^IJSitJAiNn iHl ^o THE UNIVERSrrv O SANTA BARBARA ° \ e W1V9W9 ViNVS o 9 3f\ UIS)l3AINn 3H1 " o vuvwva viNvs o / 9 3f\ » AmaJAINA 3H1 o \ » AiisiiaAiNri 3H1 o o THt ONIVERSmr i£ B O SANTA BARBARA <^ I \ \ THE UNIVERSITY ./ ^L- o >- oe 4 £ X y £ z > ? 5 Air / SANTA f lARBARA \ o OF CAlirORNIA e > ^ ^ 1 p z 3 n o jO A«v«9n 3H1 o SOME ATLANTIC BOOKS The Amenities of Book-Collecting By A. Edward Newton $4.00 An American Idyll: The Life of Carleton H. Parker $1.75 By Cornelia Stratton Parker Adventures in Indigence $i-5o By Laura Spencer Portor Atlantic Classics, First Series $1.25 Atlantic Classics, Second Series $1.25 Two volumes, in cloth, boxed, $2.50 in lialf -leather, boxed, $6.00 The Atlantic Monthly and Its Makers By if. ^ . DeWolfe Howe $i .00 Collector's Luck $2.50 By Alice Van Leer Carrick THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS boston lPATRons of democracy Sy DALLAS LORE SHARP The ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOSTON Qn^' COPYRIGHT, I919, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY COPYRIGHT. 1920, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS I HAVE been ten years writing this book, and three times ten years living it. This is another "Book of Acts" — rather than words; of prac- tice more than preaching; of sons instead of theories. I wonder if I am not the only liv- ing educator with more sons than theories, or methods, or experiments to try out ? Of course, each of my children is an experi- ment; every individual child is. But American education is not the individual child : it is a na- tional child, and that child is no longer an ex- periment. Some things in American education are reasonably proved — enough such things to keep every public school working to capacity, and every American school-child busy at his books until he is at least sixteen. It is time we stopped experimenting with public-school edu- cation. A few million more experiments will perhaps do no more harm than the millions we have already made; but they hinder education seriously. It is time the nation got down to business — the business of teaching all its people to read, write, and figure, and to get on together. There is something alarmingly experimental in the sound of this last idea! The Three R's may be among the admittedly proved things, but ought we not to experiment with this "getting- on-together" course? I have been doing that in Hingham ; and ten years of it are enough. The need to get on together over this whole country is too terribly urgent for anything but action. It is this action, my own doings with my own children in my own town schools, that this book is about. These last ten years I have been, and am still, sending my children to the Hingham pub- lic schools. I am not the only one in Hingham who does this thing; but I have been among the very few to do it who take education seriously, and who have the means to send their children to private schools. Hingham will not trust its own public schools to teach the Three R's to its children; and as for getting on together, Hing- ham knows a good many ways of getting on, but it does not wish to learn the way of getting on together. Hingham and the rest of the United States are remarkably alike. One of my dear Hingham neighbors writes: "Will you forgive me when I say that your article in the Atlantic Monthly^ seems to me mis- 1 The following pages are an expansion of that article, which appeared in November, 1919. vi leading? You surely give the impression that your children are the product of public-school training. Is it not true that they are the product of the most ideal private-school training? Their mother taught them until their habits of study were well formed, and their brains well furnished. Then and not until then were they in a condition to be of service in the public schools." I do not say that my children are the product only of the public schools. I do say that they are not the product of any trade, parochial, or private school. They have always been taught by their mother, and they have always gone to the public school, since they could go to school. I believe in home education ; it is the very best sort for individuality, as public-school education is the very best sort for democracy. What I don't believe in is private and parochial and trade-school education, for its end is not democ- racy. Nor am I exhibiting my children as schol- ars — not with their inheritance ! The Lord and their mother have worked together over them until now, their mother with more patience and push than the Lord — but they simply are not of exhibition stock, educationally. I think they are bound to be intelligent democratic citizens, a sort of citizen so necessary to this country that even scholars should be sacrificed to make them! I have not been misleading in my essay. I shall be misleading here, however, if I quote only my neighbor's letter and do not go on to tell of the far-flung response that came back to me from across the country to this plea for a com- mon school. It has been little short of a national wave of approval. The private-school people have not said very much: one woman principal told me she was glad to know that there was still a dreamer and fool left alive in the world ; but the common people read it gladly, as I hoped they would; the Master-Builders' Association of Bos- ton saying: "We believe you have uncovered something greater than you know, and we wish to get behind you." From New York, Chicago, and Pasadena have come personal letters of the same tenor, together with orders for the maga- zine to be distributed broadcast. Indeed, there is a stack of letters on my desk which I should like to print as a book, for their straight Americanism, their genuine democracy, and their unshakable faith in a common public school for all the people as the very bed-rock of a real democracy. Dallas Lore Sharp. December 25, 19 19. PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY Education is the most sacred concern, indeed the only hope, of a nation. — John Galsworthy. I The average physical age of man is thirty- three; his average educational age is eight- een, or thereabouts. A few men go on to school after eighteen, but they learn noth- ing fundamental, for theories, methods, and facts are not fundamental: they belong to the useful, the professional. Here and there is a student perennially eighteen years old in mind, who unlearns a few important things in and after college; but most fresh- men are what they are, and after three years in college they are seniors. They come to college with all their educational clothes on, asking the faculty if it will please help but- ton them up. College gives a little better fit to the educational garment. We live on and learn, but the lessons from seventeen to PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY seventy arc only a review and an application of those we learned from six to sixteen. In any national survey of education, there- fore, the higher schools and colleges are neg- ligible. Our education as a people is that of the secondary schools. In them, more than in any other American institution — more than in all other American institutions — are the issues of an enlightened national life; issues no longer national merely, for the war has made them vital to the life of the world. American democracy is now a world- issue. Already from overseas the peoples are coming to study our institution of democ- racy; the Japanese, with keen, characteristic insight, singling out the public schools — as if in them were the source and the secret of democracy. Certainly no democracy can be better than its educational system; for democracy, more than any other political programme, is a programme of education. The spirit of democracy is the fruit of education, and never an inheritance, unless an education can be inherited, devised by will, and blessed 2 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY upon a child by laying-on of hands. You can come by the spirit of aristocracy that way, for the God-I-thank-thee-that-I-am- not-as-other-men spirit is a negation and an assumption. One may even assume that he is a Kaiser and a vice-gerent of God. We cannot assume vice-gerentcies and the like in America, so we stop modestly with what- ever else there is to assume. We all alike inherit the Constitution; and it doth not appear at birth what we shall be, a Presi- dent in Washington, or a Washington corres- pondent, or both; for every child, although born a presidential candidate, cannot