Speaking on the subject “The Fruits of Ignorance Is Citizenship,” Dr. Hubert M. Poteat, in address Tuesday evening to the Junior Faculty Club at State College, divided the uneducated population of the country in three classes: Foreigners, who through ignorance fall an easy prey to labor agitators; natives who are illiterate; and a third class which he said is made up of men and women with a “bread and butter” education, those whose motto is “money if you can, honestly, if not—money.”
“Out of this chaos of ignorance,” said Dr. Poteat, “spring most of the ills that eat at the vitals of citizenship.”
“The result is,” he stated, “an indifference to movements for civic betterment, a gross inability to judge either man or measures allowing the ward politician and demagogue to be setup as a leader of the people who in so many instances blindly follow the path that is laid before them.”
The speaker described popular hysteria. The leader of almost any cult may obtain a following in this country, about the only qualification for leadership being the ability to bray loudly and continuously, he asserted. This accounts, he held, for the gradual spread of bolshevism and socialism, catering as it does to the mob spirit. In most cases, Dr. Poteat declared, the common are garden variety of socialists who is unable to give a definition of the term but is still willing to be led because he has never learned to think straight for himself.
Dr. Poteat paraphrased Dr. Coue’s famous saying with “Day by day, eat more hay, and bray louder and louder,” stating that those people who derive any benefit from the formula were welcome to their relief. He characterized the teachings of the Frenchman as just another example of a passing fad.
The right kind of education is the only cure for the ills of citizenship, Dr. Poteat declared. The training must begin in the home where first of all obedience and respect for law and discipline must be taught. Passing on to the schools, the speaker said we are rapidly becoming a nation of “six-graders,” pointing out that over one-third of the teachers in the United States have only a high school education, or less, and he urged a more careful preparation for their work on the part of these who are entrusted with the duty of teaching.
“The mere packing of the head with facts is not education,” Dr. Poteat said. The high schools of today, he pointed out, are teaching a smattering of any number of more or less useless things, and as a consequence, young people are turned out into life or sent on to college without having acquired that most worthwhile faculty, the ability to think. The schools must, to a large extent, serve to correct the modern young person’s conception of the worthwhile things in life. Now, when music is mentioned the average youngster things of “jazz,” the Sunday newspaper supplements are considered as art, and “The Sheik” is the latter day conception of the best in literature.
From page 2 of the Raleigh News & Observer, March 14, 1923. Dr. Coue encouraged people to recite “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” as a step toward self-improvement.
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