This, of course, contemplates a national school system into which all the children and the youth of the nation are to be brought to have their eyes enlightened, their hearts trained, and their ideals harmonized. So distinctly American must the public school system be that the young life of the nation, without respect to race, color or creed, shall be brought into it and subjected to its moulding and developing process. National unity and integrity cannot be maintained if a part of the nation is taught and a part remains in ignorance. A democracy must have uniformity and universality in the elementary training of its young life. Neither can the nation maintain its existence and work out its destiny if in its early training its youth is broken up into sectional, racial and sectarian groups.
Concessions have been made to foreign elements that have come into this country and organized themselves into communities, holding tenaciously to the language of the country from which they came. The almost insuperable difficulty of undertaking to mobilize the American people in time of war had its roots in just this thing of permitting aliens to occupy the American soil, live under the American flag, and continue to teach the political loyalties of their respective countries in their own languages. It necessitated the draft law by which these people were compelled to bear arms in defense of the world's civilization. No thorough American required any sort of compulsion to put him into the great conflict. The right to volunteer in the time of national danger, or in defense of the great institutions of human liberty anywhere in the world, was the inheritance which had been transmitted from the Revolutionary period to succeeding generations until it came to us and to our children. We were denied our birthright when drafted for service in war, and in that fact there is a tremendous indictment of the nation for its failure to Americanize all its growing life through the public school system and the English language.
In every state of the union the Ku Klux Klan will insist upon thoroughly Americanizing the children of the nation through the public school. All the racial elements in the country must be brought under the same standard of tutelage. Only in this way can these peoples be harmonized. It was the idea of Cecil Rhodes when he founded scholarships in Oxford for American students that British and American ideals should be harmonized. The difficulty with Mr. Rhodes' idea is that the American youth are to be harmonized with British ideals, but he made no provision in scholarships in any great American institution to which British students might come and be harmonized with American ideals. The public school, however, contemplates taking all the elements that are represented in our vast population and harmonizing them with the ideals of our democracy. So poorly has this work been done in many sections of our country, and especially in our congested centers of population, the large cities, that the product turned out from the schools has frequently contradicted the purpose for which the system was founded. We cannot take a person of foreign birth or extraction into our schools maintained by taxation and turn him out Italian-American, British-American, Irish-American, Jewish-American, German-American, Japanese-American, Chinese-American or Afro-American. He must come out an American with all of his distinctive qualities and characteristics swallowed up and absorbed in American democracy. The institution was founded by the fathers and the pattern of American life was made by the great architects of human liberty, and every time a hyphenated American is turned out of any American school it is a contradiction of the very purpose of the republic.
This work of educating the youth of the nation must be done in the open. We have no objections to the foundation of schools privately or by communities of peculiar racial distinction, or even by sectarians who, because of peculiar tenets, wish to keep their children under the eye of the church. To repeat what we have already stated, all we insist upon is just this—that these schools shall be in every sense public, open to public inspection. They must be subjected to regulation by properly constituted authority. The same courses in the fundamentals of Americanism must be taught in a privately owned or conducted school as in the public schools. Democracy can not be taught and developed behind closed doors. Its vital breath is openness. It has recently broken down many doors throughout the world. There are to be no more secret treaties, no more diplomatic intriguing, nothing between the governments of the nations upon which the eyes of all the world may not look. Surely, a democracy demanding openness in all the ways of mankind, as the nations move surely toward a common fraternity, can not undertake to conceal any part of its young life in its training for service to its country and to the world.
Holding as the Klan does that the tenets of Christianity as a code of morals are essential to our democracy, we are only too ready to agree that there should be distinctive religious training. Here, at the very threshold, there is a difficulty. Absolute freedom of conscience in religious matters is granted to American citizens. The public school teachers are drawn from various religious organizations, without respect to their church affiliations. In the average public school the children being taught represent numerous Christian sects and not a few non-Christian sects. It would be contrary to every fundamental of our national life to introduce specific religious doctrines or tenets among this diversified group. Perhaps the plan recently tried out in New York City would solve this problem. The children were dismissed from school a part of a day each week, that they might go to their respective places of worship and there be taught by ministers or lecturers of their peculiar faith in the essential things of religion and ethics.
This much is sure: These foreign peoples must be unified in Americanism and it can not be done except through our public schools. North Carolina has adopted the slogan, "Abolish illiteracy in ten years." We should take that slogan for the whole American nation. By "literacy" we should mean literacy in English. This can only be accomplished, however, when native and foreigner, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Gentile, gladly bring their children together and place them side by side to be taught in the things of democracy.
Demands have been made during the past few years that the funds collected in taxes for the maintenance of public schools be segregated. Our fellow citizens of one powerful religious organization have insisted that monies paid out by members of that church in taxes for public education be returned to the denomination and applied to the parochial schools, which are owned and controlled by the church. Of course this means that a considerable percentage of the young population of the country would be withdrawn from the Americanizing schools of the public and trained only as the church directed. Church and state are forever separated in the democracy of America. Any tendency to bring them together in building the solidarity of the nation should be arrested. It is not worthwhile to experiment further in this matter. All history shows the utter futility of attempting to build a robust, virtuous, enlightened national life through union of Church and State; and I wish to say with the utmost composure, and speaking, I trust, for every real American, that not one dollar of public monies shall ever be diverted from the public schools for sectarian institutions. This declaration may sound explosive. Yet I hope it will give no offense to anybody. The sooner it is accepted as final, so much the sooner will a very real cause of difficulty and misunderstanding be removed.
A study of our history is fundamental to the construction and the maintenance of a sound national life. Thomas Carlyle once very correctly said that one cannot manage the present or predict the future except from an accurate knowledge of the past. All sectarian textbooks in histories, partisan textbooks or sectional textbooks, are naturally distorted and perverted. Men who hold tenaciously to a particular setting, given a religious truth or any other historical fact, have looked at their fellowmen through a distorted perspective. The trivial has frequently appeared to them to be the magnificent, and the magnificent the trivial. Bias has characterized all such narratives. It is difficult enough to secure a history of any country or its people in its political, economic, industrial and social development, that is basically true to the facts. The man who writes is apt to be tremendously impressed by the age in which he lives. The tale that he tells is often a crude compilation of errors. Only recently the manuscript of a history in its making was tendered by a well known publishing house to a patriotic organization of the South for review. One of many glaring errors that obtruded from this book, which was designed to become a text book, was the statement that the democratic party originated with the original Ku Klux Klan of the Sixties. Another history in common use in the public schools of the country, filled with all sorts of inaccuracies and misstatements, was recently taken from the schools in one great section of the country. When the attention of the author was called to the inaccuracies, he offered to expurgate the offensive statements of which the section complained, but refused to change his history for other sections of the country where the statements were as yet unchallenged. If such histories are foisted upon our school system, and our children are taught the errors of the prejudiced and inaccurate historian, how much worse, and how much more dangerous, would the teaching be if the history texts are purposefully written by narrow sectarians, and the facts discolored by religious prejudice? The time has surely come when real history should be written by the truthful and wise, and the facts of our national virtues and vices, our strength and our weakness, our dangers and our securities, should be taught in our public schools, and taught to all the children. The preparation or selection of school text books in history is no more a fitting subject for rancorous bickering among sectarian politicians than the writing of text books in chemistry. It is entirely a matter for trained historians and professional teachers. We must insist that politicians of all breeds keep their hands far removed from these things.