The Psychology of Nations by George Partridge

Author:George Partridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pronoun

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CHAPTER II

INTERNATIONALISM AND THE SCHOOL

IF WE TAKE A serious and an optimistic view of education as a social institution, and think of it at all as standing in functional relationships with the social life as a whole, we must conclude that internationalism as a new movement and idea, and the school as an institution in which changes in the social order are reflected (but in which also changes in the social order are created) are closely related. Adjustment is a relatively easy matter; it is the conception of the school as a creative factor that challenges our best efforts. Let us think of the school as a workshop in which there must be created the forces by which we must make a desired and an otherwise unrealizable future come to pass and we have a new and inspiring view of education. The school perhaps must do even more than educate the forces; it must help even to create the vision itself by which the future is to be directed. The school becomes, so to speak, the working hypothesis of civilisation. In it the ideas and the desires by which nations live must be made to take shape.

The idea of internationalism implies certain changes in the external relations of nations which, whatever the form internationalism will take on its political side, are not difficult to perceive. These in turn imply internal changes. We might readily outline or psychologically analyze what could be called the mood of internationalism, in order to see its relations to education. It contains a number of factors, more or less related to one another. First, there is a recognition of a world of growing, living historical entities which we call nations; and this recognition implies new understanding and an enrichment of knowledge. Second, there is a change in the consciousness of nations, slow but visible, by which they become more willing to investigate freely and fairly their own place in history, understand their own desires, functions, virtues, faults, the value of their culture and civilization. Without such an attitude all talk of internationalism in any real sense is idle. Third, there is a new and different practical interest. We begin to conceive our world as a world of complex practical relations, and this idea of a practical world is likely to become one of the leading thoughts of the future. Fourth, by extending, so to speak, this idea of a world of practical relations, we idealize a world in which there is a common interest in great international achievements,—a world devoted more than it is now to coördinated efforts to accelerate progress, more conscious of the needs of a distant future, perhaps, or even of an ideal of universal efficiency as a means of realizing some one world purpose or many good purposes. This is not now, as it once might have been called, merely an Utopian dream. In some slight degree it is already being accomplished. Fifth, social and moral feelings are widened in

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