Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II LITTLE STUDIES IN COOPERATION The hunger for brotherhood is at the bottom of the unrest of the modern c1vilized world. ? George Frederick Watts In the labyrinth of garden possibilities through which we have been threading our way, two have been constantly attracting our attention: training in science and training in cooperation. Suppose we were accused of setting upon these too high a value. This charge might be made in all sincerity; and it might be admitted, too, provided our attention were riveted upon school problems alone and not upon world problems. But out in the world both science and cooperation play leading roles in each day’s business, great and small. The role of science is to develop the type of mind which in its humdrum aspect can turn its attention to inhibiting snap judgments or to sterilizing the baby’s milk, but which can, nevertheless, perform equally well the supreme service of discovering the typhoid germ. Cooperation renders its peculiar service by developing leadership and initiative, ? not initiative in school sports and school debates alone, but initiative that makes the worker forge ahead in studies that connect with the larger if not the more real world of civic activity and household economics. Said the child, struggling to define salt, It’s the stuff that when it is n’t in things makes them taste bad. Likewise of cooperation it may be said that, when it isn’t in things, they go, oh ! so badly. This, of course, is simply because we do not see what the other fellow is driving at. Active cooperative association permits rare intimacy with other souls, so that cooperation may be said to be a great revealer of character. Scarcely an emergency in life arises where a just estimate of human nature is not acutely needed. Even in the sp…
