NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES Proceedings OF THE SEVENTY- FIRST ANNUAL MEETING HELD AT CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JULY 1-7, 1933 VOLUME 71 Contents of previous issues of the volume of Proceedings may be found by consulting the Education Index in your library The National Education Association 1201 Sixteenth Street N. W. Washington, D. C. FOREWORD The seventy-first annual volume of Proceedings records one of the most critical years in American education. It constitutes a historical account of the Association during an important transitional year. The proceed¬ ings of the meeting at Chicago show a new aggressiveness, a new determina¬ tion on the part of the teachers of America to protect the rights of childhood as they relate to education. The year 1932-33, depicted in this volume, is one in which the teachers displayed unusual devotion to duty and impressive courage in the face of acute hardships brought on by political mismanagement and the bitter attacks of the opponents of popular education, as well as by the general economic conditions. This volume records also the proceedings of the Department of Superin¬ tendence convention in Minneapolis, and those of the World Federation of Education Associations at Dublin, Ireland. Noteworthy addresses and minutes of business sessions of the other departments of the Association are included in this book. The volume as a whole constitutes a wealth of material for a study of educational trends and developments, and for general reference purposes. Because of the abundance of material presented at the various conventions and also before the departments, it has been necessary this year to shorten most of the papers. Every effort, however, has been made to preserve the most essential parts of each address. Joy Elmer Morgan, Director , Ernest R. Bryan, Division of P ublications . Assistant Director . ’ ' ’ . c CONTENTS GENERAL SESSIONS Character Education in this Modern Day — Slattery . 17 A Century of Progress — Albert . 20 Patriotism, Education, and Religion — Gilkey . 22 Address of Welcome — Walker . 25 Address of Welcome — Bogan . 25 Address of Welcome — Whittenberg . 27 Response to Addresses of Welcome — Holt . 30 Education and Modern Social Leadership — Scott . 31 English in Life and in School — Barnes . 32 Education and the American Future — Frank . 40 The Duty of the State — McNutt . 53 Teachers on Guard — Blair . 57 How the National Education Association Helps the Individual Teacher — Hale 61 Educational Trends and the General Social Order — Judd . 66 Teachers as Citizens — Givens . 73 A New Citizenship — Cooper . 81 A National Outlook on Education — Stetson . 87 The Teachers at the Helm — Preble . 91 Teacher Training for the New Age — Donovan . 95 Forgotten Builders of the American Dream — Doudna . 102 Cooperation for Health between Home and School — Bauer . 109 The Public and Its Schools — Rosier . 116 Some Recent Legal Trends — Martin . 123 Education and the National Defense — Johnson . 130 What Next in Education? — Harman . 135 The Function of Education in a Democracy — Yocum . 141 The Elementary Principal Meets the Emergency — Roys . . . . . 149 Applying Ethics to Economics — Moore . 150 Education and the Public Mind — Hutchins . 163 Education, the Basis of Self-Government — Ickes . 168 The Circuit Rider of American Education — Crabtree . 175 REPORTS OF COMMITTEES Report of the Joint Committee on Health Problems in Education — Wood . 179 Report of the Joint Committee of the National Education Association and the National Congress of Parents and Teachers — Bradford . 182 Report of the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education — Norton . 182 Report of the Committee on the Economic Status of the Teacher — Buckingham 192 Report of the Legislative Commission — Hall . 195 Report of the Committee on Retirement Allowances — Force . 198 Report of the Committee on Rural Education — Sutton . 202 Report of the Committee to Cooperate with the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools — Nevobold . 203 Report of the Committee on International Relations — Woodward . 205 Report of the Committee on Social Economic Goals of America — Kelly . 210 Report of the Joint Committee of the National Education Association and the American Library Association — Witmer . 213 [5] 6 National Education Association Report of the National Commission on the Enrichment of Adult Life — Moyer. . . 213 Report of the National Council of Education — Bagley . 219 Report of the Committee on Resolutions — DuShane . 220 NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EDUCATION Historical Note . 226 Democracy and Education, A Discussion of the Work of the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education — Morgan . 227 The Proposed Yearbook on Materials of Instruction — Hosic . 232 The Far East in American Public Education — Carter . 233 Report of the Year’s Progress — Brubacher . 236 Report of the Committee on a National Institute of Education — Evans . 239 The Curriculum Revision Movement in American Education — Judd . 243 Functions of Professional Organizations in the Field of Education — Newlon. . . 248 Secretary’s Minutes . 256 DEPARTMENT OF ADMINISTRATIVE WOMEN IN EDUCATION Historical Note . . 270 Are Our Schools Training for Citizenship? — Pesta... . 271 DEPARTMENT OF ADULT EDUCATION Historical Note . 276 Educating the Prisoner — MacCormick . 277 Basic English — Guyton . 278 Catching Up with Literacy — Gray . 280 Art Training in Preparation for Adult Leisure — Robertson . 281 Enrichment of Adult Life thru Art — Taft . 285 Enrichment of Adult Life thru Music — van de IV all . 290 An Adventure in Adult Education in Dayton — Longnecker . 293 Glimpses from the Field — Alton . 295 Glimpses from the Field — Castle . 296 Glimpses from the Field — Kohler . 297 Glimpses from the Field — Lunak . 299 Glimpses from the Field — Rich . 301 Glimpses from the Field — Wetmore . 303 Secretary’s Minutes . 304 DEPARTMENT OF ART EDUCATION Historical Note . 310 DEPARTMENT OF BUSINESS EDUCATION Historical Note . 312 A Preliminary Statement of the General Objectives and Fundamental Principles of Commercial Education in the Public Secondary Schools — Barnhart .. . 313 Objectives of Business Education as Viewed by Business — Beaty . 320 General Objectives of Commercial Education — Rice . 321 Guidance in Commercial Education toward Vocational and Non-Vocational Objectives — Zelliot . 322 Secretary’s Minutes . 323 Contents 7 DEPARTMENT OF CLASSROOM TEACHERS Historical Note . 327 Public Ownership the Way Out — Thompson . 329 Critical Presentday Issues in Education — Gray . 330 Critical Presentday Issues in Education — Keenan . 332 Some Presentday Issues in Education — Lindlof . 334 Report of the President — Preble . 336 A History of the Department — A Record with a Future — Fahey . 343 Summary of the First Preliminary Report of the Committee on Academic Free¬ dom — Guenther . 345 Secretary’s Minutes . 347 Constitution . 352 DEPARTMENT OF DEANS OF WOMEN Historical Note . 358 Helping Them To Stand on Our Shoulders — Comstock . 359 Student Economic Problems and the Counselor — with Special Reference to Women Students — Zorbaugh . 366 Case Studies in the Development of Social Attitudes — Horn . 372 DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH Historical Note . 378 The Status of the Science of Education — Strayer . 379 Needed Developments and Expansions — Freeman . 380 Recent Social Changes and Educational Research — Willey . 380 Common Faults in Graduate Research in Education — Symonds . 381 The Advantages and Limitations of the Time Sampling Method — Anderson . . 384 The Coordination of Research among National Professional Organizations — Cooper . 385 The Coordination of Research by State Departments of Education — Coxe . 389 Desirable Steps in Coordinating Research at the College and University Level — Kelly . 390 The Cooperation of Public Administrators and Educators in Research — Ascher 393 Secretary’s Minutes . 393 DEPARTMENT OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PRINCIPALS Historical Note . 396 Education for Worthy Home Membership — Goodykoontz . 397 The Advance of School Finance — Young . 398 A Forward Step in School Financing — Pratt . 399 Educating the Public To Understand Schools — Judd . 400 Report on 1934 Yearbook — Thomas . 401 Which Way Is Forward? — Knoelk . 401 The Teacher Looks at the Principal — Anderson . 402 Which World? — Kline . 403 Music with Homemade Instruments — W eidemann . 404 What Is Mental Health? — Plenzke . . . 404 Coordination of Community Agencies for the Mental Health of Young People — Dickson . 407 Responsibility of Teacher-Training Institutions for the Mental Health of Prospective Teachers — Zachry . 409 Importance of Mental Health in the Elementary-School Principal — Davies . . . . 410 Mental Health from the Standpoint of the Doctor of Medicine — Jefferson 411 8 National Education Association Conditions of School Environment Causing Mental Ill Health of Children — Caldwell . 413 Secretary’s Minutes . 415 DEPARTMENT OF KINDERGARTEN-PRIMARY EDUCATION Historical Note . 424 High Lights of the Denver Convention of the Association for Childhood Educa¬ tion — Lee per . 425 Much Ado about Report Cards — Hardy . 429 Secretary’s Minutes . 433 DEPARTMENT OF LIP READING Historical Note . 436 Special Education and the Hard of Hearing — Bruner . 437 A Century of Progress in Lip Reading — Montague . 43S The Learning and Teaching of Speech Reading — Whitaker . 439 Finding the Hard-of-Hearing Child — Walker . 440 Secretary’s Minutes . 442 DEPARTMENT OF RURAL EDUCATION Historical Note . 446 A Program To Meet the Situation — Plenzke . 447 The Effect of the Present Economic Situation on Rural Schools — Boerger . 447 Curriculum Characteristics and Trends in Rural Secondary Schools — Ferriss 448 Some Major Curriculum Problems in the Rural Secondary School — Bristow 450 Strength and Weakness of One-Teacher Schools — Blair . 452 Educational Legislation in 1933 — Cooper . 453 Meeting the Emergency Problems in Consolidated Schools — Archer . 456 Safeguarding Instruction in the Emergency — Snyder . 457 Rural Problems and the County Superintendent of Schools — Ryman . 458 Preserving Essentials in Teaching Country Schools — Hale . 460 DEPARTMENT OF SCHOOL HEALTH AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION Historical Note . 464 Growth Comparison of Athletes and Non-Athletes — Rowe . 465 The Contribution of Child Health Demonstrations to the Health Education Program — Brown . 469 Report on the Evaluation of Teacher-Training Institutions Preparing Teach¬ ers for Service in Health and Physical Education — Neilson . 471 DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE INSTRUCTION Historical Note . 478 Nature Study — Foundation for What? — Downing . 479 A Technic for Handling Large Classes — Bedell . 483 Natural Science in the Rural Schools — Pearson . 486 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY EDUCATION Historical Note . 490 Mathematics in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Lide . 491 The Changing Curriculum in Secondary Schools — Koos . 491 Contents 9 English in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Smith . 492 Foreign Languages in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Eddy.. . . 493 Foreign Languages in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Hands chin 494 Social Studies in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Kimmel . 495 Music in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Pierce . 497 Music and Art in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — McDonald 498 Commercial and Vocational Subjects in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Noll . 499 Vocational Subjects in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Keller 500 Commercial Subjects in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Jones 500 Health and Physical Education in the Changing Curriculum of the High School — Rogers . 501 Relation of Secondary Schools to Higher Institutions — Brammell . 502 Relations between the High School and the College — Courtenay . 503 Relations between the College and Public High School — Works . 504 Secretary’s Minutes . 505 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY SCHOOL PRINCIPALS Historical Note . 508 The State and its High Schools — Butterfield . 509 Improvement and Economy in Instruction — Cook . 510 Directed Learning and the Unit Assignment — Billett . 511 The Relationship of Regional Accrediting Agencies to Secondary Education during this Crisis — Edmonson . 513 The Relationship of State Departments of Education to Secondary Education during this Crisis — Bristow . 514 The Relationship of College Entrance Boards to Secondary Schools in this Crisis— Lacy . 514 Improvement and Economy in the High-School Curriculum — Nevulon . 516 Adapting the Junior High-School Curriculum to the Needs of the Pupils — Douglass . 518 The Teaching and Learning Situation in Junior High-School Classrooms — Ryan 518 Public Relations of the Junior College — van de Bogart . 519 The North Carolina Program of State Support as Affecting High Schools — Garinger . 520 Analyzing Objectives in Music Education — Morgan . 521 Analyzing Art Objectives in the High School — Willcuts . 521 Industrial Arts Objectives and their Attainment — Smith . 522 Recent Developments in Junior-College Administration — Carpenter . 523 A Study of High-School Pupil Population in Aid of the Revision of the Curric¬ ulum — Smith . 524 The Secondary-School Implications of Certain Industrial Studies in Employ¬ ment Research — Fryklund . 525 Cooperative Studies in Secondary Education in New York State — Wiley . 526 Secondary Education in the New Deal — Donovan . 528 Maintaining High-School Standards under Present Conditions — Hinshaw . 529 Organization of Extracurriculum Activities in the Modern High School — Roemer . 530 DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL STUDIES Historical Note . 532 The Investigation of the Social Studies in the Schools: The Fifth Year — Krey 533 Secretary’s Minutes . 536 10 National Education Association DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL EDUCATION Historical Note . 538 Enriching the Life Experience of Exceptional Children — Witty . 539 An Enriched Program for Physically Handicapped Children — Johnson . 540 An Enriched Program for Socially Maladjusted Children — Coutu . 541 Where Are We Now? — A Critical Evaluation of Special Education — Dickson 542 Special Education in Germany — What Can We Learn from It? — Roser . 543 Are We Playing Fair with the Personality Problem? — Stullkcn . 544 Better Coordination of Services for Physically Handicapped Groups in School and Community Programs — Ward . 545 The Mental Deviate — A Problem in Curriculum Adjustment — Beaman . 546 Secretary’s Minutes . 547 DEPARTMENT OF SUPERINTENDENCE Historical Note . 552 The Challenge of the Present Economic Depression — Lutz . 553 The Imminence of Social Change, the Impact of Technology on a Price System of Production — Scott . 561 Educational Implications of Modern Technology — Newton . 567 The Sword over Education — Frank . 573 Educational Economy and Frontier Needs — Strayer . 