When the United States freed Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines from Spanish rule, a general system of public education, modeled after the American educational ladder, was created as a safeguard to the liberty just brought to these islands, and to education the United States added courts of justice and bureaus of sanitation as important auxiliary agencies. As a result the peoples of these islands have made a degree of progress in self-government and industry in three decades not made in three centuries under Spanish rule. The good results of the work done in these islands in establishing schools, building roads and bridges, introducing police courts, establishing good sanitary conditions, building hospitals and training nurses, applying science to agriculture, developing tropical medicine, and training the people in the difficult art of self- government, will for long be a monument to the political foresight and intelligent conceptions of government held by the American people. In a similar way the French have opened schools in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Senegal, Madagascar, and French Indo-China, as have the English in Egypt, India, Hong Kong, [26] the West Indies, and elsewhere. With the freeing of Palestine from the rule of the Turk, the English at once began the establishment of schools and a national university there, and doubtless they will do the same in time in Persia and Mesopotamia.

Germany, too, before the World War, but with less benevolent purposes than the Americans, the French, or the English, was also busily engaged in extending her influence through education. Her universities were thrown open to students from the whole world, and excellent instruction did they offer. The "Society for the Extension of Germanism in Foreign Countries" rendered an important service. Professors were "exchanged"; the introduction of instruction in the German language into the schools of other nations was promoted; and German schools were founded and encouraged abroad. Especially were Realschulen promoted to teach the wonders of German science, pure and applied. In southern Brazil and the Argentine, and in Roumania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, particular efforts were made to extend German influence and pave the way for German commercial and perhaps political expansion. Primary schools, girls' schools, and Real-schools in numbers were founded and aided abroad, and their progress reported to the colonial minister at home. All through the Near East the German was busily building, through trade and education, a new empire for himself. Had he been content to follow the slower paths of peaceful commercial and intellectual conquest, with his wonderful organization he would have been irresistible. With one gambler's throw he dashed his future to the ground, and unmasked himself before the world!

EXPANSION OF THE EDUCATIONAL IDEA. In all lands to-day where there is an intelligent government, the education of the people through a system of state-controlled schools is regarded as of the first importance in moulding and shaping the destinies of the nation and promoting the country's welfare. Beginning with education to impart the ability to read and write and cipher, and as an aid to the political side of government, the education of the masses has been so expanded in scope during the century that today it includes aims, classes, types of schools, and forms of service scarcely dreamed of at the time the State began to take over the school from the Church, with a view to extending elementary educational advantages and promoting literacy and citizenship. What some of the more important of these expansions have been we shall state in a following chapter, but before doing so let us return to another phase of the problem—that of the progress of educational theory—and see what have been the main lines of this progress in the theory as to the educational purpose since the time when Pestalozzi formulated a theory for the secular school.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What does the emphasis on the People's High Schools in Denmark indicate as to the political status of the common people there?

2. Explain the educational prominence of Finland, compared with its neighbor Russia.

3. Show the close relation between the character of the school system developed in Japan and the character of its government. In China.

4. Show why the state-function conception of education is destined to be the ruling plan everywhere.

5. Show the close connection between the Industrial Revolution and a somewhat general diffusion of the fundamental principles revealed by the study of science.

6. Show how the Industrial Revolution has created entirely new problems in education, and what some of these are.