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Title: The Ferrer Modern School Author: Harry Kelly Date: 1920 Language: en Topics: Modern School, Francisco Ferrer, education Source: Retrieved on 15th August 2020 from https://waste.org/~roadrunner/ScarletLetterArchives/ModernSchool/ModernSchoolByKelly.htm Notes: Published by the Modern School Association of North America, in Stelton, New Jersey
Rich labor is the struggle to be wise
While we make sure the struggle cannot cease.
---Meredith.
There is a Chinese fable of ancient repute setting forth the relations
between pupil and teacher and world. A disciple climbed up to the hut of
a sage on the mountain side and knocked at the door, enquiring “Master,
show me the way to Eternal Truth.” The hermit without even opening the
door, made answer: “Go live among plants and animals.”
After a half score of years elapsed, the disciple came again to the
hermit saying joyously, “Open, Master, I am great with the wisdom I have
gathered. The birds have sung my praises; the flowers have blossomed
forth to show me beauty, and the fish have leapt in the sunlight to show
me strength. Horse and cow and bamboo and rice have yielded me service.
All creation renders homage to me as the Lord of Life. I am ready now to
walk upon the Way to Eternal Truth.” Still without opening the door the
hermit replied: “Test thy greatness in the Wisdom of Sages.”
A score of years passed this time before the disciple again toiled up
the mountain side and said, “Master, I am humbled at my former
presumption and pride. I now despise the world and lowly things; my
spirit chafes within its body and longs to be free. I am weary of my
limitations. I have pored over the Wisdom of the Sages only to find that
all my thoughts have been voiced before. My mind is perplexed by the
tumult of conflicting opinions and contentious doctrines. Do but open
and teach me the Truth of All Truths.” Again without opening the door of
his cell the sage made answer: “Kindle thy life anew in the world of Ten
Thousand Things.”
Another score of years elapsed before the disciple approached the
hermitage speaking these words, “I am both great and small; I sense the
bitter-sweet of life. I embody both mountain and marsh, both hovel and
pagoda. I bear witness to the Relativity of the World. Open the door
that I may gaze on Truth.” And behold, the sage opened the door and
disclosed the entrance, not of a meagrely furnished hut, but of a
vantage-point whence might be seen a broad undulating plain teeming with
shining cities and cultivated fields beside serene, peaceful rivers.
Pointing to the prospect below and to the mountains beyond, the hermit
said: “At last thou hast spoken truly. Behold the abode of Truth. Truth
is everywhere and nowhere. Truth is but the Doing, the Becoming, the
Flux, the Path, the Tao.”
This old Chinese legend symbolizes much of the philosophy of the Modern
School. This school also attempts to teach its pupils as much by their
own experience as the old hermit did in the fable. It, too, cherishes an
ideal of constant flux and progress. It aims especially to prevent a
crystallization of the mind, a drying up of the judgment into hard and
fast ruts. The greatest tragedy of the human race is the spectacle of
buoyant creative youth gradually congealing into senile inertia. A pale,
cold moon shining only by reflected light, is one symbol of man’s
debasement and degeneration. And the ordinary education with its
emphasis on mere words and formulae and tradition has done much to bring
about such a state.
The schools, and with them the older generation, dislike creators and
innovators, the upsetters of the placid categories of existence. Never
would they exclaim as did Francisco Ferrer, “Let us not fear to say that
we want men capable of evolving without stopping, capable of destroying
and renewing their environment without cessation, of renewing themselves
also; men whose intellectual independence will be their greatest force,
who will attach themselves to nothing, always ready to accept what is
best, happy in the triumph of new ideas, aspiring to live multiple lives
in one life. Society fears such men; we therefore must not hope that it
will ever want an education able to give them to us.” The Modern School,
instead of crushing the latent personality of the pupil by means of
pressure from without, strives to develop and transform it into creative
will. Thus the pupil when called upon to meet strange and unexpected
problems in after-life, will not be burdened with the awkward and
hardened shell of routine and prejudice, but will respond to every
stimulus with open mind and concentrated powers. It is the philosophy of
flux and the dynamic gospel that alone can keep one eternally young and
maintain one in the state,:
“Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.”