com- mit his nomination and election to the hands of the priest who christens him, as he can his social position; he must leave it all to the large, firm hands of the future. How many American parents hate this divine hazard of democracy ! "I will take no chance with my boy!" a mother said to me recently, who had come from New Jersey to Boston with her young son; as if the demo- cratic hazards for her boy might be fewer in Boston ; and as if money and birth and breed- 3 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY ing brought to Boston might overcome the handicap of equality conferred by the Con- stitution upon her son. Why is she afraid? Because I have boys in Hingham? Mine are not the only boys in Hingham, as they have already found out, and as her boy will soon find out. Every boy in Hingham is a challenge to my bo}^; so is every boy in Bos- ton, and in Baton Rouge, and in Bagdad. It is the girls in Hingham that I am afraid of. Money and birth and breeding count in a democracy — for and against a man ; edu- cation and purpose, however, count a great deal more and altogether for a man. But count how? What is the true end of Amer- ican education? "Is it life or a living?" It is neither life nor a living. We can live and get a living without an education, as we can marry and give in marriage. But we cannot make the United States a democracy without education. The true end of Amer- ican education is the knowledge and practice of democracy — whatever other personal ends an education may serve. Education has turned a corner since we went to school, 4 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY and finds itself face to face with a bigger thing than life or the getting of a living. It is face to face with a big enough thing to die for in France, a big enough thing to go to school for in America — going to school, on the whole, being more difficult than dying. Life and the getting of a living may have been the proper ends of our private educa- tion heretofore; such ends are no longer legitimate. Neither life nor the getting of a living, but living together — this must be the single public end of a common public educa- tion hereafter. This new and larger end demands a new and larger thought of education. The day of the little red schoolhouse, and all other little things in American education, must pass. The large schoolhouse must come. Our present school concepts are as inade- quate as are our present school appropria- tions and programmes. We must reconceive the nation's educational needs; we must do it as vigorously, as generously, and as uni- versally as we lately conceived her military needs; and we must create an educational 5 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY machinery as effective as the military ma- chinery to meet the needs. But what a machinery is the little red schooihouse, and the little three-hundred- dollar schoolteacher, and the little thirty- cent interest of the average citizen in his public school! Can the Japanese be right in thinking the intelligence and spirit of Amer- ica a product of American schools? They have long watched this democracy, and at last, having seen its temper tried by war, they have come to study into the secret of its magnificent behavior — as if it were an educational secret, and might be found in our public schools. They are right, but they are going to be terribly shocked, and shaken in their faith. II What do the Japanese expect to find? Surely nothing less than this whole nation in school — for we are a literate people ; and nothing less than the whole nation in school together, one common school — for we are without caste as a people; and nothing less 6 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY than the whole nation together in a com- mon school until it gets the conception of democracy, the abstract, spiritual meaning of democracy — for democracy is a spirit, and they who know the truth of democracy know it in spirit. What the Japanese will actually find is a democracy divided educationally against it- self; wrong in its aim; weak in its purpose; feeble in its support; faltering in its faith; and not only divided, but hostile, in its educational plans. It is bad enough that eighteen per cent of our children do not attend school at all; it is not so bad for democracy, however, as that our other eighty-two per cent should be divided in their education by private, parochial, indus- trial, and the regular public schools, until we can be said to have no common educa- tional programme, no common educational purpose, no common educational ideal — no common school. Yet what else but a com- mon school can be the head of the corner of democracy? We must go to school; we must all go to school; we must all go together to 7 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY school, with a common language, a common course of study, a common purpose* faith, and enthusiasm for democracy. American- ization is not this new educational ideal. The world is not to be Americanized. A few millions of foreigners in America need to be Americanized; but all the millions of Americans in America need to be democ- ratized. Nothing less than the democratiza- tion of America dare be our educational aim, I have not worked out the new course of study. This book is a plea, not a pro- gramme. One thing I know: we must have a common school for all the people; and all the people must attend a common school until every American child has a high-school education. It is not a dream; it is not im- possible — unless democracy is a dream and impossible. The present standard of American educa- tion is a fourth-grade standard — and less! The educational statistician at Washington says, "it is found that 6.36 per cent of the children in the elementary schools are in the PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY eighth grade." This is not making America safe for democracy. On through the fourth grade to the end of the eighth grade, on from the eighth grade to the end of the high school, we must push the education of the whole people before we can trust the people with democracy. There will still be great need of special schools — for the subnormal: private schools for the feeble-minded; vocational schools for the slow and the stubborn; but for the normal, one common school only, for rich and poor, up to the end of the high school; by which time we are pretty nearly all that we need to be for purposes of democracy. Is this a new educational language? It is no newer than the new demands, no more foolish than genuine democracy. The old order has changed, and has given place to so large an educational need that we have neither the mind nor the machinery for it. Take the country clear across, and our edu- cational mind and machinery are little bet- ter than a reproach. And our machinery for education is better than our mind for it. 9 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY We have better buildings, better teachers, better salaries — even better salaries — than public sympathy and support. Poorer than the poorest piece of kit in all our educa- tional outfit is the individual American's support of his public school. In this new and larger education there will be great elasticity, providing for the spe- cial case, the educational machine having a transmission with plenty of speeds ahead, and even a reverse gear for those who are backward. But a larger, simpler, speedier education is to be provided, that shall re- duce the number of school years, and thus lessen the number of special cases; that shall reduce the number of narrow school courses — commercial, general business, college, and vocational — to one common course, one broad, universal course, thus educating for democracy first, and after that for life and a living — and even for entrance into college. Entrance into college! O Lord, how long shall American public-school education suf- fer this incubus of the college? A course of study that fits a student for PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY citizenship should fit him for college, the college course leading only to a larger reali- zation of citizenship, a deeper spiritual, a broader intellectual preparation for its priv- ileges and duties. College-going students and other students in high school do not dif- fer in kind or in need, and up to the college doors should have no different training; the true test for college being a moral-spiritual- intellectual test, and no such futile thing as a different course of study. Let all be