"EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY"
Many reformers admit that no reforms can bring us towards democracy as
long as class rule continues. Henry George, for example, recognizes that
his great land reform, the government appropriation of rent for public
purposes, is useless when the government itself is monopolized, "when
political power passes into the hands of a class, and the rest of the
community become merely tenants."[83] In precisely the same way every
great "State Socialist" reform must fail to bring us a single step
towards real democracy, as long as classes persist.
That strongly marked social classes do exist even in the United States
is now admitted by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Andrew Carnegie, and by innumerable
other, by no means Socialistic, observers.
"The average wage earner," says John Mitchell, "has made up his mind
that he must remain a wage earner. He has given up the hope of a kingdom
to come where he will himself be a capitalist."[84] This feeling is
almost universally shared by manual wage earners, and very widely also
by salaried brain workers. Large prizes still exist, and their influence
is still considerable over the minds of young men. But, as was pointed
out recently in an editorial of the _Saturday Evening Post_, they are
"just out of reach," and the instances in which they actually
materialize are "so relatively few as to be negligible." Even if these
prizes were a hundred fold more numerous than they are, the children of
the wage earners would still not have a tithe of the opportunity of the
children of the well-to-do.
To-day in the country opportunities are no better than in the towns. The
universal outcry for more farm labor can only mean that such laborers
are becoming relatively fewer because they are giving up the hope that
formerly kept them in the country, namely, that of becoming farm owners.
Already Mr. George K. Holmes of the United States Bureau of Statistics
estimates that in the chief agricultural section of the country, the
North Central States, a man must be rich before he can become a farmer,
and so rapidly is this condition spreading to other sections that Mr.
Holmes feels that the only hope of obtaining sufficient farm labor is to
persuade the children of the farmers to remain on the farms.
"Fifty years ago," said _McClure's Magazine_ in a recent announcement,
which sums up some of the chief elements of the present situation, "we
were a nation of independent farmers and small merchants. To-day we are
a nation of corporation employees." There can be no question that we are
seeing the formation in this country of very definitely marked economic
and social classes such as have long prevailed in the older countries of
Europe. And this class division explains _why the political democracies
of such countries as France, Switzerland, the United States, and the
British Colonies show no tendency to become real democracies_. Not only
do classes defend every advantage and privilege that economic evolution
brings them, but, what is more alarming, they utilize these advantages
chiefly to give their children greater privileges still. Unequal
opportunities visibly and inevitably breed more unequal opportunities.
The definite establishment of industrial capitalism, a century or more
ago, and later the settlement of new countries, brought about a
revolutionary advance towards equality of opportunity. But the further
development of capitalism has been marked by steady retrogression. Yet
nearly all capitalist statesmen, some of them honestly, insist that
equality of opportunity is their goal, and that we are making or that we
are about to make great strides in that direction. Not only is the
establishment of equality of opportunity accepted as the aim that must
underlie all our institutions, even by conservatives like President
Taft, but it is agreed that it is a perfectly definite principle. Nobody
claims that there is any vagueness about it, as there is said to be
about the demand for political, economic, or social equality.
It may be that the economic positions in society occupied by men and
women who have now reached maturity are already to some slight degree
distributed according to relative fitness; and, even though this fitness
is due, not to native superiority, but to unfair advantages and unequal
opportunity, it may be that a general change for the better is here
impossible until a new generation has appeared. But there is no reason,
except the opposition of parents who want privileges for their
children, why every child in every civilized country to-day should not
be guaranteed by the community an equal opportunity in public education
and an _equal chance for promotion in the public or semi-public
service_, which soon promises to employ a large part if not the majority
of the community. _No Socialist can see any reason for continuing a
single day the process of fastening the burdens of the future society
beforehand on the children of the present generation of wage earners_,
children as yet of entirely unknown and undeveloped powers and not yet
irremediably shaped to serve in the subordinate rôles filled by their
parents.
But the reformers other than the Socialists are not even working in this
direction, and their claims that they are, can easily be disproved. Mr.
John A. Hobson, for example, believes that the present British
government is seeking to realize "equality of opportunity," which he
defines as the effort "to give equal opportunities to all parts of the
country and all classes of the people, and so to develop in the fullest
and the farthest-sighted way the national resources."[85] But even the
more or less democratic collectivism Mr. Hobson and other British
Radicals advocate, if it stops short of a certain point, and its
benefits go chiefly to the middle classes, may merely increase
middle-class competition for better-paid positions, and so obviously
_decrease_ the _relative_ opportunities of the masses, and make them
_less equal_ than they are to-day.
Edward Bernstein, the Socialist, says: "The number of the possessing
classes is to-day not smaller, but larger. The enormous increase of
social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large
capitalists, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees."
