' saying that perpetual peace is a motto fit only for a graveyard to Moltke's that peace is only a dream and not even a beautiful dream, there is a long list of defenses of war. This philosophy of war is by no means peculiarly German, although German writers seem to have been the most ardent apologists of war in recent times. Treitschke, Schmitz (29), Scheler (77), Nusbaum (86), Arndt, Steinmetz, Lasson, Engelbrecht, Schoonmaker, all sing the praises of war as the most glorious work of man, or as performing for civilization some noble good. Even Hegel said that wars invigorate humanity just as the storm preserves the sea from putrescence.

But this praise of war, we say, is by no means exclusively German. Thucydides thought war a noble school of heroism, the exercise ground of the nations. To Mohammed and his Arabs war seemed not only in itself a heroism, we are told, but a divine act. This belief in war as divine is an idea that is very wide-spread among primitive peoples. Cramb, the English writer, says that it is very easy to demonstrate that the glory of battle is an illusion, but by the same argument you may demonstrate that all glory and life itself is an illusion and a mockery. Redier says that the war has brought us all the noble joys so necessary to stimulate mankind, and one no longer finds happiness, therefore, in sleeping comfortably, but only in living bravely.

There is no lack, indeed, of recognition of the heroic motive in war. Sometimes the argument appeals to religion, sometimes to art, sometimes to morality. Sometimes the advocates of war are thinking of war as the great adventure. War and the thought of war induce an ecstasy, a glow of the feelings. War is thought of as an expression of normal, healthy life, as making life more abundant and more beautiful. War brings out fundamental virtues in the individual; it also destroys the weaker and the meaner race and leaves the strong and the virtuous. Struggle, they say, is the method of civilization. Again, it is urged that war is always just in its issues. Like the old ordeal which always registered the decrees of heaven, war is the just arbiter of fate. The saving of the world through bloodshed, the uniting of the world through war, war as the great teacher of mankind, war as the creator of great personalities—all these are persistent themes in the literature of war. There is no place for the pacifist in the minds of these apologists of the heroic order. The crises of war are historic necessities; they come when it is time to release people from the bondage of the past and to bring individualistic generations back to the sense of duty and of loyalty to great causes. This is the belief of many, even now.

On the other side we find the great variety of pacifistic minds. War to the pacifists is wrong, unholy, morally sinful, biologically and economically and in every other way evil. The conscientious objector's point of view is very simple. War antagonizes some principle which is religiously or morally supreme for him. Therefore there can be no justification of war whatever, and it ought to be abolished at any price. When you ask the objector to go to war, you invite him to commit a flagrant sin. The English literature of pacifism is full of this moral and religious protestation against war which in the minds of the objectors becomes a finality beyond which it is futile to ask them to go.

The psychological and the biological pacifists are hardly less emphatic in their condemnation of war. The biological thinker undertakes to refute the theory that war is selective. He counts the cost of war in terms of human life and of racial vitality, and produces a condemning document. That war indeed selects but selects unfavorably and in an adverse direction is the conclusion of many, among them Savorgnan in his book "La Guerra e la Populazione," in which he calls war dysgenic. The psychologist tends to see in war a reversion, a lapse to barbarism. War is a product of the original savage in man, whom civilization has never tamed, as Freud would say. War lingers because of man's love of old institutions. We cling to old habits and customs, which take on a semblance of the aesthetic, because of their antiquity and old associations. This is the explanation by Nicolai. Russell thinks men fight because they are still ignorant and despotic. Patrick thinks of war as a slip in the psychic machinery. MacCurdy (37) and others think of war as a mental or a social disease.

Upon the hardships of war, its economic futility and its sheer senselessness, when looked at from the standpoint of any rational desire, many base their conclusion that war is evil. The working man and all the masses are likely to concur in this opinion. When they examine war they see that they themselves as they think are used in the interest of the few, that they shed their blood for a glory in which they do not share. They say, all men are brothers, and so why should they kill one another. Men seem more real to them than do boundaries of countries which they never see, and the interests of wealth that is also invisible.

Such thought as this has behind it some of the most powerful minds, as we know. It is Tolstoi's philosophy, and it is the argument of such men as Novicow. The professional economist and the student of history add their protests. They say that military peoples fade away, while the peaceful live and prosper, that "the country whose military power is irresistible is doomed." These are the words of Roberts. Some try to demonstrate that nothing is gained economically by war; that all the work of war is destructive, to every one engaged in it. It is argued that the nation that is suited to live will prevail without wars; and that without this inner superiority, war will avail nothing. War is bad business, in the opinion of these economic thinkers. War is like setting the dog on the customer at the door, the practical man in England complained at the beginning of the present war. As to war being associated with intelligence and with virtue in nations, or as to its ever producing either intellectual or moral qualities, many would flatly deny that war ever has such a result. The opposite would seem nearer the truth to them. Military nations are unintelligent nations, and militarism is always brutalizing.

Such pacifism and the dream of universal peace are no new ideas in the world. Like the philosophy of war pacifism has a long history. There have been pacifists everywhere and presumably at all times, since pacifism is quite as much a temperament as it is an idea or a philosophy. Cramb tells us that all recent centuries have had their doctrines of pacifism, each century having its own characteristic variety. In the time of the Marlborough wars, there appeared the book of Abbe de St. Pierre denouncing all wars. In the middle of the nineteenth century there is the doctrine of the Manchester school, maintaining that the peace of Europe must be secured not by religion, but by the cooeperation of the industrial forces of the continent. Finally, says Cramb, we see the characteristic thought of the twentieth century in the position that war is bad because it is contrary to social well-being and is economically profitless, alike to the victor and the vanquished. This is the pacifism of the socialist who holds that the ties of common labor and economic state are fundamental, and divisions into nationality are secondary and unimportant; and that militarism belongs to the pernicious state of society which perpetuates capitalism and privilege and to government as a function of the favored classes.

