| Chapter 21
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| It had been suggested by Dr. Leete that we should devote the
next morning to an inspection of the schools and colleges of the
city, with some attempt on his own part at an explanation of
the educational system of the twentieth century.
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| "You will see," said he, as we set out after breakfast, "many
very important differences between our methods of education
and yours, but the main difference is that nowadays all persons
equally have those opportunities of higher education which in
your day only an infinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed.
We should think we had gained nothing worth speaking of, in
equalizing the physical comfort of men, without this educational
equality."
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| "The cost must be very great," I said.
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| "If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would
grudge it," replied Dr. Leete, "nor even if it took it all save a
bare pittance. But in truth the expense of educating ten thousand
youth is not ten nor five times that of educating one
thousand. The principle which makes all operations on a large
scale proportionally cheaper than on a small scale holds as to
education also."
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| "College education was terribly expensive in my day," said I.
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| "If I have not been misinformed by our historians," Dr. Leete
answered, "it was not college education but college dissipation
and extravagance which cost so highly. The actual expense of
your colleges appears to have been very low, and would have
been far lower if their patronage had been greater. The higher
education nowadays is as cheap as the lower, as all grades of
teachers, like all other workers, receive the same support. We
have simply added to the common school system of compulsory
education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred years ago, a half
dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age of twenty-one
and giving him what you used to call the education of a
gentleman, instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen
with no mental equipment beyond reading, writing, and the
multiplication table."
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| "Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years of
education," I replied, "we should not have thought we could
afford the loss of time from industrial pursuits. Boys of the
poorer classes usually went to work at sixteen or younger, and
knew their trade at twenty."
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| "We should not concede you any gain even in material
product by that plan," Dr. Leete replied. "The greater efficiency
which education gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest,
makes up in a short period for the time lost in acquiring it."
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| "We should also have been afraid," said I, "that a high
education, while it adapted men to the professions, would set
them against manual labor of all sorts."
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| "That was the effect of high education in your day, I have
read," replied the doctor; "and it was no wonder, for manual
labor meant association with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of
people. There is no such class now. It was inevitable that such a
feeling should exist then, for the further reason that all men
receiving a high education were understood to be destined for
the professions or for wealthy leisure, and such an education in
one neither rich nor professional was a proof of disappointed
aspirations, an evidence of failure, a badge of inferiority rather
than superiority. Nowadays, of course, when the highest education
is deemed necessary to fit a man merely to live, without any
reference to the sort of work he may do, its possession conveys
no such implication."
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| "After all," I remarked, "no amount of education can cure
natural dullness or make up for original mental deficiencies.
Unless the average natural mental capacity of men is much
above its level in my day, a high education must be pretty nearly
thrown away on a large element of the population. We used to
hold that a certain amount of susceptibility to educational
influences is required to make a mind worth cultivating, just as a
certain natural fertility in soil is required if it is to repay tilling."
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| "Ah," said Dr. Leete, "I am glad you used that illustration, for
it is just the one I would have chosen to set forth the modern
view of education. You say that land so poor that the product
will not repay the labor of tilling is not cultivated. Nevertheless,
much land that does not begin to repay tilling by its product was
cultivated in your day and is in ours. I refer to gardens, parks,
lawns, and, in general, to pieces of land so situated that, were
they left to grow up to weeds and briers, they would be eyesores
and inconveniencies to all about. They are therefore tilled, and
though their product is little, there is yet no land that, in a wider
sense, better repays cultivation. So it is with the men and
women with whom we mingle in the relations of society, whose
voices are always in our ears, whose behavior in innumerable
ways affects our enjoyment--who are, in fact, as much conditions
of our lives as the air we breathe, or any of the physical
elements on which we depend. If, indeed, we could not afford to
educate everybody, we should choose the coarsest and dullest by
nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we
could give. The naturally refined and intellectual can better
dispense with aids to culture than those less fortunate in natural
endowments.
