J. Gresham Machen Bibliography

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I may say, if you will pardon a personal word, that the Chairman is incorrect in connecting me with Princeton University. As a matter of fact, I am connected with an institution which by some persons in certain fields is regarded as an opponent of liberty. But the charge is really very strange. I come, indeed, of a very strict sect, in company with my colleagues in the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary; but I come of a sect that has always been devoted to the great principles of liberty. And to my mind one of the fundamental principles of liberty, which is involved in the present issue, is the principle of the right of voluntary association, the right of persons to associate themselves—voluntarily for the propagation of their own views, however erroneous they may be thought to be by others, in the field of religion or in other spheres.

You will find, I think, if you investigate the matter, that it is this principle of voluntary association which, strangely enough is being attacked by same persons in the name of liberty. People seem to have a notion that a voluntary organization, religious or otherwise, is not free to exclude from the body of its official representatives those who hold principles which are diametrically opposed to its own. But as a matter of fact the principle of voluntary association, with maintenance of the purpose for which a voluntary association is formed, is at the very roots of human liberty. But with that right of voluntary association goes insistence upon the most complete tolerance on the part of the State (which is an involuntary association) over against all other bodies, religious or social or whatever they may be, no matter how deleterious to the common welfare some men may think that they are.

It is time to come to the special subject upon which I have been asked to speak. Shall we have a Federal Department of Education?

One bill (S. 291-H. R. 5000) has been introduced in the present Congress which looks directly to the establishment of such a department. Another bill (H. R. 4097) not only provides for the establishment of such a department, but also provides in very radical form for the principle of Federal aid to the States, laying down even very definite conditions on which that aid may be received. Another bill (S. 1334) has been introduced, and various proposals, as you know, have been made, looking to the reorganization of the federal departments. What the ultimate relationship between these measures and the establishment of a federal department will be, we cannot now tell; but I think that it is clear that just at the present juncture, in view of the very widespread support which the proposal has received, the question of a federal department of education is very decidedly before the country.

Do we want a Federal Department of Education, or do we not? I think we do not. And I am asking your permission to tell you very briefly why.

We do not, I think, want a Federal Department of Education because such a department is in the interests of a principle of uniformity or standardization in education which, if put into practice, would be the very worst calamity into which this country could fall. This measure cannot be understood unless it be viewed in connection with related measures, like the so-called Child Labor Amendment; or like the Sterling-Reed bill with its predecessors and its successor, which provided for Federal aid to the States and which really would have taken away what measure of States’ rights we possess.

People think very loosely in these days about receiving gifts. But on the basis of some observation of the reception of gifts in the educational field, I think I may give it as my opinion that a gift, in the educational field, always has a string tied to it. That may be observed with reference to various educational foundations. They provide ostensibly, sometimes, that the liberty of the institution to which they appropriate their funds is to be maintained. But in a very few years you will find that such institutions have become completely subservient to an outside board of control. And how much more obviously is that the case when we are dealing with the Federal Government, an agency which in, every possible way is encroaching upon the power of the States. Federal aid in education inevitably means federal control.

But the same result will be accomplished even by the measure that we now have directly in view. The establishment of a Federal Department of Education would be a step, and a decisive step, in exactly the same direction as those measures of which we have just been speaking. We are indeed, sometimes actually asked to believe that a Federal Department of Education is a very innocent thing, that when it is established it will not do anything, and will not ask for any funds, except funds that are already provided for various Federal agencies. But in this company I need not say that such modesty on the part of Federal departments is hardly in accordance with precedent. As a matter of fact it seems to be the fixed habit of every Federal bureau to ask for all the funds that it can get. I think that we may lay it down as a general principle that the more these bureaus get the more they want. And if we have a full-fledged Department of Education, with a Secretary at a salary of $15,000, and with hosts of other officers below that, we shall have a great Federal agency which is certain to embrace a larger and larger number of activities. And we shall have taken the really decisive step towards centralized control. It will be an extremely difficult, if not an absolutely impossible, thing to keep a Federal Department of Education as a merely paper affair and to prevent it from so extending its activities as to secure exactly the same results in the long run as the results that were aimed at by the so-called Child Labor Amendment and by the Sterling-Reed Bill.

