VI. THE COST OF FOSTERING INDIVIDUALITY
The cost of individualizing education acts as a deterrent, even when the desirability is fully recognized. Compulsory education for all the children of all the people is expensive. A nation must be wealthy in order to carry it through. To maintain every child born into the social order for fourteen to sixteen years without earnings, and to pay from public taxation for his education for eight to ten or more of those years, is an enterprise upon which few societies of any time have ventured. Nevertheless, if democracy is to survive, and especially if it is to improve, as a form of government, universal education on a large scale is basic. Self-government, in the highly complicated environment which has been evolved, depends on literacy and other knowledge, requiring long instruction, even for youth of average ability.
What then of the great numbers of those who deviate in various degrees below the average in capacity for learning? The social order needs and will utilize their services. The economics of their presence in the republic is not a much more difficult problem than under other forms of government. It is the politics of their presence that causes concern under a democracy; for they are enfranchised, yet without learning they are political dependents. They stand at the mercy of any catch word tossed at them, with results which have raised on every hand an earnest searching of democracy.
For example, this question has been raised: Is it possible for education to prepare the lower half of the distribution curve for self-government? Considering recent discoveries as to the mental capacity which characterizes the lower half of the population when adult, is it possible that education will ever be able to nullify the charlatan influence of demagogues, whose appeal is to prejudice and cupidity? These questions remain unanswered. In the meantime the great experiment of compulsory education is under way. The expense of it is kept down by teaching the children in large groups of thirty to fifty or over, the same lessons, in the same way, at the same time.
What would be the actual money cost of providing for individual differences in capacities, general and special? Few data to answer this question have been furnished. In Winnetka the cost of education is reported as not increased. This condition is doubtless exceptional. As previously stated, the money cost of individualizing education for the feeble-minded has been considerable. We have the figures from Cincinnati, and we derive from them that the cost of educating a feeble-minded child (one falling into the lowest one or two per cent in the distribution of general intelligence) in a special class, is over twice as great per annum as is the cost of educating an average child in the regular grades. For a feeble-minded child in a special class in Cincinnati, during the year 1917 to 1918, the money cost per annum was $83, while for a typical child in the regular grades it was $35.
The increased cost results from the fact that when education is individualized, the number of pupils occupying a room and taught by a teacher is about fifteen, instead of the regular number of thirty to fifty. If, roughly, 20 per cent of all pupils deviate from the typical so extremely as to require a considerable amount of individual instruction for their welfare, it is difficult to see how they may be well served without a considerable increase in the money cost of education.
Can the public afford to pay more than it now does? Investigations to answer this question are under way on a large scale. We need to know what our country can now pay, in order that we as educators may not commit the folly on the one hand of urging unwarrantable expenditure, nor on the other hand of failing to ask the appropriation of all that can be spared for the development of individual capacity in the nation’s children.