Full text: Proceedings of the International Congress of Education of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July 25-28, 1893

336 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
look forward to a life of his own choice and making, will desire culture, 
learning, and accomplishments. The youth growing up in the home of 
the workingman, without fortune or reasonable expectation of ever secur- 
.ng even a competence, compelled to look forward to a life of constant 
and perhaps arduous labor, subject to a competition from neighbors, or, 
often, from workingmen thousands of miles away, needs, first of all, that 
knowledge and training which will enable him to hold his own and make 
sure of subsistence and freedom from privation for his family and himself. 
The average citizen, with such capital as a generation or two of industry 
and skill may have laid aside fer him, free to give time and money for 
such education as can be given him before the approach of manhood 
brings with it the cares and responsibilities of his later working life, seeks, 
.f he be wise, first the insurance against failure in his vocation, next such 
culture and such knowledge as he may gain therewith, as a part of or in 
connection with his preparation for his life’s work. Finally, the well-to- 
do citizen possessing competence, though not wealth, seeks for his son or 
his daughter a scientific training for a profession, and a culture befitting 
nis station in life ; the first the essential, the last the most desired. 
Every citizen asks the privilege and claims the right to secure as much of 
the necessary preparation for the future of his life, and as much of that 
culture which ¢s life, as time, means; and natural capacity may permit 
him to fairly demand. 
It was long ago recognized by statesmen and men of mind that one of 
she first duties of the state is to make sure of the fitting education of the 
people of the state by providing elementary schools for all who choose to 
avail themselves of them. It was also early admitted that a system of 
useful elementary education presupposes higher institutions of learning 
in which the teachers of those schools may be prepared for their work, 
and in which all the learning of the time may be preserved and given full- 
est opportunity for extension and expansion. It is now well understood 
oy all intelligent men that the state must, to insure the highest prosperity 
and enlightenment of its people, directly or indirectly, by legislation or 
shrough the stimulated or spontaneous liberality of its wealthy men, 
superpose secondary schools upon primary, colleges upon the schools, and 
place universities at the apex of the structure. The great States of the 
West have their State universities; the old States of the East have their 
Harvard and Yale and Brown and Amherst and Williams, at once monu- 
ments to great and statesmanlike citizens among the wealthy classes, and 
capsheaves of their educational systems. No State so poor and sparsely 
populated, no statesman so weak and narrow, as to refuse to build to the 
very peak of the pyramid. In fact, it is often asserted that the true 
statesman, like Washington and Jefferson, Madison and the Adamses, 
makes the university the foundation, the secondary schools the body, and 
the primary schools the supported apex of the system ; the whole resting
	        
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