Part 13 (1/2)
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 furnis.h.i.+ng scholars.h.i.+ps to carry the brighter children of the impecunious cla.s.ses through the college, high school, and technical courses. Even this policy of scholars.h.i.+ps 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 const.i.tute 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 const.i.tute 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 inst.i.tutions 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 cla.s.ses: that for the upper cla.s.s, that for the middle cla.s.s, and that for the ma.s.ses of the people--and he even insisted that this division is democratic if the elevation of the pupil from one cla.s.s 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.
Those few who do rise under such conditions only strengthen the position of the upper cla.s.ses as against that of the lower. Tolstoi was right when he said that when an individual rises in this way he simply brings another recruit to the rulers from the ruled, and that the fact that this pa.s.sage from one cla.s.s to another does occasionally take place, and is not absolutely forbidden by law and custom as in India, does not mean that we have no castes.[88] Even in ancient Egypt, it was quite usual, as in the case of Joseph, to elevate slaves to the highest positions.
This singling out and promotion of the very ablest among the lower cla.s.ses may indeed be called the basis of every lasting caste system.
All those societies that depended on a purely hereditary system have either degenerated or were quickly destroyed. If then a ruling cla.s.s promotes from below a number sufficient only to provide for its own need of new abilities and new blood, its power to oppress, to protect its privileges, and to keep progress at the pace and in the direction that suits it will only be augmented--and universal equality of opportunity will be farther off than before. Doubtless the numbers ”State Socialism”
will take up from the ma.s.ses and equip for higher positions will constantly increase. But neither will the opportunities of these few have been in any way equal to those of the higher cla.s.ses, nor will even such opportunities be extended to any but an insignificant minority.
Nor does President Eliot's advocacy of cla.s.s schools stand as an isolated phenomenon. Already in America the development of free secondary schools has been checked by the far more rapid growth of private inst.i.tutions. The very cla.s.ses of taxpayers who control city and other local governments and school boards are educating their own children privately, and thus have a double motive for resisting the further advance of school expenditure. As if the expense of upkeep during the period of education were not enough of a handicap, those few children of the wage earners who are brave enough to attempt to compete with the children of the middle cla.s.ses are now subjected to the necessity of attending inferior schools or of traveling impracticable distances. The building of new high schools, for example, was most rapid in the Middle West in the decades 1880-1899, and in the Eastern States in the decade 1890-1900. But within a few years after 1900 the rate of increase had fallen in the Middle West to about one half, and in the East to less than one third, of what it formerly had been.[89] It might be thought that, the country being now well served with secondary schools, the rate of growth must diminish. This may be true of a part of the rural districts, but an examination of the situation or school reports of our large cities will show how far it is from being true there.
In Great Britain the public secondary schools for the most part and some of the primary schools, _though supported wholly or largely by public funds, charge a tuition fee_. The fact that a very small per cent of the children of the poor are given scholars.h.i.+ps which relieve them of this fee only serves to strengthen the upper and middle cla.s.ses, without in any appreciable degree depriving them of their privileged position. In London, for example, fees of from $20 to $40 are charged in the secondary schools, and their superintendents report that they are attended chiefly by the children of the ”lower middle cla.s.ses,” salaried employees, clerks, and shopkeepers, with comparatively few of the children of the professional cla.s.ses on the one hand or of the best-paid workingmen on the other. An organized campaign is now on foot in New York City also, among the taxpayers, to introduce a certain proportion of primary pay schools, for the frank purpose of separating the lower middle from the working cla.s.ses, and to charge fees in all secondary schools so as to bring a new source of income and _decrease_ the number of students and the amounts spent on the schools. This in spite of the annual plea of Superintendent Maxwell for more secondary schools, more primary teachers, and primary school buildings. Instead of going in the direction indicated by Dr. Eliot and preparing to spend four or five times the present amount, there is a strong movement to spend less. And nothing so hastens this reactionary movement as the tendency, whether automatic or consciously stimulated, towards cla.s.s (or caste) education--such as Dr. Eliot and so many other reformers now directly or indirectly encourage--usually under the cloak of industrial education.
