The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

In the very next column, perhaps, you read how a statesman of pious mien and impressive manner has been assuring his fellow-countrymen that they have a commission from the Almighty (which he begs leave to execute) calling them from their peaceful and orderly occupations and sending them forth to slaughter certain other men of whom they had not heard until a few months ago, to seize persons and property and to administer upon them arbitrarily. And who cheered wildly as these tidings of morality and civilization were proclaiming? Illiterates? Certainly not; but educated men, many of them highly educated, men who would hardly characterize such performances in private life as “manifest destiny” and “plain duty.”

A few columns further on and you read how one is wailing like a lost soul over heaps of scrap metal and rags and waste paper, because he cannot get permission to work them over into money and so make us all millionaires. And who is he? A college graduate. And who are his supporters? Millions who have gone to school and take in the newspapers and magazines.

These few illustrations of the reign of illogic are cited from the multitude available with a double purpose. In the first place, they faintly suggest to what an extent the citizen of a Democracy is prey to charlatanism. In countries with other forms of government—in monarchies and the like—a few charlatans are licensed and erected into respectability and power, and given the range of the people, while all others are rigidly repressed. In a Democracy any charlatan may license himself. The people are prey to every and any form of charlatanism, fraudulent or both. They must protect themselves, or they will not be protected at all. And right education is the only means.

The second point made obvious by these examples of superstition theological, superstition medical, superstition political, is that our education in the past must have been defective and must still be so. It has been seeking, it now seeks, as its chief object, to impart knowledge, not to cultivate the art of using knowledge, the art of thinking correctly.

The ideal has been an education that is reminiscent and is only incidentally constructive. The democratic ideal is the education that is constructive and only incidentally reminiscent.

There is only one way to this true education. Just as a child is taught to walk, to ride, to swim, just as it is taught to read, to write, to cipher, with just as much care, with just as much patience, with just as much deliberateness of purpose, must it be taught to reason.

This is not in advocacy of courses in formal logic. Those courses do not teach men to think. They teach men what certain other men have thought about the processes of thinking. And too often they teach it in such a way as to discourage the exercise of the reasoning faculty. No; the education that will soundly educate must make of every kind of lesson a lesson in logic, an incessant pointing out of reasons, reasons, reasons why certain facts are so, certain allegations false; an incessant demand that reasons, reasons, reasons be given—always reasons. The interrogation point should be the symbol over the door of every school, high and low, as the indication of what is going on within.

The average child starts in life with a question mark at the tip of every sense. Why does this inquisitiveness gradually disappear or become perverted into curiosity about trivialities? Why does going to school become a burden? Why are so many classes at college listless and inattentive? Why does the light, the frivolous, the thoughtless attract and hold, while that which is in reality far more interesting wearies and repels? Is it not because this reasoning faculty is allowed to grow up “any which way,” and is discouraged or suppressed wherever memory or some other form of some one’s else ideas can be substituted? Is it not because to reason comes to seem a burden, a bore, a pain? Would that be so if education were rightly based, rightly built?

We Americans reason better, perhaps, than any other nation about a wider range of affairs; probably not with so much depth as some other peoples, but certainly with greater clearness. But this is due to a compulsory training almost altogether outside of the schoolroom. It is due to Democracy, that compels the mind to grow as Spring’s sunshine compels the seed. As our affairs, both public and private, have grown more complex, the defects due to this haphazard education of the reasoning faculty, this treatment of it almost as if it were a weed, become more and more apparent, more and more in need of correction.

Common sense is looked upon as a gift of the gods, a sort of intuition. Is it not in reality merely the result of a somewhat better natural or acquired reasoning faculty? Ought not common sense to be the attainable possession of every American? And where but the schoolhouse is the place to obtain this possession, this means to self-rule, to freedom, to the full splendor of the noblest of human ideals, Democracy?