Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 64:256 (Oct 1907)
Article: What Education Is Of Most Worth?
Author: Charles Finney Cox

BSac 64:256 (Oct 1907) p. 638

What Education Is Of Most Worth?1

Charles Finney Cox

These are times when everything must be priced and tagged. The paramount question, on every one’s lips, is as to values, and values are estimated by productiveness. We are all asking: what income will a thing yield; what pleasure or privilege will it buy? Utilitarianism and commercialism never had the universal sway they have to-day.

As the general store of human possessions—intellectual as well as physical—becomes larger and larger, the demand for an appraisement of each individual’s share becomes stronger and stronger. Men and women are graded according to their available assets, mental, moral, or pecuniary. In what is colloquially known as “society” one is rather easily “sized up,” for labeling is there reduced to an exact system. In that formally organized department of human activity, position is determined by the quality or quantity of clothes and jewels one wears, by the kind of vehicle he is carried about in, or by the location and costliness of his home and its contents, or the number of servants he maintains,—in brief, by the amount of money one is able to spend without apparent embarrassment. In political life the criterion of success is the attainment of office. Men still go into public life for what they can get out of it. “Practical” politics are by no means obsolete, and the word “spoils “has not yet wholly passed out of use as a technical term indicating compensation for

BSac 64:256 (Oct 1907) p. 639

party service. Even those more or less justly accorded the name of “statesmen” are not entirely above looking for reward in popular applause and vulgar acclaim. In literature we may determine excellence, according to the book-reviews, by merely procuring a list of “the largest sellers,” and in art success is most often measured by the price which a picture or statue will bring.

In the field of research and discovery it is applied science that carries off the palm, and what people most want to know about Hertzian waves or radio-activity is for what “useful” or money-making purpose they can be employed. The consequence of this is, that the mere inventor is elevated to the rank of “scientist,” and the man who “promotes” a novelty and organizes a corporation for its exploitation is greater than the “impractical” student of nature who unselfishly works out an original generalization or formulates a previously hidden law. Thus it is an Edison and not a Kelvin, a Burbank rather than a Darwin, who receives immediate recognition and secures the material reward. Even in the domain of morals and theology we have not quite outgrown the principle of “en...