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EDUCATION
A Brief Confession of Faith

[[Symbols depicted include a book and cross (Bible) and swastikas.]]

By JAMES H. DILLARD
President of the Slater and Jeanes Funds

I HAVE frequently said: I do not believe in industrial education.  I do not believe in academic education.  I believe in education.  The question how we are to get education has, in my opinion, no definite answer.  Three of the best educated men I have ever known went to school but two or three years in their lives.  Yet they knew how to use their minds, they had high vision and broad vision, and they loved art and good literature.  Looking back over my own experience I find that the place to which I look with most gratitude for what help in education I received was a one-room school; but there was a great-minded man in that one-room school.  He was one of two men whom I have ever met who could really read Latin and Greek.  He knew the whole range of history, and he took us boys into his confidence.  So it comes from my experience that I would have for answer to the question, how to get education, only this: yourself, wanting to learn; and a real man, wanting to teach.  It is the old answer of Mark Hopkins on one end of the log and you at the other.  What Dr. DuBois said about Spence at Fisk tells the same story.  All our modern expensive equipment, so far as real education goes, is as nothing in comparison.

As things go, I think it is well for us to have both book teaching and thing teaching, and for real education I value the latter very largely because of its reaction upon the former.  I can see that when I was a boy at school I did not think back of the words to the facts or things represented by the words.  I can sympathize fully with the boy to whom China was yellow because the map was yellow, and Russia pink because the map was pink.  I did not connect even mensuration in Arithmetic with actual things, although the words named the things.  I should have been shocked if told to get on the floor and actually measure it.  It seems to me that dealing with things, doing things with hands, has a tendency to correct this danger of having the mind stop with the words and fail to project the thought to what the words mean.

There is, of course, an educational value in knowing how to do things, whether it be to make a table or a biscuit, or to raise cabbage.  There certainly is an educational value in such work if the instructor insist that the table sit steady, that the biscuit be a good one, and the cabbage-planting be done just right.  Accuracy is one of the marks of an educated man.  But in my own mind I confess that the material benefit of what is called industrial education comes second.  It is education that we want, because the educated mind can set itself and its body to whatever is needed to be done.

I can never think of education as depending on grades high or low.  I am sure that I got more of what seems to me to be education from the one-room school than I got from my course in college.  And yet for the sake of knowledge we have the grades from the primary to university, and I am sure that we should neglect none.  I think moreover that every boy and girl should have a chance at all of them if he or she can be benefited thereby.  Knowing, however, the inevitable fact that the great majority for a long time to come are to be in the so-called lower grades of education, I am sure that relative much more money should be spent than at present on these lower grades.  Even for the sake of colleges this should be.  The newly inaugurated Governor of Virginia says "We must build from the bottom up," and I venture to hope that a majority of Virginians will agree with him.  Certain it is that many now think that Thomas Jefferson made a mistake when he gave most of this thought and enthusiasm to the top part first.  I know all the arguments about having teachers and leaders and all that.  It is a question of emphasis and proportion, and we need not fly to either extreme.

Permit me to say in this connection that in making recommendations to the Slater Board, my aim has been to have one-third of the income go to what is called higher education.  This is relatively a high amount, but under the circumstances I do not think too high.  It might be wiser in consideration of the smallness of the actual amount to divide this among fewer institutions than fifteen or twenty as has usually been done.  There is a general recognition of

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