Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education

by Charles H. Ham

Thus greed and avarice were cultivated to the sacrifice of honesty. Calling selfishness prudence led to confounding right and wrong—freedom and slavery. Hence we have the Declaration of Independence containing the lofty sentiment, “All men are created equal,” and the Constitution throwing the shield of its protection over human bondage. A false system of education led to political incongruities of the grossest character, as, in the preamble to the Constitution, the declaration of its high purpose—to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty—and in the body of the instrument a guaranty of the slave-trade for twenty-five years, and a compact that it should be the duty of the national army to shoot rebellious slaves, and the duty of free citizens, of the free States, to hunt down escaping slaves and surrender them to their owners in the slave States.

The failure of the prevailing system of education to promote rectitude and right thinking was so complete that negroes escaping from slavery were called “fugitives from justice!” Its failure was so complete that the very streets of Boston in which patriots had struggled to the death in the cause of liberty now echoed the groans of the slave, and resounded with the clank of his chains. Its failure was so complete that in Faneuil Hall, the cradle of liberty, slavery was justified. Its failure was so complete that a senator, for daring to characterize slavery as barbaric, was stricken down and beaten with a club, until he lay helpless in a pool of blood on the floor of the legislative hall of the great, free republic.

These are characteristics of the early civilizations, the civilizations of Greece and Rome. They are the product of selfishness, and they show that subjective educational processes—processes which proceed from the abstract to the concrete, thus violating the natural law of investigation—produce the same effects in the nineteenth century as they did in the first century.

Ethically, slavery was tried only by the test of self-interest. In the North, as in Europe, it was not profitable, and it faded away; in the South, in the cotton and rice fields, it was thought to be profitable, and it spread and flourished. That the opposition to slavery, at the North, did not grow out of education in the schools, is evident, because the sons of the Southern ruling class were educated in the high schools and colleges of the North; but they became, notwithstanding such training, almost to a man, slavery propagandists. The heinousness of slavery was perceptible only to those who had no personal interest in its perpetuation. It is plain that the effect of the education of the schools upon the youth of the country was to make them callous to the common impressions of right and wrong; in a word, to render them thoroughly selfish.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that, if slavery had been as profitable at the North as it was at the South, it would have been perpetuated, and would have poisoned the infant civilization of America as that of Rome was vitiated and destroyed. Assuming the truth of this hypothesis, climate conditions, not education, saved this continent from the scourge of slavery. To the fact that a large part of the territory of the United States is situated in the temperate zone we owe the elimination of slavery from the social problem.

Existing social conditions in the United States do not differ materially from those of the chief countries of Europe. We have only a small standing army; but the sole great question which divided the people during the first hundred years of our political existence—slavery—had to be settled as such questions have been settled from the beginning of history, as savages settle all questions—by violence, by an appeal to the logic of brute force.

Our government differs from the governments of Europe both in principle and form, but the governmental influence is only one of many influences which unite to mould social habits. The democratic principle, adopted as the foundation of our political institutions, has not served to counteract the tendency to the formation of social class distinctions. The people lack the wisdom, or the virtue, or both, to insist upon the first prerequisite to even an approximation to social equality, namely, universal education. Of our population of fifty millions, five millions of persons, ten years old and over, are unable to read, and six millions are unable to write. In the last census decade we made the paltry gain of three per cent, in intelligence, but in 1880 we had six hundred thousand more illiterates than in 1870. Nearly two millions of the legal voters in the United States are illiterates. Every sixth man who offers his ballot at the polls is unable to write his name. Under such circumstances class distinctions of the most pronounced type are inevitable.

The tendency to the concentration of populations in cities in the United States is not less decided than it is in the countries of Europe. In 1820 the population of our cities constituted less than one-twentieth of the whole population of the country, but in 1880 it constituted more than one-fifth of the whole.

Cities have always been the chief source of societary disturbances. In the worst days of the Roman Empire tranquillity and prosperity reigned in many of the distant provinces. While at the city of Rome “every kind of vice paraded itself with revolting cynicism,” in the provinces “there was a middle class in which good-nature, conjugal fidelity, probity, and the domestic virtues were generally practised.”

Of one of the youngest large cities in the United States the late superintendent of a Training School for Waifs says, “Never in the history of this city has infant wretchedness stalked forth in such multiplied and such humiliating forms. It is hard to suppress the conviction that even Pagan Rome, in the corrupt age of Augustus, did not witness a more rapid and frightful declension in morals than that which can to-day be found in the city of Chicago.”