We Americans reason better, perhaps, than any other nation about a wider range of affairs; probably not with so much depth as some other peoples, but certainly with greater clearness. But this is due to a compulsory training almost altogether outside of the schoolroom. It is due to Democracy, that compels the mind to grow as Spring’s sunshine compels the seed. As our affairs, both public and private, have grown more complex, the defects due to this haphazard education of the reasoning faculty, this treatment of it almost as if it were a weed, become more and more apparent, more and more in need of correction.
Common sense is looked upon as a gift of the gods, a sort of intuition. Is it not in reality merely the result of a somewhat better natural or acquired reasoning faculty? Ought not common sense to be the attainable possession of every American? And where but the schoolhouse is the place to obtain this possession, this means to self-rule, to freedom, to the full splendor of the noblest of human ideals, Democracy?
In a Democracy the school should not be the temple of knowledge. It should be the temple of reason. And it shall be! And that day will be a sad one for charlatanism and for charlatans.
Each year not far from fifty million dollars are spent in America in exploiting cures for digestion troubles; and no doubt we give the doctors and the druggists a thousand millions or so each year in seeking relief from the consequences of our ignorance and our folly in feeding ourselves. Some of us are too poor to get the right sort of food, even when we know what is the right kind; others are both ignorant and incapable of resisting the clamors of appetite. The problems of mental and physical food are not analogous; they are two parts of a whole. Our ignorance of chemistry and hygiene and our unguarded appetites lead us into gastronomic folly; our ignorance of the simple and easily learned laws of the mind and our vitiated and undiscriminating mental appetites, called passions and prejudices, lead us into educational follies as wild but no wilder than our gastronomic follies. The results of the one show in poor health; the results of the other show in confusion in the conduct of our affairs, private and public.