Waukesha High School - Megaphone Yearbook (Waukesha, WI)

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.vi 4 Page One Hundred Twenty

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CHAPTER FIVE FACULTY CHIEF BLACK HAWK High on the bluffs overlooking the Rock River near Oregon, Illinois, is the colossal statue of Black Hawk. The sculptor is Lorado Taft of Chicago. whose March of Time in Jackson Park, Chicago, is world famous. Page One Hundred Nineteen

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..., ,-i - N 1.1. -.lf LR ig 'l A OME of the best minds of Europe and America, disturbed by the present disorganized and undetermined aspect of our economic chaos, are striving for a new society based upon a new philosophy of education. The opinions of Everett Dean Martin and James Truslow Adams, American critics, were printed in the 1932 Year Book. With the same purpose of facing the problem confronting our civilization and our school, we are printing a selection from an English critic as an introduction to the concluding chapter of this book. So much for education as it is now and as it is likely to become in the im- mediate future-for its defects are so manifest that it will almost certainly not be allowed to persist in its present form for many years more. In the light of what is, we may imagine what ought to be. In a world like ours-and one must as- sume that the psychological facts will remain what they are and have been for the last few thousands years-the ideal educational system is one which accurately measures the capacities of each individual and fits him, by means of specially adapted training, to perform those functions which he is naturally adapted to perform. Aperfect education is one which trains up every human being to fit into the place he or she is to occupy in the social hierarchy, but without, in the process, destroying his or her individuality, How far it is possible for any one in a modern, highly organized society of specialists to be, in Rousseau's phrase, both a man and a citizen is doubtful. Present-day education and present-day social arrangements put a premium on the citizen and iinmolate the man. In modern conditions human beings come to be identified with their socially valuable abilities. The existence of the rest of the personality is either ignored or, if admitted, ad- mitted only to be deplored, repressed, or, if repression fails, surreptitiously pandered to. On all those human tendencies which do not make for good citizen- ship, morality and social tradition pronounce a sentence of banishment. Three- quarters of the man is outlawed. The outlaw lives rebelliously and takes strange revenges. When men are brought up to be citizens and nothing else, they become, first imperfect men and then unsatisfactory citizens. The insistence on the so- cially valuable qualities of the personality, to the exclusion of all the others, final- ly defeats its own ends. The contemporary restlessness, dissatisfaction, and un- certainty of purpose bear witness to the truth of this. We have tried to make men good citizens of highly organized industrial states: we have only succeeded in pro- ducing a crop of specialists, whose dissatisfaction at not being allowed to be com- plete men makes them extremely bad citizens. There is every reason to suppose that the world will become even more completely technicized even more elaborate- ly regimented than it is at present: that even higher and higher degrees of special- ization will be required from individual men and women. The problem of rec- Puge One Hundred Twenty-one