In one year of the war we are spending twenty billion dollars. The interest on this vast sum at four per cent. is eight hundred million dollars a year,--or just fifty millions more than we spent on all forms of education last year in the United States. We are willing to spend this amount of money to make the world safe for democracy. Are we willing to spend a similar sum to put real meaning and content into the word democracy? It is conceivable that during the war we may become so accustomed to giving and tax-paying that after the war we may be willing to make similar sacrifices that democracy may have a fair chance to bear its true and legitimate fruits. In the first year of the war Mr. Rockefeller has given to the Red Cross and other philanthropic causes $70,000,000. He has done this with immense satisfaction, and without serious inconvenience. It is to be hoped that during the war he and our twenty-two thousand other millionaires may become so accustomed to paying income taxes that it may degenerate into a habit, and that after the war, from this source our funds for education may be doubled or trebled. Mr. Rockefeller should be financing not merely Mr. Flexner's experiment station in secondary education; he should be financing a hundred other secondary schools in an equally splendid way. But we can never hope to make our educational program really significant, merely by compelling the millionaires to pay their rightful share of the expense. We shall never succeed in this program, until we have become sufficiently interested in the matter to be willing to make sacrifices ourselves. It is with extreme regret that I am compelled to admit that the heart of this great problem is economic, and that the streets of the New Jerusalem we are striving to build, must be not metaphorically, but literally paved with gold.
If we can assume that after the war industrial education will be properly established and financed without diverting funds from the higher forms of education, if we can even assume that the funds available for the more humanistic training will be greatly increased, there still remain two potent forces in our educational world which seriously threaten to undermine and impair our democracy and the humanism which is its eventual goal. I refer to the corrupting influence of athletics in our high schools and colleges, and the attitude of the state towards the small college.