Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/365

Rh founded in the past to accomplish the twofold task of educating ministers for the ministry and citizens for citizenship, still exist for the sake of helping out with the educational work of the country, the great task of the state colleges and universities. But the state will not do its whole duty until the entire responsibility devolves upon the state alone. If the state does not provide enough colleges (using this general term now for both college and university), it is the state and no one else who should set about the task of providing additional ones. The state is no pauper on the hands of its citizens when it comes to a question of providing and maintaining a sufficient number of reform schools or of penitentiaries. No more should it be so in the far more vital matter of the education of its normal and desirable citizens.

Briefly, the national, state and municipal governments are not doing their duty until their citizens are offered such adequate opportunity for intellectual and technical training as to render unnecessary all such offering of opportunity by institutions founded upon a private or religious basis. This position places no difficulty in the way of private citizens or organizations who wish to give direct financial aid to institutions of learning. Their gifts would instead reflect higher honor upon them, inasmuch as they would be a manifestation of unadulterated patriotism. Those who wish to give to the cause of religious instruction would find the field as large and attractive, and untrammeled by other real or apparent motives, in the various institutions or organizations to which their donations would be made.

Moreover, the impetus in this matter must come from the state itself. The remedy will not be begun by the denominational college, for, unless something is done from without, it will continue to exist from mere inertia. The remedy will not be begun by the students, for they will in general follow the line of least resistance, and attend the institution which other members of their families and their friends have attended. They will attend the college which their parents aid materially with financial support. They feel a moral obligation to help swell its roll of attendance, and they have been taught, as were their parents before them, that the college supported by their church deserves somehow a more direct and solicitous care and interest and aid than does the college supported by their state. Yet it is the students of the denominational college who receive from it the most direct harm, along with the educational advantages of which they avail themselves. They are subjected daily to the influence of some particular denomination, in either a direct or indirect method. The denomination may be the one to which their parents belong, and to which they would also ally themselves, or have already allied themselves; but the harm consists in that they are led blindly along, instead of being left to make the choice of their own free wills, as our country in the beginning proposed