Democracy and Education

THE separation of the working classes from the general intellectual life of the country is evident at a glance. Our formal educational system furnishes less and less of the unifying force expected from it; for in the grades in which it meets the needs of the wage-earners it too often drives other people away. In college or university, on the other hand, the son or daughter of a working man is about as rare a phenomenon as a Japanese. Both are found, both are exceptions. This fact is the more striking because our universities are far from being the exclusive homes of privilege. Every one connected with them knows how large a proportion of students are wholly lacking in the traditions of the intellectual life. They come to us to receive those traditions, and the smaller American college, at least, is often forced to postpone the promotion of the higher scholarship to the diffusion of a general culture. But among the hungry crowds who press to our offered feast the working people are not found.

Of course we cannot expect them there, since grim necessity demands their presence elsewhere ; but it is a little disappointing to find that the popular movements which expressly aim to bring what education may be to busy people at home equally fail to attract them. These movements, with their fine vitality and disinterestedness, have opened a new delight in the intellectual inheritance of the race to many thousands, but by their own confession both Chautauqua and University Extension stop short of the manual workers, “University Extension has not become the means of elevating so-called working men, ” writes a representative of this admirable movement in the Atlantic for September, 1901.

Nothing is easier than to acquiesce in this state of things as a law of nature. Indeed, so great is our need of a sound scholarship in America, so great our danger of intellectual cheapness, that we are almost tempted to wish ourselves less rather than more democratic; dedicated to the sound training of the few rather than to spreading our mean attainments among the many. Yet here we must draw a distinction. Scholarship is for the elect, but the powers that can scale its austere heights are not bred in a wilderness. The word “culture ” suggests a true analogy: the wide plains whereon the race at large must live should not be brown and arid; nor is that country beautiful or good for habitation in which small plots of green are dotted in an unkempt plain, but that which presents wide and friendly stretches of fertile verdure, subdued by common human effort to common joy and need. American life must foster scholarship and culture alike; culture, if for no other reason, than that scholarship may abound.

How may we share our intellectual inheritance with the laboring classes ? The question presses and difficulties are many. One general truth we must face at outset and conclusion,— a truth very simple, and therefore difficult of practice : in order to promote the common life, it is necessary to live the life in common.

For ignorance of this truth many an admirable educational effort is doomed to failure. Large schemes, initiated by theorists, carried out at arm’s length, can never avail to overcome the intellectual isolation of the workers. Nor is it enough to annihilate material distance, while the spiritual distance endures. Almost every working-class district possesses a number of educational enterprises regarded by their would-be beneficiaries with distressing indifference. Too often the neighbors refuse to frequent our reading rooms or to attend our municipal lectures. The writer well remembers carefully preparing, at the request of the city, a lecture on Socialistic Literature in the Middle Ages, — and it was a good lecture! — only to be confronted by an audience consisting of eight little Italian girls, two melancholy teachers, and the school janitor. Not to seek more instances painfully near, it is known that the Palace of Delight in East London, inaugurated with such high sentiments, fails to allure those for whom it was intended, and that clerks and typewriters, rather than working men, avail themselves of Toynbee Hall.

Many people, scandalized at this lack of appreciation, withdraw their interest in any attempt to educate the workers. But brush away delusion from our minds, and see how the aspect of things changes ! Behold the benevolent philanthropist, spreading before a hungerbitten crowd tables of gleaming fruit and dainty bread, warmly proclaiming the feast free to all, and grievously perplexed that none draw near, — oblivious of the fact that the invited guests are chained out of reach of the food. The chains of the working population are none the less real because invisible. Sentimentality aside, their daylight hours are held in bondage that we may exist beautifully, and that they may exist, if unbeautifully. In the evening, brains stupefied by hours spent in the deafening noise and bad air of the modern factory are hardly eager to absorb intellectual delights. Well does the writer remember the headache that ignominiously broke up her experience as a working girl, after two days’ stitching from seven to six in a shoe factory. Nothing more swiftly quickens, in a fair and sensitive person, the conviction that our claims to democracy cast gibes at fact than the almost hopeless effort to bring working people into unity with our intellectual life.