581 Independence in School Government — A Frontier Necessity — Cuhberlcy . 589 In Testimony of Dr. Ellwood P. Cubberley and Capitalizing the Frontier Crisis — Elliott . 597 The Scientific Development and Evaluation of Textbook Materials — Buckingham . 602 Current Issues Relating to the Curriculum and Instructional Materials — Threlkeld . 609 Freedom from Red Tape and Statistics — A Frontier Blessing — Hartwell . 616 The Scientific Development and Evaluation of the Curriculum — Judd . 620 Educational Frontiers in the Secondary Area — Briggs . 629 Education in the Post-Secondary Area — Carrothers . 636 New Frontiers in the University Area — Hutchins . 643 Dangers in the New Leisure Area — Enderis . 650 Interprofessional Frontiers — Mayo . 652 New Problems in Adult Education — Fife . 657 The Importance of Extension Education in Maintaining an Educated Citizenry — Bogan . 662 Closing Ceremonies . 665 Secretary’s Minutes . 666 Report of the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education — Norton . 668 Report of the Auditing Committee . 673 Report of the Committee on Financing Educational Research — Ballou . 674 Report of the Committee on Lay Relations . 675 Report of the Resolutions Committee . 677 Expressions of Appreciation . 679 DEPARTMENT OF SUPERVISORS AND DIRECTORS OF INSTRUCTION Historical Note . 682 Who Administers Our Schools? — Ford . 683 Teaching International Relations — Monroe . 685 Education and Our Present Social Problems — Dewey . 687 Contents 11 Supervision of English Teaching — Hosic . 689 Evidence of the Need of Capable Instructional Leadership — Gray . 690 Indispensable Services in Supervision — Melby . 692 Secretary’s Minutes...., . 694 DEPARTMENT OF SUPERVISORS AND TEACHERS OF HOME ECONOMICS Historical Note . 698 Home Economics as a Vocation — Bogan . 699 Art and Leisure — Taft . 699 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Times Schmidt . 701 Teaching Money Management — Dyer . 701 How We May Stimulate Good Taste in Clothing Selection When Popular Fads Are Contradictory — Janney . 703 How Ideals and Attitudes Change during a Girl’s College Life — A Study Made at Iowa State College — Lynn . 704 Community Services as a Means of Developing the Home Economics View¬ point — Christy . 705 Psychological Approach as a Means of Character Training — Hess . 706 Secretary’s Minutes . 707 DEPARTMENT OF TEACHERS COLLEGES Historical Note . 710 Next Steps in the Improvement of Teacher Training — Judd . 711 A Program of Development in the Education of Teachers — Haggerty . 718 Significance of New College — Alexander . 730 Curriculum Reconstruction in the Teachers College — Fisher . ••• 736 Integrated Professional Experiences as the Basis for Learning and as a Sub¬ stitute for Formal Courses in Education — Baker . 742 What New Viewpoints in Education Justify a Redirection of Teaching?— Horn 756 What Does the Dominant American Theory of Education Imply for the Redirection of the Professional Education of Teachers t—Bagley . 763 The Education of Educators — Finney . 766 List of Accredited Institutions — 1933-34 . 773 DEPARTMENT OF VISUAL INSTRUCTION Historical Note . 780 Object-Specimen-Model Material That May Be Assembled without Cost or at Very little Cost in the Field of Elementary Science — Ramsey . 781 Maintaining Visual Education in the Face of Economic Fire — Rowland . 782 Responsibility of Teacher-Preparation Institutions for Visual Education Courses — From the Viewpoint of the Classroom Teacher — Merton . 783 What Re alia (Objects-Specimens-Models) May Be Assembled without Cost or at Very Little Cost to School Districts in Junior-Senior High-School J 70 C Sciences? — Emmert . /o;> Minimum Realia for the Social Studies— Knowlton . 786 What Recent Scientific Experiments Show with Reference to Visual-Sensory Aids — Freeman . 788 Visual Aids and the Economic Situation — Stoddard . 789 Radio-Vision — Anderson . 791 The Place of Visual Aids in Teaching the Social Sciences— Barnes . 792 12 National Education Association Relating Visual-Sensory Aids to the Curriculum — A Unit of Reading — Smith 792 Visual Aids Related to the Curriculum — Hollinger . 794 DEPARTMENT OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION Historical Note . 798 Facing a New Day — Mays . 799 Realizing Our Objectives — Selvidge . 802 Fitting the Student to a Changing World — Bogan . 803 WORLD FEDERATION OF EDUCATION ASSOCIATIONS Historical Note . 808 The Dublin Conference — Thomas . 809 ASSOCIATION AL RECORDS AND INFORMATION Act of Incorporation . 817 Bylaws . 822 Calendar of Meetings . 833 Officers for 1932-33 . 835 Officers for 1933-34 . 842 Committees for 1932-33 . 849 Minutes of the Thirteenth Representative Assembly . 864 Minutes of the Meetings of the Board of Directors . 893 Minutes of the Meetings of the Executive Committee . 913 Minutes of the Meetings of the Board of Trustees . 917 Report of the Board of Trustees . 919 Report of Auditors . 922 Report of Treasurer . 936 Report of the Budget Committee . 939 Minutes of the Meetings of the Board of Trustees . 947 Annual Report of the Secretary . 951 Report of the Committee on Necrology . 961 The Thirteenth Representative Assembly . 967 Index . 994 MEMBERSHIP OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION (Count made December 31 each year) 1907 1912 1917 1922 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 Ala . 55 93 64 708 Ariz . 20 22 37 1,107 Ark . 17 36 33 327 Calif . 249 400 432 9,592 Colo . 75 119 140 3,820 Conn. . . . 58 70 102 1,319 Dela . 9 11 13 343 D. C . 47 80 96 595 Fla . 16 27 33 320 Ga . 50 63 74 231 Idaho .... 21 45 48 497 Ill . 420 1,434 733 7.475 Ind . 128 212 207 3,137 Iowa . 93 131 185 5,944 Kans . 84 119 195 1,399 Ky . 60 84 85 431 La . 42 51 54 932 Me . 32 33 51 2,105 Md . 55 77 94 529 Mass . 332 426 366 10,696 Mich . 139 199 251 7,466 Minn. . . . 145 175 103 2,281 Miss . 16 36 38 156 Mo . 216 263 512 3,234 Mont .... 21 35 60 337 Nebr . 71 128 114 2,651 Nev . 4 26 19 310 N. H . 30 38 38 625 N. J . 198 219 280 3,427 N. Mex.. . 13 34 33 384 N. Y . 948 890 1,230 10,031 N. C . 23 55 62 323 N. Dak.. . 42 75 83 497 Ohio . 349 484 534 8,383 Okla . 23 75 95 1,252 Ore . 19 64 154 1,041 Pa . 325 454 535 6,279 R. I . 32 39 47 215 S. C . 22 25 31 89 S. Dak. . . 40 50 51 785 Tenn . 31 61 60 615 T exas .... 48 121 138 1,089 Utah . 30 40 66 2,879 Vt . 30 28 40 398 Va . 40 73 88 1,082 Wash. . . . 68 113 144 3,413 W. Va... . 24 69 114 736 Wis . 160 300 277 3,316 Wyo . 12 18 22 1,271 Alaska. . . 37 93 C. Zone. . • ••••• • ••••• . 3 1,168 P R 27 P I 519 V. I . . . • ••••• 10 Foreign.. . 110 205 140 1,150 1,331 1,635 1,580 1,485 1,204 2,186 2,262 2,524 2,671 2,683 2,305 810 857 876 876 755 654 18,497 : 19,486 20,887 23,615 24,731 20,416 4,582 4,663 4,620 4,680 4,766 4,381 1,997 2,051 1,893 1,973 1,937 1,916 756 721 759 983 1,051 1,035 1,432 1,370 1,276 1,409 1,531 1,563 2,819 2,651 2,490 2,063 2,090 1,898 645 1.909 2,713 2,567 2,277 1,589 1,049 1,050 988 902 769 664 11,253 11,197 12,045 11,802 11,831 9,842 5,315 5,902 6,457 6,364 6,519 6,144 3,342 3,342 3,218 3,324 3,634 3,605 2,789 3,020 3,256 3,294 3,567 3,225 1,321 1,362 1,428 1,613 1,579 1,469 770 636 807 819 733 685 1,643 1,769 1,696 1,547 2,125 2,395 952 882 1,592 2,102 2,059 1,854 5,646 6,340 5,191 4,828 4,801 4,634 11,256 12,230 13,652 14,541 14,103 9,739 5,773 7,518 5,805 4,540 4,424 4,945 274 361 560 669 569 473 2,973 3,219 3,287 3,097 4,425 6,165 612 886 985 1,014 935 730 2,376 2,313 2,331 2,407 2,379 2,313 778 753 783 803 694 680 431 454 337 378 515 558 7,173 7,678 9,080 10,333 10,359 11,183 354 430 536 637 676 662 8 , 666 10,315 10,522 10,481 11,461 12,505 716 854 1,066 1,277 1,249 1,026 517 588 556 836 924 762 16,785 19,490 23,850 26 , 469 24,859 21,523 1,801 1,781 1,880 2,135 2,460 2,474 2,816 2,794 2,770 2,808 3,003 2,792 18,459 19,316 21,206 24,363 26,794 29,408 319 371 336 345 386 400 633 635 1,168 1,286 1,075 759 1,198 1,288 1,269 1,264 1,213 980 1,115 1,457 2,215 2,029 1,776 1,827 4,997 3,469 3,440 3,577 3,570 3,356 2,562 2,842 2,994 2,807 2,639 2,409 417 450 370 417 403 432 1,794 2,015 2,010 2,107 2,546 2,644 6,399 5,625 4,778 4,355 3,942 3,741 2,603 2,513 2,602 2,403 2,535 2,642 4,062 4,228 4,368 4,344 4,764 4,713 1,206 1,146 1,100 1,068 952 841 161 161 171 152 188 192 107 65 65 46 36 7 2,593 2,624 2,573 2,630 2,669 2,618 79 86 338 1,212 364 137 83 110 117 125 127 121 i 105 56 11 8 8 11 i 203 223 199 213 204 172 8,466 118,032 181,350 193,145 205,681 216,188 220,149 207,418 [13] 4,982 7,865 1932 MEMBERSHIP OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION Estimated Number of Teachers Employed Number of Teachers Enrolled Percent of Teachers Enrolled Total 207,418 New York . 77,500 Pennsylvania . 62 , 000 Illinois . 48,600 Ohio . 44,500 Texas . 44,200 California . 40,700 Michigan . 35,900 New Jersey . 27,300 Massachusetts . 26,400 Iowa . . . . . 25 , 800 Indiana . 24,300 Missouri . 24,200 North Carolina . 24,100 Minnesota . 22,200 Wisconsin . 21,700 Kansas . 20,800 Oklahoma . 20,100 Georgia . 19,200 West Virginia . 18,000 Tennessee . 17,700 Alabama . 17,300 Virginia . 17,300 Kentucky . 17,200 Mississippi . 16,400 Nebraska . 14,900 South Carolina . 13,400 Arkansas . 12,700 Louisiana . 12,300 Washington . 11,800 Florida . 11, 600 Connecticut . 10,700 Colorado . 9 , 900 South Dakota . 9,400 North Dakota . 8,800 Maryland...., . 8,800 Oregon . 7 , 000 Montana . 6,700 Maine . 6,300 Idaho . 4,700 Utah . 4,600 Rhode Island . 4,000 New Mexico . 3,700 Vermont . 3,500 Arizona . 3,500 Wyoming . 3,000 New Hampshire . 3,000 Delaware . 1 , 500 Nevada . 900 Alaska . 154 Canal Zone . 202 Dist. of Columbia _ 2,857 Foreign . Hawaii . 2,551 Philippine Islands _ 26,167 Porto Rico . 4,567 Virgin Islands. . 131 Pennsylvania . 29 , 408 Ohio . 21,523 California . 20,416 New York . 12,505 New Jersey . 11,183 Illinois . 9,842 Michigan . 9,739 Missouri . 6,165 Indiana . 6,144 Minnesota . 4 , 945 Wisconsin . 4,713 Massachusetts . 4,634 Colorado . 4,381 Washington . 3,741 Iowa . 3,605 Texas . 3,356 Kansas . 3,225 Oregon . 2,792 West Virginia . 2,642 Virginia . 2 , 644 Oklahoma . 2,474 Utah . 2,409 Maine . 2,395 Nebraska . 2,313 Arizona . 2 , 305 Connecticut . 1,916 Florida . 1 , 898 Maryland . 1,854 Tennessee . 1,827 Georgia . 1,589 Kentucky . 1,469 Alabama . 1 , 204 Delaware . 1,035 North Carolina . 1,026 South Dakota . 980 Wyoming . 841 North Dakota . 762 South Carolina . 759 Montana . 730 Louisiana . 685 Nevada . 680 Idaho . 664 New Mexico . 662 Arkansas . 654 New Jersey . 558 Mississippi . 473 Vermont . 432 Rhode Island . 400 . 192 . 7 1,563 172 2,618 121 137 11 Nevada . 76 Arizona . 69 Delaware . 69 Utah . 52 California . 50 Ohio . 48 Pennsylvania . 47 Colorado . 44 New Jersey . 4\ Oregon . 40 Maine . 38 Washington . 32 Wyoming . 28 Michigan . 27 Missouri . 25 Indiana . 25 Minnesota . 22 Wisconsin . 22 Maryland . 21 Illinois . 20 New Hampshire . 19 Connecticut . 18 New Mexico . 18 Massachusetts . 18 Florida . 16 New York . 16 Kansas . 16 Nebraska . 16 Virginia . 15 West Virginia . 15 Idaho . 14 Iowa . 14 Vermont . 12 Oklahoma . 12 Montana. . . . . n South Dakota . 10 Tennessee . 10 Rhode Island . 10 North Dakota . 8 Kentucky . 8 Georgia . 8 Texas . 8 Alabama . 7 South Carolina . 6 Louisiana . 6 Arkansas . 5 North Carolina . 4 Mississippi . 3 125 3 55 103 1 3 8 [14] General Sessions Evaluating American Education was the theme of the seventy-first annual convention of the Na¬ tional Education Association. The program presented by President Joseph Rosier constituted an evaluation of education on the basis of past achieve¬ ments, present responsibilities, and opportunities for future service. Teachers from all parts of the country journeyed to Chicago, some of them at considerable sacrifice, to participate in this great convention which was noteworthy for its outspoken discussions, its frank consideration of the various crucial prob¬ lems in education, and its large, enthusiastic attend¬ ance. The city of Chicago, which has been a virtual battleground in the educational conflict was most hos¬ pitable to the visiting delegates. The Representative Assembly authorized the cre¬ ation of the Department of Art Education, thus mak¬ ing a total of twenty-three departments for the As¬ sociation. All of the departments held their sessions either in connection with the Chicago meetings or with the. Minneapolis convention of the Department of Superintendence. [ 16 j CHARACTER EDUCATION IN THIS MODERN DAY MARGARET SLATTERY, AUTHOR AND LECTURER, BOSTON, MASS. Character education worthy of the name means the creation and develop¬ ment of a Way of Life which results in good to the individual and society. All mankind is in search of it. Experiments in the quest of a Way to Live not based upon character achievements have been futile. The human race is still in early childhood despite the thousands of years it reckons as its past. Men do not yet fully appreciate man, his place in the scheme of things, his relative relationship to things. Therefore he is tempted to evaluate progress and power on the basis of material possessions. The temptation to move man constantly about on the stage of time and give to gold and goods the center is still great. But as Edwin Markham has pointed out in “Gates of Paradise”: We are all blind until we see That in the human plan Nothing is worth the making If it does not make the Man. Why build these cities glorious If Man unbuilded goes? In vain we build the work unless The builder also grows. Now and then the school has lost sight of the fact that its one supreme object is to fit the child to do his part in creating his world and to help him live in it in freedom and happiness. We have been concerned with giving to the pupil those things which promise to make him a success in the purely materialistic interpretation of the word, with the result that suddenly both he and we have discovered that our house was built upon the sand. Since 1929, distorted, creaking, breaking, the house has drifted with the current. Not only the individual teacher, but the banker, the statesman, the industrialist, know that nations having builded in wood and stone and steel rather than in goodwill, justice, and truth, have builded in vain. With his supreme task clarified and acknowledged the teacher has a better chance at the present moment than for many years to direct his energies in his work with pupils toward the building of those spiritual values with¬ out which all else is flotsam and jetsam in a whirlpool of confusion and chaos. If the teacher is to be one of the main sources, in some cases the main source, and in others the only source, of power in the creating of a scale of values which shall mean the establishing of a Way of Life which can bring liberty and happiness to the race, perhaps it would be well to look at him for a few moments. The teacher like all other human beings must reflect something of the life of his day, yet must escape from its chains. The teacher best fitted to build character is and must always be a person [17] 18 National Education Association with a measure of background, a breadth of knowledge, imagination, re¬ sourcefulness, a sense of humor, idealism, and belief in , sympathy with, and hope for the youthful members of the human race. Even more than any degree which college or university can bestow upon him, the