Education is the huge dynamo which supplies power to the American people. Not in history or in legend is there recorded such an outburst of international curiosity as that about the real America, as distinguished from the America created in the minds of Europeans by our multi-millionaires, since it became not merely agricultural but also an industrial world-factor, inevitably dominant in an era whose civilization is the first based upon peace and indissolubly wedded to peaceful arts. Europe has not been satisfied with inspecting what comes to her. Such specimens only whetted her curiosity to an edge as fine as that which cut the home ties of adventurous spirits when Columbus exhibited his Indians and his gold at the court of his patrons.
The Europeans, and the Asiatics, too, hastened to dispatch to us all manner of commissioners, semi-official and private, from princes of reigning houses to delegates from labor unions. And each of these spies—of the splendid modern kind—has been charged to seek and find and forthwith bring home an answer to the all-important question: “How do they do it?”
And these gentlemen have peeked and poked and peered in the friendliest, most flattering way imaginable. They have examined palace and tenement and cottage, and their tenants. They have eaten and drunk of all the products of the land, and have listened to speeches numerous and have read newspapers numberless. They have watched wheels go round in factories—and in heads as well. They have heard those who say “the captains of industry did it,” those who say “it was done in spite of the captains of industry and the high financiers.” And after tasting and seeing and smelling and touching and hearing, from Maine to the Golden Gate, these envoys have gone back, and with one accord have replied:
“They do it by education.”
From the end of the Civil War—an interruption of our progress to rid ourselves of a drag upon it—we have been educating as we never did before, as no other people ever did or now does. Immigrants have poured in; our great “infant industry” which protectionist and free trader alike believe in protecting and fostering, has been exceedingly expansive. And we have put home and foreign product into the great educational plant—from half to two-thirds of all between five years old and twenty going through school and academy and college. The average annual number who now receive formal education is one-fifth of our total population. And more than a million of our young men and women—one in every ten of both sexes of the higher education age, one in every six young men of that age—are annually in the universities, colleges, academies, business and professional schools. Not enough, not nearly enough; but in hopeful proportion to what used to be.
“I think, therefore I am,” runs the Descartes formula. We teach our youth to think in order that they may really be—be individual, be proud and self-respecting and self-reliant, be free with the freedom no government or law can give or secure, or take away. In the educational institutions this impulse gets form and direction that it may develop efficient manhood. And against the thinking toiler all the forces of ignorance and passion and wasteful luxury, of base and foolish political, social, industrial ideas, cannot prevail.
The first free school opened on these shores was in New York City on Manhattan Island. Of all the settlers who came to America the Dutch alone understood and believed in the free public school, offering free education not as alms but as a right. They had had it at home. They established it here, and set the example which was followed by the other colonists, first of all by those New Englanders who had lived in the Holland that fought Alva and Philip, and had there absorbed some democratic ideas. Holland was the godmother of modern Democracy, was the nursery of the modern public school.
These words are from the pen of John of Nassau, the oldest brother of that friend of civil and religious liberty, William the Silent:
“Soldiers and patriots thus educated (in free schools) are better than all armies, arsenals, armories, munitions, alliances and treaties that can be had or imagined in the world.”
Those words, written three hundred years ago by a man who had devoted his life to the study of the rights and wrongs of the common man, sum up the whole story. How his eloquent common sense contrasts with the shrieking of those little Americans who think that a cannon shot can penetrate further than a noble idea! How this old friend of freedom rebukes the puny, alleged statesmen who fancy that the manhood of this republic was developed on the battlefields, instead of realizing that military prowess is only one matter-of-course evidence of its existence! Enlightenment and Democracy make men who live for their country—and that is the new force in the world.
Let the people who fear for the future of the democratic spirit of this people look upon the spectacle of our free schools, those millions of young heads bent over books, those millions of young brains learning to think, to reason, learning to use mind and body in the service of civilization, real civilization. Enlightenment has won all the victories of the republic in the past. Its eternal warfare upon ignorance and incompetence, upon craft of plutocrat and craft of demagogue, and plausible idealism of reactionary, is the safeguard of the republic’s future. And one of the great agents of enlightenment, of Democracy—not the only great agent, not the greatest agent—is formal education in school, academy and college.
