Library Collections: Document: Full Text

The second of a series of messages to women by one of the world's remarkable women.

By Helen Keller

DR. FREDERICK TILNEY, Professor of Neurology at Columbia University, says that the brain of normal people is used to just one-fifth of its possible capacity! The fact that the blind and the deaf can keep informed as to the world about them, can enjoy books, flowers, music, and live as happily as anyone with all his faculties is a challenge to those who have five senses.

Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know, but teaching them how to find out things for themselves. The student who does not learn to think in school or college is not educated.

We know that brain power, like muscle power, can be developed by exercise. Most of us depend upon others to do our thinking for us. We accept their opinions and beliefs without taking the trouble to reason them out. That is one of the chief reasons why racial and social prejudices are so easily formed, and so difficult to eradicate. And we read carelessly, just as we listen.

Now it seems to me we Americans have a rather superficial attitude towards learning. We foster a quality of performance which implies that the end is more important than the means. We admire the ability to achieve quickly and dazzlingly in the public eye. We laud success at any cost. We imagine that a "best seller" is literature, that a newspaper with a great circulation is progressive, and that college men are educated. Such an attitude undermines spiritual values. From it spring false ideals, mental blindness, selfish ambitions and restlessness. It also explains why our spiritual progress is not commensurate with our material achievements. Everyone is impatient of painstaking workmanship. Everyone is in a hurry to finish a task. We demand quick education, quick wealth, quick transportation. Speed, speed, speed is the fixed idea of our people, and many of us delude ourselves into thinking that swiftness is progress, and quick performance genius. Because we do not take the time to develop our faculties, our knowledge on most subjects is ineffective, and what we think is of little value. For speed and impatience are heavy handicaps in the world of the mind. It is these qualities in our national life that make newspapers without ideas, literature without art and churches without religion.

There is a fact which we are apt to disregard, which is that all things in life are the direct and immediate expression of our minds. Whatever we believe is embodied in our acts. All things in the world are as they are because man's consciousness is what it is. The realization of our dream of a better world is dependent upon right thinking. At present our thinking is so close to that of the barbarous state that when we look about us and see a world of poverty, disease, sin and war, our sensibilities are not shocked. That is because these conditions are the outward expression of an unthinking consciousness. It is futile to attempt to change the world by reform or charity. Therefore it is the first duty of educators to encourage students to think; for thereby we shall build up a world more suitable for our children to be born into. The nation that thinks has a future.