Coordinate with this spirit of intellectual daring and flexibility of
mind is the sceptical attitude. The world is crying out for sceptics,
challengers of institutions, free from cant, with a keen eye for the
shams and hypocrisies of society. Men and women are by habit such
good-natured credulous dupes that to criticize and to doubt are almost
in themselves virtues. We must rid ourselves of the tyranny of
journalistic opinions and combat this inherent infallibility of parent,
preacher and politician. We must throw off the burden of all secondhand
knowledge. Too many even of our own ideas are faded and worn with much
usage and passing from one to another. Much rather to possess a little
knowledge, limited but genuinely arising from our own experience and
intimately a part of our life, than to strut about like the ass with the
lion’s skin.
“Good people, honest people, cast them off
And stand erect, for few are helped by books.
What! will you die crushed under libraries?
Lo! thirty centuries of literature
Have curved your spines and overborne your brains!
Off with it-all of it! Stand up; behold
The earth, life, death, and day and night!
Think not the things that have been said of these;
But watch them and be excellent, for men
Are what they contemplate.”
No individual has either the time or the ability to be really interested
in many pursuits at one moment. He should not pretend to mastery over
all knowledge. The ordinary schools with their uniform curriculum
attempt to impose the same interests on all; they force children to
become hypocrites, to simulate an interest in a subject or a branch of
knowledge for which they may have neither talent nor enthusiasm. And
furthermore, they attempt to impose this interest at a definite
arbitrary time without considering whether the child has forged ahead or
lagged behind the mythical average period of development. The assumption
of universality of taste implied by a uniform curriculum, and the idea
that taste is capable of being taught rather than developed, are
responsible for almost all the current cant and hypocrisy in the culture
and art of today. The Modern School, accepting the dictum that the
impulse for genuine culture must come from within, makes the pivot of
the curriculum the interest of each individual child.
That wise old German painter. Albrecht Durer, once gave some excellent
advice on the development of an artist: “A man must read (about his art)
with great diligence and learn to understand what he readeth. And taking
a little at a time he must practice himself well in the same until he
can do it, and then only must he go to something else, for the
understanding must begin to grow side by side with skill, so that the
hand have power to do what the will in the understanding commands. And
these two must advance together for the one is naught without the
other.” This saying might well be a precept for all education. Whatever
we take in we must be able to give out again. All our intellectual food
must be digested into action or pregnant thought. There must be no
stagnant pools in our mind. Said William Blake: “Expect poison from
standing water.” To become fruitful we must become integrated: we must
coordinate our actions with our ideals. Too often our actions do not
tally with our philosophy, too often they lag behind in sloth and
cowardice. Too often we erect impervious compartments in our conscience
by which we do not let our left hand know what our right hand doeth.
This coordination of head and hand is a keystone in John Dewey’s
psychology of education. A child, he says, learns and remembers by
doing; practice is the bridge between the heritage of the world’s
knowledge and the child’s individual experience. Such an idea is bound
to revolutionize school methods and school discipline. Not immobility.
not a passive helplessness, but willing attention and interest and
active occupation become the standards of discipline. And out of this
same conception arises a recognition of the cultural value of manual
labor. It is not degrading except in excess, but is, like eating or
sleeping, a common attribute of humanity, and a socializing force
between man and man, and a great chastener of unproved theories. The
great importance of Dewey’s studies in educational amid child psychology
lies in the fact that he has placed on a definite scientific basis many
ideas which other writers, such as Rousseau, Ferrer, etc., felt
intuitively to be true. They have been put in such a clear and
intelligible form and on such a firm foundation that they mark a
definite milestone of progress and discovery.
In the above paragraphs I have tried to sketch the underlying spirit of
the Modern School, its intellectual daring, its insistence on genuine
culture, its hatred of hypocrisy, its integration of thought and action,
its consistent application of libertarian ideals. But these, one may
say, are broad vague principles and have little if any connection with
the life of the child. I shall therefore indicate more definitely what
the Modern School actually means to the child. First of all, it is a
place to which he comes willingly. It is a bright, beautiful, joyous yet
serious place where he may engage in any activity that interests him,
within the limits of equal liberty and the rights of his fellow pupils.
It is a place where his individuality is honored, his likes and dislikes
are respected within the same limits as adults. It is not the place
where he is treated as a renegade fallen from grace, with every natural
impulse wicked, to be licked and whipped into the enlightened state of
adult man. It is the exposition of this persistent discrediting of a
child’s personality, the unflagging attempt to break a child’s will,
that makes Samuel Butler’s novel “The Way of All Flesh” the most
inspired account that was ever written of how not to educate a child.