called to college, and as many as possible be chosen — the eager in spirit, the morally strong, the intellectually capable. We must do away with our present false "requirements," that can be "crammed" for, that "prep" schools can fit the totally unfit for, as if getting into college were a more than normal feat, a peculiar, highly specialized, calculating pro- cess that one must be fed-up for, trained down for, as a runner is trained for the hun- dred-yard dash, rubbed down, and coached to the very tape. To-day in the Boston "Her- ald" appeared this strange piece of educa- tional news : — II PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY IIOTCHKISS SCHOOL WINS *.B.K. TROPHY Connecticut Institution Boys Pass Best Harvard Entrance Exams. The intcrscholaetic scholarship trophy, annually awarded by the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa to the school whose candidates make the best record at the admission examination, has been won for the year 1919 by the Hotchkiss school at Lakeville, Ct., at which the Rev. H. G. Buehler is headmaster. Heretofore, the trophy has been awarded to the school havinn the greatest number of candidates on the honor list, bat, in accordance with the vote of the chapter taken last year, the award has now been made to the school whose candidates attained the highest average grade, this grade being calcu- lated on the total records of all final candidates from the school competing as a group with all final candidates from other schools. This is the school of whose teachers Clyde L. Davis, in the Atlantic for November, 1919, writes : — The masters were simply drill sergeants. "You'd better remember that word, boys: you '11 need it in June," was the oft-repeated remark of the indefatigable old German instructor; and it defined the pedagogical horizon of the whole staff. Their jobs depended on making their classes pass the college entrance examinations at the end of the year; and their everlasting, driving, barren, humdrum tutoring on the rudi- ments of languages and mathematics was any- thing but inspiring. That is the prize-taking "preparation" PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY for college ! Phi Beta Kappa and the college faculties encourage this as ideal ! And here is a description of these ideally "prepared," prize-taking students of this very school, by Mr. Davis who, as a scholarship man, was himself "prepared" among them: — The ignorance of these boys amazed me. They knew nothing of United States history, and not enough geography to locate my native state with exactitude. They had traveled abroad, but having taken nothing with them, they had brought nothing back. They wrote illegible scrawls. Standard literature was positively a sealed book to them ; but, on the other hand, they had been tutored toward college entrance exami- nations from childhood. The rudiments of Latin and algebra had been drummed into them, and not a few spoke French. For me, a mature farm- product, to compete with these fellows in learn- ing languages was an impossible task. There- fore my final humiliation was to see myself easily beaten in the classroom. * 1 It is only fair to add that Mr. Davis wrote also: " But working, playing, and cheering for the school finally made me love it completely." Hotchkiss School, it is needless to say, and Milton Academy, a little later on, are not men- tioned as "sinners above all the Galilaeans," but merely as typical private schools. 13 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY These are the prize-takers at the begin- ning of their college course ! This is the great work of the private "prep" school. This is education according to the colleges, and im- posed by them upon the public schools! O Lord, I say, how long will the sensible supporting public tolerate this burden that the Pharisees lay upon the back of the pub- lic school? Right here must begin the re- form in our public-school education, the public, not the colleges, determining what the programme shall be, and doing away utterly with this cramming, coaching prepa- ratory course, wherever that course fails to meet the general need. Any special programme of training, voca- tional, business, or college, before the end of the high school, if not contrary to the Decalogue, is contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, and a menace to democracy. Moreover, it is German, no matter how we try to clothe it. Such special training was in Germany, and is here, a deliberate at- tempt to industrialize education, to make it economically efificient, to create a working 14 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY class or professional class. So-called voca- tional education before the end of a general high-school course is education backward, the training of a man into a machine, a soul into a pair of hands. It is education for autoc- racy — the German system, which, in its "People's Schools," carried ninety per cent of German children up to our eighth grade, then blocked all further education, except in trade and continuation schools. These are the "masses," and not an average of one in ten thousand got through these "Peoples' Schools" into the gymnasium, or high school, with the other ten per cent — the children of the "classes." Masses and classes until recently in American education have been one, the school doors opening alike to all; but now, under the guise of "education for a living," or in some other robe of light, the devil of vocational training goes up and down the land, installing machinery in the high-school basements, to steal away the quiet of the study room; and, holding out "Big Money" in one hand, and a desiccated textbook in the 15 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY other, says to the restless high-school boys, "Choose!" American education is going vocationally mad, going bad; for behind this mischievous propaganda is a purpose and a philosophy not had of democracy. Let me quote a pas- sage from a textbook by a native American high-school teacher: — In our country, where every youth in his first year in school learns that he may be president some day; where parents permit their children to look down upon their modest callings; where the higher professions are overcrowded, manual labor despised, the farms deserted, we often find in the serving class a weak, discontented class of people. In sharp contrast to them were the people who served us in Germany. They knew what they had to do and did it, without feeling that it injured their dignity. They, the servant class of Germany, had been educated to servitude, he means; where- as, in this country, as he goes on to say, "A 'bum' wanted a dollar for carrying three small hand-bags for us to the station"; all because of this idiotic American teaching &bout some day being president! i6 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY That "bum" had had no presidential teaching. He might have had the "busi- ness course" in school, perhaps; for, instead of a promise of the presidency, our schools nowadays hold out the necessity of making money, making it quick, and a lot of it. "Double your salary" is our educational slogan — salary, not wages. The next revi- sion of the Bible will doubtless read: "The salary of sin is death." The word, with all its pretensions, has no place in our democra- tic dictionary. Vocational training can never result here in either the servitude or the servility of Germany. The American mind reacts in an American way — turns hostile, instead of servile; mobilizes into camps, instead of castes; and goes forth to fight, chanting the Declaration of Independence. European education, as James Bryce says, has taught men either to look up or to look down. In America we look at each other on the level, square in the eye; and it is the business of our education to make that look friendly with perfect understanding. As a matter of fact, however, we are not n PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY educating enough workers, laborers, I mean, who work with their hands; nor shall we till we educate everybody to work with his hands, to produce something, something elemental, essential for human existence. Who does not do some creative work with brain or hands lives a mendicant, dies a pauper, and liei: buried in the potter's field, no matter what mausoleum marks his tomb. We should be educated to the biol- ogy, the philosophy — the democracy — of labor, and should actually be taught a trade, all of us ; and every manager and professional man might