And more important even than the formal education of the boys is the formal education of the girls. The other means to enlightenment are more accessible to the men—indeed, they compel the men to become less ignorant and less prejudiced in spite of themselves. But to reach the women, the formal education is almost indispensable, for their ignorance and their prejudice are more sheltered, less open to the light of Democracy that floods the arenas and the market places.
And educated, enlightened, democratic women are of the highest importance to America, whose mission seems to be to lead the world in the march upward to that Arcady where every human unit shall have the chance to count as one.
Our extensive and our expanding system of higher education of women is often bitterly assailed by educated men, by educators. Bourbonism, especially when bulwarked by vanity, does not yield easily. And it will be many a day before death reaps the last man with the passion for looking down on his fellow-creatures. To avoid useless dispute, admit that woman should look up to man. Still there remains unimpaired the truth that woman’s two highest functions are to be the companion of man and the mother of men. The profitable companion for an educated man must be an educated woman—educated not merely for man’s “hours of ease,” nor for his happily infrequent hours “when pain and anguish rack the brow,” but also for the hours of development and endeavor.
So long as so-called education consisted in a little Latin and less Greek, forgotten as speedily as the business of life could crowd it from the mind, higher education was as unimportant to women as—well, as it was to man. But now that education consists in teaching not how the Greeks and Romans lived, but how “you and I” must live to-day and to-morrow, the gap between the man who has had the higher education and the woman who has not had it and has not supplied the deficiency, is wide indeed and will grow wider. If as much attention were given to the relations between men and women from five years after marriage on to the end as is given to their relations during the purely sentimental and transitory mating season this difference would appear in its true importance.
The same point of view applies to woman as a mother. So long as the training of children centred around the slipper and the switch, an ignorant mother was not at a great disadvantage—the best educated mothers knew little. But now-a-days the child of the highly educated mother has an enormous advantage, other things being equal, because such a mother applies science to the conduct of her home as her husband applies it to the conduct of his profession or business.
No education in the mother will compensate for lack of character. Character without education is infinitely better than education without character. But character plus education is the true ideal—and it is attainable.
If we are speedily to enter more fully into the rich promised land which Democracy opens to us, we must have not only the man who knows but the woman who knows. After all, is not our ultimate excuse for being alive that we are the parents of the next generation? And there the woman, with practically absolute control over the next generation at its vital, formative age, has the better of the man. If anything, does she not need the higher education more than does the man?
Education for the men; education for the women. But it must be enlightened and enlightening education.
Our national ideal is not a powerful state, famed and feared for bluster and appetite, not a people welded by unthinking passion for military glory into an instrument to the greed and vanity of the few; but manhood and womanhood, a citizenship ever wiser and stronger and more civilized, with ever more and more individual units that cannot be controlled in the mass—the democratic man and the democratic woman—alert, enlightened, self-reliant, free.
Now, there can be no difference of opinion as to the way to this ideal, the way to make the individual capable to work out his own salvation without hindrance from the aggressiveness of his neighbor or neighbors, without hindrance from the prejudices begotten in and of the darkness of his own ignorance.
Against all these foes, those without, those within, there is just one effective weapon—education.
It is impossible for an ignorant man to be free. No matter what constitutions you establish, no matter what laws you pass, no matter how assiduously you safeguard individual rights and liberties, the ignorant man will still be a slave. He rejoices in his chains, his prejudices and his superstitions. He clings to them. He beats off those who seek to deliver. He welcomes those who seek to bind. He shouts for chains, he votes for chains—chains for himself, chains for others. If he is ever in the right it is because he is mistaken. And you may be certain that a demagogue or other slave-hunter will soon recapture him and restore him to his beloved bondage of error.
This is why the man who aspires to freedom instinctively reaches for the weapon of education. This is why the American people always have had as their dominant passion the passion for education. This is why on the frontier the schoolhouse is finished before the home is furnished; why the washerwoman and the drayman toil to keep their children in school and to send at least one son to college; why our self-made men pour out their wealth in educational endowments; why there are all these colossal public appropriations for schools, academies, colleges, universities.
