Of these three R’s the last has a significance of its own. It is there by virtue of a realistic conviction, born of harsh experience. A man may not be able to “figure,” and yet know that he is being cheated. And so far as getting along in a buying-and-selling age is concerned, ’Rithmetic has an importance even more fundamental than Readin’ and ’Ritin’. Yet in the list it stands modestly last—for it is a late and vulgar intruder into sacred company. Even in a young commercial nation, the old belief in the rescuing magic of the Word still holds its place in the aspiring mind.
But why, you ask, quarrel with this wholesome reverence for books? Well—suppose the working class acquired such a reverence for books that it refused to believe it was being Educated unless it was being taught something out of a book! Suppose it worshipped books so much that when you offered its children flowers and stars and machinery and carpenters’ tools and a cook-stove to play with in order to learn how to live—suppose it eyed you darkly and said: “Now, what are you trying to put over on me?” But that is to anticipate.
It was due to the organized effort of the working class that public education was at last provided for American children. Our free public school system came into existence in the thirties as a result of trade union agitation.[3] Its coming into existence is a great good upon which we need not dwell. But its subsequent history needs to be somewhat elucidated.
The public school system was founded firmly upon the three R’s. But these were plainly not enough. It had to be enlarged to meet our needs—and to satisfy our genuine democratic pride in it. So wings were thrown out into the fields of history and geography. And then? There was still an earth-full of room for expansion. But no, it was builded up—Up! And why? The metaphor is a little troublesome, but you are to conceive, pinnacled dim in the intense inane, or suspended from heaven itself, the gentlemen’s sons’ school. And this was what our public school system was striving to make connections with. And lo! at last it succeeded! The structure beneath was rickety—fantastic—jerry-built—everything sacrificed to the purpose of providing a way to climb Up There; but the purpose was fulfilled.
The democratic enthusiasm which created the public school had in fact been unaccompanied by any far-seeing theory of what education ought to be. And so that splendid enthusiasm, after its initial conquest of the three R’s, proceeded to a conquest of Greek and Latin and the whole traditional paraphernalia of aristocratic education. Every other purpose of public education was, for the time being lost sight of, forgotten, ignored, in the proud attempt to create a series of stairs which led straight up to the colleges. The high school became a preparatory school for college, and the courses were arranged, rearranged and deranged, with that intent. Final examinations were systematized, supervised and regulated to secure the proper penultimate degree of academic achievement—as for instance by the famous Regents’ examinations. The public school lost its independence—which was worth nothing; and its opportunity—which was worth everything. It remains a monument to the caste ideal of education.
For the theory which underlay the scheme was that every American boy and girl who wanted an education should have the whole thing in bang-up style. What was good enough for gentlemen’s sons was none too good for us. That there might be no mistake about it, the states erected their own colleges, with plenty of free scholarships to rob ignorance of its last excuse. These state colleges, while furnished with various realistic and technical adjuncts, and lacking in the authentic hereditary aura of their great Eastern predecessors, were still echoes, sometimes spirited and more often forlorn, of the aristocratic tradition of centuries agone. With the reluctant addition of a kindly scheme for keeping very young children in school, the system now stretched from infancy to full manhood, and embraced—in theory—the whole educable population of the United States.
In its utter thoroughness of beneficent intention, the system was truly sublime.
The only trouble was that it didn’t work.