It is clear, therefore, that if we want to defeat this tendency in the educational field, now is the time to do it. The reason why I am opposed to this proposal is that it represents a very ancient principle in the field of education, which, it seems to me, has been one of the chief enemies of human liberty for several thousand years—the principle, namely, that education is an affair essentially of the State, that education must be standardized for the welfare of the whole people and put under the control of government, that personal idiosyncrasies should be avoided. This principle, of course, was enunciated in classic form in ancient Greece. It is the theory, for example, that underlies the Republic of Plato. But the principle was not only enunciated in theory; it was also, in some of the Greek states, put into practice. It is a very ancient thing this notion that the children belong to the State, that their education must be provided for by the State in a way that makes for the State’s welfare. But that principle, I think you will find if you examine human history, is inimical at every step to liberty; and if there is any principle that is contrary to the whole genius of the Anglo-Saxon idea in government, it seems to me that it is this principle of thoroughgoing State control in education.

Of course, we have a great many prophets of it today. I suppose it is the basic idea of Mr. H. G. Wells, in his popular Outline of History. The solution of the problem of the state, Mr. Wells believes, is in education; and by undertaking this problem in a more efficient way, possible because of increased ease of communication, the modern state can accomplish what the Roman Empire failed to accomplish.

I am willing to admit that in some fields standardization is an admirable thing. For example, standardization is an admirable thing in the making of Ford cars. But just because it is an admirable thing in the making of Ford cars it is a very harmful thing, I think, in the case of human beings. The reason is that a Ford car is a machine and a human being is a person. There are, indeed, a great many men in the modern world who deny the distinction. At this point we have an illustration of the utter falsity of the popular notion that philosophy has no practical effect upon the lives of the people, that it does not make any difference what a man believes in the sphere of ultimate reality. For the whole tendency that we are fighting today has underlying it a rather definite theory. Ultimately underlying it, I suppose, is the theory of the behaviorists that the human race has at last found itself out, that it has succeeded in getting behind the scenes, that it has pulled off from human nature those tawdry trappings in which the actors formerly moved upon the human stage, that we have discovered that poetry and art and moral responsibility and freedom are delusions and that mechanism rules all. It is a mistake, we are told, to blame the criminal; the criminal is exactly what he is obliged to be, and good people are obliged to be exactly what they are. In other words, liberty is a delusion and human beings are just somewhat complicated machines.

It is probably not a thing which has come into the consciousness of very many people, but it is a fact all the same, that present-day education to a very large extent is dominated by exactly this theory, in one form or another. It is dominated partly by persons who hold the theory consciously; but it is dominated a great deal more by persons who have not the slightest notion what the ultimate source of their ideas in the field of education really is or what the result of them will be, but who are putting them into practice all the time.

What is the result of the application of this mechanistic theory in the sphere of education? I have no hesitation for my part in saying that the result is most lamentable. The result is simply intellectual as well as moral decline. It is obvious, I think, that there has been a moral decline; but what is not always observed is that there is also today a most astonishing and most lamentable intellectual decline. Poetry is silent; art is imitative or else bizarre; and if you examine the products of present-day education you will have to search far before you find a really well-stocked mind. I am not unaware, indeed, of the advantages of modern education; I am not unaware of the fact that a larger number of persons can read and write than formerly was the case. But despite all that I am still obliged to bring against the educational tendency of the present day in the sphere of public education the charge that the product is lamentably faulty.

We are told, you know, that the old-fashioned notion of really learning things is out of date. Some time ago I heard one educator, a rather well-known man, tell a company of college professors that it is a great mistake to think that the business of the college professor is to teach the student anything; the real business of the college professor, he said, is to give the students an opportunity to learn; and what the student is in college to do is to “unify his world.”

