But those achievements and fames,
while not to be belittled, I have no wish to catalogue and recite here. I
am thinking of the social value of this great public educational system
that is thinking constantly of tomorrow--of the world markets of to-
morrow, to some extent, to which these curricula, as railroads' and ships'
courses, lead; of the world's letters of to-morrow, perhaps; but more
specifically and more especially of the higher happiness of those
particular regions and the success of its democracy. I am thinking of what
these institutions of the people's own devising are doing toward the
making of a homogeneous spirit, in which individual, disinterested, and
varied achievement will have a liberty to grow--as perhaps in no other
soil of earth.
Democritus said two thousand years and more ago: "Education and nature are
similar. For education transforms the man, and in transforming him creates
in him a new nature." The State in its three institutions--the common
school, the high school, the college and university--has many in its care
and under its tuitions for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years, and in these
tuitions has she created in her children a new nature, whatever their
ancestry or place of birth.
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