This is why the man who aspires to freedom instinctively reaches for the weapon of education. This is why the American people always have had as their dominant passion the passion for education. This is why on the frontier the schoolhouse is finished before the home is furnished; why the washerwoman and the drayman toil to keep their children in school and to send at least one son to college; why our self-made men pour out their wealth in educational endowments; why there are all these colossal public appropriations for schools, academies, colleges, universities.
Of course there are the illiterates and the almost illiterate. But, numerous though they are, they do not count for much in this republic. They do not decide elections. They do not select candidates. They do not propose and compel legislation. The so-called ignorant vote is not a national or a local peril. It is not a national, rarely even a local factor.
The ignorance that counts in a Democracy is educated ignorance. Sometimes it has only been part of the way through the common schools. Sometimes it has one or more university degrees. Sometimes it struts and preens itself as “the scholar in politics.” Only too often it writes books, especially histories, and in the magazines and in the newspapers tells how and for whom we ought to vote. More often than not the very conspicuous members of this ignorant class are full to the overflowing with knowledge, knowledge from books, knowledge from experience, knowledge from travel.
No, education--democratic education--is not knowledge. It is not even experience. Profound, deadly, dangerous ignorance is compatible with both.
All its shades and kinds can be so classified as to exclude none who ought to be included, include none who has the right to go free. Is not the dangerous, ignorant man of the Democracy the man who cannot reason, cannot think for himself?
What does it mean to think for one’s self?
Fortunately, it does not mean original thinking. If that were so there would instantly arise in the world the most contracted and exclusive aristocracy it has ever known. To think for one’s self does not even mean correctly to reason out one’s own conclusions from given premises. That would involve an amount of mental labor from which many brains might shrink. It merely means to be able to follow reasoning that is laid before one; to hear both sides and suspend judgment until both are heard; to recognize which is sound and which fallacious, and upon that independent and clear judgment to accept the true, or rather, to reject the false.