Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/136

126 a given time. Does that settle the question? Does the quality of education, do the moral influences accompanying it, count for nothing? Whether would it be better to give five hundred an education destitute of moralizing and idealizing influences, or three hundred an education penetrated by those influences, trusting to the action of the smaller number to promote social order and harmony? We ask these questions not as advancing assumptions, but merely to show that all is not said when it is alleged that the state can educate more rapidly than private enterprise. If private enterprise and family effort can educate better than the state—better on the whole, taking both intellectual and moral development into account, and also the reaction on the elder generation—the higher value of the work may more than atone for its narrower range.

It is a singular thing that, in spite of his strong faith in state education, our correspondent does not seem to believe that any extension or continuance of it would have the effect of making the people at large so intelligent and self-helpful that, in the future, they would he willing and able to look after the business of education for themselves. He seems to look forward to the perpetuity of the system under which the "wealthy tax-payers" provide funds for the education of the children of the poor; at least he drops no hint that the system is ever to cease. Now, supposing we were to address "the poor" in these words: "Well, good people, we are educating your children for you gratis or nearly so, because we don't imagine you have either the ability or the inclination to educate them without our help. At the same time, please to understand that we don't expect, by any education we may give your children, to make them self-helping when they come to have children of their own. A few of them, of course, may rise, while others, more advantageously situated at present than they, and getting the same education, will fall; but the bulk of them will remain as you are to day, unable to educate their children without the benevolent help of the rich. But don't be afraid for your posterity; the rich will help, as usual. There are no classes in this country." How would all that fall on the ears of the poor? Would it be extraordinary if some one on their behalf were to reply: "If we or our children are not to be educated out of our poverty—a poverty so deep as to draw down upon us your insulting patronage—we see but little good in it. Better not to sharpen by knowledge the edge of our misery!"

Let us ask a question. As education spreads in this country, are social distinctions becoming less marked? Are inequalities of fortune becoming less striking, not to say portentous? Our correspondent dreads the spirit of socialism and anarchism, and thinks it may grow if the state does not push popular education vigorously. But the state has been pushing popular education as vigorously as it knew how; and, precisely when our educational status, so far as figures can show, is at its best, do socialism and anarchism, in forms unknown to an earlier generation, raise their misshapen and scowling heads. Might not this have something to do with the quality of the education imparted? Might it not have something to do with the withdrawal from the poor of one of the best of all moral influences, that which comes from a direct interest in the education of their own children? Our correspondent wants to have political eonomyeconomy [sic] taught in the schools so kindly provided by the rich for the poor. Whose political economy—Marx's or Mill's? Henry George's or President Walker's? It is precisely because they know that the rich not only provide, but in a large measure control, public education, that the poor have such an aversion to all the more orthodox forms of political economy. They want no official doctrines on that subject.