The Reconstructed School | Page 6

loose, fictitious thinking. So much does the show element appeal to us that we incline to parade even our troubles. Simplicity and sincerity, whether in dress, in speech, or in conduct, have so long been foreign to our daily living and thinking that we incline to style these qualities as old-fogyish.
A hundred or more young men came to a certain city to enlist for the war. As they marched out through the railway station they rent the air with whooping and yells and other manifestations of boisterous conduct. These young fellows may have hearts of gold, but their real manhood was overlaid with a veneer of rudeness that could not commend them to the admiration of cultivated persons. Inside the station was another group of young men in khaki who were quiet, dignified, and decorous. The contrast between the two groups was most striking, and the bystanders were led to wonder whether it requires a world-war to teach our young men manners and whether the schools and homes have abdicated in favor of the cantonment in the teaching of deportment. In the schools and the homes that are to be in our good land we may well hope that decorum will be emphasized and magnified; for decorum is evermore the fruitage of intellectuality and genuine culture.
As a nation, we have been prodigal of our resources and, especially, of our time. We have failed to regard our leisure hours as a liability but, like the lotus eaters, have dallied in the realm of pleasure. Like children at play, we have gone on our pleasure-seeking ways all heedless of the clock, and, when misfortune came and necessity arose, many of us were unwilling and more of us unable to engage in the work of production. In some localities legislation was invoked to urge us toward the fields and gardens. We have shown ourselves a wasteful people, and in the wake of our wastefulness have followed a dismal train of disasters, cold, hunger, and many another form of distress. Deplore and repent of our prodigality as we may, the effects abide to remind us of our decline from the high plane of industry, frugality, and conservation of leisure. Nor can we hope to avert a repetition of this crisis unless education comes in to guide our minds and hands aright.
Again, we have been wont to estimate men by what they have rather than by what they are, and to regard as of value only such things as are quoted in the markets. Wall Street takes precedence over the university and to the millionaire we accord the front seat even in some of our churches. We accept the widow's mite but do not inscribe her name upon the roll of honor. We give money prizes for work in our schools and thus strive to commercialize the things of the mind and of the spirit. We have laid waste our forests, impoverished our fields, and defiled our landscapes to stimulate increased activity in our clearing-houses. Like Jason of old, we have wandered far in quest of the golden fleece. We welcome the rainbow, not for its beauty but for the bag of gold at its end. We seek to scale the heights of Olympus by stairways of gold, fondly nursing the conceit that, once we have scaled these heights, we shall be equal to the gods.
To indulge in even such a brief review of some of the weak places and defections of society is not an agreeable task, but diagnosis must necessarily precede the application of remedies. If we are to reconstruct education in order to effect a reconstruction of society we must know our problem in advance, that we may proceed in a rational way. Reconstruction cannot be made permanently effective by haphazard methods. We must visualize clearly the objectives of our endeavors in order to obviate wrong methods and futility. We must have the whole matter laid bare before our eyes or we shall not get on in the work of reconstruction. It were more agreeable to dwell upon our achievements, and they are many, but the process of reconstruction has to do with the affected parts. These must be our special care, these the realm for our kindly surgery and the arts of healing. We need to become acutely conscious that the present will become the past and that there will be a new present which will take on the same qualities that now characterize our present. We need to feel that the future will look back to our present and commend or condemn according to the practices of this generation. And the only way to make a sane and right future is to create a sane and right present.

CHAPTER THREE
THE FUTURE AS RELATED TO THE PRESENT
In planning a journey the one