Teachers all over this land are trying to teach Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Tennyson and Browning. How are they to understand men who refer to the Bible, that veritable treasure-house of literature, on every page, if they cannot take children to the source from which the supply is drawn? How are they to discuss and interpret the style of Ruskin, of Carlyle, of Emerson? How are they to teach the history of the heroes of our own independence, many of whom were religious in every fiber of their being, and whose work will continue to bear the stamp put upon it at the beginning, utterly regardless of what has become of religious faith in the interval? How is one to teach the truth as history reveals it, unless he teaches the whole truth? And yet, see what has happened: The quarreling of religious sects, of churches, each claiming this book for its own and denying the truth of what other persons find in it, has brought about a state of affairs in which the English Bible, a fountain of English literature, has been practically stricken from the reading of a large proportion of the American people.

Some years ago I was present in the city of Jerusalem at the extraordinary celebration of Easter day in the calendar of the Greek Church. There were gathered in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher representatives of Christian communions from beyond the Ural mountains, from the far regions of Abyssinia, Copts from Africa, together with representatives of the nations of western Europe. When at high noon the supreme moment came, the visitors were treated to this shameful spectacle: Representatives, many of them clergy and high officials, of churches calling themselves Christian, were engaged in physical struggle for place that they might see, and were held in place and kept from assaulting each other by the sneering Mohammedan soldiery. Have you ever thought of the sig. nificance of a sight like that? Mohammedan soldiers, despised Turks, with cynical sneers on every face, held these devoted Christians from tearing each others' eyes out on the most sacred spot in Jerusalem. It is just this sort of thing that we are reproducing on a small scale in our bitter sectarian controversies over the interpretation of the Bible.

I contend that we are not only on the point of impoverishing life and literature by the neglect of the English Bible, but that we have already impoverished life and literature. I am not dealing with a problem that lies in the future, I am speaking of a condition which is at hand. We are impoverishing life and literature by striking out of our life and our reading one great monument of our literature, the source from which much of what is best in later centuries is drawn, the inspiration upon which the best English style has been built.

My own feeling is that what has come to pass can only be described by one word, shameful! I regard it as shameful that we have permitted, blindly no doubt, this tremendous sacrifice of literature and life and knowledge because we cannot agree upon questions of religious and

theological interpretation. Why must we wait for agreement in matters of exegesis before we study matters of history and literature? Why should we not go back to a study of the source from which much of our noble English speech has come? More than that. How do you propose to teach American history without teaching the pupil who sits in front of you the controlling motive that drove the pilgrims to the New England shore? How are you going to explain that migration unless you teach the cause from which it sprang? How are you going to teach the history of Europe? How are you going to teach anything that has happened since the breakup of the Roman empire without teaching that the controlling element in most of it was the sum total of the conceptions and feelings which we sum up under the name of Christianity?

One does not need to be a Christian to live in a Christian civilization. He lives in it whether he will or no. We are face to face with a series of facts which have been in process for nearly two thousand years, and this applies as well to the non-Christian as to the Christian. The nonChristian needs to read this literature, because he wants to understand it.

My contention is that we have made it impossible for the pupil to understand history and literature as they really are, because we have eliminated from his reading and study that which has been from a very early period a controlling force in both.

We study the religious books of other peoples, and hardly know our own. We do not study our own because we do not agree about the theological interpretation of them. We study the religious books of other peoples because we do not feel a direct personal interest in the theological interpretation of them, and the result is that we are today training more pupils to understand the elements that make up the life of ancient Rome than we are training to understand the life of our twentieth-century civilization.

I forbear to dwell longer upon this subject. It interests me exceedingly, but I have no reason to assume that it is as interesting to others. I want once more to make it perfectly clear that I am not talking about religious teaching in school; that I am not talking about theological influence in education; but that I am only protesting against sacrificing a knowledge of our civilization to theological differences. I beg that I may be understood distinctly on this point.

I know that the supreme court of the state of Wisconsin has held the Bible to be a sectarian book. I know that the state statute-books are full of laws prohibiting the reading of the Bible in the school. My view is that this is wrong. I am not in the least concerned in disputing that it has been done, but I think the time has come for us to regard it as a pressing problem to begin to get it undone.

As I said at the outset, I have selected these two subjects to speak of here in your presence, not because you will all agree with me that they

are the most important or most pressing, but because I think they are very important and very pressing, and because I know there is a sharp difference of opinion about both of them. I am very much more interested in discussing things about which there is a sharp difference of opinion, and where there is a fair chance for open debate and controversy, than in talking over the old truisms upon which all agree. It is in that spirit that I have ventured to discuss these two problems, (1) waste in our educational system, and (2) the situation presented by the lack of knowledge of the English Bible as a work of literature, the source of knowledge of a controlling element in our historic civilization.

