DEMOCRACY’S DYNAMO
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.