What is an ignorant man?
Of course there are the illiterates and the almost illiterate. But, numerous though they are, they do not count for much in this republic. They do not decide elections. They do not select candidates. They do not propose and compel legislation. The so-called ignorant vote is not a national or a local peril. It is not a national, rarely even a local factor.
The ignorance that counts in a Democracy is educated ignorance. Sometimes it has only been part of the way through the common schools. Sometimes it has one or more university degrees. Sometimes it struts and preens itself as “the scholar in politics.” Only too often it writes books, especially histories, and in the magazines and in the newspapers tells how and for whom we ought to vote. More often than not the very conspicuous members of this ignorant class are full to the overflowing with knowledge, knowledge from books, knowledge from experience, knowledge from travel.
No, education—democratic education—is not knowledge. It is not even experience. Profound, deadly, dangerous ignorance is compatible with both.
What, then, is ignorance?
All its shades and kinds can be so classified as to exclude none who ought to be included, include none who has the right to go free. Is not the dangerous, ignorant man of the Democracy the man who cannot reason, cannot think for himself?
What does it mean to think for one’s self?
Fortunately, it does not mean original thinking. If that were so there would instantly arise in the world the most contracted and exclusive aristocracy it has ever known. To think for one’s self does not even mean correctly to reason out one’s own conclusions from given premises. That would involve an amount of mental labor from which many brains might shrink. It merely means to be able to follow reasoning that is laid before one; to hear both sides and suspend judgment until both are heard; to recognize which is sound and which fallacious, and upon that independent and clear judgment to accept the true, or rather, to reject the false.
A Democracy must breed citizens who think for themselves. Without them it cannot live. With them it cannot die. Hence it follows that in a Democracy education means to cultivate the ability to think for one’s self. Democracy means the right of private judgment. Education in and for a Democracy means development of the capacity to form private judgment.
So far as the Democracy is concerned, so far as the equable distribution of rights and liberties is concerned, no education that does not increase reasonableness is of the slightest value.
The education that has for its chief aims, its only real aims, culture, refinement, knowledge, learning, may be useful to an aristocracy like Great Britain, to an empire like Germany, to an autocracy like Russia. But it is not only not helpful to but actually hostile to democratic ideas and ideals. It breeds contempt on the one hand, fear and suspicion and hate on the other—the few looking down upon the many, the many looking up at the few. It makes the powerful supercilious. It makes the weak, whether educated or uneducated, helpless. It fills the brain; it does not necessarily strengthen the brain. It gives a man something; it does not compel him to make something of himself.
The truth about democratic education is indirectly recognized in practice more and more as science and its rigidly logical methods have grown in educational importance. All our modern systems of education are based perforce, rather than by design, in part upon teaching the brain to reason. But do we realize fully as yet that for us, for our democratic purposes of self-development and self-government, teaching the brain to think is not only the whole foundation of education, but also the sustaining part of the superstructure?
Take up any one of the great newspapers of the country, the great reflectors of the public mind and heart and taste. A few minutes’ searching among the advertisements will discover columns on columns of notices of astrologers and palmists and clairvoyants, of mediums and crystal gazers and cure-all doctors with their cure-all medicines. To whom do these dealers in the secrets of life and death, the future and the beyond, appeal for their comfortable incomes? To those who cannot read? Manifestly not. To the people in the humbler walks of life? Certainly not. No, they are inviting the educated classes to call—merchants and bankers and artisans, their wives and their daughters, the “well-to-do,” the reading public, the “substantial,” the part of the people which is commonly called “the backbone of the republic.”
Go on to the news columns. You find some account of the doings of a band of thieves who have got possession of some department or departments of the city or state government, and have substituted for the statute law the law of loot. Who turned over the keys to them? The illiterate, the dishonest, the criminal? Not at all. Look at the primary rolls of the organization whom these wretches disgrace, and you find a thoroughly respectable, in the main intelligent, certainly honest, body of voters. By no stretch of the meaning could you call them uneducated in the sense in which that term is commonly used.
