In the School Room — Chapter 29 Part 1 An Argument for Common Schools

XXIX. AN ARGUMENT FOR COMMON SCHOOLS.

The argument for popular education is familiar and trite, and yet it needs to be occasionally re-stated and enforced.

There is no community in which there is not a considerable number of persons grossly and dangerously ignorant, and there are many communities in which the majority of the people are in this condition.

There is no community in which the importance of general education is over-estimated; there are unfortunately many communities in which education is held to be the least important of public interests.

A brief discussion of the subject, therefore, can never be entirely out of place.

Before proceeding to the direct argument, let me notice some of the most common objections.

It is a not uncommon opinion, that the business of education should be left, like other kinds of business, to the laws of trade.

It is said if a carpenter is wanted in any community, or a blacksmith, or a tailor, or a lawyer, or a doctor, carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors, lawyers, and doctors will make their appearance.

If a store is wanted, a store will spring up.

Why not a school-house?

Those who use this argument forget the essential difference between the two classes of wants to be supplied.

All men equally feel the distress, if naked, or hungry, or sick, or suffering from any material want.

The poor man, no less than the rich, feels the pinchings of hunger, and will exert himself to remedy the evil.

The sick man, even more than the well, appreciates the value of medicine and the necessity of a physician.

Not so in the matter of knowledge.

A man must himself be educated, to understand the value of education.

There are exceptions, of course.

Yet it is substantially true, that the want of education is not one of those felt and pinching necessities that compel men's attention, and that consequently may be left to shift for themselves.

A man who has himself enjoyed the blessing of a good education, expects to provide schools for his children, as much as he expects to provide for them food and clothing.

The wants of their minds are to him pressing realities, as much as are the wants of their bodies.

Not so with the ignorant and debased neighbors, who live within stone's throw of his dwelling.

They, from their own experience, know nothing better, and are quite content, both for themselves and their children, to live on in the debased condition in which we see them.

If these wretched creatures are ever moved to seek a higher style of living and being, the movement must originate outside of themselves.

It is a case in which the man of higher advantages must think and act for those below him.

It is a case in which people have a pressing need without knowing it, and in which consequently the laws of supply and demand do not meet the emergency.

Another common opinion on this subject is that private enterprise is adequate to meet the want.

Private enterprise in education is not indeed to be discarded.

Where the community as a whole, in its organized capacity, will do nothing, let individuals do what they can.

In such cases, let those who appreciate the advantages of education, concert measures for the establishment of schools and the employment of teachers, and for inducing parents who are indifferent to send their children.

By these private efforts, the community may be gradually awakened to the importance of the subject, and so be induced to take it up on their own account.

But private benevolence is not sufficient for so great a work.

Private benevolence besides is apt to be fitful.

It is at best subject to interruption by death and by reverses of fortune, while the cause is one which especially demands steadiness and continuity.

The means for educating a community or a city should no more be subject to interruption, than the means of lighting it, or of supplying it with water.

The argument for depending upon private enterprise for devising and providing the means for popular education, would apply equally well to matters of police, and to the protection of property.

The strong-armed and the sagacious can take care of themselves.

The stout-hearted and the good, by due concert and combination, could keep criminals in some check, even in a country where there were no courts of justice, or prisons, or detective police.

But this is not the ordinary or the best mode of accomplishing the end, nor could it in any case be thoroughly efficient.

The restraint and punishment of crime belong to society as a whole, in its sovereign capacity.

To the same society belongs the duty of seeing that its members do not fall into degrading ignorance and vice.

God, in ordaining human society, had something higher in view than merely providing for the punishment of crime.

Our Heavenly Father would have his children raised to the full enjoyment of their privileges as social and rational beings, and he seems to have established society for this very end, among others, that there may be an agency and a machinery adequate and fitted to drag even the unwilling out of the mire into which they have fallen.

Without such an interposition on the part of society as a whole, the work will not be done.

The mass of the people will remain in ignorance in every community, in which the community as such does not provide the means of education and general enlightenment.

It is often urged against common schools, that they tend to impair parental obligation.

Let us look this objection fairly in the face.

The argument is stated as follows.

If the community, in its organic capacity as a civil government, provides systematically for the instruction of the young, the system, just so far as it is successful and complete, does away with the necessity for any other provision.

The parent, finding this work done to his hands, feels no necessity of looking after it himself, and so gradually loses all sense of obligation on the subject.

