1705037753

1705037754 In an unchanging world the result might have been a permanent aristocracy, possessing the merits and defects of the Spartans. But aristocracy is out of date, and subject populations will no longer obey even the most wise and virtuous rulers. The rulers are driven into brutality, and brutality further encourages revolt. The complexity of the modern world increasingly requires intelligence, and Doctor Arnold sacrificed intelligence to “virtue.” The battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but the British Empire is being lost there. The modern world needs a different type, with more imaginative sympathy, more intellectual suppleness, less belief in bulldog courage and more belief in technical knowledge. The administrator of the future must be the servant of free citizens, not the benevolent ruler of admiring subjects. The aristocratic tradition embedded in British higher education is its bane. Perhaps this tradition can be eliminated gradually; perhaps the older educational institutions will be found incapable of adapting themselves. As to that, I do not venture an opinion.

1705037755

1705037756 The American public schools achieve successfully a task never before attempted on a large scale: the task of transforming a heterogeneous selection of mankind into a homogeneous nation. This is done so ably, and is, on the whole, such a beneficent work, that on the balance great praise is due to those who accomplish it. But America, like Japan, is placed in a peculiar position, and what the special circumstances justify is not necessarily an ideal to be followed everywhere and always. America has had certain advantages and certain difficulties. Among the advantages were: a higher standard of wealth; freedom from the danger of defeat in war;comparative absence of cramping traditions inherited from the Middle Ages. Immigrants found in America a generally diffused sentiment of democracy and an advanced stage of industrial technique. These, I think, are the two chief reasons why almost all of them came to admire America more than their native countries. But actual immigrants, as a rule, retain a dual patriotism: in European struggles they continue to take passionately the side of the nation to which they originally belonged. Their children, on the contrary, lose all loyalty to the country from which their parents have come and become merely and simple Americans. The attitude of the parents is attributable to the general merits of America; that of the children is very largely determined by their school education. It is only the contribution of the school that concerns us.

1705037757

1705037758 In so far as the school can rely upon the genuine merits of America, there is no need to associate the teaching of American patriotism with the inculcation of false standards. But where the Old World is superior to the New, it becomes necessary to instill a contempt for genuine excellencies. The intellectual level in Western Europe and the artistic level in Eastern Europe are, on the whole, higher than in America. Throughout Western Europe, except in Spain and Portugal, there is less theological superstition than in America. In almost all European countries the individual is less subject to herd domination than in America: his inner freedom is greater even where his political freedom is less. In these respects the American public schools do harm. The harm is essential to the teaching of an exclusive American Patriotism. The harm, as with the Japanese, comes from regarding the pupils as means to an end, not as ends in themselves. The teacher should love his children better than his state; otherwise he is not an ideal teacher.

1705037759

1705037760 Notes

1705037761

1705037762 Athens, the capital city of ancient Greece, the center of Greek culture.

1705037763

1705037764 Homer, who lived about the ninth century before Christ, the greatest of the Greek epic poets, credited with being the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey .

1705037765

1705037766 barrier, obstacles; anything that impedes the progress.

1705037767

1705037768 skepticism, suspension of judgment, questioning the truth of facts and the soundness of inferences; incredulous criticism.

1705037769

1705037770 vulgar, coarse; low; characteristic of the common people.

1705037771

1705037772 Carlyle, Thomas （1795-1881）, Scottish essayist and historian.

1705037773

1705037774 Plato （427-347 B.C.）, Greek philosopher.

1705037775

1705037776 at his ease in Zion . Zion was the holy hill of ancient Jerusalem, in Jewish theology, but by extension came to mean the Heavenly Jerusalem or the Kingdom of Heaven. Here, the word means heavenly kingdom. A man who is at his ease in heaven is a very self-possessed man, a man who is very composed, who looks at life steadily and calmly.

1705037777

1705037778 Goethe （1749-1832）, German poet and author.

1705037779

1705037780 imbibed, drunk in; assimilated; taken in and made part of his own.

1705037781

1705037782 mutual extermination, killing off one another; rooting out one another.

1705037783

1705037784 literati, men of letters; the learned class.

1705037785

1705037786 the Kyoto nobility, those who belong to the noble families of Kyoto, the western capital of Japan. These nobles were the most aristocrat of their kind and took on a cultured skepticism.

1705037787

1705037788 Faubourg Saint Germain, in the suburban part of Paris, the aristocratic quarter of Paris.

1705037789

1705037790 pugnacious, disposed to fight; quarrelsome.

1705037791

1705037792 cultivated eighteenth-century gentlemen . English eighteenth-century gentlemen developed the nice graces of conduct, avoided passionate outburst, tried to be cultivated, civilized.

1705037793

1705037794 advent, arrival.

1705037795

1705037796 Commodore Perry, Matthew Calbraith （1794-1858）, American naval officer who sailed his squadron of ships into the Bay of Tokyo in 1852 and opened Japan to western influence.

1705037797

1705037798 culpable, blameworthy; can be held to blame.

1705037799

1705037800 imminent, about to happen soon; impending.

1705037801

1705037802 Shinto religion, “way of the gods,” Japanese religion partly ousted by Buddhism, but now the national religion.

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