[J. L. Newland, in the Frederick Leader, Oklahoma]

It is a laudable purpose in anyone's life to seek to be educated, but it is vital, if we would make education the handmaid of happiness, that we understand its higher meaning. It is a mistake to believe that education is a process of acquiring a mass of technical facts which cannot usefully apply to everyday living. The real purpose of the right sort of education is to set in motion whatever talents we have in active, useful, happy lives.

Anyone can become educated who seeks constantly to increase his capacity for knowing and doing good. To do this, he must set his affections on good things. He must cultivate the habit of seeing and knowing the best things he can comprehend. He must cultivate a disposition to enjoy good influence—good books, good music, good companionship. As he does this he enlarges his capacity for the better things of life, and more of them naturally flow into his experience.

Speaking of the good things that are available to people who set their affections on what is right and noble, Paul said, "God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit." We cannot know the finer enjoyments of life unless we are led by such a desire to acquire them that we are purified of hindering elements. These higher pleasures come about through attaining more of the spiritual facts of life.

Education begins in our lives when fear gives place to facts, when light displaces darkness, when superstition is dispelled by reason, and blind faith yields to demonstrable understanding.

This process can be realized every day—in the simplest ways—and it can lead on to a life growing constantly more expansive and useful and happy if we cultivate the revelation of spiritual graces within ourselves through their unselfish exercise in our contacts with others.

[Payson Smith, in Advance, Boston, Massachusetts]

The problem of education is not in the main a problem of the purifying of youth. It is chiefly a question of how to lead it, of how to adjust its ideals to the extremely complicated social, economic, and political life into which it is to be precipitated with so great speed and with so little sense of security growing out of any sure knowledge we have of the requirements of living in so complex a world....

It is well that the attention of the people is being turned to the most important of all considerations—our joint responsibilities in the training of youth in the field of character. We shall indeed have performed a sorry service both for the individual and for society if we provide an education that aims to store the mind with knowledge, to sharpen the wits, and to arouse ambition unless, in the process, we likewise produce integrity. There are some considerations which we should keep in mind.

The first is this: That education is not preparation, as we have so often professed to believe. I grant that education is not preparation. It is rather growth or development. The concern which you or I need to feel is not primarily with reference to what the boy and girl will be doing or thinking a dozen years hence. Our primary concern should be as to the reaction upon the boy and girl of the environment in which they now are. We want in our future society the elements of good will, co-operation, justice, and those other qualities which will enable them to live happily, efficiently, and constructively. To get these results, however, the important thing is not to project these children into the future, or, as many seem to believe should be done, to place upon their shoulders prematurely the problems and the anxieties of adulthood. It is important rather to see that the little world in which they now live, whether it is the world of the eight-year-old or the world of the sixteen-year-old, affords opportunity for the development of those qualities of good will, co-operation, and justice which will find wider play as the horizons of life enlarge.

Second: This growth must in the last analysis be individual growth. Whatever may happen in the regimentation in any other field of human activity, certainly it is the individual and not the mass that is of importance in education. There is no other way of getting that better citizenship we all desire except by getting better citizens. There is no way of improving the social organism as a whole without using a process by which the individual units that make up that organism can be improved. I must still hold to the view that whatever a man stands for counts.

A thousand children with hands upheld in pledge may present the beauty of symmetry, but to me there is a far more compelling interest in the lively participation of individual minds challenged by creative thought. The child ultimately owns himself.

Third: Education for character must particularly give emphasis to the place that law holds in all human affairs. I am speaking not of legislative enactment, although formal rules and regulations that are man-made may and do have their place in establishing respect for law. But, particularly, there would come into education something that would vastly help youth if our homes, churches, and schools could impress upon it the inescapable working of law....

Every one of us has been changed in some manner and to some degree because of the patterns of human behavior which have been placed before us by people we have known and with whom we have lived. If, as it appears, youth is more discerning and is keener in its analysis of people, and may, therefore, be less ready to see perfection, yet by that same token it may be more apt in turning to its betterment or otherwise the fruits of its observations of those with whom its life comes in contact.

[James Hardy Dillard, as quoted in the Christian Advocate, New York, New York]

I should like to say a brief word about that which in any field of education seems to me of paramount importance. It is this: Whether the work be making a table or dress, whether it be solving an example in arithmetic or in geometry, whether it be experimenting in a laboratory or studying practical living problems, what is done should be done in the spirit of genuineness, in the spirit of aspiration for perfect accomplishment. Perfection is a hard word. We may not reach it, but we can aim at it always. Sometimes it is reached....

It is in the process of doing things with the aim to perfection that real education comes. The institution which inspires, promotes, demands, and rewards this kind of work is a really educational institution. Please do not think that I am undervaluing the knowledge, the useful knowledge, that a student may acquire. The work may be in the line of the most practical, everyday sort of pursuits. I am only wishing to express my conviction that education in its real sense depends more on how the thing is done than on what the thing is. The difference lies in doing a thing just to get through with it, or doing a thing with the determination to do it right....

What the world needs most is people who love accurate knowledge about things and conditions, people who can and will think straight about the facts and conditions that surround us. It is recognized that we are in the midst of a troubled time. People who have been really educated will not be fooled by nostrums and superficial remedies. Such people will know that troubles between persons, troubles between nations, troubles between races can be cured only in a way that is as old as it is new, and as new as it is old. It may be called the way of reality. It is the way told long ago by the prophet Micah: "To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God."

There is no way to get the world, on, no way to cure ills and hostilities and prejudices, except by promoting straight thinking and right living, and we know of no way of doing this except through the happy means of real education and real religion. We have to keep on trying to learn to think right, speak right, and act right. This is the great lesson. ... It is for this that schools and colleges are built.

[W. C. Hartson, in the Herald, Alhambra, California]

The annual conference of the Institute of World Affairs was held at Riverside ... and attracted many serious-minded people to its sessions. Science and religion had a large place in the discussions, in which much food for thought was developed for those who contemplate those subjects with an open mind.

And what is an open mind? To some of us the open mind suggests the open mouth, which catches many flies. ... A conference speaker elucidated the point by saying, "By open-mindedness is meant that stern self-discipline which causes one to accept facts and take the consequences."

Thinkers are separating themselves from intolerance. In the Riverside conference there seems to have been not one intolerant note. The deliberations of that group were actuated by an open-minded purpose to learn and accept the truth. Eventually it will be a recognized truth that not only is there but one religion, but that there is but one Mind—the Mind that evolved the thought which is the universe. Mary Baker Eddy recorded this truth many years ago, and year by year there is a wider acceptance of her concept that "in the universe of Truth, matter is unknown. No supposition of error enters there." And she continues: "Hence the eternal wonder,—that infinite space is peopled with God's ideas, reflecting Him in countless spiritual forms" (Science and Health, p. 503).

Of one thing we may be quite sure: Truth is undisturbed by the bickerings of men and women over their divergent concepts. Whatever may be the great underlying Principle behind life and the universe is for us to learn. Our progress stops short when we accept a mere belief and close our minds to other ideas. Truth is susceptible of proof. We should believe what we are able to prove and accept more advanced ideas on the same basis.... Truth finds its place in the open mind.

[Rev. Stephen C. Clark, Jr., as quoted in the Star-News, Pasadena, California]

The best and most normal Christian development is to grow and be nurtured in a knowledge and love of God, even as in our human relationship we find ourselves growing up in families, where we have always known care and devotion and love.... In early childhood, children should be trained in experience of worship and love of God. In our later life again we should make every effort to participate in the act of worship. Churchgoing and salvation do not come by exhortation and scolding, but by the feeling of value received from participation.