Education: How Old The New

“No idea is probably more ingrained in modern thinking, no opinion is more generally accepted, no conclusion is surer to most people, than that we are in the midst of marvellous progress in this little world of ours, and that our generation is somewhere at the apex of the Pyramid of Progress, elevated thereto by the attainments of the generations that have preceded us. As the Poet Laureate put it at the close of the nineteenth century, “we are the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time”; and because we have the advantage of our predecessors’ progress in their time, we are, of course, in all that makes for human happiness and fulness of life, very far ahead of those gone before us. The farther back we go in history, then, the lower down men are supposed to be found in all that stands for intellectuality and in all that represents the possibilities of human achievement at its best. It is now well understood that the generations of the past are not so much to be blamed for their backwardness as to be pitied for the misfortune that, having come earlier in the world’s history, they could not have the advantages that we enjoy, and therefore could only attain much lower stages in human progress than ours.”