LITERATE DEMOCRACY

Education has of late undergone meticulous examination from the inside, examination principally of method, somewhat of correlation with life. Fundamentally, inspection of this nature is the only way to effect improvement. Where particular processes are so many, particular criticism is the most effective. But it suits another state of mind to look at a subject in the large, even at the risk of gaining false effects. It is interesting to compare, for instance, the political condition of the nations where general education is most common with that of nations where education has received less attention. If the figures lie, if they mis-relate cause and effect, they are at least pleasant to contemplate.

Illiteracy figures as quoted in the current "World's Work" credit Germany with the lowest proportion of illiterates in her population with the figure of five hundredths of one percent. Switzerland, Great Britain, United States, and France follow in order, the last named housing a population fourteen percent illiterate. All of these are countries in which democratic government has attained high development through many and troublous experiments. In Italy, where representative government has been at best a bad dream and at worst a nightmare, the percentage of illiterates reaches thirty-one, in Spain fifty-eight, and in Russia sixty-nine. Evidently success in democracy usually accompanies a high percentage of literacy.

It's another thing, however, to say that democratic government can exist only in countries where literacy is general. The success of the republics of antiquity with their large slave populations obviously precludes such a conclusion. Yet it does definitely appear that literacy must prevail among the franchised if popular government is to remain effective. The giving of political privilege to the educationally and hence politically incompetent has made a farce of Democracy in Italy, Spain, and Russia, and all but destroyed it in those countries. The need for good government in Democratic nations is thus a sanction for universal education and, conversely, the success of democratic government in the more literate countries suggests that the educative efforts have not been entirely amiss.

But this is by way of extreme optimism. It is an open question whether it is at all valuable to the world to sweat that it may have the best that universal education and popular government have to offer. To many that best is a level of mediocrity; a level, moreover, to which brilliance must lower itself that dullness may prosper. These skeptics have their plausable case. Yet it may truly be said that society is confronted with a condition and not a theory. Democracy is in vogue; universal education in full swing. The improvements to be made must begin with the obvious faults of operation, the obvious misconceptions of education. Only thus can reform fall to be quixotic.