"We spend more than a million dollars a year on our colleges and university, and it is money well spent; but we must have education that fits not the few but the many for the business of life"
About this Quote
A million dollars a year is Capper’s opening bid, and it’s not just bookkeeping. It’s a deliberate flex of public investment meant to disarm the easy critique that education spending is indulgent. By calling it “money well spent,” he affirms the legitimacy of colleges and universities, then pivots to the sharper point: higher education can’t be the whole story, and it shouldn’t be designed as a gated pathway for the already privileged.
The phrase “fits not the few but the many” carries the Progressive Era’s moral math: democracy fails when public institutions primarily polish an elite. Capper’s subtext is less anti-intellectual than anti-mismatch. He’s arguing that the educational system, as then constituted, over-served credentialed professions and under-served the broad workforce actually sustaining the economy. “For the business of life” is doing a lot of work here: it sanctifies practicality without saying “trade school” outright, and it frames education as civic infrastructure, not personal enrichment.
Context matters. Capper was a Midwestern Republican in an America reshaped by industrialization, urban migration, and post-WWI economic volatility. The country was building public high schools, expanding land-grant ideals, and debating vocational training as a response to inequality and labor demand. His rhetoric bridges constituencies: reassure taxpayers, flatter universities, then demand an education agenda that treats mass opportunity as the real measure of a modern state.
The phrase “fits not the few but the many” carries the Progressive Era’s moral math: democracy fails when public institutions primarily polish an elite. Capper’s subtext is less anti-intellectual than anti-mismatch. He’s arguing that the educational system, as then constituted, over-served credentialed professions and under-served the broad workforce actually sustaining the economy. “For the business of life” is doing a lot of work here: it sanctifies practicality without saying “trade school” outright, and it frames education as civic infrastructure, not personal enrichment.
Context matters. Capper was a Midwestern Republican in an America reshaped by industrialization, urban migration, and post-WWI economic volatility. The country was building public high schools, expanding land-grant ideals, and debating vocational training as a response to inequality and labor demand. His rhetoric bridges constituencies: reassure taxpayers, flatter universities, then demand an education agenda that treats mass opportunity as the real measure of a modern state.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|
More Quotes by Arthur
Add to List
