The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

What, then, is ignorance?

All its shades and kinds can be so classified as to exclude none who ought to be included, include none who has the right to go free. Is not the dangerous, ignorant man of the Democracy the man who cannot reason, cannot think for himself?

What does it mean to think for one’s self?

Fortunately, it does not mean original thinking. If that were so there would instantly arise in the world the most contracted and exclusive aristocracy it has ever known. To think for one’s self does not even mean correctly to reason out one’s own conclusions from given premises. That would involve an amount of mental labor from which many brains might shrink. It merely means to be able to follow reasoning that is laid before one; to hear both sides and suspend judgment until both are heard; to recognize which is sound and which fallacious, and upon that independent and clear judgment to accept the true, or rather, to reject the false.

A Democracy must breed citizens who think for themselves. Without them it cannot live. With them it cannot die. Hence it follows that in a Democracy education means to cultivate the ability to think for one’s self. Democracy means the right of private judgment. Education in and for a Democracy means development of the capacity to form private judgment.

So far as the Democracy is concerned, so far as the equable distribution of rights and liberties is concerned, no education that does not increase reasonableness is of the slightest value.

The education that has for its chief aims, its only real aims, culture, refinement, knowledge, learning, may be useful to an aristocracy like Great Britain, to an empire like Germany, to an autocracy like Russia. But it is not only not helpful to but actually hostile to democratic ideas and ideals. It breeds contempt on the one hand, fear and suspicion and hate on the other—the few looking down upon the many, the many looking up at the few. It makes the powerful supercilious. It makes the weak, whether educated or uneducated, helpless. It fills the brain; it does not necessarily strengthen the brain. It gives a man something; it does not compel him to make something of himself.

The truth about democratic education is indirectly recognized in practice more and more as science and its rigidly logical methods have grown in educational importance. All our modern systems of education are based perforce, rather than by design, in part upon teaching the brain to reason. But do we realize fully as yet that for us, for our democratic purposes of self-development and self-government, teaching the brain to think is not only the whole foundation of education, but also the sustaining part of the superstructure?

Take up any one of the great newspapers of the country, the great reflectors of the public mind and heart and taste. A few minutes’ searching among the advertisements will discover columns on columns of notices of astrologers and palmists and clairvoyants, of mediums and crystal gazers and cure-all doctors with their cure-all medicines. To whom do these dealers in the secrets of life and death, the future and the beyond, appeal for their comfortable incomes? To those who cannot read? Manifestly not. To the people in the humbler walks of life? Certainly not. No, they are inviting the educated classes to call—merchants and bankers and artisans, their wives and their daughters, the “well-to-do,” the reading public, the “substantial,” the part of the people which is commonly called “the backbone of the republic.”

Go on to the news columns. You find some account of the doings of a band of thieves who have got possession of some department or departments of the city or state government, and have substituted for the statute law the law of loot. Who turned over the keys to them? The illiterate, the dishonest, the criminal? Not at all. Look at the primary rolls of the organization whom these wretches disgrace, and you find a thoroughly respectable, in the main intelligent, certainly honest, body of voters. By no stretch of the meaning could you call them uneducated in the sense in which that term is commonly used.