teacher who in this modern day can even hope to cultivate within his pupils enthusiasm for right doing must have a wide range of warm human emotions, guarded and guided by that balanced reason which means in¬ telligence. No character education is worthy of the name if it is carried on in hit or miss fashion without definite goals, methods and plans by which those goals may be reached. Character education carried on in one room, in one building, in cities here and there, can never mean growth and development in the character of the whole nation. We have splendid and outstanding examples today of successful community achievements in character building. These must be extended until the entire country is interested in and work¬ ing at the task. If the best results are to be expected in character training the com¬ munity must make a persistent and relentless effort to remove schools from politics. No parent or other loyal citizen should consent to policies adopted in the name of economy that mean overcrowding, use of buildings that menace health and safety, small children taken to school by bus without a matron, elimination of subjects necessary for right training, and curtailment of length of school terms. The community dares not forget that in its schools at the present moment sit the homemakers and the citizens of tomorrow. The home has relinquished much of its task — that we know, and the church finds it very difficult to make consecutive contacts with pupils in order that it may carry out its program. The community must demand high standards and adequate preparation on the part of teachers. After a period of trial, it must insist upon permanent tenure for its corps of teachers that there may be a sense of security and the teacher may share the community life. The salary must be definite and adequate. In times of strain where real necessity demands, teachers have voluntarily and generously contributed in common with all other citizens employed by state or municipality. They have a right to expect to be promptly returned to their salary basis when the times permit. These things the community should demand of their officials in loyalty to the city’s highest good and the nation s safety and welfare. Character education is a patriotic service of the very highest order. It aims to build a nation in which all shall be not only free but worthy of freedom and intelligent in the practise of it. It is the teacher in this modern day who must lead in the building of character which frees from fear, and awakens and develops that passion for truth which results in personal and civic righteousness. General Sessions 19 All his other tasks are minor in comparison with this one supreme thing which must be done if man is not to progress along those lines which at last shall destroy him. We need in our public schools today, especially in the great cities, men of the highest possible standards both personal and social. In the majority of cases we have them fighting bravely against almost overwhelming odds. In other places where the grip of the politician is strong and safeguards weak we have men wholly without those qualities of leader¬ ship which youth is willing to follow. We need in our modern public-school system men who have at least as one characteristic the qualities of knight¬ hood which Tennyson pictured so vividly when he said: I made them lay their hands in mine and swear . . . To lide abroad redressing human wrongs, To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, To honor their word as if it were their God’s, To lead sweet lives in purest chastity . . . To teach high thought and noble words, And love of truth, and all that makes a Man. But all teachers find it very difficult to appeal with success to standards above the general range of those of the community. Since all men learn to do by doing, character education worthy of the name must help the child to do right, and provide and use opportunities for right action. The United States of America has but one serious menace at the present moment. That menace is not to be found primarily in any political party nor even in the unemployment and poverty which we have reason to fear, nor in the gangs who challenge our system of orderly government. That menace is ignorance. Against it our public schools struggle. If the school is defeated in its battle the nation builded with such high hope will perish. If we hope to avert the danger which threatens we must act — and now. You will remember that in The Christmas Carol as Scrooge and the Spirit stood together two children joined them. They were a boy and a girl — meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish. Where angels might have sat enthroned devils lurked and glared out menacingly. Scrooge tried to say that they were fine children but the words choked him. “Spirit, Spirit, are they yours?” he asked and could say no more. “They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, “and they cling to me appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, for on the brow of this girl and this boy is written that which is Doom . . . unless the writing be erased. Deny it if you can!” said the Spirit stretching its hand out to the city. “Deny it — but abide the end — Doom.” And the bells struck twelve. These are not the words of an alarmist. They are fact. As true in this day as they proved to be in the days that followed the Spirit’s declaration. It is the -teachers perhaps who more than any other group of citizens in the United States today believe in the possibility of eliminating ignorance and poverty from society. Teachers have proved their faith by remaining loyal to their tasks under heavy strain such as no other professional body has been called upon to endure. They have not laid down their tasks even 20 National Education Association under circumstances which left them facing hunger and privation. The teacher has kept faith, believing that tho “. . . . the tired waves are vainly breaking, the tide is sure to win.” The road from the jungle to the plains of vision and idealism is long, but man is making his way painfully toward the distant summits. When periodically they are hidden by the mist the true educator continues his work of character building, reenforcing his spirit in the words of Washington Gladden : And fierce tho the fiends may fight And long tho the angels hide I know that truth and right Have the universe on their side. Note: Lack of space makes it impossible to include practical illustrations 'which 'were given thruout the address showing how in enlightened communities both in the United States and in countries around the world attempts are being made to meet the special problems of this modern day. A CENTURY OF PROGRESS ALLEN D. ALBERT, ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT OF A CENTURY OF PROGRESS, CHICAGO, ILL. In certain respects our Exposition differs from others. One of the most prominent differences is that our Exposition has never had a bill it could not pay. That distinction, I hasten to assure, we have achieved in Chicago. We were confronted with the necessity of financing a project which would require about $15,000,000 in advance capital and that we must procure all the capital in a period when all the world around was just as bad as Miss Slattery has painted it. With that beginning, that the Exposition, thru the genius of Rufus Dawes, has been financed upon a pay-as-you-go policy, I bring you to a second point of difference. This Exposition has a theme. We believed that life had been largely transformed in one hundred years which are coincident with the life of Chicago. We believed that it had been transformed mainly thru the mysteries of science and we believed the world was in a considerable state of fuddle as to what it all meant. We were perfectly aware that while science had not fallen down yet it had not poured out unalloyed blessings upon society. We found that disaster accompanied every contemplation of one’s good that came with science, and we were trained enough in sociology to be aware that for every benefaction of science, for every use, there appears to be some abuse. The phrase, “Tomorrow is a race, a race between Education and Catas¬ trophe,” still has its value and its relevancy for us as teachers, arid we dedi¬ cated this entire project to the cause of Education and devoted it in opposition to Catastrophe. This theme in its turn put upon us certain obligations. We were required to undertake what never before had been assayed and that which scientists were unwilling should now be assayed. We were going to General Sessions 21 interpret the mysteries of science in terms which the common people could understand. Again, the Exposition differs from other expositions in that we have changed the focus of our objective. We began by planning that the Exposition should interpret the transformation of life for the great body of people, meaning adults. After a little time that decision was weakened, and now our thought is very definitely that it doesn’t make a great deal of difference whether you and the folk of your kind come to our Exposition or not. We shall achieve a very much larger purpose if we can draw to it the youth of America and trust to them to interpret its possibilities. A great composite it is, a thing strident in its color and noisy in its music, filled with the motivations and movements and confusions of industry, cheapened now and again by base displays, and yet in the very heart of it are replicas of the Syrian peasant whose chief message to man was, Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden.” In the Hall of Religions there is a little cup. Most archeologists accredit it to the Third Century of the Christian Era. Some date it back to the First Century. It consists of a crude silver vessel in an elaborate silver holder. The crude vessel must have been very precious because it has had little pieces cut from it and because it was given so rare and lovely a mounting. In the mounting there are the figures of ten and on the backs of their chairs there are tiny writings which have enabled archeologists at the University of Chicago to identify these persons. One is Matthew, another Mark, another Luke, another John, another James, brother of Jesus, another James, the lesser, another Judas, another Paul. Would you believe that these men do not look like stained glass windows at all, rather like football players? They are aggressive, powerful, clean-shaven men, and as I dwelt upon them upon my first sight of the Chalice of Antioch, I marveled that I could ever have conceived of Peter as anything else but the type of man who, if he lived in Chicago, would be teaching my neighbors that it is not so much to have a good Republican organization as it is to have a good city government. And then I looked at the two other figures of the ten. One is of a lad about ten years old, the other is of a man of about thirty and both have been so evidently touched by so many thousands of tips of fingers or lips that the modeling has been greatly reduced, which I think is well, for as you look you are aware that you have come nearer, perhaps, than men have ever come in recent centuries to the likenesses of one whom the Jews called Brother and whom all the world knows as the Prince of Peace. As I look — I go there every day — I turn and look into the tomorrow, wondering whether the real Century of Progress is that which is behind us or that which is opening before us, and something finer than science and clearer than philosophy and more energizing than all the dreams a man can have, something that men call Faith, takes possession of me and lifts me up and I realize that if there were to be no such soul, such heart of a Century of Progress, there would be no new Century of Progress to record. 22 National Education Association PATRIOTISM, EDUCATION, AND RELIGION CHARLES W. GILKEY, DEAN, UNIVERSITY CHAPEL, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. Most of us have lived long enough to discover that people who are near of kin do not always get along together any too well. As the wise saw hits it off, we choose our friends, but God gives us our relatives! The reasons for this familiar difficulty are often plain to see — at least so it seems to those who stand outside the family looking in. Time and again the trouble seems to spring from some common family trait that always strikes fire whenever it hits upon itself in some other member of the same family with the same characteristics. A father’s square-jawed stubbornness faces the same kind of a jaw in the son who inherited it from his father, and hard looks and hard words are called forth each from the other. Brother and sister inherit the same quick-flaring temper from some red-headed ancestor; and each is tinder to the other’s touch. We bystanders shake our heads, and remark that if they weren’t so much alike, they would get along together much better. All this is of course one reason among many why family quarrels are pro¬ verbially so long and so bitter. Now my point is that this familiar situation is not limited to personal relations : that it holds likewise as between human interest, and between social groups. Human concerns that are near of kin show the same sensitive¬ nesses, and face the same difficulties. Nowhere is all this more evident than in the relations between two great human interests: the relations between education and religion. Of course, historically the kinship between them has been very close. Down the long centuries religion has been either the mother of education or its foster-mother, and has literally kept it alive in dark and hungry ages. Nor has this intimate relation been merely protective. Tho the functions of education and religion in human life are as distinct, and their characteristics as different, as those of man and woman, there is at the same time an inward kinship between them like that between brother and sister. 