well return once in seven years for a sabbatical year at that trade. But such training is not the business of the public schools. I count myself a laboring man. I believe in labor and laborers. There must be a laboring class, educated as a class, and we must all belong. I have always worked with my hands, and the best I could with my head, too. A college class is not a garden of cabbages; not exactly. Work? God works. We all work, or ought to. Christ had his kit i8 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY of tools. It is not work that divides masses from classes, and sets worker against em- ployer, nor is it money; it is lack of under- standing. "Capital and Labor must get together," is the slow and still half-sincere cry of Capi- tal. That belief was not in Capital's educa- tion, nor in Labor's either; and both are asking, "How? How can a man be born when he is old? How can Capital and Labor, which are now separated, get together?" But they must! Then they must begin to- gether, and stay together, not as Capital and Labor, but as schoolboys and men. Not long since, at a notable meeting of capitalists in Atlantic City, Labor was earn- estly urged to get together with Capital — but not at Atlantic City. No labor leader was invited to get together with the capi- talists there! And more recently, at a still more notable gathering in Washington, they were brought together, — but not in sym- pathy and understanding, — and they soon separated, more hostile, and farther from each other, than they were before. 19 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY The separation is educational : it began in school; and, wide as it now is, it shall go even wider with the spread of vocational and class education. Education and shoe- making are not the same thing. Said the treasurer of the Stetson Shoe Company to me: "We don't want boys taught to make shoes in school. We can teach them better here at the factory. We want them edu- cated by the schools. We need intelligent men, adaptable men, interested men, who see that their welfare and our welfare are one welfare." A few hours in a shoe-shop (sixteen hours in even a printing-shop!) will give the green hand skill enough for wages, doing for him all that the years of distract- ing vocational work in school would do, and do but poorly. Ask the manufacturer if it is good business to spend years for hours, especially those precious school years so greatly needed for intelligence, adapta- bility, and that community of interests which sees in welfare, "All for each, and each for all." A democracy is a whole people educated PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY up to the standard desired by the Stetson Shoe Company. It is a whole people getting together; and the closer together, the better for the democracy. The purpose of our public-school system is to start the whole people together, and keep the whole people together for all their young years, until by calling and election their ways must part; a parting not to be allowed before the end of the high-school course, in order to forestall the unequal ideals of the future, the sus- picions, jealousies, and savage interests that education can prevent, but for which there is no cure. Such education is not skill. It is under- standing. Let vocational guidance become a part of every high-school curriculum; but set up no machine in the cellar. Let no vocational work steal from the book work; let no trade, industrial, business, no normal or technical, school, divide the time with the high school. They must follow the high school. The children of the grades should have sloyd and cooking and sewing, to give a 21 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY necessary variety to their study, — some- thing different, something for their eager hands, — just as they should have play. These occupations tremendously add to the vocabulary, the general understanding and sympathy, as well as to a better-working brain; for accurate hands demand an ac- curate brain. But there should be no voca- tional or trade caste to this, if the child is normal ; and it should end with the eighth grade, the next four years, except for the deficient, being devoted to books. Technical and normal schools are increas- ingly necessary; whereas trade schools — schools to teach moulding, shipbuilding, coal-mining, trawling,- and tombstone-cut- ting — are sheer nonsense. What better trade-school than the shop? What other possible trade school in the light of all the trades? According to the Census of Manu- factures (1914), Massachusetts has 393 dif- ferent manufacturing trades. The city of Worcester has 148 different manufacturing trades, and teaches, in its expensive and elaborate trade schools, something like three PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY of these! Is the State to set up 393 different trade schools? Where are they to be set up? And how are the State's children to attend them? The whole effort is absurd, and the educational theory behind the effort still more absurd. The trade school can have small part and lot in our public educational scheme. The technical school, on the other hand, is a college and should be of college grade. A high school of commerce makes commerce the business of babes. Why not also a high school of medicine, of theology, of law? Is commerce less exacting than these other callings? and are merchants so much poorer mentally than other men, that an eighth-grade education gives them intellec- tual room and verge enough? We can build nothing for democracy on a fourth-grade foundation; it is of sand. In exalting democracy, the war has magnified and mightily multiplied citizenship over the face of the world, and revealed, not only how inadequate, but how dangerous, a thing for citizenship a little learning is. Yet here is the average fourth-grade man inheriting the 23 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY citizenship of the earth. The world and they that dwell therein have, of a sudden, become democratic — become the average man's with his fourth-grade education! What will he do with his world — in Russia? in America? Responsibility has not kept pace with liberty; education with ideality. Politically, socially, we have suffered a series of "double promotions," lifted from the first grades, and set down to problems, grades, and grades ahead. What else means the difficulty, the un- rest, the suspicion, the antagonism every- where, the revolt of the workers; the arming of the employees, the little wars in every industry, so rapidly settling into the lines of one vast industrial war, except that we do not know how to solve our social and political problems? The worker, taken as he runs, is as intelligent as his employer; neither is uneducated, but both are inadequately or wrongly educated, with gaps and twists in their education that can be made good only in a common school. 24 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY There is but one thing to do — give us more education, which, in the United States, means an education to the end of the high school for every citizen, even though com- pelled by law; an undivided general course, broadly human, broadly democratic — and after that the shop, the technical school, and the college. Ill More education and a more democratic education is our great national need. Gov- ernments are not safe in the hands of any single class — a democracy, of all govern- ments, the least safe. Heretofore the issues dividing us nationally have been sectional, economic, commercial, fiscal, the political cleavage never following social or "class" lines. It is different to-day. The ugly word "class" now thrusts up its long, low bulk like a reef dead ahead. We must go about! Education is a class-leveler. Though not by any means a cure for the inequalities of life, education comes nearer than any other thing to being the lowest common denomina- tor of the "vulgar fractions" of society that 25 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY \vc call classes. American education, how- ever, is growing ever more divided. Instead of leveling class distinctions, our schools are erecting them — the vocational school its class wall, the private school its class wall, shutting in between them the common pub- lic school — after the order of the old world, with all its old-world antagonisms. A private school in a democratic system of education is a sort of dress-circle seat in heaven, un-American and anti-American, and no substitute at all for the common