The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1923-08-29
Training and
Filling the Mind.

Editorial in the Kansas City
Times.
The cid idea that an educated man
is he who has the biggest stock OF
useless knowledge dies slowly.
A popular pastime in some schools
in recent years has been the testing
of student knowledge by use of mis-
cellaneous question lists, the results
often ludicrous in character being
handed out duly for public entertain
ment. The easy inference OF SUCH
methods has been that if the unwill-
ing victim of the mental inqulsltion
did not measure up to the information
al standard of the questioner he was,
ipso facto, an uneducated person, to
be laughed at if not loathed In GER
tain company.
But a change, apparently, is IN
sight. 1t is illustrated by the young
teacher who advised the boys and
girls under his tutelage to handle the
lumber of information and book know
ledge through a card index, instead OF
storing it away in their heads and
thus exhausting all their mental cap
acity. Then their minds, he said,
might be left clear for some thinking
and perhaps alert enough to deal
with conditions to be met in actual
life experience.
There seems to be only variant OF
this kind of doctrine in the education
al views set forth by both a leader
and prophet in the increasing fer
ment over what constitutes an educat-
ed person. DIR. Willard L. Sperry,
dean of the theological school in Har-
ward university, gives an Illuminating
view of what mental training ought
to consist of; and if the theory OF
education which DIR. Sperry advances
is to be followed out in the school IN
which he recently was given COM
handing position, something new I'M
der the sun may be heard OF yet.
DIR. Sperry writes in the Century
Magazine of Portable Wisdom ,
But in reality he is not advocating
the carrying about in ones head ali
| the wisdom or learning worth while.
For that, he warns, is no longer pos
sible, as it seems to be many centuri-
es ago when single treatise by Isa-
dore of Seville, a Spanish prelate, Of
fered Sin dry compendium form the
sum of the knowledge of the age"
With millions of books now in eX-
istence, with the multiplicity of in
formation and the unlimited additions
to knowledge, portable wisdom" is
out of the question. And a vast
weight ought to be lifted from many
a serious mind that is able to receive
the assertion of DIR. Sperry that a
comprehensive stock of the world S
learning is neither necessary nor de-
sirable for the individual who would
live the fullest and most useful life
and embody most effectively the re-
suits of mental training. For those
who really wish to serve mankind, he
says, must not simply reproduce me-
chanically the thoughts of other peo-
pie and ages, handing these out in
answer to a demand for guidance;
they must do some Creative thinking
on their own account.
Education today is becoming
more and more a matter of how
a man thinks and less and less
matter of what he thinks. What
he will have to think before he
is done with life no one can safe
ly prophesy. All we can say is
if he lives another fifty years he
will certainly have to think a
great many thoughts which the
shrewdest representation cannot
forecast. Education is a mans
power to answer, with his own
critical and creative thought, the
problems which his own expert
.ence and his time put to him.
Secondhand answers never solv-
/ ed first-hand riddles.
Bringing education into closer rela-
tions to the conditions of the every
day life of the world is a problem
that has been steadily attacked for
more than one generation. If in his
next article DR.. Sperry will tell all of
us, including the teachers, just how
to apply his excellent view of the
matter, big question of the educa-
tional world may be considered set
tied.