Whether this is true or not, whether the well-to-do middle classes are
gradually increasing in each generation, say, to 5, 10, or 15 per cent
of the population, cannot be a matter of more than secondary importance
to the overwhelming majority, the "non-possessing classes," that remain
outside. Nobody denies that social evolution is going on even to-day.
But the masses will probably not be willing to wait the necessary
generations and centuries before present tendencies, should they chance
to continue long enough (which is doubtful in view of the rapid
formation of social castes), would bring the masses any considerable
share of existing prosperity.
To secure anything approaching equality of opportunity, the first and
most necessary measure is to give equal educational facilities to all
classes of the population. Yet the most radical of the non-Socialist
educational reformers do not dare to hope at present even for a step in
this direction. No man has more convincingly described what the first
step towards a genuinely democratic education must be than Ex-President
Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, perhaps our most influential representative
of political as opposed to social democracy.
"Is it not plain," asks President Eliot, "that if the American people
were all well-to-do they would multiply by four or five times the
present average school expenditure per child and per year? That is, they
would make the average expenditure per pupil for the whole school year
in the United States from $60 to $100 for salaries and maintenance,
instead of $17.36 as now. Is it not obvious that instead of providing in
the public schools a teacher for forty or fifty pupils, they would
provide a teacher for every ten or fifteen pupils?"[86]
The reform proposed by Dr. Eliot, if applied to all the twenty million
children of school age in the United States, would mean the expenditure
of two billion instead of three hundred and fifty million dollars per
year on public education. Ex-President Eliot fully realizes the radical
and democratic character of this proposed revolution in the public
schools, and is correspondingly careful to support his demands at every
point with facts. He shows, for instance, that while private schools
expend for the tuition and general care of each pupil from two hundred
to six hundred dollars a year, and not infrequently provide a teacher
for every eight or ten pupils, the public school which has a teacher for
every forty pupils is unusually fortunate.
Dr. Eliot says that while there has been great improvement in the first
eight grades since 1870, progress is infinitely slower than it should
be, and that the majority of children do not yet get beyond the eighth
grade (the statistics for this country show that only one out of
nineteen takes a secondary course). "Philanthropists, social
philosophers, and friends of free institutions," he asks, "is that the
fit educational outcome of a century of democracy in an undeveloped
country of immense natural resources? Leaders and guides of the people,
is that what you think just and safe? People of the United States, is
that what you desire and intend?"
In order not only to bring existing public schools up to the right
standard, but to create new kinds of schools that are badly needed, the
plan suggested by Dr. Eliot would take another billion or two. He
advocates kindergartens and further development of the new subjects that
have recently been added to the grammar school course; he opposes the
specialization of the studies of children for their life work before the
sixteenth or seventeenth year, favors complete development of the high
school as well as the manual training, mechanics, art, the evening and
the vacation schools, greater attention to physical education and
development, and, finally, the greatest possible extension and
development of our institutions of higher education. He also advocates
newer reforms, such as the employment of skilled physicians in
connection with the schools, the opening of public spaces, country
parks, beaches, city squares, gardens, or parkways for the instruction
of school children. He specifies in detail the improvements that are
needed in school buildings, shows what is urgently demanded and is
immediately practicable in the way of increasing the number of teachers,
paying them better and giving them pensions, indicates the needed
improvements in the administration of the school systems, urges the
development of departmental instruction through several grades, and the
addition of manual training to all the public schools along with a
better instruction in music and drawing.
There are still other improvements in education which have already been
tested and found to produce the most valuable results. Perhaps the most
important ones besides those demanded by Dr. Eliot are the providing of
free or cheap lunches for undernourished children, and the system,
already widespread in England and the other countries, of furnishing
scholarships to carry the brighter children of the impecunious classes
through the college, high school, and technical courses. Even this
policy of scholarships would lead us to full democracy in education only
if by its means the child of the poorest individual had exactly the same
opportunities as those of the richest. _It is not enough that a few
children only should be so advanced; but that of impecunious children,
who constitute 90 per cent of the population, a sufficient number should
be advanced to fill 90 per cent of those positions, in industry,
government, and society, which require a higher education._
There is no doubt that this actual equality in the "battle of life" was
the expectation and intention of those who settled and built up the
western part of the United States, as it has been that of all the
democracies of new countries. But this reform alone would certainly
require not one but several billion dollars a year; as much as all the
other improvements mentioned by Dr. Eliot put together. We may estimate,
then, that the application of the principle of democracy or equality of
opportunity to education in accordance with the present national income,
would require the immediate expenditure of three or four billion dollars
on the nation's children of school age, or ten times the sum we now
expend, and a corresponding increase as the wealth of the nation
develops. This would be a considerable proportion of the nation's
income, but not too much to spend on the children, who constitute nearly
half the population and are at the age where the money spent is most
productive.
