Graduation Address

"Education for Enjoyment" (UA Case 67, Box 2)

As a graduate of Fredericton High School and the Provincial Normal School, as it was then called, I feel very much at home here in this Capital City. I suppose had it not been for the First Great War intervening I would naturally have come to U.N.B. for my Arts degree. How thankful you can be for the intervention of that war! It boosted my ego tremendously, however, when you attempted to rectify that intervention by making me at least an Alumnus Honoris Causa two years ago,—and, as the Treasurer of the Alumni will assure you, I pay my annual Alumni fee!

This is a time of your when a great deal of advice is given to graduates of Universities. The Toronto Telegram quite properly suggested recently that if students went to College in order to improve their income they should hesitate—and then turn to brick laying or some kindred profession which far exceeded in income that normally paid to University graduates.

It is difficult to describe education. May I put it this way? I might picture myself as a foundling left by someone on the steps of your university library. You’ve heard of the little stone over a baby’s grave in England on which were carved the words:

Came in;
Looked about;
Didn’t like it;
Went out.

We have that alternative. But most of us lack that child’s intuition and we grow up. Picture me then growing up—on your library steps. I have the option of learning the accepted responses of living and stepping down into the world with practically no knowledge of what it is all about, no knowledge of what others had discovered, or how they had faced life. There is a book in the Old Testament called Proverbs. It was not written in any particular period. It is ageless because it is a compilation of the wisdom of centuries. In the latter part of this book there is a description of how the man void of understanding gets along in life. Some one visited his vineyard and describes it:

It was all grown over with thorns,
And nettles had covered the face thereof,
And the stone wall thereof was broken down.

But I can also turn around on those library steps and open the door into my inheritance. A few years ago John Bassett, the Chancellor of the University of Bishop’s College and President of the Montreal Gazette, stood on this campus and told the undergraduates that education consisted of safeguarding our inheritance that no good thing may be lost, fighting evil wherever we find it, and inculcating in youth a sense of nobility and a spirit of creativeness. Can you think of a better definition? The Book of Proverbs also has something to say about the man who gets understanding:

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteh understanding.
For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof that find gold.
She is more precious than rubies; and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.
Length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honour.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.
She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her.

What is the University of New Brunswick? What is a University? What is its origin?

The University was founded away back in the Middle Ages for discovery of fresh knowledge by men devoted to finding, clarifying and relating. These men had to live so they bought land on which they could support themselves, then they discovered the need for the continuity of this work so they trained youth as disciples. They made their discoveries and dissiminated the knowledge orally and through writing—for a University is never selfish.

There are two things I want to suggest to you about those Universities. They were (1) committees of youth and age, great personalities and eager disciples, with (2) a great devotion to a common purpose—the discovery of knowledge—not for utility alone, not for curiosity alone, but so that they might be at home in the world—that they might know everything possible about the world in which they found themselves. All life must be a combination of "how to make a living" and "how to live." The Karan puts this beautifully "If I had two loaves of bread I would sell one and buy hyacinthe to feed the soul." We find it expressed in another way in the New Testament "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

And so we have Killian of Massachusetts’ Institute of Technology saying "Engineers, scientists, and other technically trained men in this atomic age should have a solid grasp of humanities;" and Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia after a long presidency there said: "I have boiled down the importance of education to just two things, Character and Good Manners. Everything else will come." Clarene Dunham, a professor of Civil Engineering at Yale, reflected the same thought recently in a letter, which I saw, that he had written to a mutual friend: "Education can develop a man’s abilities to accomplish things, but unfortunately, the motives and character that direct his efforts can turn these abilities toward evil as well as toward good."

With knowledge there has to be developed a sense of responsibility. An education man is a happy man because a great new world has opened out to him of illimitable interests satisfactions and surprises but an educated man is also a sad man because there comes with that knowledge a sense of responsibility that he would like to escape, but knowing the consequences, he dare not. Edna St. Vincent Millay puts this very strikingly in her Conversation at Midnight. The young Communist, John, is speaking: "A man is tired of being a town all by himself. He wants to be a grain of sand in a shovelful of sand in a cement mixer that is mixing the cement to cement together the bricks in one of the walls of one of the buildings connected with one of the cement works on the outskirts of town." Isn’t that effective? And yet giving way to that feeling permits the very communism that John exemplifies, with all its dangers and detriment.

Away back in the days of Socrates and Plato and the so-called University of Athens, the aim was to strive for excellence in human nature. In the Middle Ages the aim was to strive for the will of God and follow it. Today in the scientific era we have the tremendous emphasis on the application of science. In order to preserve civilization in this world, we must integrate all three of these.

Plato pictures the soul just before it leaves for the earth driving through heaven in a chariot. It sees Beauty, Justice, Courage and all the other virtues, and Plato remarks that success in the earthly life of that soul depends upon the extent to which amidst the shadows, confusions, and distractions of earth, the soul retains the memory of that vision. What a splendid parable that is of education at its best today!

As you go out I could wish for you the constant flash-back of your memories to the vision that you had here on this hill-top.