I am afraid that the students make a poor business of unifying their world for the simple reason that they have no world to unify. They have not acquired a large enough number of facts even to practice the mental business of putting facts together; they are really being starved for want of facts. There has been an absurdly exaggerated emphasis on methodology at the expense of content in education; and the methodology that is actually advocated is based upon the false and vicious theory to which I have just referred—a false and vicious theory that destroys all the higher elements in human life.

With the persons who advocate this theory I cannot bring myself to agree. Somehow I cannot believe that the higher things in human life are delusions and that only the lower things are real. And therefore I do believe in freedom, and I do believe that persons are different from Ford cars.

What you want in a Ford car is just as little individuality as you can get. Sometimes, indeed—I may say that on the basis of my experience with a Ford car—sometimes you get entirely too much individuality. I soon learned by my own experience, before the days of self-starters, that sometimes a Ford will start and sometimes it won’t, and that if it won’t there is no use whatever giving it any spiritual advice. Sometimes, in spite of what Mr. Ford can do, there has been an undue amount of individuality in the Ford car. But the aim of the whole activity at any rate, whatever the result may be, is to produce a thing that shall have just as little individuality as possible; the aim is that every Ford car shall be just as much like every other Ford car as it can possibly be made.

The aim of education, on the other hand, dealing, as education does, with human beings, is exactly the opposite; the aim of education is not to conform human beings to some fixed standard, but to preserve individuality, to keep human beings as much unlike one another in certain spheres as they possibly can be.

But that great aim of education, that personal, free, truly human aspect of education, can never have justice done to it under federal control. And that is the reason why the standardization of education that has already been carried on through the Federal Bureaus is deleterious. I have observed this in general: that when people talk about uniformity in education what they are really producing is not something that is uniformly high, but something that is uniformly low; they are producing a kind of education which reduces all to a dead level, which fails to understand the man who loves the high things that most of his fellowmen do not love. This degrading tendency is furthered I fear, by the present federal activities in education, and it will be given a stupendous impetus if this federal department is formed.

Just at this point, however, there may be an objection. I have been arguing, some men will tell me, against control of education by the State. But, it will be said, we already have control of education by the State, namely by the instrumentality of the individual States of our Union; and so—thus the objection runs—the authority of a Federal Department would not differ in principle from the authority which the State Governments already possess. I have been talking about individuality; I have said something about the rights of individual parents, by implication at least. “Well now,” it will be said, “are not those rights already subject to the control of the Individual States? But if they are, is not all that is being accomplished by this Federal measure merely the transference of this authority already possessed by Government to an agency that can exercise it in a wiser and more efficient way? Does not the principle, then, remain exactly the same?”

With regard to this objection, I am perfectly willing to admit that the State Governments have, in the sphere of education, in recent years committed some very terrible sins. We need think only, for example, of the Oregon School Law, which sought to take children forcibly from their parents and place them under the despotic control of whatever superintendent of education happened to be in power in the district where the residence of the parents was found. Or we need only refer to the Nebraska Language Law (similar laws being enacted in a number of other States), which provided that no language other than English should be taught in any school, public or private, up to a certain grade—in point of fact until the children were too old ever to learn languages well. That was a law which actually made literary education a crime. Or we may think of that one of the two Lusk laws in the State of New York which provided that every teacher in all classes, public and private, formal and informal, should take out a State license and become subject to state visitation and control. These laws were blows, it seems to me, against the very vitals of liberty.

But the fate of all these measures is illustrative of the safeguards which we shall have if we keep this important concern of education under the control of the individual states. The Lusk laws were repealed. The Oregon school law and the Nebraska law fell before that last bulwark of our liberty, the United States Supreme Court. As Justice McReynolds said in the great decision in the Oregon school case, the child, in America, is not the mere creature of the state—a great principle which I think includes all that we are here endeavoring to maintain.

