The Theory of Education in the United States

IV

FIRST, then, we may remark that at the root of that theory (not, indeed, forming a part of it, but of great influence in shaping it and getting it translated into practice) lay one of the most humane, honourable and engaging sentiments that are in the power of human nature to generate or to indulge. I refer to the sentiment which prompted our ancestors to determine that their children should have a better chance at the good life, the humane life, than circumstances had permitted themselves to have. If you go through our literature with an eye out for evidences of this sentiment, I think you may be astonished to see how constantly they appear, and I am sure you will be touched by their profound and pathetic eloquence. I am sure, too, that you will be interested in observing the number of points in our institutional life that this sentiment has touched, and in marking the reach of its power. I greatly doubt that a similar sentiment has ever held so commanding a position in the development of any modern society. It would be an easy and pleasant task to dwell on instances of that sentiment’s operation, to remark the uncomplaining acquiescence in great personal sacrifices which its indulgence involved. But this is not necessary; we have all seen such instances, no doubt some of us have participated in them as beneficiaries. We have said enough, I think, to show with what veneration we should regard this sentiment, and with what delicacy we should speak of it even when we are obliged to regard its exercise as misdirected; for seriously misdirected it often was, and often is. We may observe, we must in justice observe, that this sentiment has often been very imperfectly and poorly interpreted by those who indulged it most prodigally; and never oftener than now. Its interpretation frequently betrays a vast ignorance of what the humane life really is, and of the discipline whereby alone one may make progress towards this life. We must judge these misinterpretations impartially and severely, for if they are not so judged before the tribunal of letters, they will be judged nowhere else; there is no other court competent to pass judgment on them. But our very impartiality and our commitment to severity are such as powerfully reinforce our natural disposition to maintain a just reverence for the nobleness and purity of the sentiment itself.

This sentiment, I say, served as a quickening spirit, not an enlightening spirit. Its ministrations moved us to the construction, by no means deliberate but quite at haphazard, of an educational theory which may be decomposed into three basic ideas or principles. The first idea was that of equality; the second, that of democracy; and the third idea was that the one great assurance of good public order and honest government lay in a literate citizenry. I need not remind you of Mr. Jefferson’s passionate faith in this third idea, and his insistence upon it in season and out of season. It was in his day a speculative idea, which commanded quite wide consent among thoughtful persons, but which the subsequent test of practice has rather tended to explode. These three ideas are the fundamental ones in our theory of education today, precisely as they were in Mr. Jefferson’s time. They remain unmodified, and even, as I said, unexamined; they are taken as axiomatic, and all the mechanism of our system, the whole of our pedagogical practice from the primary school to the university, is built upon them.

These ideas or principles, then, are what we must consider if we propose to turn from the mechanics of our system to its theory. If we find anything wrong with them, anything unsound, we may at once apply our findings to see how the working of our mechanism is affected, and what results a clarification or straightening-up of our theory in those respects might be presumed to have.

Let us proceed, then, to examine the first of these principles, the principle of equality. We need bring forward no evidence that the doctrine of equality is a sound one, or to prove that Menander was as right in his exhortation to “choose equality” as he was in his observation that “evil communications corrupt good manners.” The idea of equality was very much abroad in the land in the early days of the republic; the French revolutionary formula of “liberty, equality, fraternity” helped in keeping it to the fore. But we perceive at once the necessity of discriminating between a sound philosophical doctrine, such as the doctrine of equality is, and the popular formulation of that doctrine, which may be fantastically unsound. There is usually a great difference between these two, as great a difference, as a rule, as there is between truth and untruth. The classical example, probably, is that of Christian doctrine. Again, the doctrine of Socialism, or of Communism, is one thing, and the set of fanciful credenda which popular imagination has conceived of as belonging to it is quite another thing; for instance, the curious notion which you find widely held, that Socialism has for its aim the arbitrary division of the world’s wealth among its population, men, women and children, share and share alike. Again, the doctrine of the single tax is almost universally believed to concern a tax on land, which is precisely what it does not at all concern, instead of a hundred-per-cent tax on the rent of land. Thus, again, the doctrine of equality and its corollaries and implications have undergone the most astounding popular misunderstanding; you may remember, perhaps, the humorous and not much exaggerated popular formulation of it in the saying that “in the United States one man is just exactly as good as another, or a little better.” Indeed, in the social sphere, the doctrine of equality has regularly been degraded into a kind of charter for rabid self-assertion on the part of ignorance and vulgarity; in the political sphere it has served as a warrant for the most audacious and flagitious exercise of self-interest. So, when we set about the examination of this doctrine in relation to our educational system, we must first and above all ascertain which doctrine of equality it is that we find at the basis of our system; is it the philosophical doctrine recommended by Menander and espoused by Mr. Jefferson, or is it a popular doctrine which neither of them could or would recognise?