This is certainly not the place to try to put order into this conflicting mass of opinion about war and peace by working out the principles of a philosophy of good and evil, since this would mean to attack one of the most fundamental of all problems of philosophy. It seems to be plain, however, that neither upon biological grounds nor by ethical principles, nor by finding any consensus in the desires and opinions of thinkers can we reach any hard and fast conclusions about the good and evil of war. It is rather by a broad interpretation of the world and of history and the nature of national consciousness, by some genetic view of national life, that we are most likely to see our way toward a practical view of the present good and evil of war. War is a phase of the whole process of social development of nations. We think of nations as living and growing, and of a world which is gradually maturing. War obtains a natural explanation on sociological and psychological principles, not as a disease, but as a natural consequence and condition of the formation of nations, or of any type of horde or group. In the course of the development of nations we see psychological factors coming more and more to the front. Desires which are more or less consciously avowed become the motives of history. It is in the play of these desires: their fixation, their generalization, and transformation, the manner in which they become attached to specific objects, that we seek the explanation of wars and of the especial psychology of nations. Nations have lived secluded and guarded lives, because of the nature of the desires which were most fundamental in their lives, and the objects upon which these desires have become directed. Now nations show some signs of emerging from their seclusion, of abandoning their ambitions of empire, and leading a more complex and more practical life.

In this progress we see the possibility of the final disappearance of war. But we have no right to pervert either history or education in the effort to eliminate war, or even to pass judgments upon war prematurely or upon the basis of personal preferences, or the moods of any moment. The whole world might, conceivably, be brought together and be made to declare solemnly that there should be no more war. Nations would thereby voluntarily relinquish their aggressive thoughts, put aside the love they have for the heroic and take justice and peace as their watchwords. And all this would seem ideal. But if the elimination of war should mean that we have no longer anything for which men are willing to die, if merely to escape from war we voluntarily sacrifice good that more than counterbalances the evil we overcome, we should say that peace had been bought at too high a price. Terrible as war is, it cannot be judged by itself alone. We have a right to look forward to a time when there shall be no more war, just as everywhere it seems to be instinctive for us to try to gain good without its attendant trouble and evil. In the meantime the world had best busy itself, mainly, in our view, with creating those things that are best, rather than in destroying those things that are worst. Nations, like individuals, must lead bravely hazardous lives, without too much thought of dangers. Peace as a sole program for the making of history appears to be too narrow, and especially too unproductive. Internationalism that is merely a combination of peoples to prevent war is not very inspiring, especially since it is doubtful whether it even leads to peace. A broad historical view that will enable us just now to make good come out of the evil of war will be a better organ of conscious evolution than a philosophy of peace can possibly be.

Such views as these give us at least some clews to the educational and pedagogical problems of war and peace. We can distinguish between an education which deals specifically with such problems, endeavoring to treat them sharply and with finality, making clear moral decisions, and an education which by enriching the mind and by educating all the selective faculties leads to an appreciation of all great practical and moral questions as aspects of the whole of history and of life.

Let us see what the specific teaching of peace may and may not include. First of all we cannot, for educational purposes, judge everything in the lives of nations by moral principles. The ideal of universal brotherhood and cooeperation, of sacrifice and altruism, cannot be realized in the present stage of history. On the other hand, the stern picture of justice is one that fits into the present mood of the world. Justice is the natural link between individualism and altruism. A world determined upon seeing justice done, a world which, without setting absolute values upon peace and war, does distinguish between just and unjust wars, between the demands and the needs of peoples, leans toward the moral life. It has little to say about duties as yet, or comparatively little, but it has a strong conception of rights. A deep enough interest in justice, by its own momentum, introduces duties into the practical life. In time the world will perhaps not be satisfied with seeing and recognizing justice, and ensuring it in great crises; it will make justice as a matter of course.

This idea of justice seems, on the whole, to be the best basis for the teaching now of international morality. The teaching of pacifism, enlarging upon the biological waste of war, trying to present the realism of war in its worst light in order to overcome the warlike spirit and to assist the doctrines of internationalism to take effect upon the mind seems to be the wrong way of teaching peace. We seem to be obligated to teach war as it is. We cannot conceal its heroic side for fear of perpetuating war, and we must not conceal the brutality of war for fear of destroying morale and the fighting spirit. And it is to be much doubted whether it is ever necessary to teach history unfairly and one-sidedly in times either of war or of peace. We depend upon larger effects and deeper judgments than can be produced by selecting and distorting the facts. Nothing is meaner in national life than dishonest history.

Education in the ideal of peace, which we may hope to be the state of the world in the future, will be an adjustment of the mind to new and practical modes of life rather than the establishing of a principle. The educated attitude of mind which will best safeguard the peace of the world must include an intelligent knowledge of all the agencies proposed to aid in establishing this state of harmony toward which we look forward. We must all know about arbitration, leagues of nations, courts of honor, understand diplomacy better and the arguments for disarmament, understand the economic and the industrial situation, the possibilities of cooeperation, reduction of the rights and privileges of classes, democratic movements. The inculcation of such knowledge is an education for peace. There is little that is abstruse in any of these ideas, and the very young child is not too young to know something of these wider aspects of the social life. All these may be presented in a concrete form as a part of the work of conveying a knowledge of current history.

We may think of various cures for war, and various efforts that might be made educationally to prevent war. Peace might effectually be cultivated by an educational propaganda. But after all it is not such cures of war as this that we are most concerned about in the work of education. We might even tend to establish in this way a peace which would be detrimental to the higher interests of civilization. A true educational philosophy, at any rate, is not to be dislodged from its purpose of keeping education constructive rather than inhibitory. This institution of education must not be too much influenced by the temporary moods of the day, by the present gloomy evidences of the devastation of war. We must teach and prepare for an abundant life in which there is glory and wide opportunity, and in which the motives of power may be satisfied. Then peace can take care of itself. But this abundant life must be a life of activity, not of mere patriotism and subjective glorification and nationalistic interest. Vanity, the low order of enthusiasms, the glory of display, can no longer have a place in this national life.

There appears to be a pedagogical lesson in the contrast between the heroic and the moral view of teaching war and peace illustrated by the German philosophy of war and the ideal of the Boy Scout organization. Deducting something for literary exaggeration, we may say that education cannot afford to neglect either of these attitudes, but must indeed in some way combine them. The exaggeration consists on one side in praising the specific act of war; but on the other side there is plainly lacking something of the dramatic appeal which any ideal life for the young must have. War is an evil, but the spirit that makes war is by no means an evil. The philosophy of war proves its failure by ignoring the moral ideal altogether, or regarding morality as something solely national, but the other, it may be, puts the moral ideal in a pedagogically impossible position. Both the content and the form must be taken into account in any educational plan that hopes to exert power or to be influential in any important way now, and it is the form which, more than anything else, is still lacking in our whole procedure of education.