A child should enter school not only willingly but without artificial
constraint. The school should merge into his stream of consciousness
merely as one incident of his daily round. He should enter it with the
same joy and earnestness with which he drinks in the other experiences
of his life; sunshine, rainy weather, meals, sleep, games, conversation
at the table, comradeship with his friends and parents. The atmosphere
of the school should not be remote from daily life, and the subjects
taught should be approached from the child’s sphere of activity. The
actual and the present are the true stepping stones toward larger
horizons; knowledge assimilated in this organic way becomes real and
vital to the child, and he unconsciously acquires the habit of applying
what he has learned.
In the ordinary school, children learn a great store of unrelated facts
which have no bearing on their life; they usually learn them under
protest and proceed to forget them when the immediate use is over.
Knowledge is seldom an end in itself. It is a waste of precious energy
to litter the mind with useless material. There is no reason why a child
with a decided bent toward music or art should drudge along with
mathematics, or a child intensely interested in machinery and mechanics
should stumble through languages. Time enough to take these things up
when he finds he needs them in the profounder study of his
life-profession. The moment the child realizes that it is necessary to
have knowledge of a certain thing he will undergo whatever drudgery is
involved in its acquisition. The point is to have him know the reason
himself.
This voluntary assumption of work to further his studies, this
cultivation of initiative, is the most moral and valuable training a
child can have. The child, after he has grown up, will not, or at least
should not, have a superior person, a parent or a teacher, to direct him
and impose upon him his task. The imposition of external authority
inculcates habits of servility and automatic obedience and subtly
undermines all growth of self-respect and spiritual independence. The
discipline obtained by imposing tasks on the child by such external
authority is most unstable and degrading: it reduces mankind to the
level of sheep.
This is indeed an ideal school, the critic may say, but it postulates a
child with decided preferences, and furthermore with decided will power.
What about the average children with no initiative and no definite
interests, the dunces, who as Anatole France has put it, have
consecrated themselves to their stupidity? The question is well worth
considering. The Modern School does not carry to absurd limits a
cultivation of individual and disorganized lines of preference; it
assumes that there is a certain common stock of knowledge which it is
wise, even necessary, for humans to possess in order to live in this
world. It is this that all children are consistently urged to acquire.
It is offered to them not with an air of finality and arbitrary
authority but in a spirit of friendly advice, an authority sanctioned by
long experience in the ways of the world.
This constitutes the common stock in trade for average and gifted child
alike. The carrying through of a somewhat definite program will furnish
enough stimulus to shape the activity of the ordinary child, and yet
will refrain from burdening its mind with useless learning, It remains
flexible enough at the same time to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of
the exceptional child and allow it to develop freely in a favorable
environment. A healthy child, who steadfastly and consistently fuses to
acquire some phase of the common stock of learning, displays qualities
of will power and special aptitudes in other directions that more than
compensate for the hiatus in his knowledge.
In spite of its easy adaptation to the needs of the ordinary child it
must be said, however, that the Modern School lays special stress on the
development of gifted children, perhaps because they are the ones most
often bruised by the ordinary schools. Such a policy, moreover, will
sometimes bring out the individual qualities of a child considered dull
merely because its special aptitudes have been repressed and never
allowed to come to fruition.
This conscious development of individuality has a philosophic and
scientific justification in the important role that variation has played
in the course of evolution. It is the individual, the organism that
takes a separate step, the variation from the norm, that has contributed
most to the progress of the world. So in the cultivation of distinctions
and individualities the Modern School sees a potent spring for the
enhancement of life.
“But what of discipline?” the critic asks, “what prevents the school
from drifting about in chaos? Can it be taken for granted that children
will learn anything except under compulsion?” The discipline, we say, is
supplied largely by the children themselves. The way for children to
acquire discipline, as the truism runs, is for them to practice it
themselves. The directive guidance is more or less supplied by the
teachers, who, discovering the various aptitudes in children, lead them
to the paths which they follow with accelerating interest. It cannot be
denied that the task is exceedingly difficult for the teacher, that it
requires infinitely more personality, tact, patience, inventiveness,
insight, knowledge of the subject and of children to teach in a Modern
School than in a conventional school. Never is incompetency bolstered up
by authority, or stupidity put at a premium as in the ordinary schools.
