Institutions must be founded for this purpose—to educate all, rich and poor, men well-born with good abilities, men ill-born with slender natural powers. In New England, these institutions have long since been founded at the public cost, and watched over with paternal care, as the ark of our covenant, the palladium of our nation. It has been recognized as a theory, and practised on as a fact, that all the property in the land is held by the state for the public education of the people, as it is for their defence; that property is amenable to education as to military defence.
In a democracy there are two reasons why this theory and practice prevail. One is a political reason. It is for the advantage of the state; for each man that keeps out of the jail and the poor-house, becomes a voter at one-and-twenty; he may have some office of trust and honor; the highest office is open before him. As so much depends on his voting wisely, he must have a chance to qualify himself for his right of electing and of being elected. It is as necessary now in a democracy, and as much demanded by the idea thereof, that all should be thus qualified by education, as it once was in a military state, that all should be bred up soldiers.
The other is a philosophical reason. It is for the advantage of the individual himself, irrespective of the state. The man is a man, an integer, and the state is for him; as well as a fraction of the state, and he for it. He has a man's rights; and, however inferior in might to any other man, born of parentage how humble soever, to no wealth at all, with a body never so feeble, he is yet a man, and so equal in rights to any other man born of a famous line, rich and able; of course he has a right to a chance for the best culture which the educational attainment of mankind, and the circumstances of the nation render possible to any man; to so much thereof as he has the inborn power and the voluntary industry to acquire. This conclusion is getting acted on in New England, and there are schools for the dumb and the blind, even for the idiot and the convict.
So, then, as the idea of our government demands the education of all, the amount of education must depend on the same three variables mentioned before; it must be as good as it is possible for them to afford. The democratic state has never done its political and educational duty, until it affords every man a chance to obtain the greatest amount of education which the attainment of mankind renders it possible for the nation, in its actual circumstances, to command, and the man's nature and disposition render it possible for him to take.
Looking at the matter politically, from the point of view of the State, each man must have education enough to exercise his rights of electing and being elected. It is not easy to fix the limits of the amount; it is also a variable continually increasing. Looking at the matter philosophically, from the point of view of the individual, there is no limit but the attainment of the race and the individual's capacity for development and growth. Only a few men will master all which the circumstances of the nation and the world render attainable; some will come short for lack of power, others for lack of inclination. Make education as accessible as it can now be made, as attractive as the teachers of this age can render it, the majority will still get along with the smallest amount that is possible or reputable. Only a few will strive for the most they can get. There will be many a thousand farmers, traders, and mechanics in their various callings, manual and intellectual, to a single philosopher. This also is as it should be, and corresponds with the nature of man and his function on the earth. Still all have the natural right to the means of education to this extent, by fulfilling its condition.
To accomplish this work, the democratic education of the whole people, with the aim of making them men, we want public institutions founded by the people, paid for by the public money; institutions well endowed, well attended, watched over well, and proportionably honored; we want teachers, able men, well disciplined, well paid, and honored in proportion to their work. It is a good thing to educate the privileged classes, priests in a theocracy, and gentlemen in an aristocracy. Though they are few in number, it is a great work; the servants thereof are not too well paid, nor too much held in esteem in England, nor in Rome, nor too well furnished with apparatus. But the public education of a whole people is a greater work, far more difficult, and should be attended with corresponding honor, and watched over even more carefully by the state.
After the grown men of any country have provided for their own physical wants, and insured the needful physical comforts, their most important business is to educate themselves still further, and train up the rising generation to their own level. It is important to leave behind us cultivated lands, houses and shops, railroads and mills, but more important to leave behind us men grown, men that are men; such are the seed of material wealth,—not it of them. The highest use of material wealth is its educational function.
Now the attainments of the human race increase with each generation; the four leading nations of Christendom, England, France, Germany, and the United States, within a hundred years, have apparently, at the least, doubled their spiritual attainments; in the free states of America, there is a constant and rapid increase of wealth, far beyond the simultaneous increase of numbers; so not only does the educational achievement of mankind become greater each age, but the power of the state to afford each man a better chance for a better education, greatens continually, the educational ability of the state enlarging as those two factors get augmented. The generation now grown up, is, therefore, able and bound to get a better culture than their fathers, and leave to their own children a chance still greater.
Each child of genius, in the nineteenth century, is born at the foot of the ladder of learning, as completely as the first child, with the same bodily and spiritual nakedness; though of the most civilized race, with six, or sixty thousands of years behind him, he must begin with nothing but himself. Yet such is the union of all mankind, that, with the aid of the present generation, in a few years he will learn all that mankind has learned in its long history; next go beyond that, discovering and creating anew; and then draw up to the same height the new generation, which will presently surpass him.