Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/211

Rh If all is free, common schools, high eohools; and colleges, boys and girls of common ability and common love of learning, mil get a common education ; those of greater ability, a more extended education ; and those of the highest powers, the best culture which the race can now furnish, and the State afford. Hitherto no nation has established a public college, wholly at the public cost, where the children of the poor and the rich could enjoy together the great national charity of superior education. To do this is certainly not consistent with the idea of a theocracy or an aristocracy; but it is indispensable to the complete realization of a democracy. Otherwise the children of the rich will have a monopoly of superior education, which is the case with the girls everywhere—for only the daughters of rich men can get a superior education, even in the United States—and with boys in England and France, and of course the offices, emoluments, and honours which depend on a superior education; or else the means thereof will be provided for poor lads by private benefactions, charity funds, and the like, which, some pious and noble man has devoted to this work. In this case the institutions will have a sectarian character, be managed by narrow, bigoted men, and the gift of the means of education be coupled with conditions which must diminish its value, and fetter the free spirit of the young man. This takes place in many of the collegiate establishments of the North, which, notwithstanding those defects, have done a great good to mankind.

The common schools, giving their pupil the power of reading, writing, and calculating, developing his faculties, and furnishing him with much elementary knowledge, put him in communication with all that is written in a common form in the English tongue; its treasures lie level to his eye and hand. The high school and the college, teaching him also other languages, afford him access to the treasures contained there; teaching him the mathematics and furnishing him with the discipline of science, they enable him to understand all that has hitherto been recorded in the compendious forms of philosophy, and thus place the child of large ability in connection with all the spiritual treasures of the world. In the mean time, for ail these pupils, there is the material and the human world