We here concern ourselves, however, not with protest or arraignment, but with the healthier question, What shall we do ? Putting aside the great problem of the schools, — a problem too wide for discussion here, — much may be learned from passing in review certain private movements toward popular education, especially those inaugurated by the settlements ; most of all, perhaps, may be learned from our blunders.

The easiest and probably the most popular method of sharing our intellectual delights with working people is to gather what audience we may, — usually a small one, — and lecture to it. Dozens of such lectures are given every year; and any one who has perpetrated his share in them and watched the efforts of others knows how rare it is for a lecturer really to hit the mark. Lecturing to working people is no holiday task, to be lightly undertaken. All arts of delivery must be practiced, simply to make the voice carry across the invisible leagues that separate the speaker and the hearers.

A talk to an audience of manual workers should always be brief. An hour is usually recognized as the decent limit of time during which a man has a right to inflict his voice, his tricks of manner, and the contents of his mind upon his fellow mortals; nor, under ordinary conditions, does a lecturer dare to exceed this limit. I have known bright men and women invited to address a working-class audience to come apparently without preparation, and for an hour and three quarters deluge with words their small, patient, and helpless audience.

Talk to tired people, moreover, ought to be clear-cut and well put. Many a time has the writer heard an accomplished lecturer pour forth the contents of his mind in a series of incoherent sentences that trailed their bewildered length along, coiling parentheses within parentheses, and never once straightening out into grammatical completeness. “Brethren! ” exclaimed Father Taylor, of blessed memory, hesitating for an instant in his fervid speech, — “Brethren, I ’ve lost my verb, —but I ’m bound for the kingdom of heaven! ” Few latter-day speakers seem equally aware of their lapses. Alas for the audience! An amorphous whirlpool of ideas is not a lecture.

Nor is it enough to avoid the prolix and the confused. One must be interesting. The Scylla of obscurity frowns on the one hand, the Charybdis of childishness surges on the other, and on one of the two many a speaker makes shipwreck. There is an obvious translation of one’s theme into words of one syllable, which is an offense to any rational audience. On the other hand, many an earnest, able, devoted scholar, anxious to bring his best and choicest, runs up against Scylla with fatal results. Is he dry ? He seems possessed to be ten times drier. Is he abstruse and hard to follow ? Impelled, doubtless, by the sense of the large need of his listeners, the rarity of his opportunity, the sacredness of his message, he condenses his entire philosophy of history and religion into an hour. I have known a Christian scholar, inspired by fervent love for the “plain people,” summarize a brilliantly original course of Lowell Lectures in a rapid talk of one hour and a half. “My dear friends,” said the scholar, aglow with enthusiasm from tip to toe, “it is needless forme to remind you of that with which you are all as familiar as myself, — the affiliations of the philosophy of Hegel with that of the Orient.” “If we can only make these ideas prevail, ” he exclaimed after the lecture, “ our nation will indeed be one brotherhood in Christ! ” Probably he was aided in his delusion by a labor leader in the audience, who, having peacefully slumbered under a sense of polysyllabic eloquence dear to the heart of the popular orator, clasped his hand cordially, with the remark, “Professor, that was fine! that was fine! ”

Avoid Scylla and Cliarybdis, and other necessities confront us. The man who would reach the people must be vivid, pictorial, emotional. No sham emotion, if you please. No one detects unreality more swiftly than the workers. They are emotional; they are not sentimental. But it is the experience of the writer that to no other audience can one let natural feelings have free play, and speak out heart as well as mind, with such a blessed sense of freedom and fellowship. The untrained mind, moreover, thinks in images, a little more directly than the trained; the subject which cannot be treated in the concrete, if such exist, would better be left alone. Are you treating of a sociological situation ? Reduce it to terms of the individual, and talk, not of the economic man, but of John and Harry. Are you presenting a poet ? Bring out directly, with no pause for secondary matters, the passion at the heart of him. A working-class audience is likely to be more poetic than another, and all the poetry in you would better be allowed to come out in talking to it.