public school. All true forces of democracy are centripetal, getting- together forces; for, as Chesterton puts it, "All real democracy is an attempt (like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out." Out where? Out where the self-confident people are. But what private school that I know is jolly hostess to the shy and timid? I prepared for college at the South Jersey Institute, a private school, at a time, though, when there was no common high school in my town. A private school, I say, but not of the "select" variety, or I should not have 26 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY been admitted. A lad of thirteen, I rode through the beautiful school-grounds on horseback, as direct from the farm as a can of morning milk. I had come on the gallop, bareheaded, barefooted — to my sudden confusion, when I found those shoeless feet tagging me into a book-walled study before a great, kind man, who stood looking me over quizzically, not critically; for he was not selecting me, I was selecting him, and it pleased and puzzled him. For nearly five years I went to the Insti- tute, which, with the coming of the town high school, had no excuse for being, and shortly ceased to be. In that same city were three other excellent academies, which died like the Institute and rose again — in the common high school, transforming the spirit, and the very body, of Bridgeton with a new and a better beauty. It has not happened so in some other places. In the town where I now live the old Academy is still doing business. The public high school in this town was opened in 1872. The Academy, founded in 1784, 27 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY did well, and in a public way, for almost a hundred years, what the high school is now- doing. Yet the Academy lives on, a select private school now, a sort of educational wedge, splitting the school-children into two groups, and dividing the town's school inter- est and support. The town's public schools need undivided interest and support. They are as good schools as they can be under the circum- stances — though evidently they lack some- thing which the Academy has, and which possibly they might have if the Academy were closed. The town's public schools are not so good as they ought to be. And I have four sons to educate. These four "are all I have, and nothing but the best is good enough for them." I had hardly settled in Hingham before the groceryman, bringing kerosene and cof- fee, remarked as grocerymen sometimes do in Hingham, — "Of course, you '11 send your boys down to the Academy ; they are nice and clean down there." 28 I PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY And a little later, the town's first citizen calmed my troubled school-spirit by con- cluding, — "Then, if you don't like the public schools, do as the rest of us do: send your children down to Derby Academy." This is how * ' the rest of us " improve the public schools in Hingham; and in Wey- mouth next to Hingham; and in Braintree next to Weymouth; and in Quincy next to Braintree; and in Milton next to Quincy — and in Boston. The town of Milton has just built a mag- nificent high school. I pass it on my way to Boston, and I say, "Truly the Common- wealth believes in education." And then I remember that hardly a child of aristo- cratic Milton attends that public school. And as for Milton's public-school teachers, the foxes of Milton have holes, the birds of Milton a sanctuary for their nests, but the public-school teachers of Milton have not within the town where to lay their heads. A public-school teacher, in a New Eng- 29 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY land town which he defined as a "last refuge of feudalism," said to me: "There was Wil- liam in the high school, whose father had been for thirty years a coachman for one of the most exclusive baronesses of the place. She directed the father to take William out of school to work on the estate. ' Education is not for such persons,' she declared. 'He should be taught a trade and made valuable to the estate.' "The boy was an honor pupil and slated for Harvard by his teachers. The Great Lady had a boy too, just William's age, who was with the greatest difficulty sticking to the private-school rolls — only by grace of the head-master and tuition fees. William's father, with good horse sense (being a coach- man), sacrificed his job rather than the boy's education. "There was also a well-known Boston banker who said to me: 'I would send my boys to your high school if I had the courage to do so, but the social connections are too valuable to sacrifice.' "During the war many great men were 30 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY imported by influential citizens of the town, to arouse enthusiasm for the war. They vis- ited the private school — not Democracy's high school." Still, Milton, to return to a local habita- tion and a name, believes in public schools — for the public. Milton, itself, however, is private. So is Hingham. We Hingham folk know that the American public-school sys- tem is the best in the world, and good enough — except for **my children." Now, "m>' children!" Well, "my children" really are extraordinary — four perfect specimens of the average hoy! They look it, they act it — they actually seem to know it. I helped them, to be sure, but not so much as certain scions of auld Irish royalty down at the public school. They had help, too, from a bunch of stout descendants of the Vikings; and peculiar help, in outgrowing their Little Lord Fauntleroyity, from one who came to Hingham High School straight down the Appian Way. For all the roads that used to lead to Rome now run to Hingham, and ter- minate in her public schools. Here gather 31 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY most of Hingham's future citizens, quite un-Americanized — young Cangiano, Bjork- lund, Weijanc, Wainakainen, and with them four young Sharps, Americanized by birth, but not yet democratized. If these four Sharps can do some Americanizing, — and the pubHc school is the best, and almost the only, place to do it in, — they can get in turn some wholesome democratizing to balance the account. Do not the public schools need my jour boys? They have been taught at home the "Whole Duty of Children," — to say what is true, to speak when spoken to, — And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as they are able. They have been taught a deal of other things besides. I doubt if many American children have had the persistent, faithful, varied training at home that these boys have had. Not all their teachers together will have put in a tithe of the time and labor upon their education that their mother has spent. Before they started to school it began, 32 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY and day by day, year after year, it has gone on ever since, — in poetry, history, nature, science, politics, and religion, — con- stant, inexorable, fresh, mentally stimulating, stirring to the spirit, and morally chasten- ing to a degree quite unheard-of in these days. If ever children were prepared to give something, as well as get something, out of their school, these children were. And where would the little they have to give count for so much as here? And where else, in turn, could they receive so much? Certainly in a school of only their own social kind they could give little; and what from their own kind could they receive? Even from a selfish point of view I must do as I am doing. And this is the point of view of most parents: with no thought for what their children can give, but only of what their children are to get out of school — out of everything! They are neither taught, nor allowed, to give them- selves — the gift supreme, without which there is no true giving. The Law^ of Heaven, and of our approach 33 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY to Heaven, which we call Democracy, de- mands that we love one another. Love waits on understanding; understanding on personal acquaintance; and such acquaint- ance waits nowhere else so naturally, so unreservedly, so honestly, so generously, as at the wide-open door of the common school. Greater love (speaking democratically) hath no man than this: that a man, rich and cul- tured, send his son and his little daughter to his neighborhood public school; and if he is afraid of the school, that he and his wife go with their children and camp in that school, and get other fathers and mothers to camp with them, until they have made that