Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 449]

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History University of Illinois

and practical in all its aims and ends, no such effort has been efficiently made. We have in our own State no such institutions, and no practical combination of resources and means, that can ever produce one worthy of the end. We have not even a ''Normal School" for the education of our teachers, nor half a supply of efficient teachers even for our own common schools; and never can have without more attention to the indispensable means for their production. Hence, our common schools are, and must continue to be, to a great extent, inefficient and languishing, if not absolute nuisances on our soil, as in some cases they now are. But the common school interest is the great hope of our country; and we only desire to render it efficient and useful, in the only way it can be done; by rearing up for it competent and efficient teachers, in the normal department of our industrial universities. Knowing that knowledge, like light and water, runs downward, not upward, through human society, we would begin with the suns and fountains, and not with the candles and puddles, and pour the light and water of life down through every avenue of darkness below, and not begin with the darkness and drought, and attempt to evolve and force it upward. No state ever did or ever will succeed by this latter process. The teacher is the first man sought, and the life and light of the whole thing, from the university downward. To this end, concentration is the first indispensable step. Leaving all our common school funds untouched, as they now are, the proposed distribution of our university fund, amounting to about $150,000, will illustrate this point. The annual interest of this, at 6 per cent, is about $9,000. If this should be divided among our ten or fifteen colleges, it would give them only from $600 to $900 each, per annum. Divided among our hundred counties, it would give $90 to each county, for a high school or any other purpose. Divided as it now is among the million of our people, it gives 9 mills, or less than one cent to each person. Concentrated upon an industrial university, it would furnish an annual corps of skillful teachers and lecturers, through its normal school, to go through all our towns and counties, create, establish and instruct lyceums, high schools and common schools, of all sorts, and through its agricultural and mechanical departments,