So it is to be observed that State measures—partly for reasons that have been brought out in what the previous speaker has said regarding the difficulty of securing a review of Congressional actions, and partly for other reasons—are very much more likely to be checked, if they are oppressive and against the spirit of our institutions, than are Federal measures. Furthermore, there is a great safeguard in numbers. The beneficent fact is that there are forty-eight States in the Union. Some of them may become very bad in the sphere of education; but it is perhaps not likely that all of them will become utterly bad. Thus there is a great safeguard in the multiplicity of the States. For various reasons, then, I maintain that the principle is not the same when education is put under federal control as when it is placed under state control.

Personally, indeed, I am opposed to certain tendencies in the sphere of public education in the states; I am opposed to the tendency by which the public school is made to do things that parents ought to do, such as providing moral instruction and the like. I am opposed to “morality codes” in the public schools. I have examined some of them and I think that they are vicious. They are not only faulty in detail, but they are wrong in principle. They base morality upon experience, instead of upon an absolute distinction between right and wrong. Despite the good motives of their compilers, therefore, they undermine the sense which children (and all the rest of us) ought to have of the majesty of the moral law.

That is, indeed, only a matter of personal opinion. I do not know whether it comes under the principles for which the Sentinels of the Republic stand. But you can take it for what it is worth. I, for my part, think that the functions of the public school ought to be diminished rather than broadened; and I believe that the public school ought to pay just a little bit of attention, perhaps, to that limited but not unimportant function which it is now almost wholly neglecting—namely, the impartation of knowledge.

Thus there are criticisms which I might make with regard to public education in the individual States. But those criticisms do not fall directly under the subject with which we are dealing here, and I am not sure whether I can claim for them the authority of the Sentinels of the Republic. In these matters, I am giving voice to my own personal opinion. But perhaps I have said enough to show at least that as citizens we have important questions to decide when we are dealing with public education in the individual States.

At any rate, in the light of what I have just said, I do maintain that the danger is very much greater when education is placed under the control of the Federal Government, than the danger which undoubtedly does prevail even now on account of a mistaken use of State authority. Federal control of education, despite what is often said, most emphatically is not the same in principle as control by the States. And so I believe that this measure which would establish a Federal Department of education ought to be defeated.

But I think that a great deal more than that ought to be done. I think that not only this particular measure ought to be defeated but the whole tendency that is represented by this measure ought to be defeated, the tendency towards a centralized standardization in education.

At this point, it is true, some persons hold up their hands in horror. “Do you mean to say”, they ask us, “that we are actually going to continue to turn this important matter over to forty-eight separate and distinct states, to say nothing of the idiosyncrasies of individual parents, who want to send their children to all sorts of peculiar private schools and church schools? What utter confusion we shall have if we permit this sort of thing! Why, if we have this unlimited freedom of private schools and so on, we shall make a perfect mess of it.” Well, with regard to that, I may say that I think it is a good deal better to have confusion than it is to have death. For my part, I believe that in the sphere of education there ought to be the most unlimited competition—competition between one state and another and competition between state school and private schools.

“But”, it is said, “do you not believe in equal opportunity? Surely the Federal Government ought to help the States so that there will be equal opportunities for all the children in the whole country.”

Now I am bound to say quite frankly, with regard to this matter of equal opportunity, that I am dead opposed to it. What ought you to do to a State that does not provide opportunities for its children equal to the opportunities that are provided by some other States? Ought you to tell the people of that State that it does not make any difference, because if they do not do the thing somebody else will do it for them? I think not. There ought to be unlimited competition in the sphere of education between one State and another State and between State schools and private schools. The State schools ought to be faced at every moment by the health-giving possibility of competition on the part of private schools and church schools. Only that will keep State education in a healthy way.

Of course, I understand perfectly well that competition in certain spheres has its disadvantages; and I am not going to talk about that. In some spheres it may have to be checked—we are not discussing that difficult question here. But when it comes to the sphere of the mind, I believe in absolutely unlimited competition. Anything else than that, it seems to me, will cause stagnation and death.