school safe and fit for their children. For verily, verily, I say unto them, a school in their neighborhood that is not fit and safe for their children, is unfit and unsafe for all children, and is a menace to the neighborhood. The schools of Hingham do need my boys as much as my boys need the schools. I must not think only of what my children get, any more than I must think only of what I am getting. Democracy demands 34 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY that we all give largely of the precious stuff that makes for liberty, equality, fraternity. Silver and gold have I little, but I have four wholesome, intelligent, clean-minded boys. I will give them. Besides my own eternal debt to this dear land, I happen to owe my country four good citizens, owe them to her now, and I will pay what I owe, and pay it now — into the great savings-bank of de- mocracy, the common public school. What else can I do and be an American? I say the Hingham schools do need my boys. Shall the newcomers from overseas find only Shoelenburgs, Chiofolos, Koz- lofiskis, Salomaas, and twenty other nation- alities in high school, with never a Sharp or a Smith among them? Are these foreigners to be the only ones hereafter to receive a democratic education? the only ones to fol- low the traditions? the only ones to support the institutions and live by the principles of our fathers? This is what they have been doing even unto death. Here are the names of the New Eng- land boys, dead on the fields of France, as 35 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY published in the Boston "Herald" — Janu- ary 13, 1919, the day I was writing this: — NEW ENGLAND BOYS ON CASUALTY LIST Killed in Action nUXTOX, CORP. VFRXON C, Burlington, Vt. KARZo.MAHOVK, CORR. MARION, Ansonia, Ct. SHANSK, CORP. .1().SKRII J., Torrington, Ct. LEFRANCOIS, PRiV. ROWELL J., Turlant, Vt. MEDEIROS, PRiV. JOHN P., New Bedford. MIKENEZONIS, PRIV. STANLEY, Bridgeport, Ct. MOSCHELIO, PRIV. SALVATORE, 44 Dunstable Street, Charlestown. MURAD, PRIV. JOHN S., Portland. Me. Not many Sharps and Smiths among these eight. Dear, gallant souls! how well they learned and lived their democracy! My own four were too young to go, but they would have gone — to fight, to die, had the war lasted longer. // my four boys could fight for democracy in France, they can go to school for democracy in the United States! Good average boys my four are, just the kind to grow into democratic citizens, and to go to school with those little foreign Amer- icans, like Karzomaroyk, Lefrangois, and Mikenezonis — killed in action in January! And my boys are just the sort to help make Hingham's public schools what they ought 36 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY to be. Hingham's public schools are far from what they ought to be, because four Sharps and a Smith or two are not enough. All the boys and girls of Hingham are necessary to make Hingham's public schools what they ought to be — and to make this democracy what it ought to be; or even to keep it what it has been. But instead of all going to Hingham's public schools, Hingham's few boys are scat- tered between the public schools and Derby Academy, Thayer Academy, Milton Acad- emy, Dummer Academy, Andover Academy — boys who ought to be with my boys in Hingham's common school; boys whom my boys will never know, not even when they meet later in Hingham's town meeting. Yet Hingham is not so bad as its neighbor town of Hanover. Hingham and Hanover are symptomatic of New England, as New England is symp- tomatic of the Eastern States generally. In the way of schools the state of New York is perhaps the least democratic community in the country, having practically no com- 37 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY mon school. The rich, and even the well- to-do, of New York patronize only the private school. Let the Japanese visitors go down South, and they shall find another segregation — of white and black children in the schools, both being educated for life and a living, but neither for living together, for democracy. And yet the South's treatment of the negro is more consistent, and, on the whole, more democratic, than New England's. Boston gives the negro the best of edu- cations and the meanest of chances to live. There are tremendous difficulties — most of them white difficulties — in this black question. I was brought up in Southern New Jersey with the negro; I have lived and worked in Georgia with him; I have studied him in Boston, at one time knowing personally almost every colored man in the city, and I know that he is not an undesirable citizen, that we need him and we should make him feel it, by giving him what he asks — simple justice: the education, the chance to work, to vote, to live, to be a man, that we demand for ourselves. Racially 38 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY there should be no mingling — for racial in- terests; and in the South, where for genera- tions yet they will live in segregated districts, they should have their own churches and their own neighborhood schools, but schools with the same course of study as the white schools; a course of study in both schools that shall make for mutual understanding, for mutual respect and tolerance, and for all that liberty and the pursuit of happiness can mean in America, north or south of the Mason & Dixon line. It is neither north nor south, but west of this line, that our oriental visitors shall come nearest to finding what American public- school education means. It is in the Middle West that they shall come closest to their quest. The best public schools in the United States are the schools of the Middle West. The people of the West believe in their schools, they spend without stint for them, and, to a degree most shocking to the ex- clusive East and South, they attend them. Their faith in public-school education was incorporated in the Act of 1787, setting 39 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY aside the Northwest Territory; wherein was a provision forever prohibiting slavery in all that territory and forever encouraging edu- cation. There are private schools in the West — in Chicago; and there are sure to be more as wealth increases and social privi- leges multiply; but the present generation of the West got its education in the public schools; and it is the system of education in the West, and the spirit of education in the West, that these visiting educators will carry back with them for adoption in Japan. IV Under the Constitution, North and South, East and West share alike certain great obligations which, taken together, are democ- racy, the preparation for which can begin only in a common education. However dif- ferent the social conditions into which we are born; however far diverging, through in- heritance and personal efTort, our individual paths, there is a common national inheri- tance into which we are all bom, a body of common knowledge which we must all learn, 40 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY a code of common principles which we must all follow, a load of common tasks which we must all shoulder, and a faith of com- mon ideals to which we must all subscribe. These things in common demand a common experience and a common training, both of which are impossible once childhood has passed. A pure democracy does not exist, not yet, anyway; and if such an ideal state, by the nature of things, cannot exist, its bed- rock exists, broadly, firmly laid in the heart of youth and in our American public schools. There is no other school American enough for my children. There are good private schools; there are poor public schools; but the one indispensable lesson for my child to learn is the lesson of American democ- racy — "that each one's duty," as James Bryce puts it for us, "is not only to accept equality, but also to relish equality and to make himself pleasant to his equals." The best private school that fails to teach this lesson is a poorer school for America than the poorest public school that does teach it. It is not impossible for a private school to 41 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY teach democracy; not impossible for it to be a democracy — or for a rich man to go to heaven. What democracy is, and what it is to be democratic — these are the first things to learn in school; besides them are other great things: to know the world of books, and be a citizen there; the world of nature, and be a citizen there; the world of art, and be a citizen there; the