good fortune in living today and not yesterday–not even under Pericles or
Augustus?
We should not be greatly disturbed by the probability that our civilization
will die like any other. As Frederick asked his retreating troops at Kolin,
“Would you live forever?”
Perhaps it is desirable that life should take
fresh forms, that new civilizations and centers should have their turn.
Meanwhile the effort to meet the challenge of the rising East may
reinvigorate the West.
We have said that a great civilization does not entirely die–non omnis
moritur. Some precious achievements have survived all the vicissitudes of
rising and falling states: the making of fire and light, of the wheel and other
basic tools; language, writing, art, and song; agriculture, the family, and
parental care; social organization, morality, and charity; and the use of
teaching to transmit the lore of the family and the race. These are the
elements of civilization, and they have been tenaciously maintained
through the perilous passage from one civilization to the next. They are the
connective tissue of human, history.
If education is the transmission of civilization, we are unquestionably
progressing. Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by
each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one
century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again. So our
finest contemporary achievement is our unprecedented expenditure of
wealth and toil in the provision of higher education for all. Once colleges
were luxuries, designed for the male half of the leisure class; today
universities are so numerous that he who runs may become a Ph.D. We may
not have excelled the selected geniuses of antiquity, but we have raised the
level and average of knowledge beyond any age in history.
None but a child will complain that our teachers have not yet eradicated
the errors and superstitions of ten thousand years. The great experiment has
just begun, and it may yet be defeated by the high birth rate of unwilling or
indoctrinated ignorance. But what would be the full fruitage of instruction