1 hey share and depend upon the same adventurous faith in the potentialities of people, the unrealized capacities of ordinary human beings. They share and depend upon the same unproved faith in the order and rationality and de¬ pendability of the universe of which we are a part. Cut the nerve of either of those faiths, and both education and religion will show the paralyzing effect. \ et at the same time, as education and religion grow toward maturity in the human family, they are both as sensitive about their relations with each other, and as critical each of the other’s shortcomings, as brothers and sisters in their teens so often are at home. On the one hand, churches and states still try now and then to prescribe or limit what schools and colleges may or may not teach about evolution or social problems — or more frequently complain that they are not appreciated in the universities. On the other hand, there are always ultra-modern professors in every institution who are ready enough to call religion hard names in reply. It is a familiar family situation between brothers and sisters — both in their teens! General Sessions 23 But tho they do not nowadays find it easy always to get along together, religion and education need each other just as members of the same family do, if their life individual and collective is to be enriched and deepened by its very diversities. Both will be the poorer if either one is read out of the common household. Certainly religion needs education. "I hat is as plain from human history as it is in presentday experience. Only the criticism and cor¬ rection that sound education provides can free religion from the super¬ stition and credulity that otherwise so easily cling to its beliefs, and from the pettiness and provinciality that otherwise so easily circumscribe its actions. Education needs religion to quicken it with creative faith and kindling power. In these difficult days, when teachers by the thousands are having to dig down to some deeper motive for their daily work than just doing it for pay, be¬ cause they’re not getting their pay, and yet can’t quit; when they have to face public neglect and forgetfulness and ingratitude without being soured by it ; education certainly needs religion to provide it with its own distinctive contribution to human life — a motivation that does not depend upon checks or cheers, and is not paralyzed by either criticism or neglect ; that does its daily work “as unto the Lord, and not unto men.” We might roughly hit off this partnership between education and reli¬ gion as something like that between these two human hands in the doing of any good job. Our hands are not duplicates: neither one can take the place of the other — as we quickly find out if we try to put a left glove on a right hand. But together in partnership they can work far more effectively than either one alone. Try to wash with one hand alone when the other hand is out of commission, and compare the awkward and ineffective result with what happens when each hand can wash the other. Just so education must forever cleanse religion of its fanaticisms and its superstitions, and wash away the dust and litter of the centuries that make it musty and stale. Just so religion must wash away from education the dust of its daily routine and weariness, and revive its enthusiasm and its consecration ; must keep it human enough so that it will not be buried beneath the weight of its own elaborate technics and its unintelligible lingos. We must remind ourselves that this family of relatives who don’t always get along easily together, but are nevertheless indispensable each to the other, consists not of two, if human life is to be rich and full, but of three: education, religion, and patriotism. That patriotism also is near of kin to the other two, there can be little question when we study either history or social psychology. Consider how down the very human centuries religion has intensified and supported patriotism ; how steadily in our modern age education has appealed to patriotic motives for support. We must maintain and improve our public schools to train our citizenry as a whole, and our universities to train our leaders. But it is equally evident that the going relations between these three near of kin have of late become more sensitive, and more critical each of the other. They do not always get along together very well. Each is quickly aware of the others’ shortcomings, and ready to talk about them in public 24 National Education Association with embarrassing frankness. Each is inclined to ask of the other a sub¬ servience which they are not by any means ready to yield. Their growing independence is evidenced, not only by great frankness of speech about the family table, but by an entire readiness to leave the family roof and shift for themselves if necessary to maintain their independence. We parents who ha\e a family of children in their teens know the familiar symptoms and vocabulary well enough. Education blurts out, in a burst of frankness, that patriotism has all too often doctored histoiy into propaganda for bigger and better wars yet to come, and lefuses to be used in the future as the tool of a nationalism that Hill be the end of modern civilization if it has its unchecked way. Religion chimes in to say that it cannot and will not admit the claim of patriotism to erect the political state as a new idol on humanity’s altar of worship and supreme devotion that belongs only to God. It cannot admit that the state can do no wrong, nor make the will of the state master of the conscience of the individual. Outgrowing its own naive belief in miracles, it cannot grant the state any miracle-working power to change wholesale murder into per¬ sonal duty, or to make the hell of modern war a vestibule to a heaven to which it certainly does not seem to bring us here on earth. Then, of course, patriotism flings back that such education and such religion are subversive and dangeious, and that the Lares and Penates of the social order and the Americanism which the fathers bequeathed to us are all in peril at their hands. . . . Presently there are the makings of a first-class family row, with plain speaking a-plenty on all sides. Of course, if an)^ of the three is to have the dogmatic and final word, to which the other two must perforce yield obedience, there is little prospect in either family or society for a happy human situation in the years ahead. Put paients and teachers alike, who have learned by experience that within both families and schools there can be plain speaking and real differences without the loss of that mutual dependence and contribution which leads to a life larger and richer than any individual can find alone, will seek to hold all three together during these next critical years. Education must give our human family the trained and critical mind, able to examine and if necessary to debunk the false gods to which both religion and patriotism too quickly bow down. Patriotism must give us that constant reference to the human welfare of ordinary men and women in this generation and in those to come, that constant emphasis on the sharing of life with all our fellows, without which both education and religion load themselves up with technics and lingos that are once if not twice removed from reality. And religion must always give us that constant lifting of our eyes from the imperfect present to the better but costly future, that constant revision of contemporary stand¬ ards and ideals by others that are more truly divine, which the New Testa¬ ment puts before us as the supreme obligation of human life: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” We have been speaking as if these three were abstract entities, or at best separate groups committed to independent interests. Let me remind you General Sessions 25 finally that the cooperation between all three for which I plead can only be achieved as each one of us seeks in his own living to exemplify and harmo¬ nize their various claims: being ourselves intelligent and patriotic and reli¬ gious all at once. And if it should ever again in human affairs come to a choice among the three, each one of us will have to decide for himself which of the three comes first — and be prepared to pay the inevitable pi ice of his decision. ADDRESS OF WELCOME IRWIN WALKER, MEMBER, BOARD OF EDUCATION, CHICAGO, ILL. One immediately senses the sincerity of purpose of this gathering and I feel more than ever that Mayor Kelly is missing a wonderful oppoitunit) to meet a wonderful lot of people. Mayor Kelly is indeed sorry that he cannot be here today and has asked me to express to you his sincere regret. It is a pleasant task to me on behalf of Mayor Kelly and the city of Chicago to extend to each and all of you a most hearty welcome. We are glad you are here and we hope you will all leave with the thought of looking forward to many happy returns to Chicago. Mayor Kelly has asked me to express to you his sincere appreciation of your selection of Chicago as your convention city. If I may make a personal observation, I would like to take this opportunity of expressing to you my sincere thought that Mayor Kelly is making a determined effort to bring about a more ideal situation in the public school system of Chicago. We know that your deliberations and your discussions are going to be of great value to education and we wish you every success. I wish to have the opportunity this morning and the pleasure of present¬ ing a key to the city but I am glad to say that that key is going to be pre¬ sented by a group of beautiful girls of whom Chicago and Illinois are proud. We are glad to exhibit them as the girls of Chicago and Illinois. ADDRESS OF WELCOME WILLIAM J. BOGAN, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CHICAGO, ILL. With pleasure and pride and hope Chicago welcomes this great convention of the National Education Association. It welcomes you with pleasure be¬ cause it is naturally hospitable and enjoys observing the pleasure of others. It welcomes you for the opportunity to express its appreciation for your appreciation as shown by your presence. It welcomes you for yourselves, for the qualities of intellect and heart and soul and judgment that enable you, like captains on a sinking ship, to direct with coolness and sanity the rescue of the best features of our civilization. It welcomes you with pride in its material achievements so well illustrated in the Century of Progress and with deeper pride in its spirit. Here the abounding vitality of the American people found peculiar expression, and here, in the heart of the continent was 26 National Education Association set one of the world’s significant centers of civilization, a city transcending local limitations and gathering into itself the energies of a united people, energies whose deeper currents flow from the great historic cultures of the world. Her highest mission may seem to the stranger within her gates to be materialistic, but we who know and love her for her faults and virtues feel that her highest mission is to provide opportunities for new expressions of the profound spiritual and intellectual experiences of the race, thereby helping to develop a culture fit for the new day. Education is the best agency for this purpose. Therefore, Chicago welcomes you that you may help to save it, for education alone can pass the barriers of time and place and bring the wisdom of all the ages to serve the present hour. Chicago welcomes you with pride in its treasures of art and music and education. You may wonder at this pride in view of this city’s reputation but you should know that tho Chicago reveals its growing pains thru crime, corruption, indifference, and cynicism, deep in the throbbing hearts of millions of its people is the desire to make this city, now fourth in the world in population and wealth, first in the world in beauty of soul. Chicago welcomes you with hope in the influences that you may bring to save the vanishing ideals of youth. It has a hope that thru guidance and education of the highest type, the rights of children may be preserved. The task of guidance in education today is especially difficult, for hundreds of thousands of men and women who have been blessed with an ideal training for life occupations are saying pathetically to an indifferent world with eyes and hands and voice: “Brother, can you spare me a dime?” With the tragic panorama of the past and present clouding our vision we ask this question in terror: “Into what occupations shall we guide the youth of today?” The only answer seems to be a mocking applause from the idle hands so pleasing to Satan. Chicago has great hope that the deliberations of this convention may provide a better answer. As good hosts we should not inflict upon you the many troubles that beset us except insofar as they may guide you in finding remedies for your trou¬ bles. Our troubles are great. Unpaid salaries, drastic economies, a hopeless future, wrecked homes, and starvation are serious enough, but for Chicago and the remainder of the nation, yes, for the world itself, there is the more serious problem of the future of youth. Starvation, poverty, and reduction of opportunity may be only temporary but there is danger that the greater problem of the future of youth with its problem of idleness may become a universal tragedy unless the peoples of the world give heed to its menace and its remedy. Therefore in welcoming you to Chicago, I, as the repre¬ sentative of five hundred thousand children, bespeak with great hope, your interest in this serious problem, for the world that cannot assimilate its youth will return to the chaos from which it was created. General Sessions 27 ADDRESS OF WELCOME A. L. WHITTENBERG, N. E. A. STATE DIRECTOR FOR ILLINOIS, SPRINGFIELD, ILL. I am delighted to see such a splendid audience of American school teachers gathered here in Chicago. Twelve months ago we were looking for someone with courage and wisdom to accept the presidency of the National Education Association and conduct its deliberations and its performances thru a year that even twelve months ago we were sure would be filled with trouble and anxiety. So the National Education Association looked to the hills of West Virginia, be¬ lieving that from the hills may come our help. We found a man there who has thru a long series of years performed almost all the duties that are involved in a varied public-school career. We found you, President Rosier. And it is with great pleasure that Illi¬ nois welcomes you to Illinois and to Chicago. Mr. Walker, I should like to thank you in the name of Illinois, Chicago, and America for the assuring words you have brought to us from his Ex¬ cellency, Mayor Kelly. We shall put great faith in the assurances that you have pronounced here. We really and genuinely believe that there will be a tremendous improvement in conditions pertaining to the teachers in the public schools of Illinois and of Chicago and of America within a very few months. I have been honored with the privilege of extending to the school teachers of America a welcome to Illinois and to Chicago. If our greeting to you does not have the brilliancy and eclat that we may have extended to some conquering hero, I assure you it is none the less genuine. Even the weather man is undertaking to welcome you with the same variety of weather that delighted us in Atlanta and in Los Angeles and in Atlantic City. It would be unwise for me to pledge to you that this delightful weather program will be continued thruout the week. About the only pledge I can safely make about the weather is that we are likely to have an abundance of it. A highly cultivated Chicago lady wrote a charming little poem of fewer than a dozen lines in which she uses one word that is frequently found in a weather program. I am fond of interpreting the word “rain” as alluding to all the natural elements — the mountains and the plains and the rivers and the lakes and the seas. I am also fond of believing that this Chicago lady intended to suggest certain masculine qualities she most admires. Probably some of us who are women and all of us who are men would like to know just what masculine qualities this Chicago lady admires : Who loves the rain And loves his home And looks on life with quiet eyes, Him will I follow thru the storm And at his hearth fire keep me warm. Nor heaven nor hell can that soul surprise 28 National Education Association Who loves the rain And loves his home And looks on life