Teachers must be respected for their own worth and not by virtue of
their position.
But there are several other factors beside the personality of the
teacher that make for discipline, not, of course, the trance-like
constraint of the ordinary school room, but the discipline of
concentrated and creative effort. First, the natural curiosity of the
child to try out all experience. Second, a premise in attendance at the
Modern School, that the child’s presence in the room implies its
willingness to play the game according to the rules. The class is there
for those who wish to learn. If a child is not inclined to pay close
attention, no restriction is put on its playing or doing whatever it
pleases elsewhere. Freedom to play is an absolute necessity in the
development of a child. There seems to be a deep inherent purpose of
Nature, an orderly step in the growth of an organism, in this
opportunity for physical activity and this leisure for the following out
of whims and fancies. Of course a child who consistently refuses to take
any part in the intellectual life of the school, labors under some
physical or mental defect, and, as such, has no place among normal
children. In problems such as these it is possible to make use of the
discoveries of the psycho-analysts in regard to the actual content of
the child mind and its progressive development. Indeed the knowledge of
what goes on in the mind during the early years is at all times
tremendously valuable in determining one’s attitude and approach toward
children and in preventing complexes and repressions dangerous in
after-life.
The third, and perhaps most important factor toward discipline, is a
certain group-consciousness, a unity of purpose, a class-morale that in
some way arises when a small group work together for a period of time.
The discovery of this collective consciousness has been so recent and
its practice so empiric and experimental that it is difficult to say
much more about it than that it just grows like Topsy. It has been found
that it cannot be projected at once in a large disorganized company, but
must be set in motion gradually and in a comparatively small unit, and
then increased by slow infiltration. Its actual working out is admirably
shown in Tolstoy’s educational experiments in Yasnaya Polyana, or the
school founded by the Hutchinsons at Stony Ford, New York. At Stony
Ford, for example, a group of about ten children practically conducted
their own school, the teachers merely giving them the necessary
direction and advice. They made programs, saw that they were carried
out, modified them to meet new situations, settled disputes, and
discouraged infractions of their rights. It was interesting to see how
effectively a newcomer who was inclined to abuse freedom and shirk
responsibility was brought around by their collective pressure.
Such a class-morale, under proper direction, gives a child valuable
training in what might be called group-living, the give and take of
social relations, a code that is visualized dimly, if at all, by adults
even after they have played their part in society. Man is perhaps not a
social animal by instinct; he has to acquire his communistic sense, his
knowledge of the structure and fabric of society, by painful experience
and the dire necessity of making a living. The ideal is to preserve an
exquisite balance between social and individual activity, to obtain all
the benefits of cooperation without completely sacrificing one’s
individuality. The ordinary school and, to a large extent, the ordinary
home, do not even realize that such a problem exists. The Modern School
by constructing a miniature society attempts to show children the
methods and advantages of working together, while insisting on
preserving their individuality intact. An ingrained sense of the scope
and limitation of cooperation is a positive contribution to social and
personal morality.
There is a further argument in favor of the plan of allowing a flexible
group to make its own rules, as opposed to the enforced routine and
arbitrary regulations of the ordinary school; namely, the child’s own
attitude toward law. Professor Earl Barnes and his assistant made some
researches in this field which were published in his Studies in
Education. “From this study we can make one safe generalization
important in its bearings upon discipline in school and family. Young
children regard punishment as an individual and arbitrary matter,
imposed without reference to the social order... Applying the results of
our study to pedagogy, we must decide that since the majority of young
children utterly ignore laws and rules they should not exist in the
discipline of the school or family.” However much the child may ignore
abstract laws, he does recognize and respect the collective opinion of
his comrades. All the more so when, under intelligent guidance, he
himself takes part in the shaping of this collective opinion. He will
obey the rules of his own making where he will disregard the categorical
imperatives which adults find useful in preserving social order.
Such a creative self-discipline provides the structure for free activity
and expression where the ordinary schools seem deliberately to cultivate
inhibition and inarticulateness. The regular school has left its mark on
all of us in destroying our spontaneity and individuality of expression;
those who have retained these qualities in after-life have done so in
spite of the school, or have brought them through with diminished force.
