Essentials in Civil Government: the preface

For the next who-knows-how-many days I will be posting an excerpt and quote from an old book I found in a musty box sitting on the warehouse floor of an antique shop. When I first opened the cover, something about the first page struck me as being totally obsolete and at the same time, so intriguing. Underneath the title, Essentials in Civil Government, were the words 'a text-book for use in schools'. Something about those words struck an odd chord in me, and I read on.
The book starts out with a preface that I believe to be amazing. This is a text-book first written in 1908. I wish the text-books of today were written with the same intent and purpose. (For legal purposes the book is no longer under copyright law and may be found on google books for reading.) Here is the opening paragraph:
"Of the whole number of pupils who can study Civil Government with profit more than nine-tenths are in the upper classes of the grammar schools and in the lower classes of the high schools. In these classes there are nearly two million young people who can be led into a just appreciation of the rights and duties of citizens. Here is a rich field for the sower, an opportunity vast in its proportions for improving the quality of American citizenship and elevating the American electorate."
The most important part of this paragraph being the last statement: "an opportunity vast in its proportions for improving the quality of American citizenship and elevating the American electorate."
Now we water down the quality, disparage the rights of citizenship, and tear down the American electorate. All out of a "sense of fairness and equality and preservation."
The best part comes at the end of the second paragraph, however, which says: "The primary aim of the book is to establish political ideals and to indoctrinate in notions of civic morality." Civic morality? The book just gets better.
I do want to note that on some subjects it is outdated, such as a woman's right to vote, though it never suggests that it would be wrong, just states the facts. By S. E. Foreman, PhD, it is one of the best two dollars I've ever spent.

--MovingGirl