It had been suggested by Dr. Leete that we should devote the next
morning to an inspection of the schools and colleges of the city, with
some attempt on his own part at an explanation of the educational
system of the twentieth century.
"You will see," said he, as we set out after breakfast, "many very
important differences between our methods of education and yours, but
the main difference is that nowadays all persons equally have those
opportunities of higher education which in your day only an
infinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed. We should think we had
gained nothing worth speaking of, in equalizing the physical comfort of
men, without this educational equality."
"The cost must be very great," I said.
"If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it,"
replied Dr. Leete, "nor even if it took it all save a bare pittance.
But in truth the expense of educating ten thousand youth is not ten nor
five times that of educating one thousand. The principle which makes
all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a small
scale holds as to education also."
"College education was terribly expensive in my day," said I.
"If I have not been misinformed by our historians," Dr. Leete answered,
"it was not college education but college dissipation and extravagance
which cost so highly. The actual expense of your colleges appears to
have been very low, and would have been far lower if their patronage
had been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheap as the
lower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers, receive the
same support. We have simply added to the common school system of
compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred years ago, a
half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age of twenty-one
and giving him what you used to call the education of a gentleman,
instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no mental
equipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplication table."
"Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years of education,"
I replied, "we should not have thought we could afford the loss of time
from industrial pursuits. Boys of the poorer classes usually went to
work at sixteen or younger, and knew their trade at twenty."
"We should not concede you any gain even in material product by that
plan," Dr. Leete replied. "The greater efficiency which education gives
to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short period
for the time lost in acquiring it."
"We should also have been afraid," said I, "that a high education,
while it adapted men to the professions, would set them against manual
labor of all sorts."
"That was the effect of high education in your day, I have read,"
replied the doctor; "and it was no wonder, for manual labor meant
association with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people. There is
no such class now. It was inevitable that such a feeling should exist
then, for the further reason that all men receiving a high education
were understood to be destined for the professions or for wealthy
leisure, and such an education in one neither rich nor professional was
a proof of disappointed aspirations, an evidence of failure, a badge of
inferiority rather than superiority. Nowadays, of course, when the
highest education is deemed necessary to fit a man merely to live,
without any reference to the sort of work he may do, its possession
conveys no such implication."
"After all," I remarked, "no amount of education can cure natural
dullness or make up for original mental deficiencies. Unless the
average natural mental capacity of men is much above its level in my
day, a high education must be pretty nearly thrown away on a large
element of the population. We used to hold that a certain amount of
susceptibility to educational influences is required to make a mind
worth cultivating, just as a certain natural fertility in soil is
required if it is to repay tilling."
"Ah," said Dr. Leete, "I am glad you used that illustration, for it is
just the one I would have chosen to set forth the modern view of
education. You say that land so poor that the product will not repay
the labor of tilling is not cultivated. Nevertheless, much land that
does not begin to repay tilling by its product was cultivated in your
day and is in ours. I refer to gardens, parks, lawns, and, in general,
to pieces of land so situated that, were they left to grow up to weeds
and briers, they would be eyesores and inconveniencies to all about.
They are therefore tilled, and though their product is little, there is
yet no land that, in a wider sense, better repays cultivation. So it is
with the men and women with whom we mingle in the relations of society,
whose voices are always in our ears, whose behavior in innumerable ways
affects our enjoyment--who are, in fact, as much conditions of our
lives as the air we breathe, or any of the physical elements on which
we depend. If, indeed, we could not afford to educate everybody, we
should choose the coarsest and dullest by nature, rather than the
brightest, to receive what education we could give. The naturally
refined and intellectual can better dispense with aids to culture than
those less fortunate in natural endowments.
"To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we should not
consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a population
of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women, as was
the plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man satisfied, merely
because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?
Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a palatial
apartment, if the windows on all four sides opened into stable yards?
And yet just that was the situation of those considered most fortunate
as to culture and refinement in your day. I know that the poor and
ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the latter,
living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness, seem little
better off than the former. The cultured man in your age was like one
up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a smelling
bottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this question of
universal high education. No single thing is so important to every man
as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons. There is
nothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that will enhance
so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors. When it fails to
do so, the value of his own education to him is reduced by half, and
many of the tastes he has cultivated are made positive sources of pain.
"To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly
uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that
between different natural species, which have no means of
communication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of a
partial enjoyment of education! Its universal and equal enjoyment
leaves, indeed, the differences between men as to natural endowments as
marked as in a state of nature, but the level of the lowest is vastly
raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have some inkling of the
humanities, some appreciation of the things of the mind, and an
admiration for the still higher culture they have fallen short of. They
have become capable of receiving and imparting, in various degrees, but
all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a refined social
life. The cultured society of the nineteenth century--what did it
consist of but here and there a few microscopic oases in a vast,
unbroken wilderness? The proportion of individuals capable of
intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the mass of their
contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any broad view
of humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One generation of the world
to-day represents a greater volume of intellectual life than any five
centuries ever did before.
"There is still another point I should mention in stating the grounds
on which nothing less than the universality of the best education could
now be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, "and that is, the interest of
the coming generation in having educated parents. To put the matter in
a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our educational
system rests: first, the right of every man to the completest education
the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his
enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have
him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third,
the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined
parentage."
I shall not describe in detail what I saw in the schools that day.
Having taken but slight interest in educational matters in my former
life, I could offer few comparisons of interest. Next to the fact of
the universality of the higher as well as the lower education, I was
most struck with the prominence given to physical culture, and the fact
that proficiency in athletic feats and games as well as in scholarship
had a place in the rating of the youth.
"The faculty of education," Dr. Leete explained, "is held to the same
responsibility for the bodies as for the minds of its charges. The
highest possible physical, as well as mental, development of every one
is the double object of a curriculum which lasts from the age of six to
that of twenty-one."
The magnificent health of the young people in the schools impressed me
strongly. My previous observations, not only of the notable personal
endowments of the family of my host, but of the people I had seen in my
walks abroad, had already suggested the idea that there must have been
something like a general improvement in the physical standard of the
race since my day, and now, as I compared these stalwart young men and
fresh, vigorous maidens with the young people I had seen in the schools
of the nineteenth century, I was moved to impart my thought to Dr.
Leete. He listened with great interest to what I said.
"Your testimony on this point," he declared, "is invaluable. We believe
that there has been such an improvement as you speak of, but of course
it could only be a matter of theory with us. It is an incident of your
unique position that you alone in the world of to-day can speak with
authority on this point. Your opinion, when you state it publicly,
will, I assure you, make a profound sensation. For the rest it would be
strange, certainly, if the race did not show an improvement. In your
day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while
poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and
pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid
on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these
maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions
of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared
for; the labor which is required of all is limited to the period of
greatest bodily vigor, and is never excessive; care for one's self and
one's family, anxiety as to livelihood, the strain of a ceaseless
battle for life--all these influences, which once did so much to wreck
the minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more. Certainly, an
improvement of the species ought to follow such a change. In certain
specific respects we know, indeed, that the improvement has taken
place. Insanity, for instance, which in the nineteenth century was so
terribly common a product of your insane mode of life, has almost
disappeared, with its alternative, suicide."