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Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · June 5, 1890

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 5, No. 23

A Political Revolution in Wisconsin.

THE last Wisconsin Legislature, passed at its last session what is known as the BENNETT law, making education in Wisconsin compulsory, and enacting this provision beside:—

No school shall be regarded as a school under this act, unless there shall be taught therein as part of the elementary education of children, reading, writing, arithmetic, and United States history in the English language.

Upon its face this provision might seem to be fair enough, but, closely considered, it is found to embody features replete with mischief. The State of Wisconsin contains a very large foreign-born population, chiefly German, Scandinavian, and Belgian. In many of its towns German is extensively spoken; in most of the private and parochial schools German is taught.

To make education compulsory, while denying to the schools where children of German parents are instructed a legal existence as schools, means substantially, their abolition; and if the State has the right to prescribe what language shall be taught in schools that are not maintained by the State, but supported and managed by private individuals, it must also have the right to prescribe and supervise all their other studies. Against such an invasion of private rights the citizens of Milwaukee have now protested with such vigor and effectiveness that the only thing to be done with the Bennett law is to repeal it.

If the local authorities of New York were to direct that Latin or Greek should no longer be taught in any of our colleges; if they undertook to furnish the text books of history to be used in private schools and to interdict all others; if they assumed to interfere with the religious training of the young, either in parochial or Sunday schools, a strong expression of dissent would promptly follow. The State maintains its own schools, and there is no interference of any sort, sectarian or political, with their management; but the dictation of the State cannot be permitted any further than in the schools which it supports by taxation.

Penal laws for the obliteration of a language have been passed and cruelly enforced in Ireland and Poland, but they can have no place upon the statute books in this country. The people of Milwaukee gave their views upon the subject very decisively; and similar views, it is quite safe to say, are entertained by a majority of the voters of every populous community in the United States, where English is not exclusively spoken.—The Sun.