A “Cooper Union” for Honolulu (1935)

We reproduce the following from a January 11, 1935 edition of Honolulu’s Star Bulletin (now the Star Advertiser). It the final installment of a series of editorials entitled ‘Is Ignorance Desirable?’ The headline for this editorial was A “Cooper Union” for Honolulu:

The vigor of interest in mass education in America is in marked and humbling contrast to that which other countries have experienced and which we ourselves had in earlier periods.

In pioneer days the lyceum was a permanent fad. Every little wide place in the road had its lecture course. Our greatest minds did not despise going out on circuit, and the backwoods farmer would finish his chores early to go hear Emerson.

Rural dwellers had their “literacy societies,” where the relative joys of pursuit and possession were discussed and horny-fisted plowmen stoutly affirmed and denied that “the signs of the times indicated the downfall of the Republic.”

Then the Chautaugua ran its long and beneficent course, until there was hardly a hamlet so belated and poverty-smitten as not to have its annual intellectual feast.

To a degree, these ventures in popular educational method were not genuine products of indigenous intellectual interest, but ventures in commercial speculation. The Chautaugua was a vast network, with necessarily intricate organization, involving advance agents, tent superintendents, elaborate equipment, troupes of musicians, impersonators, lecturers, entertainers and stage folks of all sorts.

England has had a more deep-rooted effort in its workingmen’s institutes, organized and financed by the workers themselves. Anyone familiar with the life of John Ruskin will remember that much of his precious time was given to lecturing before such organizations. Dickens, too, would lay aside his pen to speak here and there before some gathering of eager-minded working people.

Philanthropic Peter Cooper, prosperous glue maker and iron works owner, and in 1876 candidate for President, established in New York far back in 1854 the people’s institute called “Cooper Union,” which flourishes to this day, offering an enormous variety of courses of instruction to those who toil but wish to live and learn as well.

There is a need of such a “people’s institute” in Honolulu, where competent instruction at nominal cost may be offered to Honolulu’s working population.

No other single agency, perhaps, would do more to further our happy racial relationships and maintain a healthy community spirit.

None, surely, would be a more secure anchor to windward, as we face the task of weathering out the next five decades of Hawaii’s history.

Such an institution should, it is true, arise out of the initiative of the workers themselves, but history indicates that social improvements are born in the brains of idealists set going by the public-spirited and philanthropic, and finally supported and made use of by the intended beneficiaries. The inertia of populations is one of the marvels of sociology.

A sensible beginning would be the promoting of a few evening classes in some accessible downtown place to which all might come without embarrassment. The courses would have to be simple, perhaps, but thoroughgoing, and subjects such as had popular appeal.

It would be necessary to select the teachers with extraordinary care. None of the sort that students call a “sleeping porch” could succeed. The dry-as-dust, dehumanized academic bore who often holds forth in college halls could not survive and hour in a people’s institute. A genuine interest in human beings and the ability to communicate enthusiasm for his subject would be as essential in the teacher as knowledge of the subject itself.

Some day, perhaps, the flame of adult education will blaze in our streets, and the people will begin to go to school. Where is there a better place to go? Where a place than can offer so much of the joyful sense of growth? Honolulu may have a “Cooper Union,” and other places, too, have people’s institutes of their own.

Such institutions would be an outcome of the community’s grasping the concept of education, widely held among educators already, that the function of schooling is not merely to qualify one to hold a particular job, but to live a larger life.