The most anti-social aspects of capitalism, whether in its individualist or its collectivist form, are the grossly unequal educational and occupational privileges it gives the young. An examination of the better positions now being obtained by men and women not yet past middle age will show, let us say, that ten times as many prizes are going to persons who were given good educational opportunities as to those who were not. But as the children of those who can afford such opportunities are not a tenth as numerous as the children of the rest of the people, this would mean that the latter have only a _hundredth part_ of the former's opportunities. Under this supposition, one tenth of the population secures ten elevenths of the positions for which a higher education is required. As a matter of fact, the existing inequality of opportunity is undoubtedly very much greater than this, and the unequal distribution of opportunities is visibly and rapidly becoming still less equal. In 1910, of nineteen million pupils of public and private schools in this country, only one million were securing a secondary, and less than a third of a million a higher, education. Here are some figures gathered by the Russell Sage Foundation in its recent survey of public school management. The report covers 386 of the larger cities of the Union. Out of every 100 children who enter the schools, 45 drop out before the sixth year; that is, before they have learned to read English. Only 25 of the remainder graduate and enter the high schools, and of these but 6 complete the course.
The expense of a superior education, including upkeep during the increasing number of years required, is rising many times more rapidly than the income of the average man. At the same time, both the wealth and the numbers of the well-to-do are increasing in greater proportion than those of the rest of the people. While the better places get farther and farther out of the reach of the children of the ma.s.ses, owing to the overcrowding of the professions by children of the well-to-do, the compet.i.tion becomes ever keener, and the poor boy or girl who must struggle not only against this excessive compet.i.tion, but also against his economic handicap, confronts an almost superhuman task.
It is obvious that this tendency cannot be reversed, no matter how rapidly the people's income is increased, unless it rises _more rapidly_ than that of the well-to-do. And this, Socialists believe, has never happened except when the ma.s.ses obtained political power and made full use of it _against_ the cla.s.s in control of industry and government.
No amount of material progress and no reorganization of industry or government which does not promise to equalize opportunity,--however rapid or even sensational it may be,--is of the first moment to the Socialists of the movement. Wages might increase 5 or 10 per cent every year, as profits increase to-day; hours might be shortened and the intensity of labor lessened; and yet the gulf between the cla.s.ses might be growing wider than ever. If society is to progress toward industrial democracy, it is necessary that the people should fix their attention, not merely on the improvement of their own condition, but on their progress _when compared with that of the capitalist cla.s.ses, i.e._ when measured by present-day civilization and the possibilities it affords.
_No matter how fast wages increase, if profits increase faster, we are journeying not towards social democracy, but towards a caste society._ Thus to insist that we must keep our eyes on the prosperity of others in order to measure our own seems like preaching envy or cla.s.s hatred. But in social questions the laws of individual morality are often reversed.
It is _the social duty_ of every less prosperous cla.s.s of citizens, their duty towards the whole of the coming generation as well as to their own children, to measure their own progress solely by a standard raised in accordance with the point in evolution that society has attained. What would have been comparative luxury a hundred years ago it is our duty to view as nothing less than a degrading and life-destroying poverty to-day.
Opportunity is not becoming equal. The tendency is in the opposite direction, and not all the reforms of ”State Socialism” promise to counteract it. The _citizen owes it to society_ to ask of every proposed program of change, ”Will it, within a reasonable period, bring equality of opportunity?” To rest satisfied with less--a so-called tendency of certain reforms in the right _direction_ may be wholly illusory--is not only to abandon one's rights and those of one's children, but to rob society of the only possible a.s.surance of the maximum of progress.
FOOTNOTES:
[83] Henry George, ”Progress and Poverty,” Vol. II, p. 515.
[84] John Mitch.e.l.l, ”Organized Labor” (Preface).
[85] John A. Hobson, ”The Crisis of Liberalism,” p. 100.
[86] For this and later quotations from Dr. Eliot in this chapter, see his little book ent.i.tled ”More Money for the Public Schools.”
[87] See article by Dr. Eliot in the _School Review_, April, 1909.
[88] ”Knowledge and Education,” the _Independent_, 1910.
[89] Dexter, ”History of Education in the United States,” p. 173.