Be brief; be clear; be coherent. Be dignified; be pictorial; be impassioned. There is no use in trying to talk to working people unless these conditions are fulfilled. Are they ever fulfilled? And if so, is it worth while to spend the rare man in whom they meet on the small and shifting gatherings which are all we can hope to command?

The writer believes that it is well worth while. For granted such a lecturer, no matter what his topic, — city politics, Italian art, astronomical theory, — and two or three hearers will go home with a vision to carry into their working hours. At the same time, far better ways can be found of sharing our intellectual life with the unprivileged than by lecturing to them.

For the lecturer, poor soul, comes from a distant country, to talk for an hour in a world unfamiliar to him, and then withdraws, with no means of knowing how far his language has been comprehensible or acceptable to his hearers. Only the strongest imaginative sympathy can save him from gross blunders. One might suppose that instinct would for example preserve a speaker from assigning the name of “Mike ” to the man of straw in an economic discussion, when addressing an Irish audience, or from describing the fear of hell as a form of fire insurance, in the presence of Roman Catholics. But things like this most of us have done; and if luck or tact have saved us from giving positive offense, it remains true that any lecture delivered in knowledge of the subject, but in ignorance of the audience, must miss its mark.

Our theme again! In order to promote the common life, it is important to live the life in common.

In dreams one plays with paradox; why not an interchange of social posts ? Is it fair that one class should have all the outward advantages and all the inward resources too ? The vision rises of men, gently born and bred, gladly yielding for a time their pleasant houses, their environment rich in suggestion, to their disinherited brethren, and performing in shop and factory part of the mechanical labor necessary to the race, while yet their spirits dwell afar, in that spiritual city of culture of which their birthright makes them free. A dream indeed! But it is no dream that sensitive people are coming to feel that a blight rests upon the inner landscape, wherein we walk alone, and from which we know our fellows excluded. To the land of invisible delights, however, only the hand of a friend can throw open the gates. It is not the acquisition of learning which we desire for the wageearners, but the enrichment of life, — in other words, the extension of personality. And personality can grow only through contact with persons. Love, the one uniting force in a world of centripetal forces, must act from man to man if the distant are to be brought near.

Ten or fifteen years ago, when plans for achieving a social democracy, or for returning to it, were much mooted, one objection always raised a scornful head : the thing could not be done. Any efforts to bring rich and poor, educated and illiterate, into a common atmosphere were against nature, and therefore sure to fail. This was simple; it sounded conclusive to many people, aware what traditions must be disregarded, what constraint and self-consciousness must be overcome, before they could themselves mingle naturally and pleasurably with fellow beings whose enunciation differed from their own.

“Solvitur ambulando : ” as an answer to this objection arose the settlement movement. “The essence of good society,” wrote that excellent American, Lowell, in 1847, rebuking a friend who had expressed a distaste for talk with rustic neighbors, “is simply a community in habits of thought and topics of interest. When we approach each other naturally, we meet easily and gracefully; if we hurry too much, we are apt to come together with an unpleasant bump.” Settlements have not been in a hurry; they have furnished the means for approaching our fellows naturally. In their sunny atmosphere, separating traditions, self-consciousness, timidity on both sides, vanish like mists of the night, and a “community in habits of thought and topics of interest ” grows up between neighbors and residents as a matter of course. It must be confessed that we see as yet only faint beginnings of what we desire, and that the lips of the objector still murmur. Yet of the natural unity of consciousness between rich and poor, educated and unlearned, which results from simple daily intimacy, enough is seen — and has been since the world began — to enable us to fling emphatic denial in the face of that scornful “Impossible.”