Such a result, it is contended, is in contravention of the plainest dictates of nature and the most positive teachings of religion, both nature and religion requiring it as a primary duty of every parent to give his child a suitable education.

In meeting this objection, the friends of common schools agree with the objector to the fullest extent in asserting the imperative, universal, irrepealable duty of the parent to educate his own child.

The duty is not the less binding on the parent, because a like duty, covering the same point, rests also on the community.

The interests involved are so momentous, that God in his wise ordination has given them a double security.

It is a case in which two distinct parties are both separately required to see one and the same thing done.

It is like taking two indorsers to a note.

The obligation of one indorser is not impaired, because another man equally with himself is bound for payment If a child grows up in ignorance and vice, while God will undoubtedly hold the parent responsible, he will also not hold the community guiltless.

Both parties will be guilty before him, both parties will be punished.

A man is bound to maintain a certain amount of cleanliness about his habitation.

If he fails to do so, and if in consequence of this failure the atmosphere around him becomes tainted and malarious, he and his will suffer.

Disease and death will visit his abode.

But the consequences will not end here.

The infection will extend.

The whole community will be affected by it.

The whole community, equally with the individual, are bound to see that the cause of the infection is removed.

The infection will not spare the community because the individual has generated it, nor will it spare the individual because the community has failed to remove it.

Each party has a duty and a peril of its own in regard to the same matter.

The fact is, individuals and the community are so bound together, that on many points their obligations lie in coincident lines.

The matter of education is one of these points.

God has ordained the parental relation, and has implanted the parental affections, for this very reason, among others, that the faculties of the helpless young immortal may have due training and development,--that this development may not be left to chance, like that of a worthless weed, but may have the protection and guardianship which are the necessary birthright of every rational creature brought into being by the voluntary act of another.

But God has ordained society also for this same end, among others, namely, that his rational creatures may have a competent agency, bound by the laws and necessities of its own welfare to make adequate provision for the instruction and education of every human being.

The one duty does not conflict with the other.

The one obligation does not impair the other.

Both lie in coincident lines.

But, as a question of fact, is it true that common schools impair the sense of obligation in the minds of parents in regard to the duty of educating their children?

I affirm the fact to be exactly the contrary.

Those communities in which there are no common schools, and in which the people generally are in a state of deplorable ignorance, are precisely those in which the sense of parental obligation on this point is at the lowest ebb.

Go to a region of country in which not one man in ten can read and write, and you will find that not one man in ten will care whether his children are taught to read and write.

Those communities on the contrary which have the best and most complete system of common schools, and in which this system has prevailed longest and has taken most complete hold of the public mind, are the very ones in which individuals will be found most keenly alive to the importance of the subject, and in which a parent will be regarded as a monster, if his children are allowed to grow up uneducated.

The objection, therefore, has no foundation either in fact or in reason.

There is moreover another consideration not to be overlooked.

In this matter of education, it is after all but a small part which the school does for a child.

The main part of the child's education always takes place at home.

The teacher is at best only an aid to the parent, supplementing the influences of the home and the street.

The child is taking lessons continually from the father and mother, whether they mean it or not.

Every teacher knows how much more rapidly a child improves at school, whose parents are well educated, and how difficult it is to teach a child who at home lives in an atmosphere of profound ignorance.

The mind of the one whose home is a region of darkness and intellectual torpor, will be dwarfed and distorted, no matter what the efforts of its teachers.

The mind of the one, on the contrary, whose home is the abode of intellectual light, warmth, and sunshine, will have a corresponding growth and expansion at school.

There is a continual unconscious tuition, good or bad, received from the very atmosphere of the family.

Besides this, there is a great deal of direct, active duty to be performed by the parent in the education of the child.

No matter how good the school, or how faithful the teacher, there always remains much to be done by the parent, even in regard to the school duties.

The parent must see that lessons are prepared, that the child is properly provided with books, that the meal times and the other arrangements of the household are such as to help forward the child's studies.

There are a hundred things which the father and mother can do to help or to hinder the work of the school.

A child, whose parents give proper home supervision over his studies, will, other things being equal, make twice the progress of one whose parents give the matter no attention.

The community, therefore, in establishing common schools, does by no means take the whole matter of education out of the hands of the parent.

