Socialism as it is

by William English Walling

Edward Bernstein, the Socialist, says: "The number of the possessing classes is to-day not smaller, but larger. The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large capitalists, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees." Whether this is true or not, whether the well-to-do middle classes are gradually increasing in each generation, say, to 5, 10, or 15 per cent of the population, cannot be a matter of more than secondary importance to the overwhelming majority, the "non-possessing classes," that remain outside. Nobody denies that social evolution is going on even to-day. But the masses will probably not be willing to wait the necessary generations and centuries before present tendencies, should they chance to continue long enough (which is doubtful in view of the rapid formation of social castes), would bring the masses any considerable share of existing prosperity.

To secure anything approaching equality of opportunity, the first and most necessary measure is to give equal educational facilities to all classes of the population. Yet the most radical of the non-Socialist educational reformers do not dare to hope at present even for a step in this direction. No man has more convincingly described what the first step towards a genuinely democratic education must be than Ex-President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, perhaps our most influential representative of political as opposed to social democracy.

"Is it not plain," asks President Eliot, "that if the American people were all well-to-do they would multiply by four or five times the present average school expenditure per child and per year? That is, they would make the average expenditure per pupil for the whole school year in the United States from $60 to $100 for salaries and maintenance, instead of $17.36 as now. Is it not obvious that instead of providing in the public schools a teacher for forty or fifty pupils, they would provide a teacher for every ten or fifteen pupils?"[86]

The reform proposed by Dr. Eliot, if applied to all the twenty million children of school age in the United States, would mean the expenditure of two billion instead of three hundred and fifty million dollars per year on public education. Ex-President Eliot fully realizes the radical and democratic character of this proposed revolution in the public schools, and is correspondingly careful to support his demands at every point with facts. He shows, for instance, that while private schools expend for the tuition and general care of each pupil from two hundred to six hundred dollars a year, and not infrequently provide a teacher for every eight or ten pupils, the public school which has a teacher for every forty pupils is unusually fortunate.

Dr. Eliot says that while there has been great improvement in the first eight grades since 1870, progress is infinitely slower than it should be, and that the majority of children do not yet get beyond the eighth grade (the statistics for this country show that only one out of nineteen takes a secondary course). "Philanthropists, social philosophers, and friends of free institutions," he asks, "is that the fit educational outcome of a century of democracy in an undeveloped country of immense natural resources? Leaders and guides of the people, is that what you think just and safe? People of the United States, is that what you desire and intend?"

In order not only to bring existing public schools up to the right standard, but to create new kinds of schools that are badly needed, the plan suggested by Dr. Eliot would take another billion or two. He advocates kindergartens and further development of the new subjects that have recently been added to the grammar school course; he opposes the specialization of the studies of children for their life work before the sixteenth or seventeenth year, favors complete development of the high school as well as the manual training, mechanics, art, the evening and the vacation schools, greater attention to physical education and development, and, finally, the greatest possible extension and development of our institutions of higher education. He also advocates newer reforms, such as the employment of skilled physicians in connection with the schools, the opening of public spaces, country parks, beaches, city squares, gardens, or parkways for the instruction of school children. He specifies in detail the improvements that are needed in school buildings, shows what is urgently demanded and is immediately practicable in the way of increasing the number of teachers, paying them better and giving them pensions, indicates the needed improvements in the administration of the school systems, urges the development of departmental instruction through several grades, and the addition of manual training to all the public schools along with a better instruction in music and drawing.

There are still other improvements in education which have already been tested and found to produce the most valuable results. Perhaps the most important ones besides those demanded by Dr. Eliot are the providing of free or cheap lunches for undernourished children, and the system, already widespread in England and the other countries, of furnishing scholarships to carry the brighter children of the impecunious classes through the college, high school, and technical courses. Even this policy of scholarships would lead us to full democracy in education only if by its means the child of the poorest individual had exactly the same opportunities as those of the richest. It is not enough that a few children only should be so advanced; but that of impecunious children, who constitute 90 per cent of the population, a sufficient number should be advanced to fill 90 per cent of those positions, in industry, government, and society, which require a higher education.

There is no doubt that this actual equality in the "battle of life" was the expectation and intention of those who settled and built up the western part of the United States, as it has been that of all the democracies of new countries. But this reform alone would certainly require not one but several billion dollars a year; as much as all the other improvements mentioned by Dr. Eliot put together. We may estimate, then, that the application of the principle of democracy or equality of opportunity to education in accordance with the present national income, would require the immediate expenditure of three or four billion dollars on the nation's children of school age, or ten times the sum we now expend, and a corresponding increase as the wealth of the nation develops. This would be a considerable proportion of the nation's income, but not too much to spend on the children, who constitute nearly half the population and are at the age where the money spent is most productive.

Here is a program for the coming generation which would be indorsed by a very large part of the democrats of the past. But nothing could make it more clear that political democracy is bankrupt even in its new collective form, that it has no notion of the method by which its own ideals are to be obtained. For no reformer dreams that this perfectly sensible and practicable program will be carried out until there has been some revolutionary change in society. "I know that some people will say that it is impossible to increase public expenditure in the total, and therefore impossible to increase it for the schools," says Dr. Eliot. "I deny both allegations. Public expenditure has been greatly increased within the last thirty years, and so has school expenditure" (written in 1902). But Dr. Eliot doubtless realizes that what he advocates for the present moment, the expenditure of five times as much as we now invest in public schools, at the present rate of progress, might not be accomplished in a century, and that by that time society might well have attained a degree of development which would demand five or ten times as much again. Dr. Eliot is well aware of the opposition that will be made to his reform, but he has not given the slightest indication how it is to be overcome. The well-to-do usually feel obligated to pay for the private education of their own children, and even where public institutions are at their disposal they are forced to support these children through all the years of study. This is expensive, but this very expensiveness gives the children of the well-to-do a practical monopoly of the opportunities which this education brings. How are they to be brought to favor, and, since they are the chief taxpayers, to pay for the extension of these same opportunities to ten times the number of children who now have them?

In the meanwhile Dr. Eliot himself seems to have become discouraged and to have abandoned his own ideal, for only seven years after writing the above he came to advocate the division of the whole national school system into three classes: that for the upper class, that for the middle class, and that for the masses of the people—and he even insisted that this division is democratic if the elevation of the pupil from one class to the other is made "easy."[87] Now democracy does not require that the advance of the child of the poor be made what is termed easy, but that he be given an equal opportunity with the child of the rich as far as all useful and necessary education is concerned. Democracy does not tolerate that in education the children of the poor should be started in at the bottom, while the children of the rich are started at the top.