Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/127

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY.
115

emphasis and its conclusions as applied to a concrete circumstance it was a new creation. As philosophers those who drew its phraseology had predecessors; as American statesmen, they had none. The undimmed glory of a new initiative is thus theirs.

He who would be for American education the Jefferson to herald the liberating word and intone the birth song of a new freedom, will, consciously or unconsciously, pursue paths analogous to those which the framers and signers of the declaration of our political independence chose for their confession of faith. In his theories, the spirit of the age will find a powerful echo. His, as incontestably as any European thinker's, is the past of the race. The failures and the victories with which the records of distant centuries or near decades are vocal are weighty monitions or winged messages to him. The American educator is no Chinese Mandarin who in the anxiety to preserve his independence forgets the interdependence of all ages and countries. For such Mandarins America has no call. But in the application of his wisdom, gleaned in all the fields and quarried in all the mines of accessible earth, the American has no more urgent circumstance to weigh and to remember than that he is neither in Germany nor in England—but in America.

In their temporal appointments even, for many circling years to come, if not for ever, our universities will be confronted with difficulties pressing down to the same degree none of their European continental sisters. In Germany and France, and the other transatlantic states, education in its widest scope, from the primary school to the academy, counting among its members the greatest masters, is the solicitude of the government. Museums, libraries and laboratories; funds for publications and grants for scientific expeditions are endowed or maintained from the same source from which the police or administrative machinery of organized society draws its support. Moreover, the university stands, on the one hand, in an organic relation to the secondary schools, which are regulated with a sole eye to make them the well-equipped drill and recruiting grounds for the higher schools;