On the contrary, it still leaves with him the most important and necessary of the duties connected with the education of his children, while it gives him aids for the performance of the remaining duties, which no private means can ordinarily supply.

I come, however, to a much graver objection.

It is urged against common schools, as organized in this country, that religious instruction is excluded from them, and that without this element they only tend to make educated villains.

Education, it is said, without the restraining and sanctifying influences of religion, only puts into the hands of the multitude greater power for evil.

If this objection is valid, the most enlightened and Christian communities of the world have made, and are making, an enormous mistake.

Yet the objection is urged with seriousness by men whose purity of motive is above question, and whose personal character gives great weight to their opinions.

The objection originated in England, where all attempts to make legislative provision for the education of the common people have been steadily resisted by a potential party in the established church.

The arguments put forth in the English religious journals have been reproduced in the journals here, and have in many instances awakened the apprehensions of serious-minded persons.

It is worth while, therefore, to give the subject some distinct consideration.

In the first place, the facts are not exactly as stated by those making the objection.

Though little direct religious instruction may be given in the common school, there is usually a large amount of religious influence.

A great majority of the teachers of our common schools are professing Christians.

Very many of them are among our most active Sabbath-school teachers.

Now a truly godly man or woman, at the head of a school, though never speaking a word directly on the subject of religion, yet by the power of a silent, consistent example, exerts a continual Christian influence.

In the second place, as a matter of fact, direct religious teaching is not entirely excluded from our public schools.

I think, it by no means holds that prominent position in the course of study which it should hold.

But it is not entirely excluded.

The Bible, with very rare exceptions, is read daily in all our common schools.

It is appealed to as ultimate authority in questions of history and morals.

It is quoted for illustration in questions of taste.

It is in many schools a text-book for direct study.

In the third place, nine out of ten of the children of the week-day school attend the Sabbath-school.

The Sabbath-school supplements the instructions of the week-day school.

The case, therefore, is not that of an education purely intellectual.

Moral and religious instruction accompanies the instruction in worldly knowledge.

The Sabbath-school, the church, and the family, by their combined and ceaseless activities, infuse into our course of elementary education a much larger religious ingredient than a stranger might suppose, who should confine his examination to a mere inspection of our common schools, or to the reading of the annual reports of our educational boards.

But apart from all these considerations, taking the question in its naked form, is it true that mere intellectual education has the tendency alleged?

I do not believe it.

The constitution of the human mind gives no warrant for such an inference.

Recorded, indisputable facts, overwhelmingly disprove it.

So far is it from being true that the mere diffusion of knowledge has a tendency to make men knaves and infidels, I believe the very opposite to be true.

Knowledge is the natural ally of religion.

To hold otherwise, is to disparage and dishonor religion--to imply, if not to say, that ignorance is the mother of devotion.

There is an inborn antagonism between the intellectual and the sensual nature of man.

If you give to the intellect no development, you leave the senses as the ruling power.

We see this strikingly illustrated in the idiotic, who are for the most part disgustingly sensual.

Among a population grossly ignorant and uneducated, sensualism prevails in its most appalling forms.

The man is a sensualist, simply because he knows no higher pleasures.

He is degraded, because he has no motives to be otherwise.

He is barely above a brute.

The amount of crime, of the coarsest and most debasing character, among the uneducated peasantry of England, is almost incredible.

Here is a description of an English peasant of the present day, given by a competent unimpeached witness, himself an Englishman.

I quote from a work on "The Social Condition and Education of the People of England," by Joseph Kay, Esq.

, of Trinity College, Cambridge, who was commissioned by the Senate of the University to travel for the purpose of examining into the social condition of the poorer classes.

Says Mr. Kay: "You cannot address an English peasant, without being struck with the intellectual darkness which surrounds him.

There is neither speculation in his eye nor intelligence in his countenance.

His whole expression is more that of an animal than of a man.

He is wanting too in the erect and independent bearing of a man.

As a class, our peasants have no amusements beyond the indulgence of sense.

In nine cases out of ten, recreation is associated in their minds with nothing higher than sensuality.

About one half of our poor can neither read nor write, have never been in any school, and know little, or positively nothing, of the doctrines of the Christian religion, of moral duties, or of any higher pleasures than beer-drinking and spirit-drinking, and the grossest sensual indulgence.

They live precisely like brutes, to gratify, so far as their means allow, the appetites of their uncultivated bodies, and then die, to go they have never thought, cared, or wondered whither.

