motive power of liberty is faith. All great enterprises, all great lives, are built upon and sustained by an overmastering faith in something.

Faith is based upon imagination which can conceive things the eye cannot behold. Young people are prone to think of imagination as fantastic, the creation by the mind of impossible forms and events, distortions of nature, or caricatures of man. But it is a higher imagination which pictures invisible things as they are, or as they might really be. Historic imagination does not people the past with impossible beings doing senseless acts, but with living men who thought and acted as men do not think and act today, but actually did under conditions that have long passed away. The true reformer is not he who portrays an ideal commonwealth which could never be made to work, but the man whose imagination has such a grasp on the springs of human nature that he can foresee how people would really conduct themselves in conditions yet untried, and whose plans work out as he designed them.

If faith is thus based upon imagination, its fruition requires a steadfastness of purpose that is not weakened by discouragements or turned aside by obstacles that shut out the view and cast dark shadows across the path. The doubter, who asks himself at every stage whether the immediate effort is really worth while, is lost. Prophesy confidently of him that he will never reach his goal.

President Pritchett in a walking tour in Switzerland asked a mountaineer about the road to the place whither he was bound. The man replied that he had never been there, but he knew that was the path which led to it. Such is the pathway to the ventures of life. None of us has ever been over the road we intend to travel in the world. If we believe that the way we take leads to our destination we must follow it, not stopping or turning back because a curve in the mountain trail obscures the distant scene, or does not at the moment seem to lead in the right direction. We must go on in faith that every step along the road brings us nearer, and that the faster we walk the farther shall go before night falls upon us. The man who does not feel

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any reason for effort because he cannot see the direct utility of the things he learns has no faith in a college education; and if he has no faith in it he had better not waste time on it, but take up something else that he has faith in, or that is better suited to men of little faith.

Every form of civilization is, not only at its inception and in critical times, but always and forever, on trial. If it proves less effective than others it will be eliminated, peacefully or forcibly, by a gradual process of change or by a catastrophe. Now the test of a civilization based on liberty is the use men make of the liberty they enjoy, and it is a failure not only if men use it to do wrong, but also if they use it to do nothing, or as little as is possible to maintain themselves in personal comfort. This is true of our institutions as a whole and of the American college in particular. A student who has no sustaining faith in the education he can get there; who will not practise the self-discipline needed to obtain it; who uses his liberty to put forth not his utmost, but the least possible, effort; who uses it not to acquire, but to evade, a thorough education, fails to that extent in his duty to himself, to his college, to his country, and to the civilization he inherits. The man who uses his liberty to put forth his utmost effort in college and throughout his life, not only does his duty, but is helping to make freedom itself successful. He is working for a great principle of human progress. He is fighting the battle of liberty and securing its victory in the civilization of mankind.

Never have I been able to understand-and even less than ever in these terrible days, when young men, on whom the future shone bright with hope, sacrifice from a sense of duty their lives, the welfare of those dearest to them, and everything they care for-less than ever can I understand how any man can stand in safety on a hillside and watch the struggle of life in the plain below without longing to take part therein; how he can see the world pass by without a craving to make his mark, however small, on his day and generation. Many a man who would be eager to join a deadly charge if his country were at war, lacks the insight or imagination to perceive that the warfare of

civilization is waged not more upon the battlefield than in the workshop, at the desk, in the laboratory, and the library. We have learned in this stress of nations that men cannot fight without ammunition well made in abundance; but we do not see that the crucial matter in civilization is the preparedness of young men for the work of the world; not only an ample supply of the best material, but a product moulded on the best pattern, tempered and finished to the highest point of perfection. Is this the ideal of a dreamer that cannot be realized; or is it a vision which young men will see and turn to a virile faith?

NATIONALIZING EDUCATION1

[John Dewey (1859

JOHN DEWEY

was born at Burlington, Vermont. After completing his college work at the University of Vermont, he did post-graduate work at Johns Hopkins University. From 1884-1904 he was a member of the department of philosophy in the University of Michigan, being head of the department during the latter part of this period. In 1902-4 he was director of the school of education of the University of Chicago. Since 1904 he has been professor of philosophy in Columbia University.]

