National Solidarity Through Education
In discussing the public school system of the country there is little
new for me to say. But the importance of the public school system
in our democracy makes it necessary to state again and again the
dependence of our government upon the public school. In the building
of a peculiar civilization, the home and the church, as two necessary
institutions of divine planting, have been everywhere emphasized.
But in the maintenance of a democracy, a system of free schooling
is as absolutely necessary as the home or the church. Democracy,
however interpreted, must mean a leveling of all the people upward.
Intelligence is essential to progress. There is no pathway to higher
and better living except that which is illuminated by the light of a
general intelligence. Our democracy must be taught to think, and taught
to think right, if it is to live. The nations that continue to grovel
and grope, indeed, the nations that are being overwhelmed by internal
revolutions and internecine strife, are all untaught or badly taught.
I have been told that a hungry man near starvation has strange dreams
of palaces and feasts. Untaught human minds, unfed by information,
unstimulated by sound knowledge and undirected power of logic, have
strange dreams. Communism, Sovietism, Bolshevism, Anarchy, are the
nightmares of ignorance.
Our American democracy, in its earliest declarations, emphasized the
necessity for the general public training of the children and the
youth. Probably this was the real thought in the mind of Mr. Jefferson
when he wrote his equality clause in the Declaration of Independence.
Nothing he ever said has been so misinterpreted and misapplied.
Certainly he could not have meant that all men are fundamentally and
constitutionally equal. John C. Calhoun, the most logical mind in
American history, except perhaps Hamilton, said that that would be a
self-evident falsehood and not a self-evident truth. The great Lincoln
said that there were physical differences between the African and the
Anglo-Saxon that precluded political and social equality. No two things
in the universe are equal in this impossible sense which has been
distorted from Mr. Jefferson's statement that, "It is a self-evident
truth that all men are created equal." Among the billion colored
people of the earth, the black, the red, and the yellow, not one
nation has ever developed and maintained a constitutional government.
If there were equality in the essential things that go to make up the
characteristics of the colored races, certainly during the ages there
would somewhere have developed among them a civilization capable of
producing an upright, dignified, independent manhood. All that this
phrase meant at the founding of the republic, and all it means to-day,
is equality of opportunity for realizing the inherent possibilities
that are locked up in human nature.
This, of course, contemplates a national school system into which
all the children and the youth of the nation are to be brought to
have their eyes enlightened, their hearts trained, and their ideals
harmonized. So distinctly American must the public school system be
that the young life of the nation, without respect to race, color or
creed, shall be brought into it and subjected to its moulding and
developing process. National unity and integrity cannot be maintained
if a part of the nation is taught and a part remains in ignorance.
A democracy must have uniformity and universality in the elementary
training of its young life. Neither can the nation maintain its
existence and work out its destiny if in its early training its youth
is broken up into sectional, racial and sectarian groups.
Concessions have been made to foreign elements that have come into this
country and organized themselves into communities, holding tenaciously
to the language of the country from which they came. The almost
insuperable difficulty of undertaking to mobilize the American people
in time of war had its roots in just this thing of permitting aliens to
occupy the American soil, live under the American flag, and continue to
teach the political loyalties of their respective countries in their
own languages. It necessitated the draft law by which these people
were compelled to bear arms in defense of the world's civilization. No
thorough American required any sort of compulsion to put him into the
great conflict. The right to volunteer in the time of national danger,
or in defense of the great institutions of human liberty anywhere in
the world, was the inheritance which had been transmitted from the
Revolutionary period to succeeding generations until it came to us and
to our children. We were denied our birthright when drafted for service
in war, and in that fact there is a tremendous indictment of the nation
for its failure to Americanize all its growing life through the public
school system and the English language.
In every state of the union the Ku Klux Klan will insist upon
thoroughly Americanizing the children of the nation through the public
school. All the racial elements in the country must be brought under
the same standard of tutelage. Only in this way can these peoples
be harmonized. It was the idea of Cecil Rhodes when he founded
scholarships in Oxford for American students that British and American
ideals should be harmonized. The difficulty with Mr. Rhodes' idea is
that the American youth are to be harmonized with British ideals, but
he made no provision in scholarships in any great American institution
to which British students might come and be harmonized with American
ideals. The public school, however, contemplates taking all the
elements that are represented in our vast population and harmonizing
them with the ideals of our democracy. So poorly has this work been
done in many sections of our country, and especially in our congested
centers of population, the large cities, that the product turned out
from the schools has frequently contradicted the purpose for which
the system was founded. We cannot take a person of foreign birth or
extraction into our schools maintained by taxation and turn him out
Italian-American, British-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American,
German-American, Japanese-American, Chinese-American or Afro-American.
He must come out an American with all of his distinctive qualities and
characteristics swallowed up and absorbed in American democracy. The
institution was founded by the fathers and the pattern of American
life was made by the great architects of human liberty, and every time
a hyphenated American is turned out of any American school it is a
contradiction of the very purpose of the republic.
