History of Human Society

by Frank W. Blackmar

The Importance of State Education.—So necessary has education become to the perpetuation of free government that the states of the world have deemed it advisable to provide on their own account a sufficient means of education. Perpetuation of liberty can be secured only on the basis of intellectual progress. From the time of the foundation of the universities of Europe, kings and princes and state authorities have encouraged and developed education, but it remained for America to begin a complete and universal free-school system. In the United States educators persistently urge upon the people the necessity of popular education and intelligence as the only means of securing to the people the benefits of a free government, and other statesmen from time to time have insisted upon the same principle. The private institutions of America did a vast work for the education of the youth, but proved entirely inadequate to meet the immediate demands of universal education, and the public-school system sprang up as a necessary means of preparation for citizenship. It found its earliest, largest, and best scope in the North and West, and has more recently been established in the South, and now is universal.

The grant by the United States government at the time of the formation of the Ohio territory of lands for the support of universities led to the provision in the act of formation of each state and territory in the Union for the establishment of a university. Each state, since the admission of Ohio, has provided for a state university, and the Act of 1862, which granted lands to each state in the Union for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical colleges, has also given a great impulse to state education. In the organizing acts of some of the newer states these two grants have been joined in one for the upbuilding of a university combining the ideas of the two kinds of schools. The support insured to these state institutions promises their perpetuity. The amount of work which they have done for the education of the masses in higher learning has been prodigious, and they stand to-day as the greatest and most perfect monument of the culture and learning of the Western states.

The tremendous growth of state education has increased the burden of taxation to the extent that the question has arisen as to whether there is not a limit to the amount people are willing to pay for public education. If it can be shown that they receive a direct benefit in the education of their children there will be no limit within their means to the support of both secondary schools and universities. But there must be evidence that the expenditure is economically and wisely administered.

The princely endowments of magnificent universities like the Leland Stanford Junior University, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard, Yale, and others, have not interfered with the growth and development of state education, for it rests upon the permanent foundation of a popular demand for institutions supported by the contributions of the whole people for the benefit of the state at large. State institutions based upon permanent foundations have been zealous in obtaining the best quality of instruction, and the result is that a youth in the rural districts may receive as good undergraduate instruction as he can obtain in one of the older and more wealthy private institutions, and at very little expense.

The Printing-Press and Its Products.—Perhaps of all of the inventions that occurred prior to the eighteenth century, printing has the most power in modern civilization. No other one has so continued to expand its achievements. Becoming a necessary adjunct of modern education, it continually extends its influence in the direct aid of every other art, industry, or other form of human achievement. The dissemination of knowledge through books, periodicals, and the newspaper press has made it possible to keep alive the spirit of learning among the people and to assure that degree of intelligence necessary for a self-governed people.

The freedom of the press is one of the cardinal principles of progress, for it brings into fulness the fundamental fact of freedom of discussion advocated by the early Greeks, which was the line of demarcation between despotism and dogmatism and the freedom of the mind and will. In common with all human institutions, its power has sometimes been abused. But its defect cannot be remedied by repression or by force, but by the elevation of the thought, judgment, intelligence, and good-will of a people by an education which causes them to demand better things. The press in recent years has been too susceptible to commercial dominance—a power, by the way, which has seriously affected all of our institutions. Here, as in all other phases of progress, wealth should be a means rather than an end of civilization.

Public Opinion.—Universal education in school and out, freedom of discussion, freedom of thought and will to do are necessary to social progress. Public opinion is an expression of the combined judgments of many minds working in conscious or unconscious co-operation. Laws, government, standards of right action, and the type of social order are dependent upon it. The attempt to form a League of Nations or a Court of International Justice depends upon the support of an intelligent public opinion. War cannot be ended by force of arms, for that makes more war, but by the force of mutually acquired opinion of all nations based on good-will. Every year in the United States there are examples of the failure of the attempt to enforce laws which are not well supported by public opinion. Such laws are made effective by a gradual education of those for whom they are made to the standard expressed in the laws, or they become obsolete.

SUBJECTS FOR FURTHER STUDY

1. Show from observations in your own neighborhood the influence of education on social progress.

2. Imperfections of public schools and the difficulties confronting educators.