Here is a program for the coming generation which would be indorsed by a
very large part of the democrats of the past. But nothing could make it
more clear that political democracy is bankrupt even in its new
collective form, that it has no notion of the method by which its own
ideals are to be obtained. For no reformer dreams that this perfectly
sensible and practicable program will be carried out until there has
been some revolutionary change in society. "I know that some people will
say that it is impossible to increase public expenditure in the total,
and therefore impossible to increase it for the schools," says Dr.
Eliot. "I deny both allegations. Public expenditure has been greatly
increased within the last thirty years, and so has school expenditure"
(written in 1902). But Dr. Eliot doubtless realizes that what he
advocates for the present moment, the expenditure of five times as much
as we now invest in public schools, at the present rate of progress,
might not be accomplished in a century, and that by that time society
might well have attained a degree of development which would demand five
or ten times as much again. Dr. Eliot is well aware of the opposition
that will be made to his reform, but he has not given the slightest
indication how it is to be overcome. The well-to-do usually feel
obligated to pay for the private education of their own children, and
even where public institutions are at their disposal they are forced to
support these children through all the years of study. This is
expensive, but this very expensiveness gives the children of the
well-to-do a practical monopoly of the opportunities which this
education brings. How are they to be brought to favor, and, since they
are the chief taxpayers, to _pay for_ the extension of these same
opportunities to ten times the number of children who now have them?
In the meanwhile Dr. Eliot himself seems to have become discouraged and
to have abandoned his own ideal, for only seven years after writing the
above he came to advocate the division of the whole national school
system into three classes: that for the upper class, that for the middle
class, and that for the masses of the people--and he even insisted that
this division is democratic if the elevation of the pupil from one class
to the other is made "easy."[87] Now democracy does not require that the
advance of the child of the poor be made what is termed _easy_, but that
he be given an _equal_ opportunity with the child of the rich as far as
all useful and necessary education is concerned. Democracy does not
tolerate that in education the children of the poor should be started in
at the bottom, while the children of the rich are started at the top.
Those few who do rise under such conditions only strengthen the position
of the upper classes as against that of the lower. Tolstoi was right
when he said that when an individual rises in this way he simply brings
another recruit to the rulers from the ruled, and that the fact that
this passage from one class to another does occasionally take place, and
is not absolutely forbidden by law and custom as in India, does not mean
that we have no castes.[88] Even in ancient Egypt, it was quite usual,
as in the case of Joseph, to elevate slaves to the highest positions.
This singling out and promotion of the very ablest among the lower
classes may indeed be called the basis of every lasting caste system.
All those societies that depended on a purely hereditary system have
either degenerated or were quickly destroyed. If then a ruling class
promotes from below a number sufficient only to provide for its own need
of new abilities and new blood, its power to oppress, to protect its
privileges, and to keep progress at the pace and in the direction that
suits it will only be augmented--and universal equality of opportunity
will be farther off than before. Doubtless the numbers "State Socialism"
will take up from the masses and equip for higher positions will
constantly increase. But neither will the opportunities of these few
have been in any way equal to those of the higher classes, nor will even
such opportunities be extended to any but an insignificant minority.
Nor does President Eliot's advocacy of class schools stand as an
isolated phenomenon. Already in America the development of free
secondary schools has been checked by the far more rapid growth of
private institutions. The very classes of taxpayers who control city and
other local governments and school boards are educating their own
children privately, and thus have a double motive for resisting the
further advance of school expenditure. As if the expense of upkeep
during the period of education were not enough of a handicap, those few
children of the wage earners who are brave enough to attempt to compete
with the children of the middle classes are now subjected to the
necessity of attending inferior schools or of traveling impracticable
distances. The building of new high schools, for example, was most rapid
in the Middle West in the decades 1880-1899, and in the Eastern States
in the decade 1890-1900. But within a few years after 1900 the rate of
increase had fallen in the Middle West to about one half, and in the
East to less than one third, of what it formerly had been.[89] It might
be thought that, the country being now well served with secondary
schools, the rate of growth must diminish. This may be true of a part of
the rural districts, but an examination of the situation or school
reports of our large cities will show how far it is from being true
there.
In Great Britain the public secondary schools for the most part and some
of the primary schools, _though supported wholly or largely by public
funds, charge a tuition fee_. The fact that a very small per cent of the
children of the poor are given scholarships which relieve them of this
fee only serves to strengthen the upper and middle classes, without in
any appreciable degree depriving them of their privileged position. In
London, for example, fees of from $20 to $40 are charged in the
secondary schools, and their superintendents report that they are
attended chiefly by the children of the "lower middle classes," salaried
employees, clerks, and shopkeepers, with comparatively few of the
children of the professional classes on the one hand or of the best-paid
workingmen on the other. An organized campaign is now on foot in New
York City also, among the taxpayers, to introduce a certain proportion
of primary pay schools, for the frank purpose of separating the lower
middle from the working classes, and to charge fees in all secondary
schools so as to bring a new source of income and _decrease_ the number
of students and the amounts spent on the schools. This in spite of the
annual plea of Superintendent Maxwell for more secondary schools, more
primary teachers, and primary school buildings. Instead of going in the
direction indicated by Dr. Eliot and preparing to spend four or five
times the present amount, there is a strong movement to spend less. And
nothing so hastens this reactionary movement as the tendency, whether
automatic or consciously stimulated, towards class (or caste)
education--such as Dr. Eliot and so many other reformers now directly or
indirectly encourage--usually under the cloak of industrial education.
