Article September 11, 1902 Issue

The Education of Man

J. R. Mosley

Alkahest

The following excerpts are taken from an article by Professor J. R. Mosley, C.S.B., of Macon, Ga., in the Alkahest for August.

"The problem of education is to perfect man as an individual and as a member of society; and while at times the individual concept of life and education has been uppermost, and at other times the social concept, the deepest desire and the finest struggles of the race have been to perfect itself and to perfect its members. Some races and individuals have had very low, crude, and almost wholly physical desires and correspondingly low concepts of what constituted a perfect man and a perfect society, and other races and individuals have had very high, refined, and spiritual desires and correspondingly high ideals of what man should be and what society ought to be; but, as much as the darkness of ignorance and sin has obscured the true vision of perfection, this light has nevertheless been with every man and every race that 'cometh into the world.' The education of man therefore includes every desire, thought, feeling, and activity that has led individuals and communities in the ways of truth, sweetness, light, beauty, harmony, joy, peace, righteousness, wisdom, goodness, and love; in a word, everything that tends to perfect the race and its individual members.

"The ancient peoples, who did most to formulate and work out the basis for our modern ideals of life and education, were the Romans, the Greeks, and the Jews; and, if we interpret Christianity as the highest and ripest fruitage of Jewish life and thought, as well as the highest revelation of God to man, there is scarcely anything in modern life and modern education, except the robust health, vigor, and love of liberty which we inherited from our primitive Teutonic ancestors, for which we are not largely indebted to the Romans, the Greeks, and the Jews. The Roman ideal of life and concept of education was physical, practical, military, and legal; the Greek aesthetic and literary; and the Jewish, moral and religious.

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