with quiet eyes. In 1929 we first invited you to come to Chicago for your 1933 conven¬ tion. We have renewed that invitation annually. We were sincere in our first and in our subsequent invitations. All along we have wanted you to come to Chicago. We rejoice that you are here. Those of you who come from the older states of the East and from the South are aware that sturdy pioneers from your own state crossed the Alleghenies, or came up from the southland and founded Illinois. Those of you who come from the newer states of the West know that many of the early and stalwart pioneer citizens of your own state migrated from Illi¬ nois. Our family ties are interwoven; our problems are similar; our hopes are kindred ; and surely our purposes are the same. W e frankly admit our difficulties. But many of our problems here in Illinois and in Chicago are problems confronting the teaching profession. More than that — they are problems confronting the existent social order. They are fundamental. We confidently hope that your presence here and the courageous aggressive program of this great convention here in Chicago will result in great value, not only to us, but to America. Teachers seek to defend not themselves alone, but civilization itself. We shall go forward with courage and with confidence. The situation here and elsewhere is bad. But it is by no means hopeless. We may look too fre¬ quently and too long at the picture of selfishness and ignorance, of a few closed schoolhouses, of uncollectable tax bills, of unemployment with its long train of miseries. There is another picture. As children many of us studied the old-time geography book. We learned and recited some pages describing the continent of Africa. We forgot most of the description. One page in the old geography remained with us — a page devoted to the pictures of all the wild and ferocious animals indigenous to the continent of Africa. We re¬ membered that picture, and to some of us at least, that picture of wild animals was our picture of Africa. We improved our knowledge of Africa somewhat as the years went along, but personally, I quite recently had a new picture of Africa — a letter came from Africa to the office of State Superintendent of Public Instruction Francis G. Blair, and because of its contents was referred to my desk. It ran something like this: To the Honorable Commissioner of Education Springfield, Illinois United States of North America Honored and Respected Sir: There is a young man sojourning with us who is a graduate of a college (naming the college) located in Illinois. This young man wishes to teach in our public schools and so, my dear sir, we would inquire of you the standing of that college in order that we may know whether it is safe to permit him to teach our children in our public schools. 1 his letter gave to me, as it perhaps will give to some of you, a new picture of Africa. General Sessions 29 If we have produced in every American city a few very rich, but extremely selfish men, who would destroy the American idea of public education, we should remember with hope and with confidence that the overwhelming ma¬ jority of our one hundred and twenty-two millions of. people are loyal sup¬ porters of public education and are determined to maintain its sacred rig t to America’s reverent regard. If in the science laboratories of twenty-four thousand American public high schools you and the teachers you represent have thru a generation taught science so thoroly as to develop an army of trained men with the accuracy of scientific thinking; and if this army of men so trained by you is able to employ its inventive and creative genius to the extent that it has produced single machines that do the work of thousands of laborers and thereby throw out of employment ten millions of workers, let us remember that those same teachers have taught other curriculums in the same schools so thoroly that the beautiful spirit of charity and benevolence pervades and controls to the extent that another thirty millions of workers with reduced wages gladly contribute of their meager earnings to the support of the unemployed. That is one of your achievements. If thru the results of popular education the work in America can be done by machinery and without the employment of a few millions of our citizens, that same popular education for which you and your associates are respon¬ sible has produced an orderly citizenship that remains orderly ; a citizenship that remains loyal to our government and loyal to. society while suffering the most intense privation. That is one of your achievements. There is no great extravagance in the hope that the sacrifices made by school teachers thru the last three years shall not be in yam ; that because of your heroic example and your good teaching, intelligent citizens are now addressing their attention to the problem of justly and fairly distribut¬ ing the good things of life to all who earnestly and honestly strive to possess them. Let us hope that this will be America’s next great achievement. It will come largely thru your efforts and the efforts of your predecessors thru generations of good teaching. Your reduced salary, or your inability to collect your small salary, in no way indicates a lack of confidence in your worth. Intelligent .America knows that the colossal failure of all times and of all civilization is the failure in dealing with the offender against society. Intelligent America is coming to believe in the prevention of offenses against society rather than in the punish¬ ment of the offender. America knows that the American school teacher is an essential factor. May I quote to you a beautiful sentiment that was not written specially for school teachers, but which I wish to ascribe to you? I have made to you many and many a tong, But none of them told all you are; It was as tho a net of words Were flung to catch a star. 30 National Education Association It was as tho I curved my hand And dipped sea water eagerly Only to find it lost The deep dark splendor of the sea. Every Illinois teacher attending this convention is at your service. We want you to know that all the work we have done in preparing for this great convention has been a joy to us. Now we are to be rewarded by the nch compensation of having come to know you. RESPONSE TO ADDRESSES OF WELCOME LUCY MASON HOLT, PRESIDENT, VIRGINIA EDUCATION ASSOCIATION ; AND PRINCIPAL, OCEAN VIEW SCHOOL, NORFOLK, VA. It is with mingled feelings of sadness and gladness that we meet again in annual session. Sad when we do not see again those on whom we had learned to lean whose foresight, wisdom, and kindness have made possible the work we do today. Many are not here whom we have looked forward to seeing. One we pause to honor — Dr. Winship. We are sad when we know the thousands of children whose school life has been shortened. We who spend our lives with them know that when we cut them short on their preparation, and send them into the market places of man, it is the same as if in war we armed our boys with blank cartridges and paper swords. Just as the prayer meeting is the pulse of the spiritual life of a church so is it true that in the body politic the way that the people support their schools is the pulse of their appreciation of their civic duty and responsibility to tomorrow. In a veiy little while our places are filled by those who are in our schools today. When will we wake up to our full responsibilities to them? Let us be glad that ours is the privilege to help with this awakening. Let us see to it that the pupils now in our schools come out with a keener appreciation of their civic duty, of their debt to our public schools which are fundamental in a democracy, and with a realization that each one must do his honest part to help all. Let us teachers keep the vision. May we always feel that the children of America are God’s bullion and we, with their parents, are the dies which stamp them coins of citizenship for tomorrow. To the teachers of Chicago we render our tribute. In the hospitality which you extend to us you blazon on the pages of history these immortal words : Not what we give, but what we share, For the gift without the giver is bare. We accept the gift of your hearts and lay our hands in yours that we may remain a unified force for the school children of America. The North, the South, the East, the West, let us love one another. We are brothers. General Sessions 31 EDUCATION AND MODERN SOCIAL LEADERSHIP WALTER DILL SCOTT, PRESIDENT, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, EVANSTON, ILL. In America and thruout the world there is today no monopoly in social leadership. The aristocracy, the clergy, the army, the successful business men, organized labor, the farm bloc, the proletariat, are all discredited as never before. Just at this moment the world is looking to the professoriate for social leadership. No one should presume for a moment that our educators working as individuals, as faculty members, or as an association would ever create a monopoly in social leadership. It is most desirable, however, that we educators should make the most of the opportunity that is now ours. Our weaknesses should be recognized and corrected at the earliest possible moment. Historically three tendencies have stunted the stature of leadership that might otherwise have been attained by educators. The first weakness to which attention should be called is one that the educator shares with the golf club member. Golf club members, in selecting a site for a proposed club, select a site far removed from the abode of man. A hedge is then planted about the club grounds so that the members will be relieved of the necessity of being bored by the pedestrians or the motorists who might pass by the club. The boasted seclusiveness of the golf club is apparent also in the action of the educators. In considering a site and in the landscape gardening of most institutions of higher learning the site has been selected far removed from the centers of population. The monastery wall is also typical of the attempt of the educator to divorce himself from all the pressing problems of organized society. This historic tendency of educators to strive for seclusiveness has lessened the confidence that the citizens might otherwise have in the educators and, on the other hand, it has lessened the enthusiasm that our educators might have had in service to their neighbors. Second, the attitude of snobbishness as illustrated in university clubs is all too common among educators. In the city of Chicago and in every city in which there is a university club, some of the greatest civic leaders are members of the university club. On the other hand, in Chicago and possibly in every city in which there is a university club, the university club is not the first place to which the citizens would go in search for cooperation in pro¬ moting anything of general civic interest. Members of a university club are very frequently afflicted by a superiority complex, selfishness, and a snobbery resulting in an over-emphasis on personal rights, and a disregard for per¬ sonal obligations. I question whether more than 50 percent of the members of the university clubs of America exercise their right of franchise with any degree of regularity in city, state, and national elections. Most faculty members and alumni of American universities refuse to take any active part in either local or national politics. If the educators in this period of social stress and strain are to exercise leadership, they must not only take active part in all forms of political activities, but their influence should be so great 32 National Education Association that in geneial all graduates of high schools, colleges, and universities would be chai acterized by their interest and cooperation in all local, national, and international affairs. Third, and finally, the educator is afflicted to a degree by a characteristic manifest in the members of a large group of clubs, associations, and organiza¬ tions, all of which might be branded as the “stand patter” clubs, in which intolerance is the most dominant characteristic. In former ages the progres¬ sive thinker in every field met intolerance, persecution, and even execution. It made little difference whether the progressive idea was in the religious, the political, or the physical world. Socrates, Savonarola, and Galileo were all martyrs because they propounded new ideas. During the last eighty years in the physical world new ideas have been developed with such frequency that the force of intolerance has been reduced to a negligible amount. In all fields having to do with human relationships progress has been relatively slow and every new idea has been looked upon with suspicion and opposed by the modern witchburners, heresy hunters, and superpatriots. The educa¬ tional institutions of America are still afflicted with all too many obsolete teachings and methods. In possibly every educational institution of America these unfortunate practises are still continued that would be abandoned if it were not for the stand patter” attitude which still characterizes a power¬ ful minority of our faculties and educational leaders. I have great faith in the leadership that may be provided by our educators in this period of social evolution. In every crisis in America, whether in war or in peace, American educators have demonstrated their ability for con¬ structive leadership. I am convinced that this leadership will from year to year become more general and more effective, and to that end I emphasize the fact that in the educational world we should rid ourselves completely of seclusiveness, snobbishness, and intolerance. ENGLISH IN LIFE AND IN SCHOOL WALTER BARNES, PROFESSOR OF THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. ; AND PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH The general principle which I am to discuss may be phrased as follows: The English curriculum and the school activities employed in connection with that curriculum should closely resemble the most useful and successful practises of contemporary life outside the school.” Or, to adapt a statement often quoted: “The English program in school exists for the purpose of helping people carry on more effectively those English activities they would be carrying on anyhow.” To make a curriculum in accordance with this principle is very simple. To decide what should be done in English in any area of school (elementary, junior high, senior high, or college) we determine the most common and necessary types of linguistic and literary activities among people of those ages outside of school; to decide how it should be done in school (the methodology General Sessions 33 of doing and learning), we determine the standards, the technics, and the procedures employed in those activities among the most efficient practitioners of those ages outside of school. It is as simple as that! Of course, such a principle is built upon and buttressed up by assumptions, assumptions a-plenty, assumptions galore. Of these I shall discuss only two, the ones that seem to carry most of the weight. The first is the assumption that a social order exists outside of school which inevitably propels