There is no possible doubt about the answer. Our system is based upon the assumption, popularly regarded as implicit in the doctrine of equality, that everybody is educable. This has been taken without question from the beginning; it is taken without question now. The whole structure of our system, the entire arrangement of its mechanics, testifies to this. Even our truant laws testify to it, for they are constructed with exclusive reference to school-age, not to school-ability. When we attempt to run this assumption back to the philosophical doctrine of equality, we cannot do it; it is not there, nothing like it is there. The philosophical doctrine of equality gives no more ground for the assumption that all men are educable than it does for the assumption that all men are six feet tall. We see at once, then, that it is not the philosophical doctrine of equality, but an utterly untenable popular perversion of it, that we find at the basis of our educational system.

We shall probably recur to this doctrine later by a round-about way. For the present we may dismiss our a priori consideration of it with a single interesting and significant reference. We may believe, I think, that no more sincere believer in the doctrine of equality ever lived than Mr. Jefferson; certainly none more intelligent; yet the plan that he drafted for public education in the State of Virginia is the severest possible judgment against the popular perversion which we have followed ever since his day, and are still following. Mr. Chinard, of the Faculty of Literature at Johns Hopkins, who probably knows more about Mr. Jefferson than any one else in the country knows, thinks that his plan may have had a good deal to do with shaping the French system, which, as you know, differs from ours in being rigidly selective. In outline, Mr. Jefferson’s plan was this: Every child in the State should be taught reading, writing and common arithmetic; the old-fashioned primary-school course in the three Rs. Each year the best pupil in each primary school should be sent to the grammar schools, of which there were to be twenty, conveniently located in various parts of the State; they were to be kept there one or two years, and then dismissed, except “the best genius of the whole,” who should be continued there for the full term of six years. “By this means,” wrote Mr. Jefferson, “twenty of the best geniuses shall be raked from the rubbish annually.” I venture to call your attention to these rather forceful words, as showing how far this great believer in equality was from anything like acceptance of our official assumption that everybody is educable. But this is not all. At the end of six years the best ten out of the twenty should be sent to William and Mary College, and the rest turned adrift. Mr. Jefferson’s plan appears selective with a vengeance in our eyes, accustomed as they are to the spectacle of immense hordes of inert and ineducable persons slipping effortlessly through our secondary schools, colleges, universities, on ways that seem greased for their especial benefit. Of the twenty best geniuses annually raked from the rubbish of a whole State, only fifty per cent were destined to reach the undergraduate college!

The second idea which we are to examine is that of democracy; our system is professedly democratic. Let us see what this means. Here we find something more than a popular perversion of a philosophically sound doctrine, which is what we found in our examination of the idea of equality. Here we find something even stranger and more interesting, a perversion upon a perversion. Political theory of the eighteenth century was based upon the right of individual self-expression in politics; its essence was that those who vote, rule. Its chosen machinery was that of a republic, as affording the best power or purchase for the free expression of this right. As a matter of logic, when everybody votes, you have a democracy; the registration of democratic judgment is a mere matter of counting ballots. Thus a confusion of terms set in; a republic in which everybody voted was accepted as a democracy and was so styled, as it still is. This confusion persists, and the evidence of it is on every other page of many, I think the great majority, of serious writers. In fact, we may say that the terms republican and democratic have come to be regarded as synonymous. This is not greatly to be wondered at, because it is only lately that anything like a general sense of the unsoundness of eighteenth-century political theory has begun to prevail. The iron force of circumstance has finally made us aware that it is not, never was and never will be, those who vote that rule, but those who own; that you may extend the suffrage in a republic as far as you please without making any significant change in the actual rulership of the country. Republicanism does not, therefore, of itself even imply democracy. At the present time it is a matter of open and notorious knowledge that some monarchies are much more forward in democracy than some republics, even republics in which suffrage is universal. The antithesis of republicanism is monarchy, if you like, but monarchy is not the antithesis of democracy. The antithesis of democracy is absolutism; and absolutism may, and notoriously does, prevail under a republican regime as freely as under any other. Thus democracy is not a matter of an extension of the franchise, not a matter of the individual citizen’s right of self-expression in politics, as the political philosophy of the eighteenth century regarded it. It is a matter of the diffusion of ownership; a true doctrine of democracy is a doctrine of public property.

