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The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the
hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during
the next few decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness.
This educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the
mental and spiritual side of the redistribution committee. And
prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was
a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in being a congenital
cripple. His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty,
suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at last to undergo
two operations. The second killed him. Already malformation,
which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so
that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of
the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world.
It had a curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling
towards him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that
it needed usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong
face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a
large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His skin was very yellow and
wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all times an
impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him
because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust
through his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige
was very great. To him far more than to any contemporary is it
due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world
spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That general
memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern
educational system, was probably entirely his work.
'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is
the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point
of all we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything
but a plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work.
You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that
you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.
Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the
horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their
curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge
their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance
and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to
shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and
passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the
universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened
out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose.
And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously
yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,
every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation
from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding
preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is
hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from
God....'
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