“Disciplines”

American education subscribes wholeheartedly to the idea that only by long, arduous disciplining can real achievement in culture result. The unlucky and unwilling student finds himself faced with the necessity of forcing his emotional and, occasionally, his cortical processes through a rigorous treadmill of tedious facts collected by hordes of the uninspired. The tediousness of the material is, fortunately , not inherent, but lies in the methods of the slave-drivers. One hears frequent reference to the value of this or that course as a discipline. Some even are spoken of as "disciplines" without deigning to mention the fields involved. One gathers that the very process of treading the endless belt tempers the spirit, sharpens the intellect, and toughens the moral fiber. This is the more extraordinary since the very minds that would denounce the process as slavery in the physical world acclaim it as the road to salvation in the intellectual and spiritual realms. Time and again, teachers and preachers tearfully call attention to the mortifica-tion of the body and the spirit that the youngster of either sex will undergo to fit himself for a part, however small, in the world of sport, and they bewail the total absence of any such attitude in things of the mind or the soul. Scholarship is perforce falling off and moral fiber weakening. The good old times of mental superiority and moral strength are no more. The times are out of joint. Never before has mankind faced so many intricate problems, been tempted by so many allurements, been generally so confused and distracted, so dangerously near the point of utter collapse and damnation. Let us assume for the moment the point to be well taken, that through discipline of the sort submitted to by the football candidate, the growing mind of the child, of the adolescent or of the young adult is trained, developed, and strengthened. And what would we have? Just what now exists. Bankrupt universities-bankrupt intellectually , not financially-empty and spiritless churches. Sunday-school and chapel rest on the foundation that discipline is an ultimate good.