The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918Various
History
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918
Various
American periodicals
In one year of the war we are spending twenty billion dollars. The
interest on this vast sum at four per cent. is eight hundred million
dollars a year,--or just fifty millions more than we spent on all forms
of education last year in the United States. We are willing to spend
this amount of money to make the world safe for democracy. Are we
willing to spend a similar sum to put real meaning and content into the
word democracy? It is conceivable that during the war we may become so
accustomed to giving and tax-paying that after the war we may be willing
to make similar sacrifices that democracy may have a fair chance to bear
its true and legitimate fruits. In the first year of the war Mr.
Rockefeller has given to the Red Cross and other philanthropic causes
$70,000,000. He has done this with immense satisfaction, and without
serious inconvenience. It is to be hoped that during the war he and our
twenty-two thousand other millionaires may become so accustomed to
paying income taxes that it may degenerate into a habit, and that after
the war, from this source our funds for education may be doubled or
trebled. Mr. Rockefeller should be financing not merely Mr. Flexner's
experiment station in secondary education; he should be financing a
hundred other secondary schools in an equally splendid way. But we can
never hope to make our educational program really significant, merely by
compelling the millionaires to pay their rightful share of the expense.
We shall never succeed in this program, until we have become
sufficiently interested in the matter to be willing to make sacrifices
ourselves. It is with extreme regret that I am compelled to admit that
the heart of this great problem is economic, and that the streets of the
New Jerusalem we are striving to build, must be not metaphorically, but
literally paved with gold.
If we can assume that after the war industrial education will be
properly established and financed without diverting funds from the
higher forms of education, if we can even assume that the funds
available for the more humanistic training will be greatly increased,
there still remain two potent forces in our educational world which
seriously threaten to undermine and impair our democracy and the
humanism which is its eventual goal. I refer to the corrupting influence
of athletics in our high schools and colleges, and the attitude of the
state towards the small college.
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