By-products of Education

Willis A. Snyder

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, March-April 1940]

At the Henry George Centenary last September, I "scraped acquaintance" with a banker who spoke disparagingly of the effectiveness of the Henry George School extension class he was conducting. Perhaps it has been excessive modesty on my part, but I myself have been so discouraged at the number who break their promises to join our classes, at the number of others who drop out, and even those who "complete" the course and then seem to feel no concern to help spread the doctrine, that I wonder if other Extension Secretaries of the School do not share my sense of frustration.

I have been encouraged to persist partly by the instances of indirect results that have occasionally come to my notice, some of which I would like to pass on for the encouragement of others who may be tempted to abandon their work or deterred from starting a class by the scarcity of tangible results.

An executive in a manufacturing concern eight miles from Hudson, New York (where I teach), who would never attend a class, has bought four copies of our textbook, Progress and Poverty, to give away. In his office recently I noticed one of the tracts printed by Mr. Goeller that I did not recall giving to him. He said it had come back to him with acknowledgment of a "small contribution" he had made to Gilbert Tucker's group, the Tax Relief Association (I had sent them his name), and that he kept it on his desk "to start arguments with"!

I experienced one of my bitterest disappointments when the social science teacher from the Hudson High School dropped out of my class. A year later I had a chance to tell him that President Knarr of our Henry George Fellowship had recently seen a Cornell University text-book which gave considerable favorable treatment to the Georgeist Philosophy. His reply was, "Why shouldn't they? There are no arguments against it. I teach it as much as the Syllabus will permit."

A local merchant who "had no time" for class borrowed my copy of "Significant Paragraphs from Progress and Poverty." He kept it so long that I finally asked him to return it unread so I could lend it to someone else. He stalled and when I finally recovered the book he had read it and said he was convinced that Single Tax would work if it were possible to get it tried.

I could give many more instances of books sold to people whom I unsuccessfully solicited to attend classes at the school. Some were influential people, some were not. Some read the books, others did not. I always have a copy of "Progress and Poverty" in my car and have sold them to all kinds of people in all kinds of places. I hope these facts may encourage some other teacher who is working alone "out in the sticks" where you cannot send out a thousand class announcements to a thousand new names twice a year but have to get your pupils by knocking them down and dragging them in. I feel if the class had continued in Albany and the one promised in Poughkeepsie would start, it would not only produce results both tangible and intangible in those cities, but would add to the prestige of my work in Hudson. Every outpost helps, but it is harder to keep up one's courage on the frontiers than where one attends large faculty meetings every few months.

One way we try to get publicity for the Hudson Extension is by exhibits in the windows of vacant stores. I like to think that there may be some intangible propaganda there that some prejudice against our ideas may be broken down in minds of people we never contact in any other way.

The way of education is a long, slow way, it is a hard struggle. But it is not a futile endeavor. The "by-products" that we may never hear of are incalculable. In the work of education the best advice to follow is haste not, rest not. "Its growth is in other hands."