And whence did this particular impulse spring? From a sense of the real value of knowledge to man as man. From a conviction that there is no natural right more precious than the right of the mind to grow. From a deep instinct of prudence reminding a nation in which the people are the sovereign that it must attend to “the education of the prince.”
These are the feelings and convictions, very plain and primitive in their nature, which were shared by the real makers of America, and which have ever since controlled her real leaders. They are in striking contrast with the views expressed by some of the strangers who were sent out in early times to govern the colonies; as, for example, that Royal Governor Berkeley who, writing home to England from Virginia in the seventeenth century, thanked God that “no public schools nor printing-presses existed in the colony,” and added his “hope that they would not be introduced for a hundred years, since learning brings irreligion and disobedience into the world, and the printing-press disseminates them and fights against the best intentions of the government.”
But this Governor Berkeley was of a different type from that Bishop Berkeley who came to the western world to establish a missionary training-school, and, failing in that, gave his real estate at Newport and his library of a thousand books to the infant Yale College at New Haven; of a different type from those Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam who founded the first American public school in 1621; of a different type from those Puritan colonists of Massachusetts Bay who established the Boston Latin School in 1635 and Harvard College in 1636; of a different type from Franklin, who founded the Philadelphia Circulating Library in 1731, the American Philosophical Society in 1744, and the Academy of Pennsylvania in 1749; of a different type from Washington, who urged the foundation of a national university and left property for its endowment by his last will and testament; of a different type from Jefferson, who desired to have it recorded upon his tombstone that he had rendered three services to his country—the framing of the Declaration of Independence, the establishment of religious liberty in Virginia, and the founding of the University of that State.
Among the men who were most responsible, from the beginning, for the rise and growth and continuance of the spirit of self-reliance and fair play, of active energy and common order in America, there was hardly one who did not frequently express his conviction that the spread of public intelligence was necessary to these ends. Among those who have been most influential in the guidance of the republic, nothing is more remarkable than their agreement in the opinion that education, popular and special, is friendly to republican institutions.
This agreement is not a mere formal adherence to an academic principle learned in the same school. For there has been the greatest possible difference in the schooling of these men. Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Hamilton, Webster, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, Roosevelt, had a college training; Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Jackson, Van Buren, Clay, Lincoln, Cleveland, McKinley, did not.
The sincere respect for education which is typical of the American spirit is not a result of education. It is a matter of intuitive belief, of mental character, of moral temperament. First of all, the sure conviction that every American child ought to have the chance to go to school, to learn to read, to write, to think; second, the general notion that it is both fair and wise to make an open way for every one who is talented and ambitious to climb as far as he can and will in the higher education; third, the vague feeling that it will be to the credit and benefit of democracy not only to raise the average level of intelligence, but also to produce men and institutions of commanding excellence in learning and science and philosophy,—these are the three elements which you will find present in varying degrees in the views of typical Americans in regard to education.
I say that you will find these elements in varying degrees, because there has been, and there still is, some divergence of opinion as to the comparative emphasis to be laid on these three points—the schoolhouse door open to everybody, the college career open to all the talents, and the university providing unlimited opportunities for the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.
Which is the most important? How far may the State go in promoting the higher education? Is it right to use the public funds, contributed by all the taxpayers, for the special advantage of those who have superior intellectual powers? Where is the line to be drawn between the education which fits a boy for citizenship, and that which merely gratifies his own tastes or promotes his own ambition?
These are questions which have been seriously, and, at times, bitterly debated in America. But, meantime, education has gone steadily and rapidly forward. The little public school of New Amsterdam has developed into an enormous common-school system covering the United States and all their Territories. The little Harvard College at Cambridge has become the mother of a vast brood of institutions, public and private, which give all kinds of instruction, philosophical, scientific, literary, and technical, and which call themselves colleges or universities according to their own fancy and will.
A foreigner visiting the country for the first time might well think it had a touch of academic mania. A lecturer invited to describe the schools and colleges of the United States in a single discourse might well feel as embarrassed as that famous diplomat to whom his companion at dinner said, between the soup and the fish, “I am so glad to meet you, for now you can tell me all about the Far Eastern Question and make me understand it.” Let me warn you against expecting anything of that kind in this lecture. I am at least well enough educated to know that it is impossible to tell all about American education in an hour. The most that I can hope to do is to touch on three points:—