The expression of children among themselves is simple, spontaneous, and
natural; it is only when they are subjected to the rigid constraint of
the school room that the poison of inarticulateness blights their
spirit. The nervous strain of hanging on the teacher’s words and the
incubus of painfully memorizing borrowed opinion, crushes the tender
sprouts of a personal and individual reaction on life, so charming and
valuable in after years.
But what, one may ask, are the children going to express; what is the
content of this common stock of knowledge? The shaping of such a common
stock is naturally a thorny problem, with an infinite number of
individual variations, difficult to integrate to a universal. George
Bernard Shaw in his famous preface on Parents and Children has hit off
the common essentials with characteristic idiom:
“The rights of society over it (the child) clearly extend to requiring
it to qualify itself to live in society without wasting other people’s
time: that is, it must know the rules of the road, be able to read
placards and proclamations, fill voting papers, compose and send letters
and telegrams, purchase food and clothing and railway tickets for
itself, count money and give and take change, and, generally, know how
many beans make five. It must know some law, were it only a simple set
of commandments, some political economy, agriculture enough to shut the
gates of fields with cattle in them and not to trample on growing crops,
sanitation enough not to defile its haunts, and religion enough to have
some idea why it is allowed its rights and why it must respect the
rights of others. And the rest of its education must consist of anything
else it can pick up, for beyond this society cannot go with any
certainty and indeed can only go this far rather apologetically and
provisionally, as doing the best it can on very uncertain ground.”
As to what should be added to or subtracted from this ground work no
one, or rather, every one can say. I give my own outline as the
expression of an individual ideal. It is to he understood that this
curriculum is flexible and free, and is to be offered to both boys and
girls alike in the libertarian spirit previously indicated, The contents
are surveyed as a whole; no attempt is made to arrange the headings
chronologically or in the order of their quantitative importance. I have
divided the outline into two large divisions, a Foreground of immediate
practical usefulness and a Background of culture and training, desirable
but not rigidly essential in its entirety.
Reading. Writing. Arithmetic.
Clothing — Making and Mending.
Food — Cooking and Gardening.
Housing — Washing and Cleaning.
Dexterity — Familiarity with Tools and Processes.
Elementary Physiology, Psychology, Hygiene,
Sex Knowledge, First Aid.
Initiative.
Fair Play.
Honesty — Before Oneself and Others.
Ability to present ideas or facts simply and effectively before a group
of people.
Games.
Swimming.
Dramatic Expression.
Harmonious Dress.
Harmonious Surroundings — Studies in Color and Arrangement.
The Language of Drawing.
Folksong and Chorus.
Dancing.
Poems, Stories, Folklore.
The Poetry of Nature.
Original Imaginative Expression.
Nature Lore. Earth, Water, Air.
The Cycle of Seasons.
Familiar Stars, Rocks, Flowers, Birds, Trees,
Plants, and Animals.
Woodcraft.
Evolution and Cosmogony.
Primitive Man.
History of Peoples and Countries.
Geography and Exploration.
Foreign Languages.
Industry as Education--
Knowledge and Practice in Some of the Fundamental or Primitive
Industries:
Agriculture, Pottery, Printing, Spinning
and Weaving, Building, Metal Working.
Industry as the Web of Society--
Manufactures.
Transportation.
Inventions, Their History and Influence.
Spirit and Philosophy of Natural Sciences,
Mathematics, etc.
The Scientific Temper and the Quest for Truth.
Character and Morality.
Sex Relations, Their Ethics and Psychology.
Social Relations — Cooperation and Individuality.
Economic Relations — Parasitism, Exploitation, Labor and Capital.
Civic Relations — Evaluation of Government, War, Patriotism.
Religion — Group and Mob Emotions.
Evolutionary and Revolutionary Activity.
Customs and Conventions, Their Origin and Influence.
It will be noticed that in the above outline there is no provision for
formative religion. The Modern School does not teach any dogmatic
religion. Its religion, if it may be so called, is that of nature and
art, a striving toward harmony with nature, and worship of beauty in man
and world. Toward the development of character it offers the cardinal
virtues of Courage, Self-reliance, Honesty, Sensitiveness, Reverence for
one’s Ideals. It draws emotional fervor, not from the hope or fear of a
future existence, but from the epic of evolution, the ascent of mankind,
the continual struggle of life, the divine curiosity of man, the poetry
of nature, the cycle of birth, death, growth, decline of man, season,
and world. It reverences freedom as the gift most precious to man, but
never forgets that true freedom is forever linked with responsibility.
