he community is higher, but the average
among educated persons is lower, because the educated class has been
enlarged by the addition of large numbers of slightly educated persons.

This phenomenon is common to all stages of progress in all sorts of
things. It is true, for instance, in the general advance of the world in
civilization. The average degree of appreciation of art among persons who
know anything of art at all is less, for instance, than in the days of
ancient Greece, because the class of art-lovers throughout the world is
vastly larger and includes a very large number of persons whose
appreciation of art is slight and crude. There is, nevertheless, a greater
total amount of love for art, and a higher average of art education,
taking into account the world's entire population, than there was then.
Let us state the case mathematically: If, of one thousand persons, ten
have a hundred dollars each and the rest nothing, a gift of five dollars
each to five hundred others will raise the average amount owned by each of
the thousand, but will greatly lower the average amount held by the
property owners in the group, who will now number 510, instead of ten.

"How do you demonstrate all this?" will probably be asked. I do not know
of any statistical data that will enable it to be proved directly, but it
is certain that education is becoming more general, which must increase
the number of partly educated persons having an imperfect educational
background--a lack of ancestral training and home influence. Thus, among
the persons with whom the educated adult comes in contact, he necessarily
meets a larger number of individuals than formerly who betray lack of
education in speech, writing or taste; and he wrongly concludes that the
schools are not doing their work properly. If the schools were not doing
their work properly, we should have direct statistical evidence of it, and
all the direct evidence I have seen goes to show that the schools are
accomplishing more to-day and accomplishing it by better methods, than
ever before.

Similarly, I believe that the totality of teaching ability in the
profession has increased. The conspicuous failures are persons who are
unfit to be teachers and who have been drafted into service because of our
sudden increase in educational plant. The result in some cases has been a
curious aberration in disciplinary methods--a freakishness that is
inseparable from any sudden advance such as we a