A Question of Investment

W. C. Bagley

The libel suit of Mr. Henry Ford against the Chicago Tribune was far more significant educationally than financially or politically. Its significance to education, however, is not to be identified with the moral which one or two newspapers went out of their way to point. The New York Evening Sun, for example, in commenting on Mr. Ford's apparent limitations in the matter of book learning, advanced its conviction that the public schools were at fault. Mr. Ford, we believe, attended a district school in Michigan in the early 'seventies. Reference to the reports of the Commissioner of Education discloses the fact that the average annual expenditure for each pupil enrolled in the public schools at this period was about $15. The one-room schools of Michigan were certainly not above the average in this respect; and Mr. Ford's schooling was doubtless not in excess of six years' duration. A little computation enables us to reach the conclusion that the public invested not to exceed $90 at the most in the education of the gentleman in question. If the verdict of the jury had proved that Mr. Ford was all that the Tribune contended, we should be quite willing to hazard the conclusion that the public got about what it paid for.

The

Mount Clemens Tragedy

The important lesson of the Ford suit, however, is of a quite different character. As a people, we have never fully recognized that the primary purpose of public education is good citizenship. One essential of good citizenship is the ability to make one's way in the world; but this is not the whole story as many people have apparently believed. Through no apparent virtue of his schooling, Mr. Ford has made a most distinguished career in the field of industry. Also, through no apparent virtue of his schooling, he has used his vast wealth to promote the public good in many ways. Through qualities that were undoubtedly innate, he came into a position of large influence. Therein lay the peril. Lacking the background that systematic education would have. provided, he lacked balance. Of the very study that he needed most he has actually boasted of his ignorance. History would have given to Mr. Ford the background that is indispensable to the leadership that came to him inevitably as a result of his amazing success. From the social point of view, the situation portrayed by the events at Mount Clemens was not a farce; it was a tragedy. A man rich in the native qualities that Americans have always idealized enterprise, initiative, simplicity of life, abhorrence of ostentation, and a sincere desire to serve his fellows-is deprived of the larger part of a great and beneficent influence because, for some reason or another, he was prejudiced against books. The good people of our democracy may smile at Mr. Ford-but they should remember they themselves are not investing in the education of ten million potential duplicates appreciably more than the public of a former generation invested in the education of Mr. Ford.

Andrew Carnegie

Almost simultaneously with the termination of the Ford suit came the news of Andrew Carnegie's death. The coincidence suggested to many people the similarities in the careers of these two masters of industry-and the differences. Mr. Carnegie, like Mr. Ford, was a self-made man. Like Mr. Ford, too, he lacked early educational advantages. Like Mr. Ford, his native ability was more than sufficient to compensate for this handicap in so far as his individual success in life was concerned. In the democracy and altruism of the two men there is a close parallel. Mr. Carnegie, however, had a profound interest in, and respect for, education. The shortcomings of his early instruction were corrected by a lifetime of systematic reading. An overwhelming proportion of his large fortune was devoted to the advancement of learning and the extension of educational opportunities. Public libraries in thousands of towns and cities are enduring material monuments to his memory. So keenly did he appreciate the work of teachers that he wished to establish a pension system that would provide for all of them in their old age, but when he found that even his great fortune would be quite negligible even if exclusively devoted to this end, he limited this phase of his philanthropy to college teachers-and in carrying out his plans he found it necessary to have made some of the most thoroughgoing and influential studies of higher. education that have been undertaken up to the present time, including Flexner's epoch-making investigation of medical education, and Mann's brilliant study of engineering education. In order to promote research he endowed the Carnegie Institution of Washington with funds sufficient to carry on investigation in pure science at once so profound and so costly that even governments would hesitate to initiate them. He founded, supported, and endowed the Carnegie Institute of Technology at Pittsburgh,—a great university which is already giving a good account of itself and for which a great future can safely be predicted. He established the Carnegie Corporation which holds in trust a substantial residue of his fortune to be used in the support and extension of his earlier philanthropic enterprises. Last, but by no means least, as an educational endowment, he left the stimulating example of a great life-a life devoted unselfishly to the fine ambition of helping humanity on its hard road onward and upward.