world of science, and be a citizen there; the world of reHgion, and be a citizen there. The world of men, how- ever, laboring men, professional men, busi- ness men. Northern, Southern, Western men, Hingham men: to know these men, yourself as one of them, that they are America, is to be pretty safely educated for democracy — an education provided against by the very nature of the private school. Says John Galsworthy: — In my day at a public school [a "public" school in England is a private school here] . . . the universe was divided into ourselves and "out- siders," "bounders," "chaws," "cads," or what- ever more or less offensive name seemed best to 42 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY us to characterize those less fortunate than our- selves. . . . The workingman did not exist for us, except as a person outside, remote and al- most inimical. From our homes, touched already by this class feeling ... we went to private schools where the teaching of manners, mainly under clerical supervision, effectually barred us from any contaminating influence, so that if by chance we encountered the "lower-class" boy we burned to go for him and correct his "cheek." Thence we passed into the great "Caste" fac- tory, a public [our private] school where the feel- ing becomes, by the mere process of being left to itself, as set as iron. . . . All learned to con- sider themselves the elect. ... In result, failing definite, sustained effort to break up a narrow "caste" feeling, the public [private] school pre- sents a practically solid phalanx of the fortunate, insulated against real knowledge of, or real sympathy with, the less fortunate. The phalanx marches out into the professions, into business into the universities, where, it is true, some awaken to a sense of wider values — but none too many. From the point of view of anyone who tries to see things as they are, and see them as a whole, there is something terrific about this 43 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY automatic "caste" moulding of the young. And in the present condition of our country it is folly, and dangerous folly, to blink it. It is folly, and dangerous folly, to blink such a system of education anywhere. It is worse than folly to tolerate it in America. If there is a compensation, or an equiva- lent, for democracy, have the American private schools a patent on it? What can the private school do, because it is private, that the public school cannot do? Surely nothing which money can buy, for the public has the money. And it must spend it, until it puts every private school out of business. As for scholarship and deportment, the private school can hardly maintain the average standard of the public school, for private schools are notoriously sensitive to student fees. Did I say "standards"? Standardiza- tion is exactly what the private school avoids. Superior individual training is its strong claim ; a claim which might have some force were schools not machines, and were this not a democracy where no man but the handicapped needs an attendant. 44 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY Democracy or no, a vast number of ambi- tious Americans, with and without money, distrust the common schools, because they are common, systematized, standardized — as if they were therefore without chance for experiment, or for individual initiative, bent, or "manifest destiny." President Lowell of Harvard is afraid of the medio- crity of the public schools. I should like to call to his attention the picture of the prize- winning students of a famous "prep" school, quoted earlier in this book, and also beg him to study the statistics compiled by the Department of Education at Harvard, which "show that a higher degree of scholarship is reached by graduates of high schools at that college than by preparatory schools boys," and that, "this fact is present in every de- partment of the college." Public or private, a school is only a school, a machine; and the better school it is, the better machine it is, and the more machine- like is its product. The education for indi- viduality can be had in no school: such ed- ucation must come primarily from other 45 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY sources — from the home first of all, from books and friends and nature; but. take it by and large, the individual, even as an individual, stands the best chance where he stands most nearly upon his own feet, with no helps but self-helps, and where he counts for what he is, not for what his parents are, or what they lay upon him. "The fallacy underlying" my suggestion that we all attend a common school, writes the head-master of the Canterbury School (private. New Milford. Connecticut), is "that this method would be preoccupied with establishing a merely external uni- formity; for it would be vain to hope that you could make all Young America remain at the same level of thought and emotion in regard, not to their country alone, but to the world in which they live." It certainly would be vain and as unde- sirable as vain. Who could dream of such a level, knowing the variety of human na- ture even among the children of the same parents! "Many of us," he goes on, "believe that 46 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY there is no contradiction between the acqui- sition of culture and the preserv^ation of true democracy"; as if culture were exclusively a thing of the private school! And as if most Americans did believe that true democracy calls for movies, garlic, and bad manners! This will do to tell to the marines, and to publish in the columns of the New York "Tribune" (where it appeared as a letter of protest) ; but tell it not in Gath, nor publish it in the streets of Askalon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice! The complacency of this esteem is eclipsed only by the foolishness and the deep danger at the bottom of the shallow argument: "It takes all kinds of men to make up the world. Perhaps we are not wrong in concluding, in view of the past history of our country, that it takes all kinds of education to develop true democracy." Who says it takes all kinds of men to make up the world, and all kinds of educa- tion to develop a true democracy? It takes only democratic education to develop true democracy. Nor does it take all kinds of 47 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY education to destroy true democracy: pri- vate school, trade school — class education is enough to destroy democracy — as it is threatening to do. Democracy is a difficult thing to develop, to live up to or down to. Says the London ' ' Weekly Times ' ' of October 31, 1 9 1 9 : — There are thorns in the path of consistent democracy and a few of them have penetrated the feet of a Cabinet Minister. Dr. Addison saw no reason why his daughters should not be educated at the Middlesex County Secondary School for Girls. He considered it a good school. It was convenient to his home. " He has as much right " — the words are his own — "as any other citizen to send his children to a public second- ary school." Yet members of the local Educa- tion Committee complain, their view being that people who can afford more expensive schools should not take advantage of cheap ones, which ought to be left for "ordinary people." Dr. Addison has thought fit to issue a defensive statement, and ordinary people are smiling — but more at the Education Committee than at Dr. Addison. Nevertheless, this absurd case has numerous precedents and corollaries, arising 48 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY from our British exaggeration of class divisions. A rich man, for instance, is not respected for riding on a tramway car, though for some recon- dite illogical reason his presence in an omni- bus is condoned. When Dr. Addison has learnt that the democracy likes a Cabinet Minister earning £5000 a year to "keep his place," he will refrain from educating his children so well. His sole care will be to educate them expensively. Let the private school act as an asylum for the over-sensitive, the timid, the back- ward and stubborn, a function already recognized in some quarters as peculiarly its own. One of my friends, entering her son at a New Hampshire public school, was asked by the superintendent, — "Where has he been to school? " "In a private school near Boston." "Then we can't take him," was the astonishing reply. "We have no private school in this district, no provision of any kind for the abnormal." The other day I stood looking across