Preparedness and Military Training

Military training has now of course become a practical question with us and with every nation. It is the military use of military education that must first of all be considered. For that reason it must primarily be a problem upon which political authorities and military experts must decide. These experts must be competent to tell us what military equipment is necessary at any time to meet the requirements of our political situation, and they must be able to advise about the amount and kind of actual military training necessary to make this physical equipment most effective. All this, plainly, must be provided whether it be good or bad from a general educational standpoint. But preparedness and national defense mean, of course, more than the possession of guns and more than military training as such. And there can be no hard and fast line between military preparedness and the wider technical preparedness in which all the equipment and skill of scientific and mechanical activities of the country are always ready to be mobilized in the defense of it; or between these and the still more general preparedness through the organization and control of the human factor in ways that are not specifically military or mechanically technical at all.

If preparation for defense is by no means exhausted by military training, on the other hand not all military training is intended for defense. Decision about the actual amount and kind of military training, we say, may be left to the expert, but it is for the psychologist and the educator to decide whether we need a mere minimum of such training or a general military training for educational purposes. After all, however, this is perhaps more a matter of taste in educational practices than of learning. There is plenty of opinion at least on both sides. Some maintain that military discipline is of very great benefit to the man and to society. From the German point of view it is the equivalent of hygiene for the individual. It is a national regimen for physical and mental health. It is also the symbol and the expression of social solidarity. Many believe that the discipline of soldiering would be especially good for all American boys. But there is no dearth of evidence on the other side—that military training in so far as it is really conducted in the military manner is brutalizing.

After all, we say this may be a matter of preference. Some like military discipline in the schools and everywhere; some do not. The present writer for one will confess that he does not. It is not the danger of making a people warlike that one sees in it, so much as the certainty of introducing into all the daily life a spirit that is inconsistent with our stage of civilization and with the most wholesome spirit of education. It savors of the unprogressive. It means, in our opinion, the introduction into the school, in a far too easy and simple way, and consequently at far too low a level, something that ought to be put into education in a different manner. The sense of solidarity and the idealism which the German has found in his military discipline we must express in some other way. It is especially the unproductiveness of military life, and the constant suggestion of that which is archaic without either the practical setting or the ornamental life to which such things belong, that are especially to be charged against militarism.

We ought to ask, rather, how peace morale, and the essentials of the warlike spirit may be maintained without military training. Is it not rather by way of the more general and untechnical processes of education which make for physical expertness, by fundamental social education, by giving attention to our foundations of religious education, that we shall be able to create and sustain the most efficient morale? The best foundation for all necessary military activities of a free people appears to be a by-product, so to speak, of peaceful life sustained at a high point of efficiency and enthusiasm. Military training disconnected from its immediate use and application in war must appear to some and indeed to many as a misfit in modern civilized life. This is not an argument for pacifism, however. The war has taught us that militarism and military capacity in high degree may spring up from very peaceful soil, and also that military training, however perfect, is no substitute for the generic virtues out of which courage and patriotism grow. In the long run will it not be the country that can do without military training that will have the advantage? Or the country in which military preparedness is so merged in everything else as to be indistinguishable from the rest of life? Is there not, in a word, a preparedness that will make a country superior and safe both in war and in peace?



CHAPTER V

THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM

It would be hard to find a word (unless it be democracy) about which so many questions gather as now cling to the word "patriotism." Patriotism is praised as the highest virtue; it is also cursed as the cause of war. Some think of it as the sole cause of war. Some would like to see it disappear for the reason that they believe it at best an old and out-lived social virtue, now having become merely ornamental and an obstacle to the true socialization of the world. Some think patriotism still the center of the moral and the social life.

This is not the place to attempt a psychological analysis of patriotism, but we may at least try to enumerate the principal factors in it, and say what we think patriotism as a virtue—or a vice—is. Patriotism in our view is normally loyalty to country as a functioning unit in a world of nations. It is devotion to all the aspects and functions of a country as an historical entity. We must think of these historical entities, moreover, as leading lives in which, although their own ambitions for honor and greatness are legitimate, there must be a practical recognition of the legitimacy of similar interests on the part of all other nations, and in which the recognition of the common interests of nations is also freely made. Since nations perform no one single function and have no single motive of life in their normal state, patriotism can be no devotion to a single purpose or cause. Such patriotism as this, we may say, does not antagonize internationalism. Loyalty to country is loyalty to the functions and interests that properly belong to country. The individual, the family, the country and all intervening groups and entities are natural formations. To each of these entities there is due a loyalty precisely measured by the character of the functions which these entities perform.

This view of patriotism is plainly, both in its theoretical aspect and its practical consequences, widely different from those that end in pure internationalism. Its essential feature is that it recognizes the validity of all entities and groups about which deep feeling has grown up. This means, of course, that as criteria of social values these feelings are placed ahead of certain logical or scientific considerations. Pure internationalism of the intellectual type recognizes the validity only of the whole world group. Nicolai, for example, says that there is a morality and there are rights pertaining to the individual and to the whole of humanity, but all intervening groups are temporary and artificial. That, certainly, we should not agree with. The coming greater cooerdination of the world we may suppose will deepen and intensify patriotism, rather than diminish it. The homogeneity toward which the biologists tell us we are tending and ought to approach is one in which, it is likely, still sharper national outlines may well appear. The ambitions, the functions, and the culture of nations ought to be made clearer rather than be lost in the coming internationalism. We shall still in the Hegelian sense find our reality in and through the state. An aroused sense of the function and worth of country will be the basis of patriotism. Advancement toward internationalism will be made by a generalized patriotism rather than by outgrowing patriotism. That is, it is by passing from a deepened loyalty to country through a sense of the validity and right of the patriotism of all peoples that international social consciousness will be developed.

So all those very numerous views of patriotism which assert that it is only through a decline of patriotism that a rational international order can ever be established, appear to be wrong. A fundamental question is at issue here. It concerns in part the criteria of valuation in the field of the social life. The kind of cosmopolitanism and internationalism that demands the final abrogation of the sentiment of patriotism is, as we have intimated, a rationalistic doctrine. It is an attempt to extend objective principles into the realm of social values. Reason tells us, they say, that we ought to organize universally and obliterate national lines. Reason tells us we should make no distinction between ourselves and strangers, between enemies and allies. But by the same rationalism we may break up any loyalty. Patriotism is an inner, a spiritual force, and it has its roots in moods and forms of appreciation which have a certain finality about them, for the reason that they are deposits from the whole course of human history. Veblen says it is a matter of habit to what particular nationality a man will become attached on arriving at years of discretion. That is true, and it is of course the whole secret of loyalty. But it is not a matter of unimportance whether a man shall become attached to any country. It is the dynamic power of loyalty that is in question, if we consider its practical value. Loyalty grows because it has a use, which is related to the most basic feelings. It is not a product of reason, and cannot justly be judged on purely rational grounds.