children and young people into all the situations that invite and energize language and reading activity, a social order, moreover, which erects reasonable stand¬ ards, and enforces them by social control. Now, whether or not this hy¬ pothesis is valid can be determined only by extensive investigation. My belief is that normal life in America does provide an abundance of such situations, and that it does exert a potent, “natural,” social pressure. But it is my further belief that these situations are not varied enough to arouse all the potential drives and abilities of the children, that they are too hap¬ hazard for stable and systematic education, and that the standards of life need to be raised and perhaps altered somewhat thru the influence of the school and other educative agencies. From this point of view the school has a supplementary function. It should certainly hesitate before it runs counter to strong, universal, out-of-school motives and tendencies in language and reading. Rather, it should lean toward accepting them as desirable and ad¬ mirable, at least as basic and natural ; and it should bend its efforts towards carrying them further, shifting their direction somewhat, and raising them to a higher level. Typically we English teachers have scant respect for the literary and language activities and standards of life. I shall not argue the case here, tho I must record my own conviction that in the long warfare between the practises of life and the principles of the school, the former have been more frequently on the side of sanity and effectiveness. But it is not primarily a question of whether we respect the out-of-school English activities and prin¬ ciples. Whether we respect them or not, they probably have a deal more influence upon children than we in school can ever attain. If we ignore or align ourselves against the movies and talkies, the radio, the newspaper and magazine, the popular song, the current books advertised and displayed everywhere, against the effective colloquial language of everyday life, we are rendered almost impotent. The moment we “accept the universe,” accept the English interests and tendencies, the activities and practises of the children outside the school as on the whole salutary and right, and conceive it our function to parallel, to enrich and supplement, to guide, to make significant and educative, to bring about more discernment and discrimination, to lift to a higher standard — that moment we place ourselves in a “coign of vantage,” in a position that is tenable and strategic. Then, and only then, may we hope to produce in and around the school the natural incentives and the lifelike opportunities for practising and learning the arts of English. It seems to me dead certain that only by dealing with present out-of-school realities shall we succeed in 34 National Education Association making our school enterprises stimulating and educative, for only so shall we succeed in persuading the “whole child” to go to school to us. The second assumption implied in the principle that the program in school should be an outgrowth from the current English activities of young people, is that language and reading literature are continua, that the activities in these fields carried on by young people are closely similar to the activities carried on by adults. If they are not, then obviously, since we are educating children largely for the continuing common needs of life, we cannot accept the current English practises of children as the basic materials for our school English program. Insofar as they are continua, then equipping children with the attitudes, skills, and knowledges they need as children, utilizing the situations that crop up here and now is all our concern. We need take no thought for tomorrow, for “all our tomorrows will be as today.” I wish I knew with certainty to what degree the English acts and arts are continua. But common observation, as well as a few investigations, indicate that there are not many marked differences between the language activities of youth and those of adulthood. The motives are almost identical (and motives are exceedingly important) ; the elements and qualities necessary for effectiveness seem the same, tho surely there is more insistence upon con¬ ventional correctness in most groups of adults ; and the types of language, conversation, discussion, story-telling, etc., used by young people and by older ones, are, I think, similar, tho undoubtedly there is more letter-writing, more writing of all kinds among adults. On the whole we are justified, I believe, in accepting the continuum assumption for language. No doubt there are countless eccentric variations which cannot be foreseen and provided for ; but generally we may assume that if a young man or woman is equipped to meet his actual language needs here and now, he will be equipped thruout his existence. Anything that is now functional will remain functional ; any¬ thing which is not now functional will never be functional in language. Skilful participation in life is the only preparation for life. In literature, according to the best light obtainable, the situation is some¬ what different. It is true in general, I think, that the reading habit formed in youth persists pretty well thruout life, tho probably it is often interrupted or even completely snapped. But I fancy that standards of literature, that levels of reading enjoyment are not nearly as fixed in youth as we have thought. We may be fairly sure that reading interests, and we may con¬ jecture that reading tastes, vary greatly with maturity, with expanding expe¬ rience, with intellectual and social development. If this is true, what would seem to be important is that the habit of spend¬ ing a part of one’s leisure time in good reading be established in youth in the only way in which, so far as I know, it can be fixed, thru reading for imme¬ diate enjoyment, reading of that which meets one’s current interests and is keyed to one’s intelligence quotient and also to what may be termed one’s “emotional quotient.” As for the standards of the literature read, I would approve the rather negative principle of going no farther than the child’s present tastes will sanction. This does not imply, of course, that we shall General Sessions 35 not attempt, in season and out, to elevate and refine those tastes — and in this endeavor we can work great benefits. It does imply, however, that we shall not expect the immature student to be a full statured adult, with the adult’s interests, and powers of appreciation. Let us take him where we find him, and tempt him with the choicest that his taste will approve and applaud, and let us leave the rest to nature and society, and to his own maturing. There are other assumptions that I should wish to examine, but I must forbear. It is my belief that in general the situations, the activities, the stand¬ ards and practises, the present doing and learning procedures of life con¬ stitute the most promising materials and methods for the school, and that only by falling in with them and lining up with them, shall we be able to effect those improvements over the life activities which undoubtedly can be made. As long as the march of life is in one direction, while the maneuvers of the school are in the opposite direction, just so long will the school, out of touch with life, fail to influence life. Now if we should adopt such a principle, adopt it, that is, not as an alluring theory but as the guiding policy, the basic criterion for curriculum and methodology, certain drastic and dramatic changes would be wrought in our English program. Of these, for our present discussion, I select four: two from literature and two from language-composition. 1. The curriculum should contain a large ratio of recent and contem¬ porary literature. I shillyshallied a long time over that phrase “large ratio.” If we actually based our curriculum upon good, intelligent, out-of-school practise, both of adults and young people — and including, may I say, English teachers — possibly 75 to 90 percent of our offerings would be from modern literature. But probably most of us, even those who class themselves as liberals, would be satisfied with some 50 percent. That would be a con¬ siderably larger proportion of the time and attention than most schools now devote to modern literature. Objections to a program of recent and contemporary literature which would displace many “classics” would be brushed aside, bruskly and blithely, by your thoro-going realist. He would pose but one question: “Do not intelligent, successful adults and young people in life read modern books almost exclusively?” If the answer were yes — as it most assuredly would be — he would continue ruthlessly: “Then your literary curriculum in school should be made up largely of the contemporary. It is not the function of the school to decide whether old or new books should be read in life. You school¬ masters haven’t sufficient knowledge to decide that; and even tho you had, you haven’t sufficient power to put your decisions into effect. The forces and pressures of modern life largely outside your control render you help¬ less. The commercial publishing houses, the army of modern writers, the magazines and newspapers, the photoplays and the theaters, the circulating libraries and book stores — any one of these has perhaps greater influence upon reading tastes and habits than the influence of the school, and com¬ bined they break down all opposition.” 36 National Education Association What arguments can we bring to bear upon such an adversary, we who have faith in the joyous mission of the best literature of the past and believe that our young people should be familiar with a goodly portion of it? We can, of course, flourish the magic phrase “literary heritage” meaning, I pre¬ sume, that there is stored up in that elder literature the lofty ideals and traditions, the struggles, the aspirations and affirmations of the race — all of which constitute a rich legacy, which it were great pity for this oncoming generation not to inherit. But that, in the expressive language of that same generation, “gets us nowhere,” provided that this literature has no appeal, no power over the emotions and what the seventeenth century people called the ‘intellects.” For there is a biological heritage of more vast antiquity and potency than our literature, however ancient : a universal instinct, wrought intimately into our very frames, and this bids us pay attention only to that which is interesting, which has personal and immediate import. If we contend that the literature of the past has higher literary merit than that of the present, we are, it would seem, on somewhat safer ground. But on the other hand, a fair amount of the literature of our times has much literary worth. Many reputations of the past have been floated down to the present on unexamined traditions of excellence. Contemporary interest and appeal to any generation is the only quality which will keep the literature of the past influential in and upon that generation. A book is alive as long as it has life, and it has life as long as it touches the springs and sources of life in living people. Much literature of the past is, or may be made, alive and glowing with life, and piercing in its import for the problems of today. Such literature is forever contem¬ porary ; and whether it is read in life or not, it should be read in school. This is the contribution which the schools can offer to the else unguided reading activities of life outside the school. With this and a liberal amount of the best of the literature of today, we shall have a curriculum which resembles the reading desires and situations of life and effects that “modifica¬ tion of behavior” which is said to be education. 2. When we have formulated a curriculum of literature in school based firmly upon the best literature currently read in life outside the school plus that which needs only to be discovered to be read, our next task would be to formulate a manner , a procedure of reading in school which would more closely resemble that of intelligent readers outside. We need to know much more than we do at present about how good readers read in life — how they read novels, how they read poetry. But one fact must be immediately evident even to the casual observer : the good reader outside of school reads much more and reads it, generally, much more rapidly than we encourage or permit our pupils to do. Now it is easy enough to raise a hue and cry against this mode of reading, especially when it is employed for reading great or even serious books. But the fact seems to be that the more rapid reading is the type employed by intelligent people (including, let us hope, ourselves) in most of the reading situations of life. Certainly it would seem to be nearer the ideal or the General Sessions 37 practical pace than the slow, ponderous, intensive study-reading that we have favored in school. Miss Coryell’s investigation, which has been the model for several others, proves clearly that the socalled extensive method does not bring down the penalties we had prophesied would light upon the hapless child who reads a classic in a relatively short time. He emerges with as much objective knowl¬ edge as the child who spends much more time on it ; he even runs the Regents gauntlet with his head, bloody, perhaps, but unbowed. Indeed if the measure¬ ments of the two methods were delicate enough, they would probably prove that the child who reads extensively obtains a great deal more of the profits inherent in literature — whatever they are — than the child who is con¬ strained to read intensively. For one thing, he gets more pleasure, I should guess. And if he does, I would be willing to close the case at that point, inasmuch as I regard the receiving of pleasure as the one valid test of the successful reading of literature. But we need no argument as to how reading should be done in school. We need only to discover how it is done in life — done, that is, by the people, including young people, who read much and read good books. No one can doubt that they cover more ground and at a more rapid pace than we have wished our pupils to do. Very well ; let us admit they are right and we have been wrong, or at least that they are nearer right than we have been. Then we shall be free to act in our rightful capacity, and in a gracious role: wTe can help formulate a better technic for rapid reading, a technic which will perhaps preserve the gusto, the zest that now characterizes reading in life and add to it something of the desirable thoughtfulness that characterizes good reading in school. But you will remember that I promised — or threatened — to make two applications of our guiding principle to composition and language. 