For University Extension is a missionary university,
not content with supplying culture, but seeking to stimulate the demand
for it. This is just the point in which education in the past has shown
badly in comparison with religion or politics. When a man is touched
with religious ideas he seeks to make converts, when he has views on
political questions he agitates to make his views prevail: culture on
the other hand has been only too often cherished as a badge of
exclusiveness, instead of the very consciousness of superior education
being felt as a responsibility which could only be satisfied by efforts
to educate others. To infuse a missionary spirit into culture is not the
least purpose of University Extension.
I cannot resist the temptation to carry forward this thought from the
present into the future. In University Extension so described may we
not see a germ for the University of the Future? I have made the
foundation of our movement the growing conception of education as a
permanent interest of adult life side by side with religion and
politics. The change is at best only beginning; it tasks the imagination
to conceive all it will imply when it is complete. To me it appears that
this expanding view of education is the third of the three great waves
of change the succession of which has made up our modern history.
Pages:
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130