Any political ideal, or any plan for a world order, that would minimize patriotism is unnatural. The forms of socialism that do this and the laissez faire tendencies appear to have left out of the reckoning some of the modes of evaluating experience which are most basic. We may recognize all the excess of provincialism in the native patriotism of the peasant, and all the egoistic motives in the patriotism of the aristocrat and the militarist, but still we see no place in the world for the man without a country. It is not yet the workmen of the cities, who say that all men are brothers, who can lead us to a better social order. Patriotism must be educated, modernized, made more productive, but certainly its work is not yet done. It cannot be cast aside as something archaic and only a part of the ornamental and useless encumbrances of life. It is not by weakening loyalty to country, but by strengthening it, that internationalism will be made secure. If patriotism fits into modern life like sand in the machinery, as Veblen says, we must see how patriotism may be made to do better service.

Some views about patriotism which thus disparage it seem to be based upon a biological conception of it. Not a few writers apparently think of patriotism as a fixed trait of the human organism, even as a kind of mendelian character unrelated to other social qualities. This trait antagonizes social progress, but it is preserved because of secondary values which it represents, such as moral or aesthetic values. According to these views patriotism may be complex, but it acts like a unitary character. It is subject, theoretically, to selection, but as a matter of fact it remains a strong factor in the temperament of nearly all races.

But in our view patriotism is something less precise than all this would imply. It is a form in which the most fundamental and general of desires are expressed, in becoming fixated upon their most natural and necessary objects. It is an aspect of the whole process of development of the affective life. Leaving out patriotism (if such a thing were possible) would mean a break in the continuity of the social life. It would leave one group of functions without their natural support in desire. Economists sometimes seem to leave out of account the profound emotional forces and the irresistible tendencies which make social groups. They want organizations without the moods and impulses by which alone social bodies are formed or sustained; and they expect to see organization broken up or interest in it lost while all the conditions that keep alive the passion for it are intact. Patriotism and the existence of nations seem, however, to be the opposite sides of the same fact. And we may assume that so long as nations exist, at any rate, patriotism will exist, and one of the most necessary functions of public education will be the regulation of the motives and feelings which are contained in this sentiment.

Patriotism is first of all to be considered, then, as a phase of the social life as a whole, rather than as an unique emotion or a special variety of loyalty. It is a way in which the sum of tendencies that enter into the social life become fixated upon certain qualities of the environment, or upon certain objects. Patriotism will best be understood in a practical way by observing its objects. Patriotism is a total mood; country is a total object. But the mood of patriotism expresses varied desires, and the object of patriotism is a highly complex and variable object. In being loyal to or devoted to country in the sense which we usually mean when we say one is patriotic, we are devoted to at least the following objects: 1) physical country as home; 2) the ways, customs, standards and beliefs of the country; 3) the group of people constituting the nation; and here race, social solidarity, ideal constructions of an united people having common purposes and possessions enter; 4) leaders; 5) country as an historical entity having rights and interests—a living being having experiences, ideals and characteristics. The educational problem is of course the regulation of the attachment of the individuals of a nation to these objects. In one sense this educational problem of patriotism is nothing less than that of developing social consciousness itself. It is precisely the task of fostering or creating in the child the basis of all loyalty. Given a loyal mind in the child and a normal environment, we need to be concerned but little about the causes and the groups upon which that loyalty will expend itself, for the conditions are all present for forming an attachment to every natural group. Considered generically and psychologically there is no patriotism, we say, marked off from everything else, and there is no one object that excites patriotic loyalty. All educational influences that strengthen attachment to home, all social feeling, devotion to the ways of any group and obedience to its standards, respect for all law and authority, all appreciation of historic relations, help to develop patriotism, merely because country, in these aspects, is an omnipresent object to which the feelings thus engendered will automatically become to some extent attached.

The first task in the teaching of patriotism (first at least as regards the obviousness of the need) is to give all children a vivid sense of country as physical object, and a deep aesthetic appreciation of this object—although of course this idea of physical country cannot be detached from everything else. Each country has its different problem. Ours is to create a total country, in the imagination of the young. A German writer not long ago predicted that the future of America lay in the direction of breaking up into a little England, a little Ireland, and a little of the other nationalities here represented. That particular danger may seem remote enough, but in another way we do continue to be lacking in unity. Our patriotism has been too local, and America, even after the great war, is to some extent still a collection of geographical regions. New England, the South, the Coast are more real to many than country as a whole. Our great distances, and the impossibility of clearly imagining them have necessarily presented obstacles thus far to a unified image of country. The time may come, and perhaps soon, when such a divided consciousness of country will be a grave flaw in our national life.

It must be a serious function of some kind of geography to give reality to the idea of country, although of course we cannot separate entirely geographical from historical idea of country. The teaching of the geography of the native land must be different from other geography. Native land must have a warmth and home feeling about it that other countries do not have, but as yet the psychological conditions for this have apparently not been worked out. With our present facilities in pictorial art, the geographical element in the idea of country seems controllable. The minds of children are exceedingly impressionable in this direction. Intensity of feeling and vividness of imagination are at the disposal of the educator. The love of color, especially, must be used to make lasting impressions upon the mind. We need to notice also that the idea of physical country that enters most into patriotic feeling is not an idea of city streets but of the open country. It is the country that inspires the strongest home feeling, and it is the country that is the basis of the sense of changelessness and eternity of native land, that is a strong element in patriotic sentiment. This element of patriotism, it is plain, is something aesthetic. It is not so much a moral loyalty to country that is inspired by the everlasting hills, as an aesthetic love of it as the home land. This aesthetic love of the home land is a response to such stimuli as the beautiful arouses everywhere. It is susceptible, therefore, to all the influences of art—of music, picture, symbol; these must all be employed in teaching patriotism. The theme of home is especially sensitive to the effects of music. It is this idea of home, enlarged and enriched by pictorial representation of country, deeply impressed and influenced by music, and unified and imbued with the feeling of personal possession by the story of country that is the core of patriotic feeling. It is the function of art, especially of music, to help to make the home feeling of the child normal and enthusiastic—to raise it above the stage of being an "anxiety of animal life," as Nicolai terms the primitive love of home. Art must help to remove the fears and depressions that may lurk in the idea of home, which are great obstacles to the development of the higher devotions. It is the lack of normal love of home in the city, we should say, that makes socialism and all forms of internationalism that breed so rapidly there such dangerous moods in a democracy. Without true home love, we may conclude, the wider loyalties can never be quite wholesome, although they may be intense and fanatical.