“But”, people say, “how about efficiency?” Well, I think, if the truth must be known, that that word “efficiency” is one of the most misused words in the language. Many persons seem to suppose that the mere use of that word constitutes an argument; they seem to suppose that you ought to regard it as a sufficient argument in favor of anything whatever when that thing is said to be efficient.

I notice also another word that is used in a somewhat similar way. It is the word “sincere”. It often seems to be supposed that it is an argument in favor of a person who disagrees with us, when the fact is established that “he is perfectly sincere”. It seems to be supposed that the fact that he is sincere constitutes a reason why I ought to agree with the person in question. But how absurd that is! As a matter of fact, the more sincere a man is in his advocacy of a thing that is wrong, the more opposed to him I am—not the more opposed to him in my estimate of his moral character (I may respect him personally because he is sincere), but the more opposed to the measures that he advocates. The more sincere he is in favor of something that I regard as bad, the more dangerous he is likely to be.

It is somewhat the same with regard to this matter of efficiency. Some men seem to think that it is admirable for its own sake. But surely efficiency involves doing something, and our attitude toward the efficiency all depends on whether the thing that is being done is good or bad. A man does not admire efficiency very much when the efficiency is working to his disadvantage. You have all probably heard the story about the tramp that got up to the fourth floor of the department store. The floorwalker on the fourth floor kicked him down to the third floor; and there he fell foul of the floorwalker on the third floor, who kicked him down to the second floor; and then the floorwalker on the second kicked him down to the ground floor; and then the floorwalker on the ground floor kicked him outside. He landed on his back outside, and when he got up he remarked in great admiration: “My, what a system!”

I am unable to attain quite that measure of complete detachment that was attained by that tramp. Men want us to be overcome by admiration for a system that is working us harm. For my part, I flatly refuse. I am reminded of what Dr. Fabian Franklin said some years ago in an article in the Yale Review. Some persons, he said in effect, think that an objection to socialism is that it would not work. But so far as he was concerned, he said, his objection was rather that it might possibly work.

So it is with this Federal control of education. The better it works the worse it suits me; and if these people had their way—if everything could be reduced to a dead level, if everybody could be made like everybody else, if everybody came to agree with everybody else because nobody would be doing any thinking at all for himself, if all could be reduced to this harmony—do you think that the world would be a good place under those circumstances? No, my friends. It would be a drab, miserable world, with creature comforts in it and nothing else, with men reduced to the level of the beasts, with all the higher elements of human life destroyed.

Thus I am in favor of efficiency if it is directed to a good end; but I am not in favor of efficiency if it is directed to something that is bad. As a matter of fact, Federal Departments are not efficient, but probably the most inefficient things on the face of this planet. But if they were the most efficient agencies that history has ever seen, I should, in this field of education, be dead opposed to them. Efficiency in a good cause is good; but I am opposed to Federal efficiency in this sphere because the result of it is a thing that I regard as bad—namely, slavery.

And I am not inclined to do what a great many people do today; I am not inclined to write freedom in quotation marks as though it were a sort of joke. I believe, on the contrary, that it is something that is very real. An ounce of freedom is worth a pound of efficiency. I think, too, that we may discern within the last year just the beginning of the rise of the love of liberty again in our people. I hope therefore that this measure may be defeated, and that all measures may be defeated that look in the same direction, and that we may return to the principle of freedom for individual parents in the education of their children in accordance with their conscience, and to the principle of freedom for the States, and to the reliance upon the multiplicity of them for a preservation of those things that have made our Country great.

It is to be hoped that the indications of a returning love of liberty which are just beginning to appear are not illusory, but that America, despite opposition, is going to return to the freedom that used to be the very atmosphere that she breathed. But let us be perfectly clear about one thing—if liberty is not maintained with regard to education, there is no use trying to maintain it in any other sphere. If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might just as well give them everything else. That is the reason why I think that every one of us ought to be opposed with all his might and main to the sinister legislative measure that we have been considering today. No, we do not want a Federal Department of Education; and we do not want, in any form whatever, the slavery that a Federal Department of Education would bring.