Excerpt from Culture in Education

But you will be wondering what all this has to do with cul ture and with us? Well, I want you to realize that the culture we enjoy and represent is the fruit of all our past as a race, that it has depended on material elements, such as are fur hished by the crops, the mines, the factories, the things that the ships and railways bring to us and carry away from us. How these things belong to culture, let us not stop now further to enquire in detail, and I am sure that it was expected of me to draw a sharp dividing line between the practical, utilitarian elements of life and the cultural. Believe me, those who draw Such dividing lines are separating the inseparable. They re mind me of the heirs of a certain rich man I once knew, who divided up his library among themselves so that each heir re ceived two volumes of Grote and Gibbon and Macaulay and the rest, but none received a whole set! You wouldn't get a half-yard of cloth by raveling out all the cross threads from a Whole yard, you wouldn't have any cloth left at all. Howinfinitely more complex in the weaving is man than a piece of cloth, and to educate him to perform only 'one service in the world is sadly to belittle his chances of larger grth. 'so I would not have you believe that a practical, to the exclusion of a cultural education, or a cultural education without regard for the practical, is desirable for any one of you, much less for large classes of our people. The old classical fable, employed also by St. Paul, of the debate of the members, the hands and head, the heart and stomach, and all the rest, as to which was the most important organ of man, will here come'into your minds, perhaps, and, of course, the conclusion was that the members were so mutually dependent, each in its own' func tions, that the man was a Whole and all his members essential to his well being. A; headless man were scarce better suited to the right scheme of things than a cultureless education.

It is a matter of surprise that our school authorities have not realized that, instead of encouraging a war between the prac tical and cultural in education, pitting the one against the other, they should rather try to effect a synthesis, a compact, between these two utilities. My own practical suggestion is this, that the schools of Texas Should stand open during all the long summer vacation for manual training and domestic sci ence. By proper organization into sections every pupil, even those engaged in regular work, might have one or at most two consecutive hours several times a week for these summer courses in the practical things. Thus a fruitful opportunity to get the practical subjects would be open to every pupil, and 'he would learn to fulfil his part in the oloing of the world, while from his literary and scientific training in the rest of the year his opportunity would come to fit himself to join the thinking forces that alone, in any real sense, make our old world move on.

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