The second element in patriotism we identify as the love of, or loyalty to, the sum of the customs, beliefs, and standards that make up the mores of a people. A peculiarly perplexing educational problem arises, since there are two opposite evils to be avoided We may too readily cultivate a spirit which either takes the form of a narcissistic love of one's own ways, or which, extraverted, so to speak, becomes a fanatical ambition to impose one's own culture upon the world; or, on the other hand we might become too self-critical, too cosmopolitan, and too receptive toward all foreign culture. National conceit, complacency and destinism face us in one direction, the danger of losing our identity and our individuality and our mission in the other. These problems of course confront all nations; they are especially urgent in America, because of the composite nature of our national life and the rapid changes that take place in it, and also because of the ideal nature of the bond that holds us together. We are still a somewhat inchoate and flowing mass of social elements, imperfectly cooerdinated, manifestly, yet deeply united by ideals which appeal to very deep emotions. Our work is to maintain social solidarity, preserve and educate certain fundamental qualities of our national life which are our real claims to individuality as a people. These essential traits, perhaps because of our newness as a form of civilization, appear to be less clearly defined, less definitely represented in institutions, and to be more abstract than the qualities that make up the essential character of other peoples.

Our educational problem is, naturally, different from all others. We are committed to an idea of liberty. We make this principle of freedom the dominant in all our national life. We have not tried, and cannot consistently attempt to centralize our educational institutions very much, or even allow our culture to become crystallized into a definite type, for this would be almost as bad as denying our principle of religious freedom. But we cannot, in the other direction, become too diversified intellectually, and still less in regard to more fundamental aspects of life, for this would break up our unity altogether, or determine it more and more in the direction of political coercion. Thus far, it appears, it has been our great virtue as a people that we have remained united by emotional forces, or by the suggestive power of an idea. Sooner or later we shall need to see whither our present tendencies lead, and education must in all probability be put to work to control and regulate the elements that make for unity and for disruption in our life. Our work as educators will be to maintain a working harmony in the affective and instinctive life of the people. We need now, and we shall need more and more, religious, moral and aesthetic unity in our life as a nation—not a forced and superficial agreement, but a deep harmony of ideals and moods. This purpose must never be lost sight of by the educator. It must be made to pervade all our educational philosophy and all our plans for the school. This educational problem exists of course everywhere in some degree, and in regard to all manner of social groups. But American life as a whole is peculiarly a growth in which diverse and even divergent elements must continue to be brought together and held together through the power of ideas which are subject to many influences. Diversity and differentiation are added as fast as the process of assimilation can be carried on. There can be no closing up of differences in a final perfection and security.

Must we not, then, make the education of instincts and feelings, and the control of the basic moods, rather than the development and stimulation of specialization and differentiation our first and chief concern? Must we not do this even at a loss of efficiency in some directions, if necessary? Certainly we must not go too fast nor too far towards industrialism. To control any tendency to over differentiation and industrialism that is now likely to occur we must have a broad humanitarianism and a humanistic ideal of culture (by which we do not mean classicism). The sharing of all experiences that represent our spirit and purpose and American ideas, and equal opportunity to realize them, must be our thought in planning our educational work. The future of America may well depend upon our power, or upon the power of our original idea, to hold people together by the essential moods in which our American ideas are represented. The production, out of these elemental moods, of common interests on a high level will be, we take it, the only preventive in the end of the growth of common interests on a low level, which is always threatened in democracies, and is the way democracies tend to destroy themselves by their democracy. Education in the fundamentals of industrial life, in social relations, in play and in art, in religion, is what we most need—the latter, we may conclude, most of all. We must have in some way a greater religious unity and more religion, not by attempting an impossible amalgamation of creeds as was promulgated by some of the founders of the New Japan, but by an education that includes and brings forth all that is common in religion. That at least is the only kind of unity that offers hope finally of making a world safe with democracy in it. This is not a plea for a back-to-nature movement, for the simple life, for a life which tends away from industrialism. Industrialism will go on, if for no other reason, because pastoral or agricultural peoples would soon be at a disadvantage in an industrial world as it is organized now, for want of rapid increase in population. But it is implied that industry itself must be made suitable for the democratic life. It means that we must go back of the identities of language and obedience to common laws, and take as our educational foundations that which American life is in truth based upon: physical power and motor freedom, the sense of liberty, the colonial spirit of comradeship and devotion to common cause, the ideal of an abundant and enthusiastic life. Merely becoming conscious of these and observing their meaning and their place in our national life is in itself a large contribution to the sources out of which patriotism may be drawn. When our patriotism is sincere enough so that we shall be milling to sacrifice for country our religious intolerance and bigotry, our social antipathies, and our industrial advantages, we shall have a morale which for peace or for war will be wholly sufficient.

Must our ambition be to teach American children that American ways are the best, and that these ways ought to be established in the world? There is both an evil and a good, both an absurdity and a sublime loyalty in the view which all nations have, that their own culture and life are the best. This conceit is in part a product of isolation, and is pure provincialism. But it is also of the very essence of the reality feeling and the sense of solidarity of peoples and of their loyalty to country. It must not be dealt with too ruthlessly. There is a primitive stratum of it that must remain in all peoples. Nations, however benighted, will not be dispossessed of this idea, but experience and education will make nations more discriminating so that they can at least see what is essential and what is superficial in their own characteristics. Certainly whatever is ethical in our foundations we, and all other peoples, will be expected to hold to. We feel it a duty to spread our moral truth abroad and our mores are necessarily right for us, and this idea of rightness of mores must imply a desire to make them prevail in the world. We may recognize, abstractly, other standards of conduct, but there is something in moral belief which, of course, cannot voluntarily be changed, and which must stand for the ultimately real in consciousness so long as it is held to be so by the mass of the people. This must extend also to aesthetic standards, and to all final judgments of values to some extent.

For these reasons we must suppose that the spirit of competition among nations, certainly so far as it concerns the ambition for empires of the spirit, must remain. Belief on the part of a people in the superiority of their own culture cannot and should not be eliminated. By this spirit the good, we may be sure, will prevail, but prevail only through opposition and competition. There can be no real compromise in the field of these moral possessions and appreciations. We must be Americans, and react with American ideas. True nationalists everywhere appear to recognize and to be guided by this truth. We cannot voluntarily lay aside our own beliefs nor help believing they are right, although we may see that were we differently situated we might change them.