It finds ethical guidance in the uncompromising yet benevolent morality
of nature, the inevitable punishment, without passion or revenge, which
nature exacts of those who outrage its canons. It finds the ripest
wisdom in the knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of man, and
discovers in activity a justification for existence.
This is a religion for free, independent spirits, for the “Yea-Sayers”
of life. Those who are not satisfied with such sturdy fare, must seek
consolation elsewhere, in the miasmas and stagnant swamps of
civilization. There are always interested persons, to whom they may go,
people deluded by their own specious comforts and promises, and eager to
sell a soul for lip service or barter away eternity for a pittance of
time. The Modern School, by its principle of impartiality and
non-interference, cannot and would not restrain those who wish to be
slaves: it can merely point out the promised land and let those who
will, attain it. But it hopes and believes that even if those who have
once had a taste of freedom do drift away to reaction and bondage, they
never can swing the pendulum over quite so far; that their attitude will
always he modified and qualified by a larger and broader point of view.
And as the Modern School is superior to the petty differences of
religions, so it is to other of Society’s classifications. Among its
children it makes no disparaging distinctions of race or nation or sex.
It welcomes individuality anywhere. In fact, it is the aim of the Modern
School to protest against any vague, lazy-minded classifications which
shackle the individual in the bonds of a class. It accepts the dictum of
modern science that a member of one race or sex is just as capable of
development as another. It opposes the pettiness and narrowness of
provincial prejudices with the spirit of true internationalism — a
respect for the best in other nationalities. Toward this end, the Modern
School advocates for youth a wider opportunity for travel and exchange
of ideas, but it realizes that in so doing it often acts like the doctor
who prescribes rest and fresh air to sweat-shop workers.
It does not, however, refrain from laying before the children this and
every other divorce between the ideal and the actual. In our present
society, when untold numbers of men and women sink into economic bondage
through ignorance and lack of common contacts, it is not only foolish
but criminal not to fully describe its dangers to those who may be
caught in its meshes. None are so blind as those who do not wish to see:
almost all schools ignore these glaring injustices of our civilization,
and whether consciously or unconsciously, proceed to train children to
become virtual wage slaves. The Modern School will not acquiesce in so
deliberate an establishment of slave morality. By considering the
special aptitudes of each child, it attempts to guide the child to the
work and profession which will give it the fullest measure of self
expression and creative activity. But in the largest sense the Modern
School can merely take a negative stand: it can merely present it with
all the facts concerning such institutions as our economic system, the
State, war, patriotism, and the like, and so prevent the child from
entering upon the world blindfold. It must leave to the individual
itself what action it chooses to take upon these issues in later life.
By such impartial and objective criticism it finds an effective way of
imparting information on controversial issues, without imposing the
teachers’ personal opinions on the child. “The real educator,” says
Ferrer, “is he who can best protect the child against the teacher’s own
ideas and will; he who can best appeal to the child’s own energies. The
whole value of education consists in respect for the physical,
intellectual and moral faculties of the child.”
For the first time in the world?s history a school has arisen which has
taken the part of the child in the universal drama of youth versus age,
revolutionary exuberance against rigid convention. Generation after
generation has perpetuated the vicious circle, the fathers and mothers
moulding their sons and daughters to traditional habits, and they in
turn wreaking vengeance upon their children for the outrages they
suffered at the hands of their parents. It is only because there is
something irrepressible in life, that society has progressed at all. But
this school is maintained by men and women who have kept some spark of
their youth alive, who have some recollection of the thoughts and
feelings of their childhood. Haunted by the appalling sadness of that
old Greek proverb “Whom the Gods love, die young,” they have sought to
champion the cause of youth and keep its spirit aglow.
They too, like valiant Ponce de Leon, have searched the universe for the
Quintessence of Spring and the Elixir of Youth. But, wiser than he in
the ways of nature, they realize that the true approach is not only by
way of the body, but by way of the mind and spirit. They have already
seen a few men and women, untrammelled by the bonds of habit and
tradition, keep their minds flexible and receptive, and their spirits
radiant to the very last; and they wish to make the chosen band ever
larger and mightier. In this idea of a Modern School, these seekers —
have they not discovered the true Fount of Eternal Youth?