Brought up in the darkness of barbarism, they have no idea that it is possible for them to attain any higher condition; they are not even sentient enough to desire, with any strength of feeling, to change their situation; they are not intelligent enough to be perseveringly discontented; they are not sensible to what we call the voice of conscience; they do not understand the necessity of avoiding crime, beyond the mere fear of the police and the jail; they have unclear, indefinite, and undefinable ideas of all around them; they eat, drink, breed, work, and die; and while they pass through their brute-like existence here, the richer and more intelligent classes are obliged to guard them with police and standing armies, and to cover the land with prisons, cages, and all kinds of receptacles for the perpetrators of crime."

Surely it must be some hallucination of mind, which leads men to suppose that the diffusion of knowledge among such a population, even though it be only scientific and intellectual knowledge, can have any natural or general tendency adverse to religion and morals.

Apart, however, from speculation, and as a pure question of fact, the recorded statistics of crime point unmistakably the other way.

Criminal records the world over prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the overwhelming majority of crimes are committed by persons deplorably ignorant.

Intellectual education, therefore, I contend, even when deprived of its natural ally and adjunct, religious training, has no natural tendency to produce knaves and villains.

On the contrary, it is a most efficient corrective and restraint of the evil and debasing tendencies of human nature.

If the intellect is not so high a region in man's constitution as the moral powers, which I readily grant, it is at least above the mere sensual part, in which vice and crime have their chief spring and aliment.

The question fortunately is one susceptible of a direct appeal to facts.

Who are the men and women that people our jails and prisons?

Are they persons of education, or are they in the main persons deplorably ignorant?

What is the record of criminal statistics on this point?

I will quote a few of these statistics, from a great mass of similar evidence lying before me.

Out of 252,544 persons committed for crime in England and Wales, during a series of years, 229,300, or more than 90 per cent.

, are reported as uneducated, either entirely unable to read and write, or able to do so only very imperfectly; 22,159 could read and write, but not fluently;

and only 1085 (_less than one half per cent.

of the whole_) were what we call educated persons.

In nine consecutive years, beginning with the year 1837, only 28 educated females were brought to the bar of criminal justice in England and Wales, out of 7,673,633 females then living in that part of the United Kingdom; and in the year 1841, out of the same population, not one educated female was committed for trial.

In a special commission, held in 1842, to try those who had been guilty of rioting and disturbance in the manufacturing districts, out of 567 thus tried, 154 could neither read nor write, 155 could read only, 184 could read and write imperfectly, 73 could read and write well, and only one had received superior instruction.

In 1840, in 20 counties of England and Wales, with a population of 8,724,338, there were convicted of crime only 59 educated persons, or one for every 147,870 inhabitants.

In 32 other counties, with a population of 7,182,491, the records furnished _not one convict_ who had received more than the merest elements of instruction.

In 1841, in 15 English counties, with a population of 9,569,064, there were convicted only 74 instructed persons, or one to every 129,311 inhabitants, while the 25 remaining counties and the whole of Wales, with a population of 6,342,661, did not furnish one single conviction of a person who had received more than the mere elements of education.

In 1845, out of a total of 59,123 persons taken into custody, 15,263 could neither read nor write, and 39,659 could barely read, and could write very imperfectly.

In the four best taught counties of England, the number of schools being one for every seven hundred inhabitants, the number of criminal convictions was one a year for every 1108 inhabitants.

In the four worst taught counties, the number of schools being one for every 1501 inhabitants, the number of convictions was one a year for every 550 inhabitants.

That is, in one set of counties, the people were about twice as well educated as in the other, and one half as much addicted to crime.

In other words, in proportion as the people were educated, were they free from crime.

Thrift and good morals usually keep pace with the spread of intelligence among the people.

This has been the result in all those countries of Europe where good common schools are maintained, as in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and most of the German States.

Pauperism, with its attendant evils and crimes, is almost unknown in those countries, while in England, where the common people are worse educated than those of any Protestant nation in the world, pauperism has become an evil which her wisest statesmen have given up as unmanageable.

In 1848, in addition to hundreds of persons assisted by charitable individuals, no less than 1,876,541 paupers (_one out of every eight of the population!

_) were relieved by the boards of guardians of the poor, at an expense from the public purse of nearly thirty millions of dollars.