War-Modified Education

War-Modified Education

Dr. A. E. Winship, a great traveler, a thrilling lecturer and a friend of the Latter-day Saints, writes in a recent issue of his paper, the Boston Journal of Education: Democracy is of and by and for the common people, just as autocracy is for aristrocracy. When we make the world safe for democracy, we make it a common-people's world. The modification of this war is greater than we can even imagine. Take the religious modifications, for instance. We have not realized how many of us had our highest test of religious love by devilish hate of other re- ligions. Who can conceive of the American Y. M. C. A. offering its hut to the Knights of Columbus, for the celebration of mass and administering of !he communion? And when the Knights of Columbus have their hut ready, they in turn invite their Israelitish "brethren" to administer to their Jewish worshipers in a Roman Catholic "temple." And on the ever-memorable day in April, 1917, when the United States Senate voted us into the world- war, and a Democrat from the Gulf pledged a consecrated South to this war, and a rock-ribbed Republican from Massachusetts solemnly dedicated his party and his state to the arming of this war, and a senator from New York spoke for the devotion of his state and of his people, a reverend hush fell upon the reverend senators as the hour closed and one of their number rose and in a wonderful prayer represented Baptists and Methodists, Unitarians and Episcopalians, Catholics and Jews, before the throne of God. Probably the most remarkable fact thai can be recorded of American Christians is the fact that that prayer was offered by Senator Reed Smoot, of Utah. In theory public education is democratic in the forming, but as a matter

454 IMPROVEMENT ERA of fact it has always been more aristrocratic than democratic. All this is changing. At a summer normal school in San Diego, Calif., the president and every teacher devoted their evenings for five weeks to teaching one hundred draftees from Chicago in Camp Kearny to read and write, and to learn an inconceivable number of other things valuable to them as men "over there." That normal-school faculty forgot the traditional superstition of the normal school, and without a course of study, without a common method, without notebooks or diagrams, did four years' work in five weeks with many of those men. Finally, we are war-modified politically. I wish to offer myself as a living example of a war-modified politician. I am a Republican of Republi- cans. I was born that way and have never sold my birthright. I have never been a candidate for a salaried office, appointive or elective. I have done my bit by voice and purse in every campaign since I was twenty-one years of age. I have been in five of the last six Republican conventions. I did what I could in the presidential campaigns of 1912 and 1916, and I was not on the winning side. In this hour of our nation's and the world's crisis I am thankful that American voters were wiser than I, that the man whom the Lord seems to have raised up for this hour is the commander in chief of the Armies and Navies of the United States, and the world's leader in thought and action in making the world safe for democracy.