honor. We give money prizes for work in our schools and thus strive to
commercialize the things of the mind and of the spirit. We have laid waste
our forests, impoverished our fields, and defiled our landscapes to
stimulate increased activity in our clearing-houses. Like Jason of old, we
have wandered far in quest of the golden fleece. We welcome the rainbow,
not for its beauty but for the bag of gold at its end. We seek to scale
the heights of Olympus by stairways of gold, fondly nursing the conceit
that, once we have scaled these heights, we shall be equal to the gods.

To indulge in even such a brief review of some of the weak places and
defections of society is not an agreeable task, but diagnosis must
necessarily precede the application of remedies. If we are to reconstruct
education in order to effect a reconstruction of society we must know our
problem in advance, that we may proceed in a rational way. Reconstruction
cannot be made permanently effective by haphazard methods. We must
visualize clearly the objectives of our endeavors in order to obviate
wrong methods and futility. We must have the whole matter laid bare before
our eyes or we shall not get on in the work of reconstruction. It were
more agreeable to dwell upon our achievements, and they are many, but the
process of reconstruction has to do with the affected parts. These must be
our special care, these the realm for our kindly surgery and the arts of
healing. We need to become acutely conscious that the present will become
the past and that there will be a new present which will take on the same
qualities that now characterize our present. We need to feel that the
future will look back to our present and commend or condemn according to
the practices of this generation. And the only way to make a sane and
right future is to create a sane and right present.