The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

      

WASHINGTON, March 20—Still in Washington, but the floods are improving generally and the day has been, on the whole, a very peaceful one. Everything down along the Potomac is pretty well flooded, but they have decided to remove the dikes around the monuments.

A few friends for luncheon and at 2.30 I went down to the station to meet our eldest son who is on his way to Florida with the idea of joining his father on his fishing trip. Actually, he will now get there ahead of time and wait until my husband arrives. We had a few minutes together and caught up on all the family news.

I read an interesting article in April Harper's today. It is by Louis Adamic and discusses Black Mountain College, which is apparently a rebel group of teachers and students. The article contains a quotation on what education should mean to students.

Colleges, it says, should turn out people "who will be eternally modern and as such distinguished not by what they will know, but by what they will do with what they will know: and who will know and feel that life is essentially not competitive but calls for co-operation everywhere, and that, lest humanity perish, men must cease spending most of their energy scheming how to harm one another and begin looking toward a goal, toward something they wish to become and make of the world."

That seems to me one of the best statements I have ever seen on the aims of education. I know nothing about Black Mountain College but if any type of education can give its students a real understanding such as this, we will have made a stride in solving the problems of the present day, which, so far, our education does not seem to fit us to do.

I think the college from which the rebel group broke away has cause to be proud of itself. Any college which breeds mental virility, even if it creates a difference of opinion, may be proud of its achievement, for all despotism is based on education which holds people to a definite pattern and crushes individually.

E.R.


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, March 21, 1936

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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