MR. JONES: “Your coarse sarcasm, if aimed at me, is misdirected. I never went to college. I didn’t want to tend furnaces, so when I finished high school I got a job. But there’s something to this gentleman’s sons’ stuff. I had four years’ start of Smith, but I feel that he’s got a certain advantage over me just because he _is_ a college man. Now why is that, I’d like to know? I could have gone to college too, if I had cared enough about it. But studying didn’t interest me. I was bored with high school.”
Exactly, Mr. Jones. And some hundreds of thousands of others were also so bored with high school that even the prestige which a college education confers, could not tempt them to further meaningless efforts. You have explained a large part of the breakdown of our public school system. In theory--but Mr. Robinson wishes to speak.
MR. ROBINSON: “Theory--theory--theory! I think it’s about time a few facts were injected into this alleged discussion! The fact I’m interested in is just this: I quit school when I was twelve years old. I had just finished grammar school. I _couldn’t_ go to high school. I _had_ to go to work. What have your theories of education got to do with me?”
Everything, Mr. Robinson! You smashed one theory to pieces, you were about to be condemned to a peculiar kind of slavery by another theory, and you were rescued after a fashion by a third theory. You are, to begin with, the rock upon which the good ship Education foundered. As I was about to say when I was interrupted: the grandiose ideal of a gentleman’s sons’ education for every American boy failed--because there were some millions of American boys like you who _could not_ go to college, and some hundreds of thousands of others like Mr. Jones here, who _would not_--who did not feel that it was worth the necessary effort. And these vast hordes of you going out into the world at the age of twelve to sixteen with only the precarious beginning of a leisure class culture, became the educational problem which the last generation has been trying to solve.
It was the American Business Man who proposed the first “practical” reform; and if you have any doubt of the validity of the Caste theory, note what happened. The American Business Man knew that these millions of youths were going to enter his shops and factories; they were not going to be members of a leisure class, they were going to be wage-slaves; and so he proposed to educate them to be efficient wage-slaves.