I. POLITICAL
THE ENLARGED CONCEPTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION. The new ideas as to the purpose and functions of the State promulgated by English and French eighteenth-century thinkers, and given concrete expression in the American and French revolutions near the close of the century, imparted, as we have seen, a new meaning to the school and a new purpose to the education of a people. In the theoretical discussion of education by Rousseau and the empirical work of Pestalozzi a new individualistic theory for a secular school was created, and this Prussia, for long moving in that direction, first adopted as a basis for the state school system it early organized to serve national ends. The new American States, also long moving toward state organization and control, early created state schools to replace the earlier religious schools; while the French Revolution enthusiasts abolished the religious school and ordered the substitution of a general system of state schools to serve their national ends.
From these beginnings, as we have seen, the state-school idea has in course of time spread to all continents, and nations everywhere to-day have come to feel that the maintenance of a more or less comprehensive system of state schools is so closely connected with national welfare and progress as to be a necessity for the State (R. 367). In consequence, state ministries for education have been created in all the important world nations; state and local school officials have been provided generally to see that the state purpose in creating schools is carried out; state normal schools for the preparation of teachers have been established; comprehensive state school codes have been enacted or educational decrees formulated; and constantly increasing expenditures for education are to-day derived by taxing the wealth of the State to educate the children of the State.
CHANGE FROM THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE. The original purpose in the establishment of schools by the State was everywhere to promote literacy and citizenship. Under all democratic forms of government it was also to insure to the people the elements of learning that they might be prepared for participation in the functions of government. [1] This is well expressed in the quotations given (p. 525) from early American statesmen as to the need for the education of public opinion and the diffusion of knowledge among the people. The same ideas were expressed by French writers and statesmen of the time, and by the English after the passage of the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 (p. 642). With the gradual extension of the franchise to larger and larger numbers of the people, the extension of educational advantages naturally had to follow. The education of new citizens for "their political and civil duties as members of society and freemen" became a necessity, and closely followed each extension of the right to vote. In all democratic governments the growing complexity of modern political society has since greatly enlarged these early duties of the school. To-day, in modern nations where general manhood suffrage has come to be the rule, and still more so in nations which have added female suffrage as well, the continually increasing complexity of the political, economic, and social problems upon which the voters are expected to pass judgment is such that a more prolonged period of citizenship education is necessary if voters are to exercise, in any intelligent manner, their functions of citizenship. In nations where the initiative, referendum, and recall have been added, the need for special education along political, economic, and social lines has been still further emphasized.
At first instruction in the common-school branches, with instruction in morals or religion added, was regarded as sufficient. In States, such as the German, where religious instruction was retained in the schools, this has been made a powerful instrument in moulding the citizenship and upholding the established order. The history of the different nations has also been used by each as a means for instilling desired conceptions of citizenship, and some work in more or less formal civil government has usually been added. To-day all these means have been proven inadequate for democratic peoples. In consequence, the work in civil government is being changed and broadened into institutional and community civics; the work of the elementary school is being socialized, along the lines advocated by Dewey; and instruction in economic principles and in the functions of government is being introduced into the secondary schools. Instead of being made mere teaching institutions, engaged in promoting literacy and diffusing the rudiments of learning among the electorate, schools are to- day being called upon to grasp the significance of their political and social relationships, and to transform themselves into institutions for improving and advancing the welfare of the State (R. 368).
THE PROMOTION OF NATIONALITY. In Prussia the promotion of national solidarity was early made an important aim of the school. This has in time become a common national purpose, as there has dawned upon statesmen generally the idea that a national spirit or culture is "an artificial product which transcends social, religious, and economic distinctions," and that it "could be manufactured by education" (R. 340). In consequence of this discovery the school has been raised to a new position of importance in the national life, and has become the chief means for developing in the citizenship that national unity and national strength so desirable under present-day world conditions. In the German States, where this function of the school has in recent times been perverted to carry forward imperialistic national ends (R. 342); in France, where it has been intelligently used to promote a rational type of national strength (R. 341); in Italy, where divergent racial types are being fused into a new national unity; in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines (R. 343) where the United States has used education to bring backward peoples up to a new level of culture, and to develop in them firm foundations of national solidarity; in China (R. 335) where an ancient people, speaking numerous dialects, is making the difficult transition from an old culture to the newer western civilization; and in Algiers and Morocco, where the spirit of French nationality is being fused into dark-skinned tribesmen— everywhere to-day, where public education has really taken hold on the national life, we find the school being used for the promotion of national solidarity and the inculcation of national ideals and national culture. To such an extent has this become true that practically all the pressing problems of the school to-day, in any land, find their ultimate explanation in terms of the new nineteenth-century conceptions of political nationality.
