Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/656

638 affirmative. His answer might be correct if confined to some kinds of education. But he does not seem to consider that the education conducted without official or state assistance, permission or direction, maybe entirely opposed to the best interests of the state, and, indeed, subversive to its organization, and thus fall short of the kind of education required for the very existence of the state. Had he asked the more vital question, "Could education, such as is required for the existence of the state, be certainly supplied without state direction or official assistance?" the writer would hardly have answered that "the kind of education required could well be supplied without state direction and state authority." And it would seem that the real question for England and America to answer is. Will voluntary, individual, or associated parental authority at all times sustain the education required by the state? And still further. Will the education furnished by voluntary effort be equal to the demands of the successive generations as they come and go? To provide this, some authority must interpose some organized system of supervision, as active and continuous as the life of the government, and. as extensive as the demands of the generations passing through the required course.

State education, then, is not only not a hindrance, but a necessity, state aid, however, in education is of wide application. It may not be necessary for the state to pay for education out of the state treasury, and still it may necessary to regulate by law some system of uniform public instruction. It may be necessary for the state to allow local taxation for the education which, without law, they might demand in vain. It may be necessary for states to allow, by statute law, a graded system of education, culminating in a university course. If the child is required to be educated in some particular way, he certainly should have the legal right to demand the time to acquire it, and the course of study legally defined. If he is allowed, a time to acquire the state education, he should be allowed the necessary instruction during the time. These are correlative relations.

On no individual or associated plan, of a voluntary character, can education be supplied to the entire people, such as the state can rely upon for its own existence. It would take generations to give it even a partial existence in the most favored communities in the most advanced governments. At no one period could the voluntary plan apply the requisite culture to the entire masses passing the age of school culture. And to this conclusion the honorable gentleman seems himself to have come when criticising the present English attempt to introduce a national system. He says: "No truly great thing grows like a mushroom. An intelligent value for education can only spread slow, like civilization itself. In our hurry to act, we have not seen how much life and movement is sacrificed to make place for an official system. Those who administer such systems wish to get the flower ready made without any process of growth."