Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/454

450 they leave, with meager education, the public school, they must immediately plunge into the breadwinning maelstrom to emerge the same fatigued, misguided voters that their fathers are. Much of the information which it is essential that the intelligent voter possess, in order that he may make the most of every day in his life, can not be taught by the public school system. First, because the amount of knowledge which they are obliged to purvey is so great that the entire public school machinery is already overworked, and they could not, even if they thought it feasible, install the necessary equipment to extend their labors to other fields. Second, because the juvenile mind is not capable of weighing and determining matters of economic importance.

A large proportion of our voters, after securing a rudimentary education, are obliged to labor, and fail to pursue further the studies begun. They seldom read anything save a more or less misguided, hysterical and misleading newspaper. The fatigue resulting from daily physical labor is not conducive to intellectual activity in the form of instructive reading at night, and hence we find our average voter growing up woefully ignorant of the essentials of good government, and dependent, as already indicated, upon self-interested, irresponsible and unreliable sources for his misinformation.

The great disease at the root of almost all evil is ignorance, and the remedy is education. Were it not for ignorance, that universal malady, it would not be possible for so many agencies to exist which diminish the happiness and its corollary, the producing capacity, of the race.

In the supplemental education of the laboring adults upon a broad and practical basis rests the remedy for the present unhappy condition. A large proportion of our countrymen fail to keep abreast of the times in their methods of thinking and of living, because the demands which breadwinning makes upon their strength and time prevent their obtaining authoritative information on the thousand and one subjects, a knowledge of which would lighten their burden and brighten their pathway.

If it can be borne in upon the public mind that many diseases can be avoided, that the amount of insanity can be reduced, that crime with its great attendant expense can be decreased, that the producing capacity of man can be increased, while augmenting at the same time the number of his comforts and the extent of his leisure, there will be a demand for something looking toward relief, and almost any reasonable measure will be actively supported.

Information of the sort needed to secure the interest and cooperation of the voter, whose support is essential to the accomplishment of his own betterment, must be easily accessible, and presented in