As I laid down a recent issue of the Saturday Review of Literature, one devoted entirely to the subject of education, one salient fact stayed with me. It was that although the scholarly writers have agreed that education is a vital element in reshaping a battered world, no complete corrective has yet been discovered within the field itself. Many theories were put forth, but no unified plan was sanctioned by all. Most of the efforts for improvement are purely experimental.
That the need is a deep and great one is constantly impressed upon us. Hardly a day goes by without our reading, in magazine or newspaper, some article related to the problem of education. Sometimes the cry is within our own country; at other times we are challenged by the necessity of re-educating the entire world. Parents feel vaguely that all is not well in the schoolhouse, teachers themselves reach out for an answer, philosophers bend earnestly over their writings. Those now in school are restless with unformed yearnings after a better equipment for living. Young men and women coming back from the service are looking forward to taking up where they left off in universities and business schools. What can we do to help?
As Christian Scientists, it is our privilege to take this world-wide problem to the light of Truth, and heal it. Mary Baker Eddy has said in "Miscellaneous Writings" (p. 61): "The education of the future will be instruction, in spiritual Science, against the material symbolic counterfeit sciences. All the knowledge and vain strivings of mortal mind, that lead to death,—even when aping the wisdom and magnitude of immortal Mind,—will be swallowed up by the reality and omnipotence of Truth over error, and of Life over death." In view of this prophetic statement, is it not a salutary sign that human education is becoming aware of its own limitations? Since it has not been founded on the rock, Truth, it was bound to be shaken from its mesmeric smugness. We read in the twenty-first chapter of Ezekiel (verse 27), "I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it ... until he come whose right it is."
