Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887

by Edward Bellamy

  Chapter 21

  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 we hadgained nothing worth speaking of, in equalizing the physical comfort ofmen, 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 ten norfive times that of educating one thousand. The principle which makesall operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a smallscale 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. Leete answered,"it was not college education but college dissipation and extravagancewhich cost so highly. The actual expense of your colleges appears tohave been very low, and would have been far lower if their patronagehad been greater. The higher education nowadays is as cheap as thelower, as all grades of teachers, like all other workers, receive thesame support. We have simply added to the common school system ofcompulsory education, in vogue in Massachusetts a hundred years ago, ahalf dozen higher grades, carrying the youth to the age of twenty-oneand giving him what you used to call the education of a gentleman,instead of turning him loose at fourteen or fifteen with no mentalequipment beyond reading, writing, and the multiplication table."

  "Setting aside the actual cost of these additional years of education,"I replied, "we should not have thought we could afford the loss of timefrom industrial pursuits. Boys of the poorer classes usually went towork at sixteen or younger, and knew their trade at twenty."

  "We should not concede you any gain even in material product by thatplan," Dr. Leete replied. "The greater efficiency which education givesto all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short periodfor 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. There isno such class now. It was inevitable that such a feeling should existthen, for the further reason that all men receiving a high educationwere understood to be destined for the professions or for wealthyleisure, and such an education in one neither rich nor professional wasa proof of disappointed aspirations, an evidence of failure, a badge ofinferiority rather than superiority. Nowadays, of course, when thehighest education is deemed necessary to fit a man merely to live,without any reference to the sort of work he may do, its possessionconveys 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 inconveniencies to all about.They are therefore tilled, and though their product is little, there isyet no land that, in a wider sense, better repays cultivation. So it iswith the men and women with whom we mingle in the relations of society,whose voices are always in our ears, whose behavior in innumerable waysaffects our enjoyment--who are, in fact, as much conditions of ourlives as the air we breathe, or any of the physical elements on whichwe depend. If, indeed, we could not afford to educate everybody, weshould choose the coarsest and dullest by nature, rather than thebrightest, to receive what education we could give. The naturallyrefined and intellectual can better dispense with aids to culture thanthose 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, as wasthe plight of the few educated in your day. Is a man satisfied, merelybecause he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?Could he take more than a very limited satisfaction, even in a palatialapartment, if the windows on all four sides opened into stable yards?And yet just that was the situation of those considered most fortunateas to culture and refinement in your day. I know that the poor andignorant envied the rich and cultured then; but to us the latter,living as they did, surrounded by squalor and brutishness, seem littlebetter off than the former. The cultured man in your age was like oneup to the neck in a nauseous bog solacing himself with a smellingbottle. You see, perhaps, now, how we look at this question ofuniversal high education. No single thing is so important to every manas to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons. There isnothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that will enhanceso much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors. When it fails todo so, the value of his own education to him is reduced by half, andmany of the tastes he has cultivated are made positive sources 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 endowments asmarked as in a state of nature, but the level of the lowest is vastlyraised. 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. Theyhave become capable of receiving and imparting, in various degrees, butall in some measure, the pleasures and inspirations of a refined sociallife. The cultured society of the nineteenth century--what did itconsist of but here and there a few microscopic oases in a vast,unbroken wilderness? The proportion of individuals capable ofintellectual sympathies or refined intercourse, to the mass of theircontemporaries, used to be so infinitesimal as to be in any broad viewof humanity scarcely worth mentioning. One generation of the worldto-day represents a greater volume of intellectual life than any fivecenturies ever did before.

  "There is still another point I should mention in stating the groundson which nothing less than the universality of the best education couldnow be tolerated," continued Dr. Leete, "and that is, the interest ofthe coming generation in having educated parents. To put the matter ina nutshell, there are three main grounds on which our educationalsystem rests: first, the right of every man to the completest educationthe nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to hisenjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to havehim educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third,the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refinedparentage."

  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 the factthat proficiency in athletic feats and games as well as in scholarshiphad 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 six tothat 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 in mywalks abroad, had already suggested the idea that there must have beensomething like a general improvement in the physical standard of therace since my day, and now, as I compared these stalwart young men andfresh, vigorous maidens with the young people I had seen in the schoolsof the nineteenth century, I was moved to impart my thought to Dr.Leete. He listened with great interest to what I said.

  "Your testimony on this point," he declared, "is invaluable. We believethat there has been such an improvement as you speak of, but of courseit could only be a matter of theory with us. It is an incident of yourunique position that you alone in the world of to-day can speak withauthority on this point. Your opinion, when you state it publicly,will, I assure you, make a profound sensation. For the rest it would bestrange, certainly, if the race did not show an improvement. In yourday, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, whilepoverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, andpestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laidon women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of thesemaleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditionsof physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and studiously caredfor; the labor which is required of all is limited to the period ofgreatest bodily vigor, and is never excessive; care for one's self andone's family, anxiety as to livelihood, the strain of a ceaselessbattle for life--all these influences, which once did so much to wreckthe minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more. Certainly, animprovement of the species ought to follow such a change. In certainspecific respects we know, indeed, that the improvement has takenplace. Insanity, for instance, which in the nineteenth century was soterribly common a product of your insane mode of life, has almostdisappeared, with its alternative, suicide."