There are three things at least, as regards our mores that cannot be accomplished. For this we may take our evidence and our warning from Germany. Culture cannot be spread by force, since force does not conquer spirit. Devotion to the basic principles of one's civilization cannot rationally nor safely be extended to include all customs and manners, so that we may assume that there is a right way in everything which is ours and a wrong way which is foreign. The mores of a people cannot be changed or manipulated by education and propaganda without uprooting the moral structures of society. When we begin to practice a Social-politik we enter upon dangerous ground.

Are we not, then, to take the attitude in education that our culture is an experimental culture and represents an experimental civilization? Although for us our ways and beliefs are final criteria of values in conduct, and we cannot hope or wish to free ourselves from them or to be guided by objective data, still we put them forward in the spirit of the enquirer, rather than as eternal principles. If this be right, we are not to guard our civilization jealously, hedge it about with national jealousy and bigotry but rather send our culture abroad on a mission. We are to understand and to teach the culture of every other nation sympathetically, trusting to our own foundations to hold firm. We must be so fortified in our own virtue that we shall not be afraid to send our spirit abroad to compete with whatever it shall meet in the old world or the new. This impulse to extend one's culture and philosophy is a deep one, and we believe it to be well-grounded. It has been said that the deepest impulse of British imperialism has been to extend English ways of thought throughout the world. There is truth in this. We may conclude also that unless a nation can feel sincerely that it is founded upon something that ought to endure and at least to have an opportunity to become universal, it lacks a growth principle and its civilization is not very secure. Certainly it lacks a great pedagogical advantage in all the internal work of education.

The work of the intellectual leaders of a people is to uncover this kernel of sincere belief and worth, and strip nationalism at the same time of its encrustations of vanity and deception. There are, we may suppose, at the bottom of every nation's consciousness such sincere principles which are entitled to a fair field in the competition of the civilizations and the cultures of the world. We may be sure that there is Americanism that needs to be taught both for the sake of the world and for our own sake; something which constitutes our best contribution to an experimental world in which the over-emphasis of all sincere principles can ultimately do no harm. Americanism, with all the errors it may contain, and all the limitations it may have as a universal principle is better for us and for all, we may believe, than any dispassionate and well considered intellectualism, or a cosmopolitanism that is based upon a fear of provincialism. Let us be prepared, therefore, to go forth not to conquer but to participate in the life of the world.

As regards materials by means of which we are to teach a patriotism that shall be a strong devotion to the mores of the nation, there appear to be three important elements. We have, first, a literature which contains in part at least the spirit of our national life, although it does so only in part. Secondly, we have a beginning at least of an interpretation of American life through an American history that is to be something more than a history of political events, and shall be a true history of the American people. This history must include the history of our ideas and our ideals, our literature, institutions, art, and be indeed a true social history. This history must be the main source book for teaching what our country has meant to those who have lived in it, and what these people have really been and done. This is national character study. Character study, a truly psychological and interpretative history, should teach us what we are likely to do and what we ought to do in all typical situations with which we are likely to be confronted. How far we are as yet from such a general knowledge in regard to ourselves needs hardly to be suggested. The third element in this aspect of the teaching of patriotism is something more tangible and more immediately practical. Our ideals have to some extent at least been crystallized in our institutions, where they will still further be elaborated. The participation on the part of all in some way in these institutions is a part of our required training for good American life. A book knowledge of institutions is, of course, better than none at all, but there is no reason why knowledge should end there. All people, especially those now being educated, ought to have more direct and more intimate part in all the representative institutions of our country, even in the political institutions, and perhaps in them most of all. Americanism, whatever else it may be, must be a practical Americanism. It must have ideals and clear visions, it goes without saying, but it is the making and shaping of institutions by living in and through them that must be the main feature of our social life and of our education. When the individual and the social form are molded and developed together, patriotism will be a natural phase of mental growth.



CHAPTER VI

THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM (continued)

Patriotism we thought to be, in the third place, devotion to the group. Here the problem of the teaching of patriotism becomes specifically a question of social education. The question arises as to precisely what the objects of the devotion we call loyalty to the group are, and what factors in group-consciousness need most to be emphasized or educated as patriotism. Is it race or manners or the pure fact of propinquity or herd contact or all together that are the objects of social desire and the feeling of solidarity?

Race has been emphasized as the prime interest in group loyalty, but there seems to be doubt about this. At least there are difficulties in isolating anything we can call love of race. We can never separate race from propinquity, for example, or from mores, or from the bonds due to common possession of causes. Race loyalty appears to be a primitive feeling. When races were pure, groups small and possession common, all the elements of loyalty to group were present at once and coextensive. As civilization progressed the bond of pure race lessened. All races have now become mixed, we are told, and kinship in a group has ceased to be a fact. Nicolai maintains that race patriotism has grown out of family instinct, as something quite separate from herd instinct, but it seems likely that common interests, organization under necessity, or the social attraction resulting from any common cause must have been stronger than any consciousness of kinship, or any herd instinct as such—which may indeed not have existed at all.

It is this more conscious bond of function and propinquity at least that must be taken into account in the education of patriotism—certainly American patriotism. We in America can hardly emphasize race patriotism, without producing internal disruption. It is common function that is the distinguishing mark of the individuals of a group, rather than common origin. Common function, especially subsumption under one ordered government, particularly if the purpose be that of securing common protection, can plainly overcome all loyalty to race. Common religion antagonizes race consciousness, and we see therefore within nations races splitting up along lines of religious difference. We see within races also greater antagonism and greater lack of common interest between classes than between the same classes as found in different races. Aristocrats everywhere, for example, appear to have greater mutual sympathy and sense of nearness than do the upper and lower classes of the same race.

One of our own urgent educational problems is that of overcoming race differences and of utilizing racial bonds for practical ends. We try to put loyalty to group first, and we assume that race patriotism can be supreme only among those who have no country worth being loyal to. Loyalty to race, however, has a pedagogical use. We see it being employed to extend social feeling beyond the point to which propinquity and common cause can carry it. It was used, we know, in the propaganda and educational campaign by which German statesmen and historians hoped to develop a wider German consciousness. The racial object in this case is apparently purely fictitious. We see the same concept being used now to create or expand social feeling throughout the Anglo-Saxon race. What we mean mainly by Anglo-Saxon race is really English speaking peoples, having common or similar mores and ideals. It is, of course, by emphasizing and participating in common functions that loyalty either to an Anglo-Saxon union or to the total group in our own nation will be developed. Our own type of patriotism, in which there can be little or no racial loyalty as such, must be built upon more ideal and abstract conceptions than that of race. It is loyalty to group having a common idea, we say, which must be the basis of American group loyalty. This we must regard as higher than any race patriotism. All nations are now, as Boutroux remarks, to a greater or less extent psychological races. The factors that have produced them are the factors that have caused men to become functioning units.