The words "nation" and "national" have two quite different meanings. We cannot profitably discuss the nationalizing of education unless we are clear as to the difference between the two. For one meaning indicates something desirable, something to be cultivated by education, while the other stands for something to be avoided as an evil plague. The idea which has given the movement toward nationality, which has been such a feature of the last century, its social vitality, is the consciousness of a community of history and purpose larger than that of the family, the parish, the sect, and the province. The upbuilding of national states has substituted a unity of feeling and aim, a freedom of intercourse, over wide areas, for earlier local isolations, suspicions, jealousies, and hatreds. It has forced men out of narrow sectionalism into membership in a larger social unit,

1From Proceedings, National Education Association, 1916. Reprinted by permission.

and created loyalty to a state which subordinates petty and selfish interests.

One cannot say this, however, without being at once reminded that nationalism has had another side. With the possible exception of our own country, the national states of the modern world have been built up through conflict. The development of a sense of unity within a charmed area has been accompanied by dislike, by hostility, to all without. Skilful politicians and other self-seekers have always known how to play cleverly upon patriotism and upon ignorance of other peoples, to identify nationalism with latent hatred of other nations. Without exaggeration, the present world war may be said to be the outcome of this aspect of nationalism, and to present it in its naked unloveliness.

In the past our geographical isolation has largely protected us from the harsh, selfish, and exclusive aspect of nationalism. The absence of pressure from without, the absence of active and urgent rivalry and hostility of powerful neighbors, has perhaps played a part in the failure to develop an adequate unity of sentiment and idea for the country as a whole. Individualism of a go-as-you-please type has had too full swing. We have an inherited jealousy of any strong national governing agencies and we have been inclined to let things drift rather than to think out a central, controlling policy. But the effect of the war has been to make us aware that the days of geographical isolation are at an end, and also to make us conscious that we are lacking in an integrated social sense and policy for our country as a whole, irrespective of classes and sections.

We are now faced by the difficulty of developing the good aspect of nationalism without its evil side of developing a nationalism which is the friend and not the foe of internationalism. Since this is a matter of ideas, of emotions, of intellectual and moral disposition and outlook, it depends for its accomplishment upon educational agencies, not upon outward machinery. Among these educational agencies, the public school takes first rank. When some time in the remote future the tale is summed up and the public, as distinct from the private and merely

personal, achievement of the common school is recorded, the question which will have to be answered is, What has the American public school done toward subordinating a local, provincial, sectarian, and partisan spirit of mind to aims and interests which are common to all the men and women of the country-to what extent has it taught men to think and feel in ideas broad enough to be inclusive of the purposes and happiness of all sections and classes? For unless the agencies which form the mind and morals of the community can prevent the operation of those forces which are always making for a division of interests, class and sectional ideas and feelings will become dominant, and our democracy will fall to pieces.

Unfortunately at the present time one result of the excitement which the war has produced is that many influential and wellmeaning persons attempt to foster the growth of an inclusive nationalism by appeal to our fears, our suspicions, our jealousies, and our latent hatreds. They would make the measure of our national preparedness our readiness to meet other nations in destructive war rather than our fitness to coöperate with them in the constructive tasks of peace. They are so disturbed by what has been revealed of internal division, of lack of complete national integration, that they have lost faith in the slow policies of education. They would kindle a sense of our dependence upon one another by making us afraid of peoples outside of our border; they would bring about unity within by laying stress upon our separateness from others. The situation makes it all the more necessary that those concerned with education should withstand popular clamor for a nationalism based upon hysterical excitedness or mechanical drill, or a combination of the two. We must ask what a real nationalism, a real Americanism, is like. For unless we know our own character and purpose, we are not likely to be intelligent in our selection of the means to further them.

I want to mention only two elements in the nationalism which our education should cultivate. The first is that the American nation is itself complex and compound. Strictly speaking, it is interracial and international in its make-up. It is composed of