Education for the men; education for the women. But it must be enlightened and enlightening education.
Our national ideal is not a powerful state, famed and feared for bluster and appetite, not a people welded by unthinking passion for military glory into an instrument to the greed and vanity of the few; but manhood and womanhood, a citizenship ever wiser and stronger and more civilized, with ever more and more individual units that cannot be controlled in the mass—the democratic man and the democratic woman—alert, enlightened, self-reliant, free.
Now, there can be no difference of opinion as to the way to this ideal, the way to make the individual capable to work out his own salvation without hindrance from the aggressiveness of his neighbor or neighbors, without hindrance from the prejudices begotten in and of the darkness of his own ignorance.
Against all these foes, those without, those within, there is just one effective weapon—education.
It is impossible for an ignorant man to be free. No matter what constitutions you establish, no matter what laws you pass, no matter how assiduously you safeguard individual rights and liberties, the ignorant man will still be a slave. He rejoices in his chains, his prejudices and his superstitions. He clings to them. He beats off those who seek to deliver. He welcomes those who seek to bind. He shouts for chains, he votes for chains—chains for himself, chains for others. If he is ever in the right it is because he is mistaken. And you may be certain that a demagogue or other slave-hunter will soon recapture him and restore him to his beloved bondage of error.
This is why the man who aspires to freedom instinctively reaches for the weapon of education. This is why the American people always have had as their dominant passion the passion for education. This is why on the frontier the schoolhouse is finished before the home is furnished; why the washerwoman and the drayman toil to keep their children in school and to send at least one son to college; why our self-made men pour out their wealth in educational endowments; why there are all these colossal public appropriations for schools, academies, colleges, universities.
What is an ignorant man?
Of course there are the illiterates and the almost illiterate. But, numerous though they are, they do not count for much in this republic. They do not decide elections. They do not select candidates. They do not propose and compel legislation. The so-called ignorant vote is not a national or a local peril. It is not a national, rarely even a local factor.
The ignorance that counts in a Democracy is educated ignorance. Sometimes it has only been part of the way through the common schools. Sometimes it has one or more university degrees. Sometimes it struts and preens itself as “the scholar in politics.” Only too often it writes books, especially histories, and in the magazines and in the newspapers tells how and for whom we ought to vote. More often than not the very conspicuous members of this ignorant class are full to the overflowing with knowledge, knowledge from books, knowledge from experience, knowledge from travel.
No, education—democratic education—is not knowledge. It is not even experience. Profound, deadly, dangerous ignorance is compatible with both.