The most anti-social aspects of capitalism, whether in its individualist
or its collectivist form, are the grossly unequal educational and
occupational privileges it gives the young. An examination of the better
positions now being obtained by men and women not yet past middle age
will show, let us say, that ten times as many prizes are going to
persons who were given good educational opportunities as to those who
were not. But as the children of those who can afford such opportunities
are not a tenth as numerous as the children of the rest of the people,
this would mean that the latter have only a _hundredth part_ of the
former's opportunities. Under this supposition, one tenth of the
population secures ten elevenths of the positions for which a higher
education is required. As a matter of fact, the existing inequality of
opportunity is undoubtedly very much greater than this, and the unequal
distribution of opportunities is visibly and rapidly becoming still less
equal. In 1910, of nineteen million pupils of public and private schools
in this country, only one million were securing a secondary, and less
than a third of a million a higher, education. Here are some figures
gathered by the Russell Sage Foundation in its recent survey of public
school management. The report covers 386 of the larger cities of the
Union. Out of every 100 children who enter the schools, 45 drop out
before the sixth year; that is, before they have learned to read
English. Only 25 of the remainder graduate and enter the high schools,
and of these but 6 complete the course.
The expense of a superior education, including upkeep during the
increasing number of years required, is rising many times more rapidly
than the income of the average man. At the same time, both the wealth
and the numbers of the well-to-do are increasing in greater proportion
than those of the rest of the people. While the better places get
farther and farther out of the reach of the children of the masses,
owing to the overcrowding of the professions by children of the
well-to-do, the competition becomes ever keener, and the poor boy or
girl who must struggle not only against this excessive competition, but
also against his economic handicap, confronts an almost superhuman task.
It is obvious that this tendency cannot be reversed, no matter how
rapidly the people's income is increased, unless it rises _more rapidly_
than that of the well-to-do. And this, Socialists believe, has never
happened except when the masses obtained political power and made full
use of it _against_ the class in control of industry and government.
No amount of material progress and no reorganization of industry or
government which does not promise to equalize opportunity,--however
rapid or even sensational it may be,--is of the first moment to the
Socialists of the movement. Wages might increase 5 or 10 per cent every
year, as profits increase to-day; hours might be shortened and the
intensity of labor lessened; and yet the gulf between the classes might
be growing wider than ever. If society is to progress toward industrial
democracy, it is necessary that the people should fix their attention,
not merely on the improvement of their own condition, but on their
progress _when compared with that of the capitalist classes, i.e._ when
measured by present-day civilization and the possibilities it affords.
_No matter how fast wages increase, if profits increase faster, we are
journeying not towards social democracy, but towards a caste society._
Thus to insist that we must keep our eyes on the prosperity of others in
order to measure our own seems like preaching envy or class hatred. But
in social questions the laws of individual morality are often reversed.
It is _the social duty_ of every less prosperous class of citizens,
their duty towards the whole of the coming generation as well as to
their own children, to measure their own progress solely by a standard
raised in accordance with the point in evolution that society has
attained. What would have been comparative luxury a hundred years ago it
is our duty to view as nothing less than a degrading and life-destroying
poverty to-day.
Opportunity is not becoming equal. The tendency is in the opposite
direction, and not all the reforms of "State Socialism" promise to
counteract it. The _citizen owes it to society_ to ask of every
proposed program of change, "Will it, within a reasonable period, bring
equality of opportunity?" To rest satisfied with less--a so-called
tendency of certain reforms in the right _direction_ may be wholly
illusory--is not only to abandon one's rights and those of one's
children, but to rob society of the only possible assurance of the
maximum of progress.
FOOTNOTES:
[83] Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," Vol. II, p. 515.
[84] John Mitchell, "Organized Labor" (Preface).
[85] John A. Hobson, "The Crisis of Liberalism," p. 100.
[86] For this and later quotations from Dr. Eliot in this chapter, see
his little book entitled "More Money for the Public Schools."
[87] See article by Dr. Eliot in the _School Review_, April, 1909.
[88] "Knowledge and Education," the _Independent_, 1910.
[89] Dexter, "History of Education in the United States," p. 173.