Can Education Alone Save Us?
In an address before the National Educational Association, Dr. David Starr Jordan, chancellor of Stanford University, expressed the thought and the conviction that the world must be saved from the atrocities of war and receive the blessings of permanent peace through the educational and enlightening influences of the school-teacher. The doctor recognizes that “the struggle of the next fifty years” will be “the most intense since the Reformation.” Speaking of the work confronting the teacher, he said: “The problem is, how to hold in relations of mutual help a world in which mutual destruction has, through the prostitution of science, been made so easy, and in which all the traditions of history and of the limitation of patriotism cause such destruction to lie along the line of least resistance.” Dr. Jordan has devoted much of his life to emphasizing the advantages and the blessings of peace, and he is a past master in depicting the cruelties, the absurdities, the imbecility of war. Without any question, he has done his full share in creating a sentiment in the world that has made so many rulers ashamed to acknowledge the responsibility of going to war. He was very sanguine in his hopefulness, before this European conflict, that the world would never again go to war. But while recognizing this splendid work for peace that he and other strong men have done, it is important that the fact should be emphasized that it takes more than mere education, more than mere culture, to keep people from fighting. The culture, the education, the scientific attainments of this time, have combined to produce the most awful scenes of carnage and savage slaughter that the world has ever witnessed. And there are no more highly enlightened, no more profoundly educated, no more thoroughly scientific nations on the face of the earth than those that are now causing rivers of blood to flow all through Europe, with some of the streamlets reaching over into western Asia. Therefore education and culture are not enough. Men must know the experiences, the hopes, and the divine principles of the Prince of peace in order to avoid wars. Education alone, apart from the experiences of the true Christian, has been shown to be incapable of keeping men from killing one another. And it should be emphasized that a mere profession of the name of Christ is not sufficient; for have not all the nations at war been known as “Christian nations”? Therefore it is conclusive that mere education and the profession of Christianity are not sufficient barriers against the storms that may be raised by the war gods. A true and personal contact with the blessed Christ Himself is alone sufficient to curb the evil passions and the furies of human anger that so readily burst into the devastating flames of war.