The Washington herald., 1915-02-08
IIliteracy.
By JOHN d. BARRY.


/ W HEN Woodrow Wilson ran for President
w of his opponents ridiculed him as q
professor. He was professor, distinguished in a
very high calling. And never
! did he enunciate soundeI
/ principle than in the statement
&! 1S that he made the other day
! ~ when he vetoed the bill max
! ing illiteracy a bar to admis-
sion of immigrants to this
country.
IA Democracy has its respon-
sbilities we'll its privi-
leges 1t has to live up to its
assertions and its claims. 1t
asserts that one man is as
good as another, not by virtue of what he has OF
what he has been trained to be, but by virtue of
his inherent worth, his common humanity. 1t
claims that human being he is entitled to his
share in the common inheritance To disbar man
from entering large part of the earth, to shut
him out from putting his foot on it simply and
solely because he couldn't read or write would be
an intolerable outrage democracy.
Suppose this policy had been followed hun
dred years ago. Many of the ornaments of our
society would never have appeared on our soil
American history might have lacked the figure of
Lincoln and other distinguished figures. Were the
pioneers less sturdy, and less admirable
count of the illiteracy so prevalent among them?
The mere question carries absurdty on its face.
In the matter of reading and writing, we'll
las in many other respects of education, people
who ought to know better go pitifully astray. To
hear them talk one might think that education
was the most important matter in the world that
is, schooling, and that the uneducated
those whose humanity was in some way different
from the rest of mankind. that they belonged to
inferior clay The way the educated treat the I'M
educated often provides illustrations OF this atti
tude, ptiful illustrations, too. IT, to be educated,
meant the creating Of the narrow minded and the
snobbsh it would be far better to drive education
out of the world and to maintain a nation of
terateS.
Fortunately we know that such is not neces-
sarily the result of education. There are edu-
Gated women and men who are in the truest sense
of the word democrats. The fact remains, never
theless, that in this country we'll in the
older countries education particularly what is
called the higher education, tends to draw people
away. from democracy and in the direction of
educated out of sympathy with their kind and
find only those who are more or less like them
selves worth knowing Humanity they degrade
to cult. They refer with pride and pleasure
to the culture they supposed to have acquired
and to be able to express in their everyday re-
lations. Some of them the instant they begin to
speak with the uneducated, whom they regard as
interiors, freeze up and adopt manner Of icy
patronage Aware as they are of many things,
they are not aware of the pain they nfict nor OF
the sorry figure they themselves present, of
the damage they do to the of real culture. |
Some one has said that it is pity the world
ever studied grammar-it has done so much to |
cause bitterness and hate among human beings. |
Beneath the half-humorous exaggeration here
there is a truth worth rejecting on. And some
thing of this truth is expressed even in popular
mstrust Of having for President one who used to |
be professor. The old-fashoned ungrammati- |
cal politician throve largely because his constitu- |
ents felt that he was like themselves that he was
human 1t is the shame of the educated that, only
too often they have allowed themselves to act
if they had become dc-humanized. And this
shame has extended to great institutions
Of learning. Fortunately the institutions are be-
coming alive to the situation and are trying to
each closer to the people at large.
But no mere schooling, however ideally con-
1ucted, can round out human beings. In its ma
ure, schooling is limited. 1t represents only one i
tind of experience. The best it do is to de-
'eop the open-mindedness that shall enable the
young to take in. all that is healthy in the wider
experience Of living. Walt Whitman by no
means the kind of usually called educated
or cultivated. In his writing he used the most
curious words and phrases, easily made ridicu-
Gus by the purists; but he had spirit that
scared beyond mere language and that made
oedantry look tawdry and cheap. If schooling
;ould turn many human beings into Whitmans
t would be a mightier power than it is now.
And, in the process, it would concern itself little
With what are regarded as the fundamentals.
nature like Whitman's forcibly reminds US
hat education, together with its advantages, car
les its disadvantages. If Whitman had gone to
college, would he have remained the Whitman