the street into the windows of a private school, windows literally darkened by the shadow of 49 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY a great public-school building. This private school had been an old dwelling-house, one of a solid block of houses that it had appro- priated much as a hermit crab appropriates an abandoned mollusk's shell, the school accomodating itself to the house, not the house to the school. A single window to a floor let in the shadows of the street. The select children were in the study room; and as I looked, I chanced to see one of them seize what appeared to be her geography, and bring it down with a vicious smash upon the dear devoted head of her select sister. It was only the exceptional act, of course, which proves the abiding rule of good man- ners in private schools; but I could only think how human and hopeful private-school children are, and how like public-school children, really; and what a pity to mew up these few select girls in this dark, inade- quate, abandoned house of gentry, when they might have spent the afternoon across the street with a thousand little unselected brothers and sisters, in the spacious halls of the great public school, — as I was spend- 50 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY ing my afternoon, it being the day before Christmas, — marching down the long ring- ing corridors to the tune of "Over There," for an hour of Christmas singing and story- telling in the sunny assembly-room; and marching back singing, "Keep the Home Fires Burning," every right hand at salute as the thousand little singers passed out between the Colors flanking the assembly- room door. Money can get culture for the public schools; there is no patent on culture. All the factors of culture — buildings, pictures, books, music, and refined teachers — shall be had, and shall be had for all public schools, just as soon as the public recognizes educa- tion as strictly social, fitting us to live to- gether. The Three R's will be the beginning of this education, and democracy the bigger end toward which it moves. The Three R's broadly handled, strongly, stirringly taught, and carried on until they compass the doctrine of democracy, shall be the com- mon education of the future. Give me the literature of the world, give 51 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY me the power of expression, give me the magic of mathematics, and besides these, give me the idea of democracy, as a moral code, as a social order, as a reHgious faith, and you have given me, not only wisdom and power, but an eye for the wind when I cart ashes for the city, and a sympathy for the flustered caretakers of the Belgian suite when I am entertained in Buckingham Pal- ace. Before President Wilson's visit only royalty had occupied the Belgian suite, and the aged attendants were troubled over the proper etiquette. You can imagine Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, out of the abundance and gentleness of their democracy, saying, "Oh, don't make any fuss over us. Treat us just as you do your other guests. Whatever is good enough for royalty is good enough for us." It is the unabashed, complaisant Ameri- can "mediocrity," the lack of money and manners, that Hingham and Boston and New York draw back from in the public schools — the unwashed American, in the language of my groceryman. It is this and 52 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY more: it is really American democracy itself which our people dislike. It is from America herself, her best self, that we withdraw — to set up about us our little neighborhood aristocracies. The wise men from the East, except out of curiosity, perhaps, will not enter a private school in the United States, having learned in Japan how an aristocracy is created; what they have come seeking is the source and the secret of democracy; and they are right in coming to the public schools. But suppose they come to Boston, to the only public school in the Back Bay? Oh, here is the secret for which they are seeking. They have followed the gleam, and it has led them to this school for rich and poor — if there are any poor in the Back Bay! Here shall be found the little citizens of the future, eleven hundred of them from the water-side of Beacon Street, over, far over from "between the tracks"; little seeds in the cold-frame of democracy, seatmates, classmates, playmates together in the na- tion's Common School ! 53 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY Common School! the nation has public schools, and private schools, but no com- mon school. The Oriental visitors, who are used to a mild form of aristocracy in tiieir own Japan, will stare with astonishment at the eleven hundred children in this Back Bay public school ivho are none oj them Back Bay children. True, there are children from the Back Bay here, — cooks' children, coach- men's children, from over on Beacon Street, — while the rest are a floating riff-raff from somewhere west of Boylston Street, between the railroad tracks. Back Bay children used to attend this public school, and a few may still attend. When it was made thoroughly democratic, however, the Back Bay withdrew its children, en bloc; but not its patronage. Back Bay women, believing in education and culture, have privately supplied this school with their money, ever since they deprived it of their children — money for drawing, dancing, singing, and a school visitor. And all these things money can buy; but the thing that money cannot buy is democracy. Only 54 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY Back Bay children can supply the Back Bay school with democracy, and Back Bay child- ren are not allowed to go to this Back Bay school. Eleven hundred children in the only Back Bay public school, and scarcely a Back Bay child among them ! As a nation, we understand the theory of democracy; collectively, we are eloquent preachers of the doctrine; but as individuals, we practise a different thing. We can die for democracy. Yet we cannot go to school for it; we cannot be democratic. We are sending democratic literature to the ends of the earth. Our Fourteen Peace Points were translated into three hundred native languages of India, whose millions of poor for the first time had the gospel of democ- racy preached to them. The isles of the sea heard, and the Japanese came seeking the truth of democracy — in the only public school of the Back Bay of Boston! "We will drop things German, and take things American," they say. But what do they find America doing? Dropping things American and adopting things German — 55 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY the vocational in place of the liberal school, the private and the parochial in place of the common school. They find America fighting to make the world safe for democ- racy, and arraying her own citizens in war- ring camps of class and mass by a system of "education for a living," and by another system of "education for life," for place, and power, instead of for liberty, equality, fraternity, which is just the opposite of what Germany to-day is doing. Does God laugh? He must laugh, else despair of the human race would kill Him. Here are the German people with their new republican constitu- tion abolishing all private schools, both ele- mentary and preparatory; sweeping off the stage, along with titles of honor, class privi- lege, the Iron Cross, and all other accoutre- ments of the "old imperialism," the thou- sands of private educational establishments which flourished throughout the fatherland before the war. "That the German people, with their intense faith in the power of education, should have done this is a signi- ficant sign of the times" — in Germany! 56 PATRONS OF DEMOCRACY But in America? I have four sons to edu- cate in America — one a politician, I hope; one a preacher; one a poet; one a combined farmer and a college professor, may be! I am ambitious for them. But professor, or poet, or preacher, or politician, — I care not what, — one thing they shall be, if the public schools can make them : they shall be demo- cratic citizens of this great democracy, taught to accept equality, taught to relish equality, and taught to make themselves pleasant to their equals. r (/ e;^ ^ 9 ^^^n\^\l I! ml? TUV I IBKAKN I M\ KRsn ^ ()^ (M iforma Santa Barbara IHIS BOOK IS Dl K ON T»K I AST DATK STAMPKD SKI OVN. " JO Asviian 3H1 *, o UJS!l3Alh4n 3Hi o " wiNiioinva JO 9 / N ^r souTMERN REGIONAL UBRARY^FftClLljnTi lllliillililli' -- 000 824 275 2