as ends in themselves.  The supply stations take on a new meaning to the boy who is yearning to reach the flag at the top.  But it needs to be said here that the traditional superintendent and teacher will greet this entire plan with a supercilious smile.  They will call it visionary, unpractical, and idealistic—­then return to their seventy-five per cent regime with the utmost complacency and self-satisfaction.  It is ever so with the traditional teacher.  He seeks to be let alone, that he may go on his complacent way without hindrance.  To him every innovation is an interference, if not a positive impertinence.  But, in spite of the traditional teacher, the school is destined to rise to a higher level and enter upon a more rational procedure.  And we must look to the dynamic teacher to usher in the renaissance—­the teacher who has the vitality and the courage to break away from tradition and write integrity into the course of study as one of the big goals and think all the while toward integrity, physical, mental, and moral.

CHAPTER FIVE

APPRECIATION

Education may be defined as the process of raising the level of appreciation.  This definition will stand the ultimate test.  Here is bed-rock; here is the foundation upon which we may predicate appreciation as a goal in every rational system of education.  Appreciation has been defined as a judgment of values, a feeling for the essential worth of things, and, as such, it lies at the very heart of real education.  It must be so or civilization cannot be.  Without appreciation there can be no distinction between the coarse and the fine, none between the high and the low, none between the beautiful and the ugly, none between the sublime and the commonplace, none between zenith and nadir.  Hence, appreciation is inevitable in every course of study, whether the authorities have the courage to proclaim it or not.  Just why it has not been written into the course of study is inexplicable, seeing that it is fundamental in the educational process.  It is far from clear why the superintendent permits teachers and pupils to go on their way year after year thinking that arithmetic is their final destination, or why he fails to take the tax-payers into his confidence and explain to them that appreciation is one of the lode-stars toward which the schools are advancing.  In his heart he hopes that the schools may achieve appreciation, and it would be the part of frankness and fairness for him to reveal this hope to his teachers and to all others concerned.