reach just
this result. They carried in their heads ideals of the Christian man and
woman, and they wanted to educate all to this model. Public schools in a
democracy may work in the same way. Any institution which runs for years
in the same hands will produce a type. The examination papers show the
pet ideas of the examiners. It must not be forgotten that the scholars
set about the making of folkways for themselves, just as members of a
grown society do. In time they adopt codes, standards, preferred types,
and fashions. They select their own leaders, whom they follow with
enthusiasm. They have their pet heroes and fashion themselves upon the
same. Their traditions become stereotyped and authoritative. The type of
product becomes fixed. It makes some kind of compromise with the set
purposes of the teachers and administrators, and the persons who issue
from the schools become recognizable by the characteristics of the type.
It is said that the graduates of Jesuit colleges on the continent of
Europe are thus recognizable. In England the graduates of Oxford and
Cambridge are easily to be distinguished from other Englishmen. In the
continental schools and barracks, in newspapers, books, etc., what is
developed by education is dynastic sentiment, national sentiment,
soldierly sentiment; still again, under the same and other
opportunities, religious and ecclesiastical sentiments, and by other
influences, also class and rank sentiments.[2212] In a democracy there
is always a tendency towards big results on a pattern. An orthodoxy is
produced in regard to all the great doctrines of life. It consists of
the most worn and commonplace opinions which are current in the masses.
It may be found in newspapers and popular literature. It is intensely
provincial and philistine. It does not extend to those things on which
the masses have not pronounced, and by its freedom and elasticity in
regard to these it often produces erroneous judgments as to its general
character. The popular opinions always contain broad fallacies,
half-truths, and glib generalizations of fifty years before. If a
teacher is to be displaced by a board of trustees because he is a
free-trader, or a gold man, or a silver man, or disapproves of a war in
which the ruling clique has involved the country, or because he thinks
that Hamilton was a great statesman and Jefferson an insignificant one,
or because he says that he has found some proof that alcohol is not
always