Since the development of world trade routes following long rail and steamship lines, along which people as well as raw materials and manufactured articles pass to and fro, the entrance of new and diverse peoples into distant national groups has created a new problem of nationalization that before the early nineteenth century was largely unknown. Previous to the nineteenth century the problem was confined almost entirely to peoples conquered and annexed by the fortunes of war. To-day it is a voluntary migration of peoples, and a migration of such proportions and from such distant and unlike civilizations that the problem of assimilating the foreigner has become, particularly in the English-speaking nations and colonies, to which distant and unrelated peoples have turned in largest numbers, [2] a serious national problem. The migration of 32,102,671 persons to the United States, between 1820 and 1914, from all parts of the world, has been a movement of peoples compared with which the migrations of the Germanic tribes—Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Suevi, Danes, Burgundians, Huns—into the old Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries pale into insignificance. No such great movement of peoples was ever known before in history, and the assimilative power of the American nation has not been equal to the task. The World War revealed the extent of the failure to nationalize the foreigner who has been permitted to come, and brought the question of "Americanization" to the front as one of the most pressing problems connected with American national education. With the world in flux racially as it now is, the problem of the assimilation of non-native peoples is one which the schools of every nation which offers political and economic opportunity to other peoples must face. This has called for the organization of special classes in the schools, evening and adult instruction, community-center work, nationalization programs, compulsory attendance of children, state oversight of private and religious schools, and other forms of educational undertakings undreamed of in the days when the State first took over the schools from the Church the better to promote literacy and citizenship.
EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. The effects of the great industrial and social changes which we have previously described are written large across the work of the school. As the civilization in the leading world nations has increased in complexity, and the ramifications of the social and industrial life have widened, the school has been called upon to broaden its work, and develop new types of instruction to increase its effectiveness. An education which was entirely satisfactory for the simpler form of social and industrial life of two generations ago has been seen to be utterly inadequate for the needs of the present and the future. It is the far-reaching change in social and industrial and home-life, brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which underlies most of the pressing problems in educational readjustment to-day. As the industrial life of nations has become more diversified, its parts narrower, and its processes more concealed, new and more extended training has been called for to prepare young people for the work of life; to reveal to them something of the intricacy and interdependence of modern political and industrial and social groups; and to point out to them the importance of each one's part in the national political and industrial organization. With the ever-increasing subdivision and specialization of labor, the danger from class subdivision has constantly increased, and more and more the school has been called upon to instill into all a political and social consciousness that will lead to unity amid increasing diversity, and to concerted action for the preservation and improvement of the national life.
More education than formerly has also been demanded to enable future citizens to meet intelligently national and personal problems, and with the widening of the suffrage and the spread of democratic ideas there has come a necessary widening of the educational ladder, so that more of the masses of the people may climb. Even in nations having the continental- European two-class school system, larger educational opportunities for the masses have had to be provided. This has come through the provision of middle schools, continuation schools, higher primary schools, and people's high schools, [3] as in Germany, France (see diagram, p. 598), the Scandinavian countries (p. 713; R. 370), and Japan (p. 720). In nations having an American-type educational ladder, it has led to the multiplication of secondary schools and secondary-school courses, that a larger and larger percentage of the people may be prepared better to meet the increasingly complex and increasingly difficult conditions of modern political, social, and industrial life. In the more advanced and more democratic nations we also note the establishment of systems of evening schools, adult instruction, university extension, science and art instruction in special centers, the multiplication of libraries, and the increasing use of the lecture, the stereopticon, and the public press, for the purpose of keeping the people informed. No nation has done more to extend the advantages of secondary education to its people than has the United States; France has been especially prominent in adult instruction; England has done noteworthy work with university extension and science and art instruction; while the United States has carried the library movement farther than any other land. All these, again, are extensions of educational opportunity to the masses of the people in a manner undreamed of a century ago.
UNIVERSITY EXPANSION. The modern university first attained its development in Prussia (pp. 553-55), while in England and in the nations which drew their inspiration from her, the teaching college, with its narrow range of studies and disciplinary instruction (R. 331), continued to dominate higher education until past the middle of the nineteenth century (R. 359). The old universities of France, aside from Paris, were virtually destroyed in the days of the Revolution, and their re-creation as effective teaching and research institutions has been a relatively recent (1896) event. The universities of Italy and Spain ceased to be effective teaching institutions centuries ago, and only recently have begun to give evidences of new life.