3. An English curriculum based honestly upon the most common and most useful language practises in life would reduce severely the composition work in school and increase liberally the socialized language activities. For there is pretty reliable evidence that an overwhelming proportion of the language of life is not compositional in its nature. It is not discourse, it is not structured, architectured language ; nor do the compositional quali¬ ties of unity, coherence, proportion, and such like, appertain to it. The language of life is largely group activity, it is social behavior ; and the quali¬ ties of effectiveness are social rather than rhetorical: adaptability, coopera¬ tiveness, tact, appropriateness, naturalness, humor, and the like. For most adults and young people the only types of composition, that is of planned, unified, consistent, solo- language, are: stories of the incident and personal-ex¬ perience variety ; letters ; uninterrupted explanations ; and occasional speeches. It is the social types, conversation, discussion, informal arguments, and the myriad brief, off-hand activities in bargaining, playing, working, carrying on human enterprises — it is these that constitute the language of daily living. No one who observes these activities critically can doubt that for success¬ ful participation in them we need education, the education of doing under 38 National Education Association conditions favorable to learning to do better. And no one can doubt that the school English program has failed to provide this education. One reason it fails, I think, is that most teachers conceive of the composition as a kind of general tool, a universal solvent, a panacea for all linguistic ailments, hence rely upon composition work as a means of teaching social language. It would seem to me that the only way to teach the arts of conversation, discussion, and other forms of social language, is to teach them specifically, not to teach something as different, as composing. I hope I am not being misunderstood. I strongly believe that the schools should equip people to think thru the problems that arise in their lives and in their academic subjects, and also, as far as is possible, to write out and talk out their thoughts in connected, orderly fashion. But this is an institu¬ tional objective: it is not a peculiar function of the English department. I would have the English department, insofar as it includes composition, to deal not with composition per se, but with reports, articles, stories, with the specific types of structured writing and speaking that are found in life. We should regard the composition, like the geometric proposition and the logical syllogism, as both too narrow and too broad for effective educa¬ tional use. And while I am dealing with the thought factor in language, may I express my conviction that conversation and discussion are for most people the most common, convenient, and useful instruments for stimulating thought and ar¬ riving at conclusions. But it is, after all, not the intellectual elements in language that are most important in life ; it is the social, the behavioristic elements. Not primarily for training in thought should we teach language, but for training in social behavior, in group conduct. 4. The fourth application of our general principle may be stated thus: The acceptable colloquial language of life should be the standard or norm of school English. That the acceptable — or accepted — language of life, the language that serves as the medium of communication in nearly all the situations of our everyday existence, is prevailingly of the colloquial type is manifest. There is no time, and perhaps there is here no need, to define that colloquial language. It is characterized by loose, free-flowing sentences ; by contractions and elisions ; and particularly by a style that runs naturally and somewhat negligently into idioms, slang, and the easy diction of the vernacular. It is the proper because the appropriate language for small, intimate, social groups, and for common affairs. Typically, it is natural, light, picturesque, humorous; it may be gay and brisk and witty, or it may be suggestive of the deeper emotions. Sometimes, of course, it is and should be commonplace and trivial. At its worst it is characterized by inane and coarse slang, by gross language and grammar blunders, by slovenly enuncia¬ tion. But whatever its faults, it is basically the English language, the most ancient and respectable, the most democratic, the most versatile, and the most useful means of expression and communication. All other modes or styles are off-shoots from it, are, in a sense, dialects of the mother tongue. There is no question, I think, that the schools have generally preferred a General Sessions 39 basic style that is opposed to colloquial language. We have striven for a style that is either formal and bookish or, on the other hand, literary — each one, of course, worthy of its place, but neither capable of performing the vast and varied services of the vernacular. We have tried to outlaw slang and the homely, vigorous, idiomatic phraseology of John Bull and Uncle Sam. We have refined and polished, we have clipped and pruned, we have scholasticized and schoolmastered our lusty English, we have made hair¬ splitting distinctions between linguistic tweedledums and tweedledees. And all to no avail. Unless the students of the subject are in error, the schools and the whole tribe of grammarians and keepers of the well of English undefiled have not altered by a degree the development and history of the language. The reason they have not is, that they have been opposing the very genius of the language; their tiny rules have been in conflict with elemental laws. The gumption of the people has been too much for the pedantry of the schools. Not that the schools cannot and should not have a salutary and educative effect upon colloquial language. They can and should — and they will, as soon as they believe in it, respect it, trust it. The moment we quit, for example, the task of chiding back the waves of slang and begin to devote ourselves to discrimination, for ourselves and our pupils, between desirable and undesirable slang, we shall have effect. As soon as we cease making finical distinctions between shall and will, as soon as we give up treating as belonging to the same felon class the gross and the trivial, the venal and the venial, then we are in a position to help people use better the colloquial language they will use anyhow. Then we shall be aligned with, not against, the pressures and processes of life. And we need not fear lest the fine art of teaching be neglected. It is, I suspect, as difficult to master an effective colloquial style — a style both full-blooded and refined, both natural and thoughtful — as the formal style or even the literary style; as difficult and much more important. The most notable recent contribution to our knowledge of disputed usages is the Leonard monograph, “Current English Usage.” This was published in November, 1932, by the National Council of Teachers of English. But the fact that the National Council published the monograph is not to be taken as evidence that the Council as an organization approved the findings. The National Council does not consider itself an academy capable of ruling on points of usage. Individually many of the Council members regard the findings as acceptable and applaud the movement toward the determination of what is desirable current use, with the consequent elimination of what has been termed “old purist junk.” But many members of the Council are opposed to many of the findings, and some of them are quite certain the movement is harmful. The Council per se regards this monograph as a sound, scholarly study, of sufficient scientific worth to deserve publication and distribution. It is somewhat in the position of the publishing company which issues books containing material which individual members of the firm do not accept, or it is like a graduate school which approves theses 40 National Education Association because they are scientific, tho members of the faculty may not at all agree with the findings or the conclusions. But what strikes a student of the subject as amusing is, that apparently many people regard the Leonard study as a bolt from the blue, as a new and unsuspected and subversive attack on established and sacred matters. As a matter of fact, there is not one of the expressions studied by Leonard which has not been in divided usage, some of them for a long time, with the issue clearly defined and the battle lines sharply drawn. There is not a new item or a new point of view in any part of the Leonard monograph. What Mr. Leonard did, was to secure and then to record and arrange the opinions of a considerable number of persons on disputed expressions, persons whose judgments had weight: linguists, lexicographers, publishers, teachers of Eng¬ lish, and the like. It seems to me, that perhaps the most notable and useful feature of the Leonard monograph, as well perhaps as a number of other studies in collo¬ quial usage, is that, it does establish, within its limits and for its own pur¬ poses, the importance and acceptability of the colloquial style. And that is all I am insisting upon. I believe the schools should accept as the standard and norm the effective colloquial language employed outside the school, and should then attempt to train children and young people in fine and discrimi¬ nating use of the colloquial style. I have stated and discussed the principle, and I have given applications of it, two from the field of literature and two from the field of language and composition. It is evident that many other and perhaps more important ap¬ plications might be made. I am firm in the belief that if we would approve generally the best and most successful practises in the field of reading and language outside the school, and then would pledge ourselves to a program of improving those activities, we should all be in a happier situation. We should then bridge that unfortunate gap which yawns between the English of life and the English of school. We should be in touch with and in line with the great social forces that control. Conceivably, then, the schools would actually help the children to engage more effectively in those linguistic and literary activities that they are engaging in anyhow. EDUCATION AND THE AMERICAN FUTURE GLENN FRANK, PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, WIS. The two phases of the crucial issue of public economy in its relation to the future of the schools and of public education in its relation to the future of the nation are inextricably interlocked, but I shall speak of them in turn, addressing myself, first, to the problem of public economy in its relation to the future of the schools, and, second, to the problem of public education in its relation to the future of the nation. That it is necessary for public institutions as well as private individuals to tighten their belts in lean years may be accepted without argument. I have broken my lance as often as any other American against waste, inefficiency, General Sessions 41 and the retention of manifestly obsolete public services. I lifted my voice and lent my pen in behalf of such economy when the economic skies were bright and the bloated statistics of a bogus prosperity tempted private individuals and public institutions alike to reckless prodigality. I think, therefore, that I have earned the right now, when the economic skies are dark and the stern fact of a depleted national income confronts us, to speak of the national danger that lies coiled at the heart of economy measures that are not dictated by a statesmanlike sense of relative values. The necessity for economy is indisputable. The nature of economy is de¬ batable. The form of economy may make the fact of economy either a national asset or a national liability. There are those who think that for educators to speak now of the dangers confronting education and the other social enterprises of government in the economic crisis that has chilled and arrested the national life is a kind of treason to those who are wresting with the almost insuperable task of bal¬ ancing public budgets. In the minds of such Americans, budget balancing has been lifted to the dignity of a religion, and in this improvised religion they find mandate for the merciless inquisition of public servants who seek to keep the national mind reminded of those immediate human values and those long-time social responsibilities that lie behind public budgets and for which, indeed, public budgets exist. I cannot concur in this point of view! I am not so blind as to assume that a nation can suffer an economic dislocation as profound as this without its institutions having to adjust themselves to its impact. I do not suggest that the teacher should be exempt from his just share of the sacrifices the time may necessitate even after a broad and socially sensitive statesmanship has given its best to the situation. But, in a phase of economic crisis, there are interests that lie beyond economics, and, unless these interests that have to do with the bodies and minds and spirits of the men and women and chil¬ dren of the nation are safeguarded in the midst of crisis, economic recovery itself will prove a barren achievement. It is quite as important to balance the nation’s life as to balance the nation’s budget. It is quite as important to prevent a social deficit for the future as to wipe out a financial deficit in the present. The great army of laymen who are serving on the governing boards of schools, colleges, universities, libraries, hospitals, and kindred social institu¬ tions, on city councils, in state legislatures, and in Congress are facing almost insurmountable difficulties in making ends meet. The Banquo’s ghost of in¬ sufficient public income persistently haunts their consideration of imperative public expenditures. These laymen, charged with the guardianship of these basic public services, must function in an unprecedentedly distracting atmos¬ phere. A thousand and one competing demands beat about their desks. They are caught in the cross-fire of irrational demands for increasing public ex¬ penditures and equally irrational demands for decreasing public expendi¬ tures. They are told, in one breath, that the buying power of the period must be increased and, in the next breath, that the buying power of govern- 42 National Education Association ment must be decreased. If, in this distracting atmosphere, they are to bal¬ ance public budgets without unbalancing the life of community, state, and nation, they need all the help that can come from responsible and unham¬ pered discussion of those forces and institutions upon the full and effective functioning of which the physical health, intellectual discipline, and spiritual stability of the future depend. To prosecute such discussion in the midst of the direst fiscal difficulties that have confronted government in this generation is not treason but coop¬ eration. Indeed, the highest cooperation we can give to the men and women charged with the appropriation of public funds is to hold so high that all may see the banner of those values that lie beyond economics, the values we can least afford to lose, the values without which prosperity becomes a poison in the nation’s vitals. It has been part of the genius of America that we have invested liberally in education. For this reason, it was inevitable that, when depression began to enforce retrenchments in public expenditures, there should come an unusual concentration of public attention