Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

Page 25 text:

THI COLLEGE RECORD. has happened. It has oot happened all at once, bnt its effects upon the imagination have come rather suddenly. A big part of it goes by the name of the industrial revolution, tin ohange from hand Labor to power driven machinery. And that is bringing a social revolution. We may like it or uot, we may apprehend the violence of anarchy, we may forsee the peaci i'ul evolution of new social arrangements, but we have got to make the best of it, and it will be well for us to make the best of it and not the worst. I think we are goiug to make the best of it. What is at the bottom of the industrial revolution? It is not poetry, or art, or religion. It is not anything that we owe in any great measure to the centuries before the nineteenth. It is a new thing ; it is science. To call this a scientific age is of course to commit an ob- vious platitude. Those who do not like science, and many that do like it, lament that the age has gone daft on science and cannot produce good art or good poetry. That is open to discussion, but it is true to a considerable extent, and it cannot be helped all at once. When the best ability of the day is attracted into industry and science other lines are bound to suffer. But all that belongs to another chapter. To say that science is a new thing, and that we have it in a stupendous measure is to say that our generation knows incomparably more facts than did the men who lived before 1850. I am not sure that we know any more about human values, about love, loyalty, courage and things like that. But we are getting a new point of view, and that is the great thing. It is the point of view of progress, not progress back to the civilization of Athens, but progress forward to, — well, nobody can tell quite what, but progress to something differ- ent and something better, because we are going to make things different and better, because we don't stand forever the stupidities that mutilate society. At least we talk that way very ardently and very nobly, and we think we are say- ing something. Yet if existing conditions are stupid, just what are the conditions that would be reasonable? No- body quite knows. That is however no reason why we

Page 24 text:

THE MODERN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION. AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE CONVOCATION EXERCISES, SEPTEMBER SEVENTEENTH, BY DR. WENDELL T. BUSH. T YERYBODY knows that there is in the air a disposition J — ' to be radical. To be radical is to be discontented with something and to try to get rid of it. It is a negative attitude. We are all, I suppose, more or less radical, at least about the high cost of living and the low price of grapes. This new spirit or the spirit of seeking what is new and dif- ferent is to be found everywhere. Not everybody likes it. Some people call it the the spirit of progress, others call it anarchy and scepticism. I happen to like it, and I am going to speak up for it. It is called by different names in different places. In American politics we call it insurgent or Progressive; art, the field where new ideas are apt to get expressed first, has known this spirit for 100 years under the label of Roman- ticism. But call it what you like, the old sense of security in eternal verities, the habit of standing pat in a standpat universe has given way to a sense of movement of experi- ment and adventure. This interest in the new and the different appears also in theories and methods of education; and because education is a thing of such immense consequence, radicalism here ought not to be the merely negative attitude that it frequent- ly is. If the new spirit is really to spell progress in the field of education, we must know what we want and why we want it. Tben, if wTe are reasonable and fortunate, we may in some measure, be able to get it. I wish I might be able to say something worth while on this point. It would not be worth while to try to define ed- ucation, or progress, or the radical spirit. We all know what those things are. We live in the same part of the world, and feel the same great currents of public interest. So I will not try to be complete or orderly, or systematic. We are more likely to hit upon something if we just dump on the table whatever ideas we have, and then see what there is. The spirit is new because conditions are new; something

Page 26 text:

6 THE COLLEGE RECORD. should not find things bad and determine to make them better. There is one idea with which natural science is continual- ly occupied, the idea of casuality. The simplest illustra- tion is from chemistry. If you want to get sulphuric acid you put together hydrogen and sulphur and oxygen in defi- nite proportions under definite laboratory conditions. The farmer does the same kind of things. If he wants a crop of potatoes he must put his seed potatoes into the right kind of soil and he must have the right kind of weather. The cook that makes a pudding and the statesman that brings about some social reform use the same method. They all put certain things together and then something happens. We assemble the conditions, which, when they can co-oper- ate, will generate a perfectly definite product. This is the operation of casuality. Things behave in typical ways when brought into conjunction with other things under definite conditions. If they did not we could never know how to do anything; we could not know with any certainty how to build a fire or how to boil an egg. If anything whatever is to be brought about, it has got to be brought about in this way. Somebody must put together the natural forces that will do spontaneously the work to be done. What I call assembling the conditions is technique or method. The technique of progress, to use a rather grand phrase, must be of the same sort. It must be, in the first place, a technique of remedies. We must find out what group of conditions generates the present result, and then what variation in the conditions will alter the result as we wish to alter it. It is not faith in ancient wisdom nor in the myths of ancient po- etry that will keep us here. Our only resources are the casualities that nature puts at our disposal, and the only way to know what these are, is to look for them, to study nature, for there is nothing else that we can use. Science gives us the technique of self-reliance, and the spirit of pa- tiently studying the facts, in order to discover the techniques to which facts lend themselves, I venture to call the spirit of science. We might say that the typical behavior of substances is