The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit by Ralph Waldo Trine online

XIV THE WORLD'S BALANCE-WHEEL

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American education must be made for American institutions and for nothing less than this. The nation's children should be shielded from any power that seeks to get possession of them in order at an early and unaccountable age to fasten authority upon them, and to drive a wedge between them and all others of the nation.

The nation has a duty to every child within its borders. To fail to recognize or to shirk that duty, will call for a price to be paid sometime as great as that that has been paid by every other nation that did not see until too late. Sectarianism in education stultifies and robs the child and nullifies the finest national instincts in education. It is for but one purpose--the use and the power of the organization that plans and that fosters it.

Our government profiting by the long weary struggles of other countries, is founded upon the absolute separation of church and state. This does not mean the separation of religion in its true sense from the state; but keeping it free from every type of sectarian influence and domination. It is ours to see that no silent subtle influences are at work, that will eventually make the same trouble here as in other countries, or that will thrust out the same stifling hand to undermine and to throttle universal free public education, and the inalienable right that every child has to it. Our children are the wards of and accountable to the state--they are not the property of any organization, group or groups, less than the state.

We need the creation of a strong Federal Department of Education of cabinet rank, with ample means and strong powers to be the guiding genius of all our state and local departments of education, with greater attention paid to a more thorough and concrete training in civics, in moral and ethical education, in addition to the other well recognized branches in public school education. It should have such powers also as will enable it to see that every child is in school up to a certain age, or until all the fundamentals of a prescribed standard of American education are acquired.

A recent tabulation made public by a Federal Deputy Commissioner of Naturalization has shown that a little over one tenth, in round numbers, 11,000,000, of our population is composed of unnaturalized aliens. Even this however tells but a part of the story; for vast numbers of even those who have become naturalized, have in no sense become Americanized.

Speaking of this class an able editorial in a recent number of one of our leading New York dailies has said:

"Of the millions of aliens who have gone through the legal forms of naturalization a very large proportion have not in any sense been Americanized, and, though citizens, they are still alien in habits of thought, in speech and in their general attitude toward the community.

"There are industrial centres not far from New York City that are wholly foreign. There are sections of this city that--except as the children through the schools and association with others of their own age yield to change--are intensely alien.

"To penetrate these barriers and open new avenues of communication with the people who live within them is no longer a task to be performed by individual effort. Americanization is a work that must be undertaken and directed on a scale so extensive that only through the cooperation of the States and the Federal Government can it be successfully carried out. It cannot longer be neglected without serious harm to the life and welfare of the Nation."

Some even more startling facts are given out in figures by the Department of the Interior, figures supplied to it by the Surgeon General's Office of the Army. The War Department records show that 24.9 per cent. of the draft army examined by that department's agents were unable to read and understand a newspaper, or to write letters home. In one draft in New York State in May, 1918, 16.6 per cent. were classed as illiterate. In one draft in connection with South Carolina troops in July, 1918, 49.5 per cent. where classed as illiterate. In one draft in connection with Minnesota troops in July of the same year, 14.2 per cent. were classed as illiterate. In other words it means for example that in New York State we have in round numbers 700,000 men between 21 and 31 years of age who are illiterate. The same source reveals the fact that in the nation in round numbers over 10,000,000 are either illiterate or without a knowledge of our language. The South is the home of most of the wholly uneducated, the North of those of foreign speech. And in speaking of this class a recent editorial in another representative New York daily, after making mention of one industrial centre but a few miles out of New York City, in New Jersey, where nearly 16 out of every 100 cannot read English, has said:

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