A Square DealandEducation
Facts tend to become commonplace, and we tend to lose sight of their importance when once they are ingrained into the life of the nation. Although we talk a good deal about what the widespread education of this country means, I question if many of us deeply consider its meaning. From the lowest grade of the public school to the highest form of university training, education in this country is at the disposal of every man, every woman, who chooses to work for and obtain it. The State has done very much. Private benefaction has done much, very much. And each one of us who has obtained an education has obtained something for which he or she has not personally paid. No matter what the school, what the university, every American who has a school training, a university training, has obtained something given to him outright by the State, or given to him by those dead or those living who were able to make provision for that training because of the protectionof the State, because of existence within its borders.
¶Each one of us then who has an education, school or college, has obtained something from the community at large for which he or she has not paid, and no self-respecting man or woman is content to rest permanently under such an obligation. Where the State has bestowed education the man who accepts it must be content to accept it merely as a charity unless he returns it to the State in full, in the shape of good citizenship. I do not ask of you, good citizenship as a favor to the State. I demand it of you as a right, and hold you recreant to your duty if you fail to give it.
¶From all our citizens we have a right to expect good citizenship; but most of all from those who have received most; most of all from those who have had the training of body, of mind, of soul, which comes from association in and with a great university. From those to whom much has been given we have Biblical authority to expect and demand much in return; and the most that can be given to any man is education. I expect and demand in the name of the nation much more from you who have had training of the mind than from those of mere wealth. To the man of means muchhas been given, too, and much will be expected from him, and ought to be, but not as much as from you, because your possession is more valuable than his. If you envy him I think poorly of you. Envy is merely the meanest form of admiration, and a man who envies another admits thereby his own inferiority.
¶We have a right to expect from the college-bred man, the college-bred woman, a proper sense of proportion, a proper sense of perspective, which will enable him or her to see things in their right relation one to another, and when thus seen while wealth will have a proper place, a just place, as an instrument for achieving happiness and power, for conferring happiness and power, it will not stand as high as much else in our national life. I ask you to take that not as a conventional statement from the university platform, but to test it by thinking of the men whom you admire in our past history and seeing what are the qualities which have made you admire them, what are the services they have rendered. For, as President Wheeler said to-day, it is true now as it ever has been true that the greatest good fortune, the greatest honor, that can befall any man is that he shall serve, that he shall serve the nation, serve his people, serve mankind; and lookingback in history the names that come up before us, the names to which we turn, the names of the men of our own people which stand as shining honor marks in our annals, the names of those men typifying qualities which rightly we should hold in reverence, are the names of the statesmen, of the soldiers, of the poets, and after them, not abreast of them, the names of the architects of our material prosperity also.[23]
¶You, men and women, you who have had the advantages of a college training are not to be excused if you fail to do, not as well as, but more than the average man outside who has not had your advantages. Every now and then I meet (at least I meet him in the East and I dare say he is to be found here) the man who having gone through college feels that somehow that confers upon him a special distinction which relieves him from the necessity of showing himself as good as his fellows. I see you recognize the type. That man is not only a curse to the community, and incidentally to himself, but he is a curse to the cause of academic education, the college and university training, because by his insistence he serves as an excuse for those who like to denounce such education.
¶Your education, your training, will not conferon you one privilege in the way of excusing you from effort or from work. All it can do, and what it should do, is to make you a little better fitted for such effort, for such work; and I do not care whether that is in business, politics, in no matter what branch of endeavor, all it can do is by the training you have received, by the advantages you have received, to fit you to do a little better than the average man that you meet.
¶It is incumbent upon you to show that the training has had that effect. It ought to enable you to do a little better for yourselves, and if you have in you souls capable of a thrill of generous emotion, souls capable of understanding what you owe to your training, to your alma mater, to the past and the present that have given you all that you have—if you have such souls it ought to make you doubly bent upon disinterested work for the State and the Nation.[22]
¶Education may not make a man a good citizen, but most certainly ignorance tends to prevent his being a good citizen. Washington was far too much of a patriot, had far too much love for his fellow citizen to try to teach them that they could govern themselves unless they could develop a sound and enlightened publicopinion. No nation can permanently retain free government unless it can retain a high average of citizenship, and there can be no such high average of citizenship without a high average of education, using the word in its broadest and truest sense to include the things of the soul as well as the things of the mind.
¶School education can never supplant or take the place of self-education, still less can it in any way take the place of those rugged and manly qualities which we group under the name of character; but it can be of enormous use in supplementing both. It is a source of just pride to every American that our people have so consistently acted in accordance with Washington’s principles of promoting institutions for the diffusion of knowledge. There is nothing dearer to our hearts than our public school system, by which free primary education is provided for every one within our borders.
¶The higher education such as is provided by the University of Pennsylvania and kindred bodies, not only confers great benefits to those able to take advantage of it, but entails upon them corresponding duties.
¶The men who founded this nation had to deal with theories of government and the fundamentalprinciples of free institutions. We are now concerned with a different set of questions for the Republic has been firmly established, its principles fully tested and approved. To merely political issues have succeeded those of grave social and economic importance, the solution of which demands the best efforts of the best men. We have a right to expect that a wise and leading part in the effort to attain this solution will be taken by those who have been exceptionally blessed in the matter of obtaining an education.
¶That college graduate is but a poor creature who does not feel when he has left college that he has received something for which he owes a return. What he thus owes he can as a rule only pay by the way he bears himself throughout life. It is but occasionally that a college graduate can do much outright for his alma mater; he can best repay her by living a life that will reflect credit upon her, by so carrying himself as a citizen that men shall see that the years spent in training him have not been wasted.
¶The educated man is entitled to no special privilege, save the inestimable privilege of trying to show that his education enables him totake the lead in striving to guide his fellows aright in the difficult task which is set to us of the twentieth century. The problems before us to-day are very complex, and are widely different from those which the men of Washington’s generation had to face; but we can overcome them surely if we approach them in the spirit which Washington and Washington’s great supporters brought to bear upon the problems of their day—the spirit of sanity and of courage, the spirit which combines hard common-sense with the loftiest idealism.[25]