The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

Let me try to sum up what I have been saying on this difficult subject of the lack of system and the growth of unity in American education. There is no organization from the centre. But there is a distinct organization from the periphery,—if I may use a scientific metaphor of such an unscientific character. The formative principle is the development of the individual.

What, then, does the average American boy find in this country to give him a series of successive opportunities to secure this personal development of mental and moral powers?

First, a public primary school and grammar school which will give him the rudiments of learning from his sixth to his fourteenth year. Then a public high school which will give him about what a French lycée gives from his fourteenth to his eighteenth year. He is now ready to enter the higher education. Up to this point, if he lives in a town of any considerable size, he has not been obliged to go away from home. Many of the smaller places of three or four thousand inhabitants have good high schools. If he lives in the country, he may have had to go to the nearest city or large town for his high school or academy.

Beyond this point, he finds either a college, as it is called in America, or the collegiate department in one of the universities, which will give him a four years’ course of general study. Before he can begin this, he must pass what is called an entrance examination, which is practically uniform in all the better institutions, and almost, but perhaps not quite, equivalent to the examination in France for the degree of bachelier. Thus a certain standard of preparation is set for all the secondary schools. It is at the end of his general course in literature, science, and philosophy that the American student gets his bachelor’s degree, which corresponds pretty nearly to the French degree of licencié in letters and sciences.

Now the student, a young man of about twenty-one or twenty-two years, is supposed to be prepared, either to go into the world as a fairly well-educated citizen, or to continue his studies for a professional career. He finds the graduate schools of the universities ready to give him courses which lead to the degree of M.A. or Ph.D., and prepare him for the higher kind of teaching. The schools of law and medicine and engineering offer courses of from two to four years with a degree of LL.B. or M.D. or C.E. or M.E. at the end of them. The theological seminaries are ready to instruct him for the service of the church in a course of three or four years.

By this time he is twenty-four or twenty-five years old. Unless he has special ambitions which lead him to study abroad, or to take up original research at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, or some other specially equipped university, he is now ready for practical work. The American theory is that he should go to work and get the rest of his education in practice.

Of course there have been short cuts and irregular paths open to him all along the way,—a short cut from the high school to the technical school,—a short cut into law or medicine by the way of private preparation for the examination, which in some States is absurdly low. But these short cuts are being closed up very rapidly. It is growing more and more difficult to get into a first-class professional school without a collegiate or university degree. Already, if the American student wants system and regularity, he can get a closely articulated course, fitted to his individual needs, from the primary school up to the door of his profession.

But the real value of that course depends upon two things that are beyond the power of any system to insure—the personal energy that he brings to his work, and the personal power of the professors under whom he studies. I suppose the same thing is true in France as in America. Neither here nor there can you find equality of results. All you have a right to expect is equality of opportunity.

II. The great symbol and instrument of this idea of equal opportunity in the United States is the common school. In every State of the Union provision is made for the education of the children at public expense. The extent and quality of this education, the methods of control, the standards of equipment, even the matter of compulsory or voluntary attendance, vary in different States and communities. But, as a rule, you may say that it puts within the reach of every boy and girl free instruction from the a-b-c up to the final grade of a lycée.

The money expended by the States on these common schools in 1905-1906 was $307,765,000,—more than one-third of the annual expenditure of the national government for all purposes, more than twice as much as the State governments spent for all other purposes. This sum, you understand, was raised by direct, local taxation. Neither the import duties nor the internal revenue contributed anything to it. It came directly from the citizen’s pocket, at the rate of $3.66 a year per capita, or nearly $13 a year for every grown-up man.