In the very next column, perhaps, you read how a statesman of pious mien and impressive manner has been assuring his fellow-countrymen that they have a commission from the Almighty (which he begs leave to execute) calling them from their peaceful and orderly occupations and sending them forth to slaughter certain other men of whom they had not heard until a few months ago, to seize persons and property and to administer upon them arbitrarily. And who cheered wildly as these tidings of morality and civilization were proclaiming? Illiterates? Certainly not; but educated men, many of them highly educated, men who would hardly characterize such performances in private life as “manifest destiny” and “plain duty.”
A few columns further on and you read how one is wailing like a lost soul over heaps of scrap metal and rags and waste paper, because he cannot get permission to work them over into money and so make us all millionaires. And who is he? A college graduate. And who are his supporters? Millions who have gone to school and take in the newspapers and magazines.
These few illustrations of the reign of illogic are cited from the multitude available with a double purpose. In the first place, they faintly suggest to what an extent the citizen of a Democracy is prey to charlatanism. In countries with other forms of government—in monarchies and the like—a few charlatans are licensed and erected into respectability and power, and given the range of the people, while all others are rigidly repressed. In a Democracy any charlatan may license himself. The people are prey to every and any form of charlatanism, fraudulent or both. They must protect themselves, or they will not be protected at all. And right education is the only means.
The second point made obvious by these examples of superstition theological, superstition medical, superstition political, is that our education in the past must have been defective and must still be so. It has been seeking, it now seeks, as its chief object, to impart knowledge, not to cultivate the art of using knowledge, the art of thinking correctly.
The ideal has been an education that is reminiscent and is only incidentally constructive. The democratic ideal is the education that is constructive and only incidentally reminiscent.
There is only one way to this true education. Just as a child is taught to walk, to ride, to swim, just as it is taught to read, to write, to cipher, with just as much care, with just as much patience, with just as much deliberateness of purpose, must it be taught to reason.
This is not in advocacy of courses in formal logic. Those courses do not teach men to think. They teach men what certain other men have thought about the processes of thinking. And too often they teach it in such a way as to discourage the exercise of the reasoning faculty. No; the education that will soundly educate must make of every kind of lesson a lesson in logic, an incessant pointing out of reasons, reasons, reasons why certain facts are so, certain allegations false; an incessant demand that reasons, reasons, reasons be given—always reasons. The interrogation point should be the symbol over the door of every school, high and low, as the indication of what is going on within.
The average child starts in life with a question mark at the tip of every sense. Why does this inquisitiveness gradually disappear or become perverted into curiosity about trivialities? Why does going to school become a burden? Why are so many classes at college listless and inattentive? Why does the light, the frivolous, the thoughtless attract and hold, while that which is in reality far more interesting wearies and repels? Is it not because this reasoning faculty is allowed to grow up “any which way,” and is discouraged or suppressed wherever memory or some other form of some one’s else ideas can be substituted? Is it not because to reason comes to seem a burden, a bore, a pain? Would that be so if education were rightly based, rightly built?
We Americans reason better, perhaps, than any other nation about a wider range of affairs; probably not with so much depth as some other peoples, but certainly with greater clearness. But this is due to a compulsory training almost altogether outside of the schoolroom. It is due to Democracy, that compels the mind to grow as Spring’s sunshine compels the seed. As our affairs, both public and private, have grown more complex, the defects due to this haphazard education of the reasoning faculty, this treatment of it almost as if it were a weed, become more and more apparent, more and more in need of correction.
Common sense is looked upon as a gift of the gods, a sort of intuition. Is it not in reality merely the result of a somewhat better natural or acquired reasoning faculty? Ought not common sense to be the attainable possession of every American? And where but the schoolhouse is the place to obtain this possession, this means to self-rule, to freedom, to the full splendor of the noblest of human ideals, Democracy?
In a Democracy the school should not be the temple of knowledge. It should be the temple of reason. And it shall be! And that day will be a sad one for charlatanism and for charlatans.