How Uncle Sam Wooed His New Conscience Once Uncle Sam lived in reasonable married happiness with a conscience. But a few years since his companion died, leaving him the problem of a family of unruly children (Pharisaism, Immigration, Trusts, Railroads, Saloons). For years the widower let them grow up as best they would. Of late, however, he has begun to see what home can be without a mother; and he is determined to find a successor for his lost partner The present cartoon is the first of a series which will show how, in his endeavor to win the approval of his conscience, he disciplines one after another of the children I. THE PROPOSAL Uncle Sam-"Wilt have me as I am?" His New Conscience-"Not until you make your children behave " The World Go-Day VOLUME XIV MARCH, 1908 NUMBER 3 R Are We Educating Aristocrats? IGHT in the midst of the hurly-burly of trying to get a candidate for the candidacy for the presidency, the American people are undertaking to reform their educational system. There is no man, or for that matter, no woman so poor as not to have somewhere concealed about his or her person a criticism of our schools and colleges. With the zeal of your born reformer these gentlemen and ladies are doing the best they can to reform each other while they are reforming the schools, but they all agree in one thing: our educational system ought to be different from what it is. One man insists that college education unfits a man for work in foundries and machine shops. Another man insists that the state should pay nothing for maintaining high schools, but should devote its funds to teaching trades. Teachers, trustees and parents are engaged the country over in an intermittent attack upon high school societies, while, emboldened by the general spirit of discontent, some have even dared to attack that bulwark of college loyalty, the college fraternity. And above all the pedagogical melee there rises one voice lamenting in the best of accents and broad A's that the workingmen on Boston street cars do not rise to let a Harvard professor have a seat. They tell us that our education as it now stands, particularly in its so-called "higher" forms, is making aristocrats. The charge is just true enough to be serious. There are schools and colleges where those families that can afford it pay out a minimum of a (Copyright, 1908, by THE WORLD TO-DAY COMPANY.) thousand dollars a year for having their sons pass examinations, join fraternities and become enthusiasts over athletic teams. Many students act like snobs. Their standards of success are measured by income and social position; their very friendships seem determined by the size of incomes. Their sympathies in college are limited by their cliques and vacation house-parties. They toil not, neither do they study, until with a tutor just before examination; and yet Solomon in all his glory had no such sense of the importance of Zion as they have of their fraternities. Are these men not on the highway to contempt of democracy? Are they as eager to forget the Declaration of Independence as are their sisters to marry impecunious titles? To find the real student life of the nation one must look away from the half dozen institutions of which these charges are true, to the hundreds of other colleges and universities in which the great bulk of our young men and women are being educated. A large proportion of these students are working their way. They take care of furnaces, they canvass for books, they wait on tables, they hire out as farm hands. The instruction they get comes from men who themselves, almost without exception, have had the same experience. College professors have a contempt for the man who measures the good things of life by their money value. As a class they are full of warm social sympathies and are champions of democracy. College fraternities, it is true, have erected certain artificial lines between students, but fraternity men, when once they have passed out from college, see in their fraternities only the crucibles where lifelong friendships have been made. In the rush of their ordinary employment they claim no superiority and perpetuate no class feeling. * The man who knows college men in school and out knows that they are the best friends democracy has. They have their prejudices; but what man without prejudices is worth anything? They have their friends, but they do not expect workingmen to rise to give them seats in street cars. They see certain dangers in organized labor, but they see even more dangers in predatory wealth. As long as our colleges turn out this sort of aristocrats, democracy need have no fear. |