The weekly democratic statesman. [volume] (Austin, Tex.) 1871-1883, 1881-07-14
NOT THE FREE SCHOOL.


The Erdminer thinks the STATES
MANS opposition to our system offree
schools may reflect public sentiment
at Austin, and if so that Austin is a
poor place for the location of the
state university. Let us see how this
is. The A. & NJ. college at Bryan is a
free school. 1t has been a sad fail
ure. The Sam Houston normal
school, at Huntsville, is free school,
and at the end of three years train
ing of teachers the secretary of the
stale board of education is sent out
of the state to find teachers fit
to hold summer institutes. This
looks as though it has not
come up to the full measure of ex-
pectation. There are any number
of free schools all over Texas, fail
ing to meet public expectation, and
the STATESMAN is more than ever
anxious to see some other sort of
school encouraged by the govern
ment. This university is not to be
free school. If the university
regents do their duty, they will call
to Texas the most talented thinkers
and mind-trainers of the world
They will enter the sacred pre-
cincts of Harvard and Yale
and Dartmouth and Prince
ton. and other great educational
centers of America and Europe,
and they will pay the best pro-
fessors of the world to take charge
of schools in the Texas university.
Ii this be done, there will be sys-
TEN of education established at this
great university which will cause
it to attract students, not only
from every county in Texas, but
from every state in the Union. The
university will not be a free
school, but one where high ed
ucation, worth paving for, will be
maintained. 1t should be made to
occupy plane in the educational
world, second to no Institution in
Europe or America, and such edu-
cation being worth a great deal, it
will not be the gratuitous gift of the
state. The university of Texas, il is
expected, will turn outgrandly edu-
Gated men, and, in time, probably,
women, and such education, of
course, will have its price-the price
that secures talent and learning and
reputation, and which makes
learning noble and self-sustain-
ing. Such is the school we
would have, whose halls would
shadow, and be Swallowed by the
dome of the Texas capitol. Here
we would have young Texas learn
the arts and sciences, deriving at
home what it has heretofore re-
quired fortunes to secure at Cams.
bridge and Harvard and Princeton
and Charlottesville, and at Oxford,
Berlin, Heidelberg, Bohn and
Liepsig. Here we would have con-
gregated the young men of Texas,
paying for high education in their
own state, and here we would have
young men refuging, not only from
the severe winters of the north, but
lured hither because of the reputa-
ton of our university. The E:rami-
aer is III deep water when it contem-
plates a university like the one the
STATESMAN would have. The Texas
free schools and the Texas Uni
versity should not be whispered in
the same breath. If there is to be
any similarity between the two, we
would say stop this canvass right here
and give the thing to Waco, or let
it more properly be located on the
unknown plains of the west, where
neither buildings nor faculty nor
students would be required. The
STATESMAN would have our univer-
sity occupy the highest plane among
educational institutions, and when
the Examiner talks about the one
and the other system as capable of
association, it simply displays the
fact that it has no. conception of the
true university. To contemplate
one would make it giddy and yet
Waco should not be measured by
the Examiners standard.