In houses where this kind of natural intercourse is established, or expected, intellectual fellowship between people of different traditions will probably crystallize. Small groups, rarely numbering more than a dozen, will gather around some lover of art, history, literature, to share his delights. In the “clubs ” or “classes ” thus created the real conditions of our problem may at last be fairly studied. Here the spiritual distance which holds a lecturer from his audience, if not overcome, may at least be measured; here the personal contact of mind with mind, so difficult in our overcrowded schoolrooms, may be attained. For years, the writer has watched a number of such groups, and can testify to their worth, — a worth far wider than that of brightening the life of one individual here or there, sacred as this end may be. As one talks with a single boy or girl, week after week, light falls on the relation of entire classes, and we gain what years of theorizing would not bring us.

The chief value of such classes is less in their achievement of results than in their revelation of conditions. Difficulties in the way of full intellectual fellowship appear on every hand, — difficulties small and large, absurd and grave. Some of them can be conquered ; these stimulate to action. Others, under present industrial conditions, cannot; these stimulate to thought.

Let us glance, for a moment, at a difficulty of the first type,— a primary question, yet never considered at all by two thirds of our admirable schemes for “elevating the masses.” On what ground shall we try to meet ? It is painfully evident that uneducated people do not naturally like the same things as the children of privilege. Probably in Athens or in fifteenth-century Florence there was no such divergence of taste. Art and letters blossomed in the open, from the rich soil of popular life, not in class greenhouses, carefully secluded from common air. That the contrary obtains to-day; that the arts such as they are form a class monopoly; and that our people at large, left to themselves, not only produce nothing good, but too often enjoy nothing good, in the way of music, art, or letters, is of course one of the significant and painful facts that are turning young artists to socialism. Meantime, what are we going to do if we wish to follow Stevenson’s admirable advice, and make ourselves good and other people happy ? It is a question faced by every settlement, in its recreative as well as in its educational moods. Shall we make people happy by offering what they like, —cheap music, vulgar chromos, and so on ? We can do this. Or shall we insist that they be made happy by what we like, — Pre-Raphaelite art, it may be, or the music of Wagner ? This we cannot do, but we can spend a great deal of time in trying to do it.

The truth is that we are to attempt neither course. We are not to furnish vulgar or even inferior things simply because they are acceptable : this is immoral. Neither are we to offer recondite delights which only the select few in any class would appreciate: this is absurd. We have to discover, by very delicate experiment, the common ground, which assuredly exists in every province, where educated and uneducated can alike rejoice to wander. The thing is not easy to do, nor is theory of much avail; but it is possible. We must seek that which is wholesome, universal, and enduring, and also moderately near our natural understanding; and when we have found this, we may rest assured that if only we have sufficient tact — which is another name for love — to open the path, the weariest and most ignorant mind may find joy and healing. Supreme beauty and significance will make their way, if a chance is given them : of that we may rest assured.

Even here, of course, distinctions exist. Some great literature is almost too remote for simple grown-up folk to reach. “Mercy! I could listen to that trash all night without feeling tired,” was the cheerful remark of a weary labor leader entertained at a country house by a scholar’s exquisite rendering of the Odyssey straight from the Greek. Perhaps a glimpse came to the scholar that the woes of Odysseus might well seem “trash” to one breathlessly absorbed in following the modern labor war. Boys, however, can always listen to a spirited rendering of the great epic of the boyhood of the race. As for Shakespeare, — he of our tongue, our heart, our mind, — where can he not establish his sway, if a friend but lead to him? Nor can one help feeling that life grows broader and brighter in a street where, during an entire winter, fresh boyish voices are constantly heard breaking into the eloquence of Mark Antony or the passion of Shylock. Sometimes one finds the universal where one least expects it. I have overheard a middle-aged Swedish woman repeat with simple delight to her neighbor at an evening party —

In a hot laundry, where the girls stood ironing collars by the thousand through the August days, one girl, chanting Wordsworth’s dew-pure poems on Lucy to a little tune of her own, set all her mates to follow. “It makes it seem cooler in there, ” was the comment of one among them. And it is often said that you cannot interest working people in poetry ! Doubtless race counts for something. The primary instinct of the Hebrews, for instance, leads rather to metaphysics. But the Celts among us, at all events, have full imaginative sensitiveness, as any one could see who turned from a critical class of college students, languidly analyzing, let us say, The Ancient Mariner, to the dreaming eyes and eager if stumbling tongues of young Irish people, under the mystic spell of the same poem.