This gives us a clew at least to a practical principle for the education of social loyalty. We must secure participation on the part of the individual in every function that belongs to each group to which the individual himself is attached. Thus all degrees and kinds of loyalty may be made to exist in the same mind without conflict or confusion, precisely because the loyalty desired is loyalty to people as groups or organizations having causes, not to collections of individuals as such.

The teaching of loyalty to any cause appears to be a lesson in patriotism. So far as teaching of patriotism is centered directly upon the production of loyalty to the whole group which constitutes the nation, the first object must be to create a sense of reality of the group in the mind of the individual. We may expect to do this in part by the teaching of geography and history in an adequate way, but we must also instill such patriotism by inducing individuals to participate in nation-wide organizations, which are capable of realizing dramatic effects. The experiences of the war have taught us to see this. It is organization or cooeperation for practical ends, under conditions in which deep feeling is aroused, that most quickly and effectually creates the sense of solidarity in great groups of individuals. We must study the psychological side of this matter, and see how the power and momentum that are so readily gained in time of need can be better controlled for all the routine purposes of education and the practical daily life. The organization of national activities by means of voluntary associations will be likely to be one of the main educational methods of the future. If we are far-seeing we shall try to utilize the powers of organization, cooeperation and communication to overcome many antagonisms now existing in society. War temporarily suspends class distinctions and many other forms of social dualism. The reaction after the war may be in the direction of increasing all the former antagonisms. To attain a strong morale and unity in times less dramatic than those of war is an educational problem, in a wide sense, but it is also a problem of the practical organization of all the social life.

All nation-wide affiliations of children which in any way cross-section classes or antagonistic interests of any kind tend to create materials out of which patriotic sentiment is made. The school itself has tended to produce social unity, but it has also tended to level downward, and also to mediate associations which do not touch upon the activities and interests and differences of society. Our schools are democratic by default of social interest in them, so to speak. We need organizations that shall level upward and to a greater extent involve the home. Then we shall see how democratic and how unified our social life really is. These organizations must be both democratic and practical. They must engage the interests of all classes. We know little as yet about the potential power, both for practical accomplishment and for the building of a higher type of loyalty and patriotism, there may be in wide organization. Here we can best combine the initiative and spirit that usually come from the upper classes with the great powers of achieving aggregate results inherent in the people as a whole. If we are to have a nation which shall be a unit, the people as a whole must have practical interests that require daily exertion and attention. They must be not merely united in spirit as a people, but united in common tasks that are definite and real. Devotion to the functions of the people is loyalty to the nation. This we should say is but an elaboration of the old colonial spirit of cooeperation, when merely living in a community meant a certain daily service to all the community. We must continue to do now more consciously and with more technique, so to speak, what was once done more spontaneously and in a more primitive way. It is thus that the idea of neighbor might extend throughout the country as a whole. All the materials are at hand for an unlimited development of the practical life. The sense of solidarity and the comradeship and helpfulness that grow naturally in a small community, where conditions are hard and dangers imminent, we must still maintain in a great nation by organization. This is at heart an educational problem. It is a work of national character building. It is training in patriotism.

In this, as in all other phases of education now, we must consider how the great energies hidden in the aesthetic experiences can be put to use. The aesthetic, especially in its dramatic form, is a power to be reckoned with. Interest, organization, moral obligation do not control or release all the energies contained in the social life. We need the high moods of dramatic situations to reach the most fundamental motives. The teacher must not only present ideas; he must generate power. And this is true of all efforts to employ for any end the interests of the people, old or young. The social life, if it is to be effective, must constantly be brought under the influence of dramatic stimuli. Dillon, a political writer, earnestly pleads for an extension and deepening of the sympathies of children, and says that patriotic sentiment must be engrafted upon the sensitive soul of the child. No one could refuse to admit this. The question, however, is of ways and means. In our view it is mainly through play, or better, art, that the soul of the child is thus made sensitive. A dramatic social life must be the main condition upon which we depend for thus extending and deepening the sympathies of the child.

Among these dramatic social effects we seek, the use of national holidays, all methods of symbolizing events, causes, or functions which are nationally significant are of course not to be ignored, but after all it is through practical activity made social and raised to dramatic expression or feeling, either by its own inherent idea and suggestive power, or by the addition of aesthetic elements, that loyalty to the greater group and its functions will best be educated. It is precisely the lack of these dramatic elements and these mass effects in the social life that now leaves the social sense in its national aspects weak, and allows the various dividing lines throughout society to make even the most necessary activities to a greater or less degree ineffectual.

The educational problem itself is plain. Unity of public interests, which can apparently now be obtained only under threat to national existence, must be maintained, not artificially, but voluntarily. We want the morale of war and the social solidarity of war in the times and activities of peace—in those activities that represent service to country and also those which consist of the service of country in the performance of its broader functions as a member of a family or society of nations.

A fourth factor in patriotism we recognize as loyalty to government, to state, or to leader. The place of such loyalty in a truly democratic country as contrasted with an autocratically governed country seems plain. It is not only sovereignty but statesmanship as well that must reside in the people. The people must not only have the power but the wisdom to rule. Even the ideals of the country must come out of the common life, or there at least be abundantly nourished. The German writers protest that the purely native ideals of the people do not represent the meaning and purpose of the State. The natural feelings of the people lack purpose and definiteness. The State is something very different from the sum of the people and the representation of their will. The native sense of solidarity is not at all like the organization that comes through the State. But this abstract conception of the State as a being different from the people is precisely, in the view of such writers as Dickinson, the cause of wars. Upon this point Dickinson sees now a wide parting of the ways. We must have either one kind of world or the other. We must continue our warlike habits, and make the God-state the object of our religion, or abandon all this for a thorough-going democracy. It is the special interest that is assumed to inhere in the God-state that is the menace to peace everywhere. The abstract theory of State inspires far-seeing policies, democracy lives more by its natural instincts and feelings. The theory of necessary expansion, the right to grow and to intrude, is a natural deduction from the conception of the God-state; loyalty to the State demands ever increasing lands and population in order to have more military power.

