Chapter 32 - As To the Quality of Our Education

Every child in school until a certain age or until a sufficient equipment to meet the ordinary duties of life is reached, should be the nation's motto.

It is also eminently fitting that something be said of the quality of the education it is proposed to make compulsory attendance upon universal. To come at once to the point in mind and briefly -- training of the intellect alone is not sufficient; we shall remain a long way off from the ideal until we make moral, humane, heart-training a far more important feature of our educational systems than we have made it thus far. We are advancing in this respect, but we have great advances yet to make. Kindness and consideration, sympathy and fraternity, love of justice -- the full and ready willingness to give it as well as to demand it, the clear cut comprehension of the majesty and beauty that escapes into the life of the individual as he understands and appropriates to himself the all-embracing contents of the golden rule.

The training of the intellect alone at the expense of the "humanities " has made or has enlarged the power of many a criminal, many a usurper of other men's homes and property, many an oppressor, and has thereby added poison and desolation to his own life as well as to the lives of those with whom he has come in contact and who have felt his blighting and withering influence. It is also chiefly from those without this training, that that great body of our fellow-creatures which we term the animal world, receive their most thoughtless and cruel treatment, and perhaps from· among none more than among the rich and fashionable.

I think there is another feature in our educational systems that we would do wisely to give more attention to. In a nation of free institutions, more attention could wisely be given to systematic and concrete instruction in connection with the institutions of government, and in connection with this a training in civic pride that sees to it that our public offices are filled with men of at least ordinary honesty and integrity, men who regard public office as a public trust worthy the service of their highest manhood, rather than with those whose eye is single to the largest amount of loot and graft that comes within the range of their vision and the reach of their hand.

Such a system would in time spell the end of Tammany Hall -- a Democratic organization in New York City, whose chief object is to make politics a cover to divert the largest possible sums of money from the people of the City of New York to line the pockets, and in great abundance, of those in control of the body of loot. It would in time spell the end of the Republican rings and halls whose object and purpose is identically the same in every city where they have been able to gain control, as well as the Democratic rings in cities other than New York. The methods of the rings of the one are equally black with the methods of the rings of the other; where the motives are the same the resultant action is the same.

Our educational methods are developing. In educational work are some of our noblest, our foremost men and women. There is an element of the practical, the useful, that is now sort of remodeling our earlier methods. It has always seemed to me that not only in our public schools but in our colleges and universities, it is possible to get as great a degree of training from branches that are in themselves useful, that will be of actual use later on, as out of those that are used for their training value only. The element of the useful, not at the expense of the training, but combined with it, should be, I think, and is coming to be, the marked feature of our developing educational methods.

The bread and butter problem will be the problem of practically all in our common or public schools today. There probably will not be one in a thousand whose problem it will not be. To make our educational systems so that they will be of the greatest practical aid to all as they enter upon life's activities should, it seems to me, be one of our greatest aims. That our college courses can be improved to at least from twenty to forty per cent along this same line I am fully persuaded, in addition to the saving of considerable valuable time for those who, contemplating professional careers, will afterwards have to spend a considerable period in years in professional schools.

When we consider that not more than one-tenth of one per cent of those in our common schools ever get as far as the college or university, we can see how important it is that every child be guaranteed what the law of the most ordinary justice demands, that he or she have the benefit at least of what will enable him or her to enter upon the stage of young manhood and young womanhood free from the tremendous handicaps with which so many are entering upon it today.

( from: In the Fire of the Heart)