The Indian advocate., December 01, 1908, Page 404, Image 10

About The Indian advocate. ([Sacred Heart, Okla.]) 1???-1910

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f 404 THE INDIAN ADVOCATE
EDUCATION WITH AN EYE TO
THE FUTURE.
SUMMONED before the bar of critical analysis, the title
of this article would not receive very favorable comment.
Education, that body of laws, pedagogy, and all other
auxiliary sciences that make up education, must necessarily
have an eye, and that eye must be directed to the future.
However, it is also true, and it is here reluctantly admitted
with shame, that there is such a system of education which
is either eyeless and merely gropes in the dark, or the location
of its eyes enables it to look only back to the past and pre
vents it from penetrating the present or lifting the veil of the
future. -It goes without saying, that such a system of educa
tion is hardly deserving of the name, and where it is estab
lished and becomes dominant, it can only result detrimen
tally to those who aie unfortunately placed under its influ
ence. Looking at it from that standpoint, it is permissible
to talk of education with an eye to the future or rather it is
agreeable and profitable to discuss true education.
True education necessarily takes cognizance of the future;
beginning with the child, it merely touches the dormant qual
ities and attempts to stir them into action and to direct them
into the proper channels. It sees in embryo temper and tem
perament, tendencies and habits which must be improved and
nursed and chabtened; not merely for present transitory pur
poses, but with an eye to the future, looking forward to the
growth of manhood and womanhood. It attacks mental di
rectness or mental perversity; mental vigor or mental weak
ness; and itt object is to give it proper nourishment or the
proper balance, as the case might be, and thus develop it in
to a harmonious whole for usefulness in the distant future.
True education does not merely impart knowledge for the
present, but makes present knowledge a lower stratum for a
deep foundation, and, as time goes on, for the election of a
beautiful, and if possible, sanitary and pleasant superstruc
ture. The perverse temper, the ugly habits and the unwhole
some proclivities are curbed in the present that the child maj,