This work of educating the youth of the nation must be done in the
open. We have no objections to the foundation of schools privately or
by communities of peculiar racial distinction, or even by sectarians
who, because of peculiar tenets, wish to keep their children under the
eye of the church. To repeat what we have already stated, all we insist
upon is just this--that these schools shall be in every sense public,
open to public inspection. They must be subjected to regulation by
properly constituted authority. The same courses in the fundamentals
of Americanism must be taught in a privately owned or conducted school
as in the public schools. Democracy can not be taught and developed
behind closed doors. Its vital breath is openness. It has recently
broken down many doors throughout the world. There are to be no more
secret treaties, no more diplomatic intriguing, nothing between the
governments of the nations upon which the eyes of all the world may
not look. Surely, a democracy demanding openness in all the ways of
mankind, as the nations move surely toward a common fraternity, can not
undertake to conceal any part of its young life in its training for
service to its country and to the world.
Holding as the Klan does that the tenets of Christianity as a code of
morals are essential to our democracy, we are only too ready to agree
that there should be distinctive religious training. Here, at the very
threshold, there is a difficulty. Absolute freedom of conscience in
religious matters is granted to American citizens. The public school
teachers are drawn from various religious organizations, without
respect to their church affiliations. In the average public school the
children being taught represent numerous Christian sects and not a few
non-Christian sects. It would be contrary to every fundamental of our
national life to introduce specific religious doctrines or tenets among
this diversified group. Perhaps the plan recently tried out in New York
City would solve this problem. The children were dismissed from school
a part of a day each week, that they might go to their respective
places of worship and there be taught by ministers or lecturers of
their peculiar faith in the essential things of religion and ethics.
This much is sure: These foreign peoples must be unified in Americanism
and it can not be done except through our public schools. North
Carolina has adopted the slogan, "Abolish illiteracy in ten years." We
should take that slogan for the whole American nation. By "literacy"
we should mean literacy in English. This can only be accomplished,
however, when native and foreigner, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and
Gentile, gladly bring their children together and place them side by
side to be taught in the things of democracy.
Demands have been made during the past few years that the funds
collected in taxes for the maintenance of public schools be segregated.
Our fellow citizens of one powerful religious organization have
insisted that monies paid out by members of that church in taxes
for public education be returned to the denomination and applied to
the parochial schools, which are owned and controlled by the church.
Of course this means that a considerable percentage of the young
population of the country would be withdrawn from the Americanizing
schools of the public and trained only as the church directed. Church
and state are forever separated in the democracy of America. Any
tendency to bring them together in building the solidarity of the
nation should be arrested. It is not worthwhile to experiment further
in this matter. All history shows the utter futility of attempting
to build a robust, virtuous, enlightened national life through union
of Church and State; and I wish to say with the utmost composure,
and speaking, I trust, for every real American, that not one dollar
of public monies shall ever be diverted from the public schools for
sectarian institutions. This declaration may sound explosive. Yet I
hope it will give no offense to anybody. The sooner it is accepted
as final, so much the sooner will a very real cause of difficulty and
misunderstanding be removed.
A study of our history is fundamental to the construction and the
maintenance of a sound national life. Thomas Carlyle once very
correctly said that one cannot manage the present or predict the future
except from an accurate knowledge of the past. All sectarian textbooks
in histories, partisan textbooks or sectional textbooks, are naturally
distorted and perverted. Men who hold tenaciously to a particular
setting, given a religious truth or any other historical fact, have
looked at their fellowmen through a distorted perspective. The trivial
has frequently appeared to them to be the magnificent, and the
magnificent the trivial. Bias has characterized all such narratives.
It is difficult enough to secure a history of any country or its
people in its political, economic, industrial and social development,
that is basically true to the facts. The man who writes is apt to be
tremendously impressed by the age in which he lives. The tale that
he tells is often a crude compilation of errors. Only recently the
manuscript of a history in its making was tendered by a well known
publishing house to a patriotic organization of the South for review.
One of many glaring errors that obtruded from this book, which was
designed to become a text book, was the statement that the democratic
party originated with the original Ku Klux Klan of the Sixties. Another
history in common use in the public schools of the country, filled with
all sorts of inaccuracies and misstatements, was recently taken from
the schools in one great section of the country. When the attention
of the author was called to the inaccuracies, he offered to expurgate
the offensive statements of which the section complained, but refused
to change his history for other sections of the country where the
statements were as yet unchallenged. If such histories are foisted
upon our school system, and our children are taught the errors of the
prejudiced and inaccurate historian, how much worse, and how much more
dangerous, would the teaching be if the history texts are purposefully
written by narrow sectarians, and the facts discolored by religious
prejudice? The time has surely come when real history should be written
by the truthful and wise, and the facts of our national virtues and
vices, our strength and our weakness, our dangers and our securities,
should be taught in our public schools, and taught to all the children.
The preparation or selection of school text books in history is no more
a fitting subject for rancorous bickering among sectarian politicians
than the writing of text books in chemistry. It is entirely a matter
for trained historians and professional teachers. We must insist that
politicians of all breeds keep their hands far removed from these
things.