A philosophical historian measures the value of a revolution, not by its political achievements, not by the various social emancipations and ameliorations that it brings about, but by the quality of the idea that it liberates upon the world. The idea of the right of individual self-expression in politics had been formulated before 1789, it had been advanced and advocated by social philosophers, but the French Revolution liberated it, diffused it everywhere, made its terms a common glossary. Just so the Russian Revolution liberated the idea that democracy is not a political status at all, but an economic status. This idea also had long been accepted by many social philosophers. It was implicit in the doctrine of the Physiocrats, of Gump-lovicz of Graz, of Theodor Hertzka, explicitly recognised by Marx, and elaborated in our own country by Henry George. But the explosion of the Russian Revolution liberated the idea, blew it, we may say, into all men’s heads and lodged it fast there, so that now, consciously or unconsciously, intelligently or unintelligently, they interpret democracy to themselves in some kind of economic terms. This revelation of democracy as an economic status was no doubt purely a bye-product of the Russian Revolution; such, too, was the idea liberated by the French Revolution. Revolutionists do not habitually think in academic terms. But it is by the quality of the liberated idea, not by the ups and downs of the Five-Year Plan, not by the ups and downs of organised Communism, not by the merits or demerits of any social or administrative machinery peculiar to the Soviet regime, that the philosophical historian will estimate the real significance of the Russian Revolution.

We see, then, that the political philosophy of the eighteenth century had a wholly erroneous notion of the nature of democracy, and that it was this erroneous notion which has lasted all through our history, namely: that democracy is a political status, and that it is to be achieved or realised by an extension of the franchise. Meanwhile, on the top of this, which we may call an academic error, grew the popular error which accepted as democratic whatever was merely indiscriminate. This error, too, has persisted down to our time. The people of Philadelphia in Genêt’s day, who wore cockades in their hats and called one another “citizen” no doubt believed that they were giving an exhibition of democratic manners. They were not; they were giving an exhibition of bizarre manners, vulgar manners. It is a commonplace of our journalism to speak of some highly-placed person as having democratic manners when he is only affable, or sometimes when he is only coarse and rude. There is no such thing as democratic manners; manners are either bad or good. “A man thinks to show himself my equal by showing himself grob” said Heine; “he does not show himself my equal; he shows himself grob”

Interested popular definition, like interested legal definition, is a process, as a contemporary of Bishop Butler said, by which anything can be made to mean anything. The popular idea of democracy is animated by a very strong resentment of superiority. It resents the thought of an élite; the thought that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience, achievement and enjoyment, which by nature are open to some and not to all. It deprecates and disallows this thought, and discourages it by every available means. As the popular idea of equality postulates that in the realm of the .spirit everybody is able to enjoy everything that anybody can enjoy, so the popular idea of democracy postulates that there shall be nothing worth enjoying for anybody to enjoy that everybody may not enjoy; and a contrary view is at once exposed to all the evils of a dogged, unintelligent, invincibly suspicious resentment.

The whole institutional life organised under the popular idea of democracy, then, must reflect this resentment. It must aim at no ideals above those of the average man; that is to say, it must regulate itself by the lowest common denominator of intelligence, taste and character in the society which it represents. In a society governed by this idea, for example, schools like the Crown Patronage Schools of Prussia would be resented as undemocratic. The advantage of such schools, obviously, is, first, that of being founded by a sovereign whose position raises him above a great many petty and local considerations, and thus largely enables him to view their plan disinterestedly; and second, that the sovereign can command not only the most competent but also the most disinterested advice. Hence they would probably be better schools than those which might be set up by a local school-board appointed by a mayor or elected by popular vote. The spirit of democracy, however, would look askance at schools established by an absolute sovereign, with the advice of men like von Humboldt and Schleiermacher, because in its view the first business of a school is not to be good, but as our phrase goes, “to give the people what they want”; and this is what the school set up by the mayor and school-board is much more likely to do. Animating this view is the touchy and resentful assurance that it is no sovereign’s or scholar’s business to suggest what the people should want or might profitably want; who is any von Humboldt or Schleiermacher that he should offer gratuitous advice about what our children should learn or how they should be taught?

We perceive at once, of course, that all this has actually nothing to do with democracy; but quite clearly it is all in the popular interpretation of democracy, and it is with this, rather than with any rational notion of democracy, that our educational system has always been obliged to reckon. We must face the fact, and we may face it with the dignity and disinterestedness appropriate to scholars, that an examination of our system from end to end shows its theory to be as unsound in respect to democracy as we found it to be in respect of equality. Look at it anywhere, strike into it at any point you like, and the working of its mechanism will testify to a theory that is not equalitarian but pseudo-equalitarian; a theory that is not democratic, but egregiously and preposterously pseudodemocratic.