As the executive head of one of the South’s most representative denominational colleges and as a lecturer on the subject before representative summer schools for teachers, President Snyder has had occasion to bestow upon his theme serious and special study and his intelligent and earnest treatment of his topic tends to present it in a practical and popular form and to eliminate from it those speculative and academic qualities that have so generally characterized its discussion.
A native of Macon, Ga., where he was born during the final year of the Civil War, President Snyder was reared and educated in Nashville where, after completing the course of the city high schools he entered Vanderbilt University in 1883, and from which he graduated in arts, with both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
He was until 1890 connected with his alma mater, the last three years of which time he was instructor in Latin and student of graduate subjects. He subsequently pursued advanced special work in German and English universities, since which time, until 1902, he was professor of the English Language and Literature in Wofford College. He has been president of this institution since 1902.
President Snyder’s contribution to the actual promotion and solution of his subject has been considerable, as he has served as lecturer on English Literature at the South Carolina State Summer School and the Summer School of the South, at Knoxville, Tenn.
He is a frequent contributor to magazines on literary and educational subjects and is a member of the Modern Language Association of America, and the Religious Education Association.
The American democracy is not so much an achievement as a prophecy. Its chief glory cannot be in what it is, but in what it is to be. It has not attained the measure of its growth till every man in it has a fair chance and an open field to make the most of himself, and has done so with reasonable completeness. It is therefore essentially idealistic, and, however deeply concerned with the present hour’s duty and work, its face is ever set toward a larger future for itself. But this larger future can only be realized in a finer and more efficient quality of the men and women who are to do the work and continue the unfolding life of this free democracy of equal opportunity,—equal opportunity not for the few favored by fortune or circumstance, but for every child born in it. No democracy dare have any other mind with reference to itself.
The most necessary, as the most inspiring, work therefore which a democracy assumes to do is that of seeing to it that all its children are rightly trained for intelligent service and skilled efficiency. This task it undertakes not only that it may live as a collective body but also that each citizen may in the best and fullest manner express his own individual life. In this two-fold view of the matter popular education, the putting of all the children of all the people into the best possible schools, under the best possible teachers, for the longest possible time, becomes the sacred and imperative duty of a democracy that cares for to-morrow as well as for to-day. And the to-morrow of a democracy, in all the manifold activities of its complex life, is determined by what it does for the child of to-day.
From this viewpoint no democracy ever had a better opportunity to test itself and its ability to control the future than that phase of democratic life working out its destiny here at the South. For the conditions are such as to make the task of training the citizenship of the future almost the one thing to be done. The figures representing those conditions have been so often used of late that one is really inclined to resent the very mention of them. Nevertheless, a proper understanding of the conditions entering into this, as into any problem, is the first step toward the solution. Moreover, in this struggle now on for popular education at the South, it is no part of courage to blink a fact because it is ugly, nor of sane judgment to let anything or anybody beguile us into fighting our battle in the dark. We should keep steadily before us the facts as they are, the stupendous nature of the work that lies ahead and how it is to be done, and withal the eternally vital need of doing it now and in the right way.
Now as far as figures can give one anything like an adequate conception, the situation is about this: In 1900 there were 8,683,762 persons of school age in what we are used to call the Southern states,—5,594,284 white persons and 3,089,478 black. It should be said in passing, yet with all emphasis, that the South may as well get used to reckoning the children of its former slaves in both its educational assets and educational liabilities. Justice and expediency are both vitally involved in this view of the situation. Now, of this future citizenship only sixty out of every hundred were actually in process of school training, and of this enrollment only forty-two were, on the average, in daily attendance. The only comfort that one can get in this situation is by looking back and seeing that conditions have been worse and forward to see that they are bound to be better.
These figures, then, represent the mass of material that popular education has to deal with and the actual portion upon which it is really working. Now when one considers the machinery of instruction, the teachers, the school-property, the length of terms, and the capital invested, one sees even more vividly that the democracy of the immediate future must be limited in its development, not alone because its children are not in process of training but because the means themselves are inadequate and inefficient. The entire country pays, on the average, for its men teachers a salary of $49.00 per month, for its women $40.00. The South gets its men for $35.63 and its women for $30.47. Leaving out of consideration the quality of service to be had at such a pitifully low price, one can be perfectly sure that no high professional ideals and standards can be maintained at such rates. But let us look at the matter from another standpoint; upon every child in its schools the South spends $6.95 as against $10.57 for the entire country; while some states of the West spend $31.49, some Southern states are spending only $4.50. It is not surprising therefore to see what this means as to the average length of school term among us: in the entire country every child has a chance to be in school at least 145 days, while the child of the South has open to him only 99 days. Clear enough is it, then, that democracy in this section is, in comparison with the rest of the Union, handicapped in the very beginning of its race. Moreover, the relation of popular education to its best life, in the light of the situation revealed by these figures, is a deep and fundamental one.