Within the past three quarters of a century, and in many nations within a much shorter period of time, the university has very generally experienced a new manifestation of popular favor, and is to-day looked upon as perhaps the most important part, viewed from the standpoint of the future welfare of the State, of the entire system of public instruction maintained by the State. In it the leaders for the State are trained; in it the thinking which is to dominate government a quarter-century later is largely done; out of it come the creative geniuses whose work, in dozens of fields of human endeavor, will mould the political, social, and scientific future of the nation (R. 369). Every government depending upon a two-class school system must of necessity draw its leaders in the professions, in government, in pure and applied science, and in many other lines from the small but carefully selected classes its universities train. In a democracy, depending entirely upon drawing its future leaders from among the mass, the university becomes an indispensable institution for the training of leaders and for the promotion of the national welfare. In a democratic government one of the highest functions of a university is to educate leaders and to create the standards for democracy.
The university has, accordingly, in all lands, recently experienced a great expansion. The German universities have been prominent modern institutions for a century and a half. Realizing, as no other people have done, their value in developing skilled leaders for the State, promoting the national welfare, integrating the Empire, and as centers for building up among students of other nationalities a good-will toward Germany, large sums have been spent on their further development since 1871. Within the past quarter-century new and strong French universities have been created, [4] and old universities in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece have been awakened to a new life. The English universities have been made over, since 1870, and new municipal universities in Sheffield, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and London have set new standards in English higher education. The universities of Scotland, Holland, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries have also recently attained to world prominence. In Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, the Philippines, India, Egypt, Palestine, Algiers, and South Africa, new universities have been created to advance the national welfare. The South American nations have also established a number of promising new foundations, and given new life to older ones. Often nations swinging out into the current of western civilization have developed their universities before popular education really got under way.
In no country has the development of university instruction been more rapid than in the United States and Canada. New and important state universities are to-day found in most of the American States and Canadian Provinces, some States maintaining two. These have been relatively recent creations to serve democracy's needs, and upon the support of these state universities large and increasing sums of money are spent annually. [5] In no nation of the world, too, has private benevolence created and endowed so many private universities of high rank as in the United States, [6] and these have fallen into their proper places as auxiliary agents for the promotion of the national welfare in government, science, art, and the learned professions.
From small collegiate institutions with a very limited curriculum, a century ago, stimulated in part by the German example and in part responding to new national needs, universities to-day, in all the leading world nations, have developed into groups of well-organized professional schools, ministering to the great number of special needs of modern life and government. The university development since the middle of the nineteenth century has been greater than at any period before in world history, and with the spread of democracy, dependent as democracy is upon mass education to obtain its leaders, the university has become "the soul of the State" (R. 369). The university development of the next half- century, the world as a whole considered, may possibly surpass anything that we have recently witnessed.
THE STATE SCHOOL SYSTEMS AS ORGANIZED. We now find state school systems organized in all the leading world nations. In many the system of public instruction maintained is broad and extensive, beginning often with infant schools or kindergartens, continuing up through elementary schools, middle schools, continuation schools, secondary schools, and normal schools, and culminating in one or more state universities. In addition there are to- day, in many nations, state systems of scientific and technical schools and institutions, and vocational schools and schools for special classes, to which we shall refer more in detail a little further on. The support of all these systems of public instruction to-day comes largely from the direct or indirect taxation of the wealth of the State. Being now conceived of as essential to the welfare and progress of the State, the State yearly confiscates a portion of every man's property and uses it to maintain a service deemed vital to its purposes.
The sums spent to-day on education by modern States seem enormous, compared with the sums spent for education under conditions existing a century ago. In England, for example, where the first national aid was granted, in 1833, in the form of a parliamentary grant of £20,000 (approximately $100,000), the parliamentary grants for elementary schools had reached approximately £12,000,000 by 1910, with an additional national aid for universities of over £1,100,000. The year following the World War the grants were £32,853,111. In France a treasury grant of 50,000 francs (approximately $10,000) was first made for primary schools, in 1816. This was doubled in 1829, and in 1831 was raised to a million francs. By 1850, the state aid for primary education had reached 3,000,000 francs; by 1870, 10,000,000 francs; by 1880, 30,000,000; and by 1914, approximately 220,000,000 francs. In addition the State was paying out 25,000,000 francs for secondary schools, and 10,000,000 francs for universities. In the United States the total expenditures for maintenance only of public elementary and secondary schools was $69,107,612, in 1870-71; had reached $214,964,618 by the end of the nineteenth century; and was $640,717,053 in 1915-16, with an additional $101,752,542 for universities. By 1920 the total expenditures for the maintenance of public elementary, secondary, and higher education in the United States will probably total a billion dollars. These rapidly increasing expenditures merely record the changing political conception as to the national importance of enlarging the educational opportunities and advantages of those who are to constitute and direct the future State.