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| "To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we
should not consider life worth living if we had to be surrounded
by a population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated
men and women, as was the plight of the few educated in your
day. Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to
mingle with a malodorous crowd? Could he take more than a
very limited satisfaction, even in a palatial apartment, if the
windows on all four sides opened into stable yards? And yet just
that was the situation of those considered most fortunate as to
culture and refinement in your day. I know that the poor and
ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the latter,
living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness, seem
little better off than the former. The cultured man in your age
was like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself
with a smelling bottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at
this question of universal high education. No single thing is so
important to every man as to have for neighbors intelligent,
companionable persons. There is nothing, therefore, which the
nation can do for him that will enhance so much his own
happiness as to educate his neighbors. When it fails to do so, the
value of his own education to him is reduced by half, and many
of the tastes he has cultivated are made positive sources of pain.
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| "To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass
wholly uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them
almost like that between different natural species, which have no
means of communication. What could be more inhuman than
this consequence of a partial enjoyment of education! Its universal
and equal enjoyment leaves, indeed, the differences between
men as to natural endowments as marked as in a state of nature,
but the level of the lowest is vastly raised. Brutishness is
eliminated. All have some inkling of the humanities, some
appreciation of the things of the mind, and an admiration for
the still higher culture they have fallen short of. They have
become capable of receiving and imparting, in various degrees,
but all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a refined
social life. The cultured society of the nineteenth century
--what did it consist of but here and there a few microscopic
oases in a vast, unbroken wilderness? The proportion of individuals
capable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to
the mass of their contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as
to be in any broad view of humanity scarcely worth mentioning.
One generation of the world to-day represents a greater volume
of intellectual life than any five centuries ever did before.
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| "There is still another point I should mention in stating the
grounds on which nothing less than the universality of the best
education could now be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, "and
that is, the interest of the coming generation in having educated
parents. To put the matter in a nutshell, there are three main
grounds on which our educational system rests: first, the right of
every man to the completest education the nation can give him
on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself;
second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him educated, as
necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the
unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage."
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| I shall not describe in detail what I saw in the schools that
day. Having taken but slight interest in educational matters in
my former life, I could offer few comparisons of interest. Next to
the fact of the universality of the higher as well as the lower
education, I was most struck with the prominence given to
physical culture, and the fact that proficiency in athletic feats
and games as well as in scholarship had a place in the rating of
the youth.
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| "The faculty of education," Dr. Leete explained, "is held to
the same responsibility for the bodies as for the minds of its
charges. The highest possible physical, as well as mental, development
of every one is the double object of a curriculum which
lasts from the age of six to that of twenty-one."
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| The magnificent health of the young people in the schools
impressed me strongly. My previous observations, not only of
the notable personal endowments of the family of my host, but
of the people I had seen in my walks abroad, had already
suggested the idea that there must have been something like a
general improvement in the physical standard of the race since
my day, and now, as I compared these stalwart young men and
fresh, vigorous maidens with the young people I had seen in the
schools of the nineteenth century, I was moved to impart my
thought to Dr. Leete. He listened with great interest to what I
said.
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| "Your testimony on this point," he declared, "is invaluable.
We believe that there has been such an improvement as you
speak of, but of course it could only be a matter of theory with
us. It is an incident of your unique position that you alone in the
world of to-day can speak with authority on this point. Your
opinion, when you state it publicly, will, I assure you, make a
profound sensation. For the rest it would be strange, certainly, if
the race did not show an improvement. In your day, riches
debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while
poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food,
and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the
burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life.
Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the
most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully
nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of
all is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is never
excessive; care for one's self and one's family, anxiety as to
livelihood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life--all these
influences, which once did so much to wreck the minds and
bodies of men and women, are known no more. Certainly, an
improvement of the species ought to follow such a change. In
certain specific respects we know, indeed, that the improvement
has taken place. Insanity, for instance, which in the nineteenth
century was so terribly common a product of your insane mode
of life, has almost disappeared, with its alternative, suicide."
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