The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1955, Blaðsíða 19

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
17
consuming animal. They try to tell
me that I am nothing but an eater,
therefore I should eat some kind or
other of breakfast food. Or that I am
a sleeper, and I need this kind of
mattress. Or that I am a drinker, and
must have this beverage in my home.
Or that I am nothing more than a
driver, and therefore must have this
machine to drive. j
I, for one, rebel against these great
lies and misconceptions of our time,
that we are things, statistics, consum-
ing animals . . . this and nothing more.
I like to think that I rebel because I
am an Icelander, but whether I am an
Icelander or not, a citizen of the
United Sates or not, I think man is
more than this. He may have weak-
ness, he may be fallible, yet he has the
spark of creativity and the wonder of
reflective thought in him. He is cast
in the very likeness of God.
It is important then that we make
use of our characteristically Icelandic
respect for the truth, because it is
this respect for truth alone that can
bring man’s understanding of himself
back into proper focus.
But of course there is the famous
twin Icelandic characteristic. If the
Icelander has a respect for truth, he is
also filled with a spirit of indepen-
dence. You may or may not have liked
Halldor Laxness’ book, but you must
admit the name was good: the Iceland-
ers are an “Independent People”.
Well, the world is certainly deficient
in that spirit today.
Take for instance the spectacle of
modern education. Conformity is the
keyword of education in our day. The
student is not only expected to meet
standards, but a certain set of stand-
ards. If only we attend the prescribed
number of classes, absorb and retain
the required number of facts, and re-
produce them in a manner in keeping
with the desires of our instructors . . .
then we are educated people! There
are many persons walking up and
down the world in this day who have
a slip of paper to proclaim the fact
they are educated people, a fact that
is reflected neither in their ability to
conduct constructive lives, nor in their
ability to reach conclusions or make
decisions for themselves.
On the other hand, it has been
characteristic of the Icelanders that
they have always respected and
admired the man who has earned for
himself by hard labor that which too
many of us have received by the
“spoon-feeding” of modern education.
For education does not mean merely
the ability to absorb, retain, and re-
produce facts. An educated man is not
a sponge! An educated man is one who
is so disciplined that he can not only
think, but think for himself! He is,
above all, an independent man!
Of course I recognize, as do most of
us, that the independent spirit of the
Icelanders has often won for him a
bad name. His independence of spirit
has often degenerated into an im-
movable stubborness. But as we look
back in the history of the Icelandic
people to see this spirit at its best, we
cannot help but admire it. It is a
spirit tempered with integrity, unfet-
tered by selfishness or self-interest, and
it is a spirit that is lit with willingness
to communicate.
Do we need this spirit of indepen-
dence today? ... We are living in a
time of extremes; two outstanding
examples are Communism and Mc-
Carthyism. The nature of these
extremes is such that they would
reduce all men to a paralyzing com-
mon denominator of thought and ac-
tion. We ought to have the indepen-