EDUCATION BY THOMAS DAVIDSON AUTHOR OF "Aristotle and tHE ANCIENT Educational ideals," NEW YORK 1901 PREFACE To be strictly accurate, the title of this book should have been "A Brief History of Education, as Conscious Evolution." To record, even summarily, the facts and events in the long history of education, within the narrow limits of a text-book, would have been both impossible and undesirable. My endeavor has been to present education as the last and highest form of evolution-that great process which includes both Nature and Culture. I have tried to show what it is that evolves, why it evolves, and why evolution, finally attaining to consciousness, becomes education. Seeing that the immanent purpose of evolution is the realization of free individuals, that is, moral personalities, I have endeavored to mark the steps by which this has been gradually attained, and to indicate those that have yet to be taken. By placing education in relation to the whole process of evolution, as its highest form, I have hoped to impart to it a dignity which it could hardly otherwise receive or claim. From many points of view, the educator's profession seems mean and profitless enough, compared with those that make more noise in the world; but when it is recognized to be the highest phase of the world-process, and the teacher to be the chief agent in that process, both it and he assume a very different aspect. Then |