In music, Germans and Hebrews alike can often not only follow,but lead. The teacher of music in an East Side settlement assures us that nine out of ten of her little pupils in the neighborhood possess positive talent, while the proportion is reversed among her pupils uptown. As regards art, the puzzle of sharing our delights is especially great, because so few of us in America have any delights to share. Few enterprises are more interesting, however, than the annotated picture exhibitions with personal guides, now sometimes held in poor quarters; while loan art collections are at least useful as showing us what not to do. Such collections also prove one positive thing: that for a Roman Catholic population the devotional art of Italy furnishes a large section of the common ground we seek. A taste for modern Pre-Raphaelites, it may be added, cannot be cultivated among them. Is the misfortune great ? One curious blank spot exists in the eye of the city wageearner. Landscape, which one sentimentally presents to him as a substitute for the refreshment of nature, arouses no emotions in his breast. His first and last enthusiasm, whether in art or life, is for persons.

Large ideals grow from small endeavors ; it is not too much to say that new conceptions of our national destiny shape themselves in the mind of him who enters into loving fellowship with one and another of our poor. He sees in vision the race slowly forming on our shores, composite of the races of the western world. For, whether we will or no, the Anglo-Saxon is not the American; nor will he, as the centuries advance, remain on our soil in racial isolation. Too strong is that mighty impulse toward unity with which we may coöperate if we will; instincts of Celt, of Slav, of Hebrew, of Latin, as well as of AngloSaxon and of Dutch, will throb in the veins of the Americans to be. All is process as yet; they throng to our coasts, these seeming alien peoples, bearing, unconsciously to themselves, rare gifts, for lack of which our nation suffers; we press them into exclusive ministry to our material needs. If the word “Irish” or “Jew” carries with it a suggestion from which our Anglo-Saxon instinct shrinks, not wholly without reason, where lies the fault ? Assuredly in the civilization that develops and emphasizes in each case the lower racial characteristics, instead of giving wise nurture to those higher faculties which might, under happier conditions, enrich the AngloSaxon type. Have we no use, in the formation of our people, for the poetic and emotional sensibility of the Celt ? For the religious passion and metaphysical ardor of the Hebrew ? For that instinct toward the plastic arts yet strong in the Italian ? The strength and persistence of these elements history makes plain; intelligent personal fellowship corroborates the witness of history. We, the Americans first in possession, have escaped, it may be, in a measure, the racial antagonisms and prejudices so marked in the Old World; we have advanced to a negative hospitality and a reluctant toleration; but we have done no more. The nobler powers of our guests and fellow citizens we allow to atrophy and degenerate, while we profit by their mere labor force. We lose an opportunity, we make a great mistake.

It is a mistake that springs largely from ignorance; from our indolent refusal to create, by loving effort, a spiritual democracy corresponding to our outward forms. Two conclusions press themselves upon the mind. The first is sad; we realize that industrial conditions at present absolutely forbid the manual workers from entering on any large scale or in any general sense into the intellectual inheritance of the race. The second is joyful; we become aware that these same workers possess faculties even now ready to yield quick response to a wise culture, and only awaiting a wider freedom to help in enlarging and uplifting our national life. Not the laboring classes alone, but all of us, suffer in class isolation. Neither by improved educational systems, nor by personal contact on formal lines, can this isolation be overcome, but only by a genuine living of the common life, and by the social and industrial changes that must follow. Our scattered thoughts on democracy and education lead us straight to the more searching theme of democracy and society.

Vida D. Scudder.