Chapter I: Preface

Most books that deal with the subject of education, and there are many, are concerned with the training of the young. Much is said about educational methods but very little about content. There is discussion, also, of the effectiveness of institutions, schools and colleges, and the interest of the State in education. This book does not deal with such matters.

It is concerned with other problems. What is an educated person like? How does he differ from the uneducated? Does he think differently and, if so, why? We shall be empirical in our study. We shall study persons who are generally recognized as outstanding educated minds and ask what it is that characterizes them. Is an educated person one who is like Socrates, Erasmus, Montaigne, Goethe, Arnold, Santayana?

The theme of this book is that education is more than information, or skill, or propaganda. In each age education must take into account the conditions of that age. But the educated mind is not a mere creature of its own time. Education is emancipation from herd opinion, self-mastery, capacity for self-criticism, suspended judgment, and urbanity.

It is often believed that education, adult education in particular, is an avocation or an interest to occupy the individual in his leisure time, like music or stamp collecting. The work of The People’s Institute at Cooper Union, New York, where these lectures were given, is essentially that of adult education. I have tried to think through with those who attended the lectures what it is that for ten years we have been trying to achieve. Adult education is now becoming an important interest in American life, and the inquiry seems timely.

This book, then, contends that education is a spiritual revaluation of human life. Its task is to _reorient_ the individual, to enable him to take a richer and more significant view of his experiences, to place him above and not within the system of his beliefs and ideals. If education is not liberalizing, it is not education in the sense of the title of the book. I use the term “liberal” not in the political sense, as if it meant half measures, but in its original sense meaning by a liberal education the kind of education which sets the mind free from the servitude of the crowd and from vulgar self-interests. In this sense, education is simply philosophy at work. It is the search for the “good life.” Education is itself a way of living.

I have written the book not from the standpoint of the professional educator for whom education is frequently--if it be adult education--an enterprise designed for the uplift of other people, but from the standpoint of one who is concerned that his own education shall not stop in middle-life. No one is fit to be a teacher in whose own mental process education has ceased to go on. One is a student first and only incidentally a teacher. The best teacher is the seeker after truth amongst his students. Probably the most successful educator cannot tell what is the secret of his success in teaching. That which is important about the philosophy of education is not method but that background of knowledge which enables its possessor to judge what is worth knowing and doing.

EVERETT DEAN MARTIN.

CONTENTS

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