The democracy, of course, can harbor no such conception of State. Loyalty, in the democracy, must be to state and to statesmen rather as leaders of the people. The first and most necessary factor in patriotism as loyalty to authority is that authority must represent interests of country and people and must for that reason deserve loyalty. Educationally, the problem is quite the reverse of the educational problem of the autocracy. The people are not to be trained in obedience and subservience to the state, but we have mainly to create in the minds of all people the capacity to recognize true leaders. It is not loyalty to authority as such, we say, that is wanted, but loyalty to leader who has no power at all except the power of the good and its forceful presentation. A democracy is a society in which the aristocrats rule by persuasion, although we must think of this aristocracy as an aristocracy of intellect and morality rather than of birth and wealth. The ideal, we suppose, toward which our definition of democracy leads is a state in which authority as represented in the institutions of government, and leadership represented in natural superiority coincide. It is a State in which the good and the great shall govern. But in general, parliaments cannot now be the sources of moral and intellectual leadership of the people. They are subjected to too many conflicting interests. The time may come, we say, when authority and superiority will coincide, when laws will be made and executed by those who ought to do these things rather than by those who merely have the power to gain opportunity to do so. At any time and place we may, of course, behold great leadership combined with great authority. A true democracy is a state in which such coincidence will be inevitable.

The minds of men are now full of these themes. They ask how nations may become unified without injustice and autocracy. Trotter says that national unity is what is wanted most of all things now in England. England must become conscious of itself, he says, and infuse into public affairs a spirit that will carry leaders far beyond their own personal interests. England has survived until now in spite of a strong handicap of discord. He speaks of the imperfect morale of England, shown in the war, which arose from the preceding social discord, and shows that the only perfect morale is that which is based upon social unity in the nation. All this is true also of ourselves. We also have our problem of creating loyalty to government and a national unity upon which a perfect morale both for peace and for war may be assured, by inspiring an ideal of honor, honesty, and efficiency in all public service, and also by arousing an intense interest in public service and deep appreciation of what public service and leadership mean, on the part of all the people. This is plainly not merely a work of cleaning politics. It is a work of public education. The attitude of a people toward authority and leadership is something more than a susceptibility to leadership and influence. There is a desire for the experience of ecstatic social moods, the craving to be active and to be led. We make a great mistake if we think all that democracy means is an instinct of individual independence, a desire to take part in the government as an individual. It is also a social craving that is involved. The presence of the great leader, even in times of peace, stimulates social feeling, and raises it to a productive level. This social feeling, we say, is not a mere reaction. It is the expression of a desire and readiness on the part of the people to participate in social activities, and to attach themselves to worthy leaders, or to those now who appeal to the most dominant selective faculties.

It is precisely at this point that the educational problem comes into view. We are likely to think of the public education required in a democracy as too exclusively political education, education that will enable the individual to assert himself—to know, to criticize, to vote, to take an active part in politics. This spirit is especially prominent in English life. It is all very good in itself and necessary. But we need to educate ourselves also so that we may have a capacity to be led, in the right direction. To increase sensitiveness to leadership, but also to make that sensitiveness selective of true values, is one of the great educational problems of a democracy.

It seems to be a part of the work of education to create popular heroes, to do upon a higher level what the public press does in its own way, but mainly partisanly and too often from wholly unworthy motives—make reputations. We must do more in the teaching of history and biography than to glorify the lives of dead heroes. We need to be quite as much concerned about coming heroes. We must excite the imagination of the young and prejudice the public mind through educational channels, in favor of sincere and true leaders. The opportunity of the story teller is large, in this work, and we need also to develop to a very high degree of excellence the educational newspaper. One of our great needs in education in this country is a daily newspaper for all schools—one that shall be both informing and influential, appealing by every art to the selective faculties, governed absolutely by ethical, or at least not by political and partisan motives. The power of such a press might be very great indeed. As an unifying influence and a ready means of communication, and an instrument of use in the organization of all children, the function of this press would be a highly important one.

All means of creating political ideals from within, of forging the links between leader and people in the plastic minds of children and youths, will be an education in one of the fundamental elements of patriotism. Such an education would be very different, however, from the state planned and authorized education that has been carried on under autocratic regimes. The difference is one of spirit and result, rather than of method. In one case the State becomes a kind of Nirvana, in the thought of which personality and individuality are negated. Patriotism produced in the minds of the young under the influence of a democratic spirit tends to become a creative force rather than a blind devotion to an accepted order. Institutions are made and advanced rather than merely obeyed and defended in this educational process. The widest scope and the freest opportunity are allowed for superior qualities of leaders and for right principles to have an effect upon society (and the result we invite indeed is a profound hero worship on the part of the young), but the conditions would be such that no other kind of authority would be able to exert a wide influence. To secure these conditions is, of course, one of the chief tasks of all the administrative branches of our educational service.

The final factor of patriotism, according to our analysis, is loyalty to country as an historical object. The ideas and the feelings centering about the conception of country as personal, as living, as having rights and experience, duties and individuality are likely to be vivid and intense. They are the inspirers of supreme devotion to country, and also at times, of morbid national pride and fanatical country-worship. The education of this idea of country we should suppose would be one of the fundamental problems of the development of patriotism. Presumably we are not to try to destroy this idea of country that all people seem to have, or to show it as one of the illusions of personification. Country is, of course, different from the mere sum of the people. It has continuity and it performs functions and it is an historic entity. Modernize and reform this idea, we must, but we cannot do away with it as something archaic and superstitious. Country is real, the concepts of honor and right belong to it, and country is something to which the mind must do homage.

Boutroux says that a nation is a person, and has a right to live and to have its personality recognized as its own. Granting this to be true, and that we must think of country as personal and active, the question arises whether this concept of country is something that requires in any definite way educational interference. We should say that if countries are essentially living historic entities having as such a high degree of reality, this reality-sense will be an important element in the practical life of peoples. There can be no thought in our historical era of breaking up these entities we call nations. It is a day of intensified rather than of diminished nationalism. The sense of reality of nations must, we might think, be made more intense; pride of country must remain; we may find some place even for the idea of the divine nature of country, which is an element in the patriotic spirit everywhere. That this conception of country is a very necessary element in the morale of a country in war seems clear; that the morale of peace must be founded upon the same personal and religious sentiments we can hardly doubt.