(1) First, we must have knowledge of the world we live in -not so much masses of facts as a comprehension of principles, insight into relations and tendencies.  A man should be at home upon the earth; he should be able to call the stars by name, to realize something of the immensities by which this spinning planet is surrounded, and to see in every landscape a portion of the wrinkled, water-eroded surface of the globe.  He should see this apparently solid sphere as a whirl of atoms, and come face to face with the old puzzles of matter and mind.  He should be able to trace in imagination the growth of stellar systems; the history of our own earth; the evolution of plant and animal life, from the first protoplasmic nuclei to the mammoth and mastodon; the emergence of man from brute hood into self-consciousness, his triumph over nature and the other animals, and his achievement of civilization.  He should watch primitive man wrestling with problems as yet partly unsolved, see him gradually establishing law and order, inventing and discovering, mastering his fate.  He should follow the floods and ebbs of progress, the rise and fall of nations, know the great names of history and have for friends humanity’s saints and heroes.  He should be at home in ancient Israel, in classic Greece, in Rome of the Republic, in Italy of the Renaissance, especially in the early days of our own land, learning to comprehend and sympathize with the struggles and ideals that have made our nation what it is.  He should understand the clash of creeds and codes, follow the thoughts of Plato, of Bacon, of Emerson, and grasp the essence of the problems that now confront us.  What dangers lie before us, what the great statesmen and reformers are aiming at, what are the meaning and use of our institutions, our government, our laws, our morals, our religion — here is a hint of the knowledge that every man who comes into the world should amass.  To know less than this is to be only half alive, and unable to fulfill properly the duties of citizenship.  Widespread ignorance of the larger social, moral, political, religious problems of the day, is ominous to the Republic; and it is impossible to understand aright without a background of history and theory.  The aim of the schools should be to give not only some detailed information but a structural sense of life as a whole, a sane perspective; and to inspire an enthusiasm for intellectual things which shall outlast the early years of schooling.  The few facts imparted should suggest the vast fields beyond, and stir youth to that passion for truth which shall lead to ever-new vistas and farther horizons.