Thoughts on Institutions of the Higher Education (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Now, why do people fall into the ranks of the dependent classes ? 1. They may have an abnormal organization, mental or physical, or, 2. Their surroundings (as termed by Robert Owen) may be unfavorable; this will include alike those who have been subjected to evil training in youth and those who, though they may have had fairly good home influences, have not been strong enough to resist the temptations which come to us all in life. The first are the results of the breeding of the race under influences not adapted to our natures, the second are produced by the continuance of the processes which have produced the first. The above-mentioned causes include ill-mated parents, (our schools make no effort to direct their pupils how to avoid unfitting mates for life), defective physical, mental and moral training, bad hygienic surroundings, mental anxiety and all the concomitants of poverty, and as none of these causes can be removed until it is known how to remove them, in ultimate analysis the absence of the right kind of teaching and training for the young, in short, ignorance may be said to be the cause of all the other causes exactly as we have elsewhere shown this same cause to be the cause of the causes of war. Thus we see that the low ratio of illiteracy in states having the highest ratio of members of the dependent classes has a real relation and is owing to the fact that the teaching and trainingwhich go on in our common schools do not teach their pupils how to adapt themselves to their environment, nor, where the latter is under human control, how to adapt the environment to their natures. " War Clouds and Ho to Disperse Them." In so far as the failure to adapt environment to man's nature is the result of unwise legislation the remedy can be applied only when the...