THE ENGLISH IDEAL OF EDUCATION AND ITS
DEBT TO AMERICA

MICHAEL ERNEST SADLER, LL.D., DIRECTOR OF INQUIRIES AND REPORTS,
EDUCATION OFFICE, LONDON, ENGLAND

Standing before this great assembly, an English student of education. would wish his first words to be words of gratitude for the unstinted kindness which is shown to those who come from a distance to gain guidance and encouragement from American educators and American schools. We in Europe owe much to your educational experience and still more to your educational faith. Our desire to learn from you has never been so strong as it is today. Your British guests at this convention, and those whom you have welcomed with equal cordiality before, have come to learn, and, like good teachers, you have spared no pains to help us. Your kindness is all the more appreciated by us because we realize that you show it to us as being, in a measure, representatives— spokesmen for a great multitude of British educators who cannot themselves come to America, but who, if they could come, would do so in the spirit of admiration for your achievement and of confident hope for the future of your schools. I wish that I could adequately express to you the deep feeling of friendship and sympathy with which students and teachers and pupils in my own country regard American educational work. Profoundly attached as we are to what is strong and good and true in our own methods of education, we have learned many lessons at your hands, and we are prepared to learn more. We cannot directly imitate you at least in some things- for every nation is in part controlled by its own past and cannot change its methods of education as if they were merely mechanical devices of photogravure or electric traction. Any ideal of education which is alive (and that of England is very much alive) has its roots deep in history and possesses profound psychological significance. It is not a thing to be lightly tampered with or recklessly. destroyed. But if we cannot directly imitate you, we can and do heartily and affectionately admire those points in which, by reason of opportunity.

and circumstance and the looser grip of controlling tradition, you have excelled us in the public organization of your schools and universities.

You cannot wonder that in our hearts we should be proud to think that the world's belief in the power of education has been deepened by the faith, the undaunted persistence, the liberality, and the business-like idealism of a nation which still has so many ties of kinship and association with the old home. And when, therefore, your President honored me with an invitation to address you tonight, I came to the conclusion, tho with much misgiving as to my power for the task, that I should, perhaps, not do amiss if, during the time which you are so good as to spare to me, I were to attempt to sketch the ideal of English education and to measure its debt to America.

The keynote of all the best educational thinking of our time is hope. Never before has the work of national education been so full of profound interest to the teacher, the student, and the statesman, or so full of promise for the future. We are hopeful because so much has already been accomplished, because so many formidable and threatening difficulties have been overcome. Three things especially call for thankfulness. We are thankful for, first, the growing and now almost universal recognition of the fact that all human beings, however humbly born, have the right to the fullest possible measure of that physical, intellectual, and spiritual development which is appropriate to them and for which they are ready to make the necessary personal sacrifice of effort and of time. Secondly, we are thankful for the wonderful results which have followed most conspicuously in the sphere of applied science, but not less in other fields. of human effort, from brave and single-minded devotion to exact truth. Thirdly, we are thankful for the proofs--so plain to those who have eyes to see that, stupendous as have been the achievements of men thru the mastery over many of the forces of nature which machinery has placed in their hands, the greatest of all facts are still the spiritual facts — love, will, faith, endurance, self-sacrifice.

But no standing still is possible. Our very success makes further advance imperative. Applied science is rapidly changing the conditions of industrial life. It is multiplying certain kinds of opportunity, but also fixing the boundaries within which opportunities must be found. Much forethought and wise guidance will be needed to prevent the growth of economic and social conditions which would gravely hamper some healthy forms of individual initiative. Much wise teaching, much noble example, will be needed to prevent some of the rising generations, who grow up under the domination of applied science, from suffering a sort of atrophy of the moral will. Again, in the decay of old restraints, it is becoming pathetically plain that some upholding tradition and authority are needed for the welfare of many human lives. And, lastly,

the instinctive longing of so many hearts for certainty and guidance is revealed on all sides of us by signs of spiritual unrest.

These things profoundly affect education, because all true education is a mirror of life. The result is that all over the world educators are taking counsel with one another, in order that, in the difficult times which are coming upon us, we may have at our command a wide knowledge of what is being done by teachers in countries far away and of what was done by teachers in times remote from our own. Nothing is less characteristic of the educational student of our day than complacency and confidence in his own knowledge. It is, indeed, a difficult problem

:

which confronts us all. How many things have we not to seek to combine The stimulus which makes an alert intelligence: the discipline. which trains to bodily and intellectual self-control; those deeper influences which fortify against temptation and help us to bear sorrow and loss and pain; and that highest kind of individuality which purges itself of self-seeking thru service to others dying to live.

Other causes, too, make it natural and easy for us thus to compare our educational experience. Distances are shrinking by reason of swift and cheap means of transit: the post, the telegraph, the press and photography are bringing distant people into closer contact and are giving them a more vivid realization of one another's lives and needs. And a great psychological change is coming over the world thru the spread of educa tion in its wider sense. People are more impressionable to new ideas, readier to welcome new influences.

see opening doors.

In all quarters of the world we can

Thus it is that we can see gathering before our eyes, as it were, a great procession of the nations, each bringing into the world's common stock its own tradition of excellence, its own native insight into truth. Each, indeed, brings with it much that it would fain forget, but each brings also much that the others would fain receive. Germany comes with her noble idealism and her patient devotion to scientific truth; France comes with her insight into the significance of political ideas, with her exquisite lucidity of thought and speech, and with the measured beauty of a still living classical tradition. Scandinavia comes with her refinement of home-life, her skillful training of bodily powers, her care for adult education for laboring men and women, and her wise use of handicraft as a means of intellectual and moral training. America comes with her genius for self-adaptation and for assimilating diverse elements under a common flag; with her power to seize great opportunities on a great scale; with her intense belief in the value of individual development, combined with her not less striking readiness to subordinate, in moments of crisis or danger, individual interests to the claims of collective advantage or to the needs of public discipline. Russia, the true Russia, comes with her intense love for the plain, common people; with