Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The State and the City
I must speak on a highly technical subject which I have not myself chosen, and must give utterance to conclusions which have been forced upon me, which I have not arrived at willingly, and I am afraid that I shall certainly be a distributor of that kind of gloom of which the President of the University of Minnesota spoke so feelingly last night. I find myself envying those gentlemen who were assigned genteel subjects like The University and the State, or The Evils of Liberal Education in a State School System. One who talks of politics can hardly be genteel, and I am going to talk of politics. I shall not attempt to say any of those fine things that might be said of the relation of the state and the city with regard to many other features of very common life. I shall say something about the relation of the state and the city in regard to the schools.
Education is a state, not a national, affair in our country, for the reason that thirteen separate colonies which had each its own schools did not see fit, when they federated themselves into a Union, to entrust to it the responsibility of directing them. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively or to the people." The control of education was one of these powers reserved to the states. This arrangement has grave defects. A republic can not exist unless its citizens are trained to discern their interests, to perform their duties, to protect their rights and to be intelligently solicitous about "everybody's business" which is what res publica, means. The agency which is primarily responsible for fitting them for their democratic life is the public school. Through it our country continually creates itself and upon it its well-being depends. But the nation has no authority to control this source of its own being.
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