Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/553

Rh a million will hardly do for a college. The host solution of the problem of the secondary schools in the south is the concentration of the strength of a community upon its public schools, since to keep them at a creditable level is to help to the solution of more questions than can be reached in any other way. The endowed private school, on the other hand, has the great advantage of being out of politics and having a freer hand in working out its development than is possible to a public school in a community of lax or unformed educational standards. In either case, the point is to secure to the school freedom to select its teachers without political or denominational dictation, and to make it strong enough to impose its standards upon a reluctant community.

Finally, the interdependence of school and college is such that neither can do its best work alone. The college rests upon the school as the house on its foundations, and without the college standards by which to test its work the school loses a powerful stimulus. With the utmost generosity on the part of our philanthropists which can be looked for, even in these lavish days, the southern colleges must remain for many years inferior to those of the north in equipment and as a whole in teaching force. Yet they represent for the great mass of the young men and women in their respective communities the best that is open to them, and, too often, all that can be desired. Probably as valuable a gift as could be made to the south just now, and one requiring a comparatively small fund, would be the establishment of a group of scholarships especially for young southern men and women, available in different institutions in the north. Let us imagine the competitive examinations for such scholarships held at Raleigh for the young men and women of the Old North State, at Columbia, South Carolina, for the students of that state, at Augusta, Jacksonville, Mobile. Not only would every ambitious boy and girl in the state be aroused, but the spur of opportunity would be felt in every school with a spark of life in its management, and there would be the impact upon the very centers of growth of new habits of thought.

'The south has no reason to be ashamed of its traditions,' said a dignified and able southern woman who had done good service for education, when such a plan was broached in her hearing. But by the time that one of her sons had graduated at Harvard and another at Cornell, and her daughter was hard at work at Vassar and her niece at Pratt, she would see that no question of traditions, in the sense in which she felt them threatened, was involved. On the contrary, what is best in the distinctive characteristics of the south can not be preserved by men and women of belated minds, and one of the services which we ask of that part of the country is that those finer elements shall be preserved and made a part of our national life. The present demand for industrial education in the south, too, which is making