(Vol. 114 No. 1) Text (PDF) - Spelman College: Home

“True education helps us on the one hand to know truth, but morethan that it helps us to love truth and sacrifice for it. It gives us notonly knowledge, which is power, but wisdom, which is control.”of love and make it appear that youare loving when you are actuallyhating. This type of moral and ethicalrelativism is sapping the verylife’s blood of the moral and spirituallife of our nation and our world.And I am convinced that if we are tobe a great nation, and if we are tosolve the problems of the world, wemust come out of this mountain.We have been in it too long. For ifman fails to reorientate his lifearound moral and ethical values, hemay well destroy himself by the misuseof his own instrument.Now education has a great roleto play at this point. You see, educationhas a two- role function. Theone is utility and the other culture.Education must give an individualefficiency, but it must also humanizethe individual. On the one hand,education must give us the power toconcentrate, the faculty for intensivethinking; this is a basic function ofeducation. On the other hand, educationmust help us to think critically.And so education helps to liftan individual from the bondage oflegends and half truths to the unfetteredrealm of objective analysis andcreative appraisal. If an individualcan’t think critically, he really isn’teducated. Of course I’m sure all theSpelmanites and Morehouse menand Morris Brown and Clark andAtlanta University students and allthe other people present here areeducated. I’m sure that does notapply to you. So many people can’tthink critically. Thinking criticallymeans that the individual mustthink imaginatively, creatively, originally.Originality is a basic part ofeducation. That does not mean thatyou think something altogether new;if that were the case Shakespearewasn’t original, for Shakespearedepended on Plutarch and others formany of his plots. Originality does notmean thinking up something totallynew in the universe, but it does meangiving new validity to old form. In areal sense, education must help anindividual think intensively, critically,imaginatively.But this isn’t enough. Any educationthat stops at this point is a dangerouseducation. An individual thatstops at this point is a dangerous education.An individual who is properlyeducated must have more than efficiency.The proper education will notonly give the individual the power ofconcentration but worthy objectivesupon which to concentrate. It will givehim not only critical faculty for precisejudgment, but profound sympathieswith which to temper the asperityof his judgment. It will not onlyquicken his imagination but kindlehis enthusiasm for the objects of hisimagination. True education helps uson the one hand to know truth, butmore than that it helps us to love truthand sacrifice for it. It gives us not onlyknowledge, which is power, but wisdom,which is control. I am convincedthat if we are to move forward, that ifwe are to face the many problems ofour world, education must take onthis two-fold role as it has traditionallydone, and give the individual a senseof moral and ethical values along withhis efficiency, so that he will go out ofhis college classroom knowing thatthere are certain moral laws in theuniverse just as there are basic physicallaws. For in a real sense there issomething in this universe that justifiesCarlyle saying, No lie can live forever.There is something in this universethat justifies William CullenBryant in saying, Truth crushed toearth will rise again. There is somethingin this universe which justifiesJames Russell Lowell saying,Truth forever on the scaffold.Wrong forever on the throne,Yet that scaffold sways the future.And behind the dim unknownStandeth God within the shadows,Keeping watch above His own.There is even something in this universewhich justifies Greek mythologyin talking about a goddess of Nemesis.There is something here in thestructure of our universe that justifiesthe Biblical writer in saying, Youshall reap what you sow. This is alaw-abiding universe, and we mustmove out of the mountain of moraland ethical relativism that we havebeen in all too long.We must also move out of themountain of practical materialism.We have been in it long enough. I amnot speaking now of metaphysicalmaterialism the materialism whichsays in substance that all reality canbe explained in terms of matter inmotion and that life is merely a physiologicalprocess with a physiologicalmeaning. We need to move out of thatmountain also, I guess, but I am talkingabout another type of materialismnot a theoretical materialism, whichis usually confined to a sophisticatedfew, I am speaking of a practical materialism,which means living as if therewere nothing else that had reality butfame and material objects. We operate,or we live rather, in two realms, so4 S P E L M A N M E S S E N G E R