Antioch College - Towers Yearbook (Yellow Springs, OH)

Page 48 text:

ll-W Henry George Gieser, M oose law, Saslqatchezuafz, Canada Phillip Arthur Hazelton, Freeport, Maine Iohn William Henley, Indianapolis, Indiana Iarnes Gale Idle, Pemberton, Ohio Herschel Iones, Hastings, Nebraska Anne Elizabeth Keeler, Marietta, Georgia Howard Charles Kelly, Dayton, Ohio William Henry Linn, Ir., Grand Rapids, Minnesota Cornelia Lunt, Denver, Colorado Ruth Louise Mangan, Greenville, Ohio .46

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11? UNITY IN EDUCATION HE Antioch Plan requires that we consider what sorts of knowledge are really essential to the man who today is to be called educated, and that we - organize these into a curriculum possessing unity. To this end we have a number of courses, DOI merely required, but required in a certain sequence. Moreover the various in- structors coiidinate and correlate what is taught. Yet a se- quence of courses, however coordinated and correlated, do not make a unity 5 they remain simply so many courses. Not even the fact that these courses converge on the individual student makes them a unity. Unity comes when the student makes them a unity. It does not come unless the converging and cor- related courses make a difference to the individual. Of course, to make a difference to the individual or in the individual is the end of education. And the important unity is the unity of one's conduct or attitude towards life. A biologist who would drink unnecessarily of polluted water has scarcely achieved it. The physician who expectorates in the street car has not attained it. And the educated man of today who ac- cepts the teachings of modern science, but insists also on a literal acceptance of the first chapters of Genesis has not achieved it. 45

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I use the term achieve advisedly. For a unified and consis- tent life is an achievement, and one of no mean order. It does not simply happen, it will not come about merely by being ex- posed to unified and consistent teaching. It comes from an earnest effort on the part of the learner himself, first, to put together what he knows and then to act accordingly. Permit me to make a slightly different approach. Consis- tent conduct is impossible without a unified knowledge. If we are to act consistently we must, in Matthew Arnold's words, endeavor to see life clearly and see it whole. As Thomson says, it takes a long-necked observer to see the entire f-irmament from one window. So we have divisions of labor among scientists, and we have divisions in the labor of students. These constitute the courses. But the divisions be- tween courses are not insurmountable stone walls. It is a whole we study and that whole is the order of Nature, an organism with parts or members, constituting one body. All of the sci- ences, as well as religion, philosophy, and, indeed, art, are but so many different ways of viewing or approaching nature. 47