WHEREIN POPULAR EDUCATION HAS FAILED IT T cannot be denied that there is serious and general disappointment at the results of popular education up to this date. Elementary instruction for all children and more advanced instruction for some children have been systematically provided in many countries for more than two generations at great cost and with a good deal of enthusiasm, though not always on wise plans. Many of the inventions of the same rich period of seventy years have greatly promoted the diffusion of education by cheapening the means of communicating knowledge. Cheap books, newspapers, and magazines, cheap postage, cheap means of transportation, and free libraries have all contributed to the general cultivation of intelligence, or at least to the wide use of reading matter and the spread of information. In spite, however, of all these efforts to make education universal, all classes complain more than ever before of the general conditions of society. Now, if general education does not promote general contentment, it does not promote public happiness; for a rational contentment is an essential element in happiness, private or public. To this extent universal education must be admitted to have failed at the end of two generations of sincere and strenuous, if sometimes misdirected, effort. Perhaps it is too soon to expect from public education any visible increase of public contentment and happiness. It may be that general discontent is a necessary antecedent to social improvement and a preliminary manifestation of increased knowledge and wisdom in all classes of the community. Yet after two whole generations it seems as if some increase of genuine reasonableness of thought and action in all classes of the population ought to be discernible. Many persons, however, fail to see in the actual conduct of the various classes of society the evidence of increasing rationality. These sceptical observers complain that people in general, taken in masses with proper exclusion of exceptional individuals, are hardly more reasonable in the conduct of life than they were before free schools, popular colleges, and the cheap printingpress existed. They point out that when the vulgar learn to read they want to read trivial or degrading literature, such as the common newspapers and periodicals which are mainly devoted to accidents, crimes, criminal trials, scandals, gossip, sports, prize-fights, and low politics. Is it not the common school and the arts of cheap illustration, they say, that have made obscene books, photo graphs, and pictures, low novels, and all the literature which incites to vice and crime, profitable, and therefore abundant and dangerous to society? They complain that in spite of every effort to enlighten the whole body of the people, all sorts of quacks and impostors thrive, and that one popular delusion or sophism succeeds another, the best-educated classes contributing their full proportion of the deluded. Thus the astrologer in the Middle Ages was a rare personage and usually a dependent of princes; but now he advertises in the popular newspapers and flourishes as never before. Men and women of all classes, no matter what their education, seek advice on grave matters from clairvoyants, seers, Christian scientists, mind-cure practitioners, bone-setters, Indian doctors, and fortune-tellers. The ship of state barely escapes from one cyclone of popular folly, like the fiat-money delusion or the granger legislation of the seventies, when another blast of ill-informed opinion comes down on it, like the actual legislation which compels the buying and storing of silver by Government, or the projected legislation which would compel Government to buy cotton, wheat, or corn, and issue paper money against the stock. The educated critics of the practical results of public education further complain that lawless violence continues to break out just as it did before common schools were thought of, that lynch law is familiar in the United States, riots common from Berlin to Seattle, and assassination an avowed means of social and industrial regeneration. Even |