Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 450]

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Industrial Universities for the People

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concentrating and diffusing the benefits of practical knowledge and experience over all our employments and pursuits, our farms and shops. Here as elsewhere, the sun must exist before the diamonds and dewdrops can shine. The mountain heights must send down their rills and their torrents, gathered from their own flood and the boundless resources of the ocean and the sky, before the desert can blossom as the rose. Money, however much or little, concentrated in logs, clapboards and brick, enclosing a herd of listless, uneasy, and mischievous children, cannot make a common school. The living teacher must be there—living not dead; for dead teachers only make dead scholars the more dead. Nor can grammar, language, metaphysics, or abstract science, however accurate, voluminous and vast, ever diffuse new life and new energy into our industrial pursuits. There, practical apparatus, the thorough and accurate needful experiments, as well the living and practical teachers are needed, in order even to begin the great work. This is necessarily expensive, quite beyond even the anticipated resources of our existing institutions. Hence again, we need concentration, and not a miserable useless and utterly wasteful diffusion of our resources and means. Throughout our State, and throughout the whole civilized world, in all ages, where there has been most neglect of universities and high seminaries, and most reliance placed by the people in the miserable pittance doled out to them by the state, like so many paupers, for the support of common schools, precisely there the common school will be found, for the inevitable reason above indicated, most inefficient, weak and worthless, if not positive nuisances to society, and, whenever the reverse is found, the reverse influences of life, light, animation and hope beam forth from the schools at once. We repeat it, the common school is our great end, our last hope and final joy. But we would reach and reanimate it under the guidance of practical common sense, as all experience shows it must be done, as it only can be done, and we would reach the vital, practical interests of our industrial pursuits, by precisely the same means, and on precisely the same well known and thoiv oughly tried plans and principles. We seek no novelties. We desire no new principles. We only wish to apply, to the great in-