Looking Backward: 2000-1887 Read online

  CHAPTER XXI.

  It had been suggested by Dr. Leete that we should devote the nextmorning to an inspection of the schools and colleges of the city, withsome attempt on his own part at an explanation of the educationalsystem of the twentieth century.

  "You will see," said he, as we set out after breakfast, "many veryimportant differences between our methods of education and yours, butthe main difference is that nowadays all persons equally have thoseopportunities of higher education which in your day only aninfinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed. We should think wehad gained nothing worth speaking of, in equalizing the physicalcomfort of men, without this educational equality."

  "The cost must be very great," I said.

  "If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it,"replied Dr. Leete, "nor even if it took it all save a bare pittance.But in truth the expense of educating ten thousand youth is not tennor five times that of educating one thousand. The principle whichmakes all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on asmall scale holds as to education also."

  "College education was terribly expensive in my day," said I.

  "If I have not been misinformed by our historians," Dr. Leeteanswered, "it was not college education but college dissipation andextravagance which cost so highly. The actual expense of your collegesappears to have been very low, and would have been far lower if theirpatronage had been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheapas the lower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers,receive the same support. We have simply added to the common schoolsystem of compulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundredyears ago, a half dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the ageof twenty-one and giving him what you used to call the education of agentleman, instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with nomental equipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplicationtable."

  "Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years ofeducation," I replied, "we should not have thought we could afford theloss of time from industrial pursuits. Boys of the poorer classesusually went to work at sixteen or younger, and knew their trade attwenty."

  "We should not concede you any gain even in material product by thatplan," Dr. Leete replied. "The greater efficiency which educationgives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a shortperiod for the time lost in acquiring it."

  "We should also have been afraid," said I, "that a high education,while it adapted men to the professions, would set them against manuallabor of all sorts."

  "That was the effect of high education in your day, I have read,"replied the doctor; "and it was no wonder, for manual labor meantassociation with a rude, coarse, and ignorant class of people. Thereis no such class now. It was inevitable that such a feeling shouldexist then, for the further reason that all men receiving a higheducation were understood to be destined for the professions or forwealthy leisure, and such an education in one neither rich norprofessional was a proof of disappointed aspirations, an evidence offailure, a badge of inferiority rather than superiority. Nowadays, ofcourse, when the highest education is deemed necessary to fit a manmerely to live, without any reference to the sort of work he may do,its possession conveys no such implication."

  "After all," I remarked, "no amount of education can cure naturaldullness or make up for original mental deficiencies. Unless theaverage natural mental capacity of men is much above its level in myday, a high education must be pretty nearly thrown away on a largeelement of the population. We used to hold that a certain amount ofsusceptibility to educational influences is required to make a mindworth cultivating, just as a certain natural fertility in soil isrequired if it is to repay tilling."

  "Ah," said Dr. Leete, "I am glad you used that illustration, for it isjust the one I would have chosen to set forth the modern view ofeducation. You say that land so poor that the product will not repaythe labor of tilling is not cultivated. Nevertheless, much land thatdoes not begin to repay tilling by its product was cultivated in yourday and is in ours. I refer to gardens, parks, lawns, and, in general,to pieces of land so situated that, were they left to grow up to weedsand briers, they would be eyesores and inconveniences to all about.They are therefore tilled, and though their product is little, thereis yet no land that, in a wider sense, better repays cultivation. Soit is with the men and women with whom we mingle in the relations ofsociety, whose voices are always in our ears, whose behavior ininnumerable ways affects our enjoyment,--who are, in fact, as muchconditions of our lives as the air we breathe, or any of the physicalelements on which we depend. If, indeed, we could not afford toeducate everybody, we should choose the coarsest and dullest bynature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we couldgive. The naturally refined and intellectual can better dispense withaids to culture than those less fortunate in natural endowments.

  "To borrow a phrase which was often used in your day, we should notconsider life worth living if we had to be surrounded by a populationof ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women, aswas the plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man satisfied,merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorouscrowd? Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in apalatial apartment, if the windows on all four sides opened intostable yards? And yet just that was the situation of those consideredmost fortunate as to culture and refinement in your day. I know thatthe poor and ignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us thelatter, living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness,seem little better off than the former. The cultured man in your agewas like one up to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with asmelling bottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this questionof universal high education. No single thing is so important to everyman as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons. Thereis nothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that willenhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors. When itfails to do so, the value of his own education to him is reduced byhalf, and many of the tastes he has cultivated are made positivesources of pain.

  "To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass whollyuncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like thatbetween different natural species, which have no means ofcommunication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of apartial enjoyment of education! Its universal and equal enjoymentleaves, indeed, the differences between men as to natural endowmentsas marked as in a state of nature, but the level of the lowest isvastly raised. Brutishness is eliminated. All have some inkling of thehumanities, some appreciation of the things of the mind, and anadmiration for the still higher culture they have fallen short of.They have become capable of receiving and imparting, in variousdegrees, but all in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of arefined social life. The cultured society of the nineteenthcentury,--what did it consist of but here and there a few microscopicoases in a vast, unbroken wilderness? The proportion of individualscapable of intellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the massof their contemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in anybroad view of humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One generation ofthe world to-day represents a greater volume of intellectual life thanany five centuries ever did before.

  "There is still another point I should mention in stating the groundson which nothing less than the universality of the best educationcould now be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, "and that is, theinterest of the coming generation in having educated parents. To putthe matter in a nutshell, there are three main grounds on which oureducational system rests: first, the right of every man to thecompletest education the nation can give him on his own account, asnecessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of hisfellow-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoymentof his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed anintelligent and refined parentage."

  I shall not describe in detail what I saw in the schools that day.Having taken but slight interest in educational ma
tters in my formerlife, I could offer few comparisons of interest. Next to the fact ofthe universality of the higher as well as the lower education, I wasmost struck with the prominence given to physical culture, and thefact that proficiency in athletic feats and games as well as inscholarship had a place in the rating of the youth.

  "The faculty of education," Dr. Leete explained, "is held to the sameresponsibility for the bodies as for the minds of its charges. Thehighest possible physical, as well as mental, development of every oneis the double object of a curriculum which lasts from the age of sixto that of twenty-one."

  The magnificent health of the young people in the schools impressed mestrongly. My previous observations, not only of the notable personalendowments of the family of my host, but of the people I had seen inmy walks abroad, had already suggested the idea that there must havebeen something like a general improvement in the physical standard ofthe race since my day, and now, as I compared these stalwart young menand fresh, vigorous maidens with the young people I had seen in theschools of the nineteenth century, I was moved to impart my thought toDr. Leete. He listened with great interest to what I said.

  "Your testimony on this point," he declared, "is invaluable. Webelieve that there has been such an improvement as you speak of, butof course it could only be a matter of theory with us. It is anincident of your unique position that you alone in the world of to-daycan speak with authority on this point. Your opinion, when you stateit publicly, will, I assure you, make a profound sensation. For therest it would be strange, certainly, if the race did not show animprovement. In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness ofmind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses byoverwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required ofchildren, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs oflife. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy themost favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefullynurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of allis limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is neverexcessive; care for one's self and one's family, anxiety as tolivelihood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life--all theseinfluences, which once did so much to wreck the minds and bodies ofmen and women, are known no more. Certainly, an improvement of thespecies ought to follow such a change. In certain specific respects weknow, indeed, that the improvement has taken place. Insanity, forinstance, which in the nineteenth century was so terribly common aproduct of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared, with itsalternative, suicide."