upon the schools. For no large public expenditure can be exempt from public examination when the public income nose-dives to new low levels. Nor should it. But it is the business of social statesmanship to turn this depression-induced concern with the schools to constructive rather than destructive account. In a phase of crisis, like this, there is always a flare-up of superficial and sinister criticism of the schools by demagogs who are willing to play horse with anything they think they can capitalize to their personal or political advantage. If the nation listens to such voices now, we may wreck in a year the achievements of a quarter century. But, by and large, the common sense of our commonwealths can be trusted to take care of their demagogs, at least the more blatant of the breed. But the most serious threat to education just now is not the obviously blatant demagogy. The schools of the nation are today threatened with emasculation at the hands of dishonest reduc¬ tionists who have subtly hidden themselves in the camp of honest advocates of essential retrenchment. The honest advocates of essential retrenchment are deeply concerned that the door to educational opportunity shall be kept open to the sons and daughters of all classes and all conditions of men. The dishonest reductionists, where their indifference cannot be traced to igno¬ rance, seem willing to undermine public confidence in the whole system of free public education if their ends can be achieved thereby. We have been stampeded into hysteria regarding public expenditures that bears all the ear-marks of the hysteria that swept our sanity from its mooring during the World War. And, broadly speaking, the same forces have engi¬ neered these two aberrations of the national mind, namely, the forces stand¬ ing to profit most from these hysterias. Under the hysteria of war-time the greatest benefactors of society were supposed to be those who rounded up the most pro-Germans, slackers, and bolsheviks, and, in the round-up, anybody standing in the way of the forces that thought to gain from the world storm was pretty sure to be plastered with the label of pro-German, General Sessions 43 slacker, or bolshevik. Under the hysteria of the depression period it is as¬ sumed in some quarters that the greatest benefactors of society are those who are today casting the most withering aspersions upon the servants and serv¬ ices of local, state, and national government. I am not speaking of the honest alarm that many properly feel at the increasing costs of government, and I am not questioning the urgent desir¬ ability of eliminating manifest waste and dismantling obsolete sei vices that may be found clinging like branches to the ship of state. This is all to the good. But beyond this honest concern with essential economy I agree with those who sense in the nationwide cry against governmental expenditures three deliberate purposes masking behind the cry for economy. (1) The determination of a discredited economic leadership to shift the blame ior the depression to the shoulders of government and thus to divert public attention from its own muddling mismanagement of the national enterprise. (2) The determination to cut governmental expenditures to a point where incomes and inheritances will not face further tax drafts regardless of how drastic the drop in revenue from property taxes may become. (3) The determination to stop by starvation the extension of governmental ac¬ tivity, to compel government to return to the simpler role of a simpler day, leaving to the leadership of private interests an unfettered freedom to reenact the ventures in irresponsibility that landed the nation in economic disaster and may land many of the idols of yesterday in jail or in exile. In a time when honest economy is imperative, it is not, I know, popular to direct attention to these ulterior motives that parade in the borrowed livery of honest economy, but upon their exposure now the future health of the national enterprise will depend. And no group in the nation stands to gain more from such exposure than the realistic, honest, and socially minded leadership of American business, industry, and finance. Upon the imperative necessity for economy in public expenditures theie can be no disagreement. I insist only that we effect that economy with states¬ manlike foresight for the future of community, state, and nation. It is pos¬ sible to be quite as short-sighted in administering economy as in allowing extravagance. We can so easily economize blindly or let limited interests dictate the schedules of retrenchment. And this, gentlemen, is the grave national danger that lurks in our current concern with economy. The country over, educators are being roundly damned by the blind reduc¬ tionists for standing guard over the interests of the schools in the budget sessions of local, state, and national government. A certain type of news¬ paper and a certain type of politician would have it thought that the educa¬ tors are out to feather their own nests regardless of what happens to the other servants and other services of government and in utter disregard of the plight of private business. If there be such educators they aie manifest y unworthy of their profession. The vast army of educators thruout the nation who, in this crisis, are flying in the face of trumped-up hysterias by doing everything within their power to save the schools from financial strangulation and increasing political manipulation are doing so because their sense of relative values tells them that education is one of the supreme responsibilities 44 National Education Association and functions of government ; that, after the provision of relief for those in distress and out of work and the protection of life and property, education is the most impoitant single obligation resting upon government in this crisis. It is to education alone that we can look to produce a leadership for the future that might conceivably use this magnificent machine economy of ours to free the race from drudgery, poverty, and insecurity instead of letting us starve in a world of too much food, and go workless in a world with a million undone tasks, suffering all the perils of scarcity in an age of plenty. This is all I purpose to say on the problem of economy in its relation to the futuie of education. I am so completely on record, in the educational journals and elsewhere, respecting this issue that repetition here is, I think, unnecessary. The deepei problem that makes the issue of statesmanlike economy so crucial is the problem of education in its relation to the future of the nation. And to this problem I now want to turn. the moment, filled with premonitions of profound change in the political, social, and economic life of the United States. The forces of change may be damned up by inflexible traditions until they break the dykes v ith a lush of 1 evolutionary energy or they may be directed by flexible intel¬ ligence into a process of social reconstruction that will give fresh significance and assured stability to our national future. Because I believe that the future and fortune of all of us now living will be determined by the outcome of the battle royal that is now on between the forces of inflexible tradition and the forces of flexible intelligence, I have chosen to chart the issues of this battle, and to indicate the role of the schools in it. I am convinced that profound historic change impends in the life and enterprise of our time. I am not sure of the direction this change will take. We may be in for a long retrogression or we may be on the threshold of renaissance. The blackening of the skies that began in 1929 may have her¬ alded a pei manent eclipse of our national genius or these may be but the grey houis before a social sunrise that will warm and illumine our lives where transient disaster has chilled and darkened them. In either case, the America of tomorrow will be radically different from the world of yester¬ day’s textbook or of today’s newspaper. And what that world will be like will depend upon whether the forces of inflexible tradition or the forces of flexible intelligence direct our affairs in the days immediately ahead. Our national life is just now in the fourth phase of a progression of events that has before in history brought whole peoples to the social crossroads. Unless I grossly misread the meaning of the last two decades of American history, four distinct developments in the drift of events have brought the American social order to its present critical juncture. First, old philosophies and old procedures that had long dominated our political, social, and economic life fell into varying degrees of futility thru the failure of Amencan leadership to keep them progressively adjusted to the new circumstances of this new age of science and technology. General Sessions 45 Second, while this slump into futility was going on, new philosophies and new procedures, alert to the needs and adapted to the nature of the new age of science and technology, were being patiently and unobtrusively elaborated by scientists and seers whose historic mission it is to be the unofficial statesmen who, in freedom from the clamor of constituencies and the compulsion to compromise, blaze new trails of social organization and political action which the official statesmen may follow if they will. Third, thru a long period of manifest maladjustment between the old policies and the new problems of American life, despite the heavy hand this maladjustment laid upon the lives of men, the masses of Americans generally clung uncritically to the doctrines of the fathers in matters political and economic. Fourth, in the wake of the worldwide economic collapse, from one end of the United States to the other, men have been shaken out of the sterile serenity that marked their mood in the days of our jerry-built prosperity, with the result that today they no longer display their accustomed reluctance to question the major assumptions upon which their lives and enterprises have long been organized. It is the mood of this fourth phase that makes critical the present juncture in American affairs. The tether of traditional loyalty has slipped as men have watched the ground-stakes of their social and economic orders loosen. In the days of our phantom prosperity we were sleek and self-satisfied. We were well-fed and wanted nothing so much as to be let alone. We were impatient of those queer persons who seemed forever to be poking about the foundations of our social and economic institutions. As if anything could be wrong with a civilization that paid such excellent dividends! The missioners of political, social, and economic readjustment got short shrift at the hands of the crowd around the ticker-tape. New movements had, in the main, hard sledding. Almost the sole excep¬ tion to this was the lush growing of bootleg religions and the rise of an apostolate of fakers who led thousands of otherwise intelligent men and women to believe that, in their wistful quest for the deeper meaning of existence, they could suck the juices of a living gospel from the dead rinds of ancient superstitions or the green stalks of bogus psychologies. Perhaps mankind will always rebel in this irrational way against an era that becomes so exclusively absorbed in the goods and chattels of a crass prosperity ! At any rate, aside from this single exception of the gullible embracement of improvised religions, we were, until the chill and arrest of the market col¬ lapse fell upon us, snug to the point of blindness to the basic drift of our civilization. The era of prosperity that ended in 1929 was, for Americans, an era in which new ideas in the fields of political, social, and economic philosophy did not sweep the mass mind. As the old Scotch phrase has it, the heather was wet, and fires did not sweep easily across the fields. Today the situation is the exact reverse. The heather is dry ! Disillusion¬ ment has done its perfect work ! The crowd is again capturable ! The man in the street is straining at the leash of old dogmas of politics and economics that have failed to keep hunger from his stomach, cold from his body, and fear from his heart ! And men everywhere are fumbling blindly for the clue to some fresh departure in their common life ! The mass mind is hospitable to the bearer of new policies ! 46 National Education Association Such a mood is at once a grave danger and a great opportunity. A grave danger if irresponsible demagogy dominates it! A great opportunity if re¬ sponsible statesmanship directs it! In its present mood, the mass mind is willing to follow responsible states¬ manship. It would prefer to follow responsible statesmanship. It may follow irresponsible demagogy. It will take counsel of its patience while a Roosevelt gathers power unprecedented into his hands and cuts the red tape that has bound government to the hitching-post of inaction. But it will not unduly prolong its patience. There is, I think, a latent impatience close under the surface of the liberal patience Americans generally have displayed thru these difficult days. The mass mind will expect constructive action and creative results promptly to follow the freedom to act which its current mood has made Congress make possible. If the fruits of this freedom to act should fail visibly to ripen, the mass mind will turn inevitably to an alterna¬ tive leadership. And it may be none too discriminating in its selection of the alternative! We are past the point at which beating the tom-tom for obsolete tradi¬ tions of politics and economics can either satisfy the mass mind or bring recovery and stabilization to our national life. We still have time to choose between guided reconstruction and unguided revolt. I use the word “revolt” instead of the word “revolution” because there is a basic distinction between the two. This distinction was brilliantly enforced by the great Mazzini in his crusade for the socio-moral invigoration of Italy in the early nineteenth century. It was tellingly dramatized by the Due de la Rochefoucald as he stood with King Louis watching the Parisian mob storm the Bastille in 1789. “This is revolt,” said King Louis. “No, Sire,” said Rochefoucald, “It is revolution.” Revolt was there, of course, but Rochefoucald was right in reminding Louis that he was watching the profounder fact of revolution in which his people had set out deliberately to readjust the old tools of government, which were obsolete, to the new taskes of government, which were obvious. And this, as Rochefoucald saw, was a more fundamental thing than mere revolt, a far-reaching process of social readjustment in which revolt was but an incident that might or might not take place. There can be revolt without revolution. There can be revolution without revolt. In fact, the greatest revolutions are never marred by revolts. We do not want a revolt. And unless intelligence abdicates, we can face difficulties far more drastic than we have yet known without revolt. But, unless we are willing to run the risk of a lapse into chaos, we cannot avoid revolution, if by revolution we mean what we should mean, namely, evolution under the guid¬ ance of an intelligence that is neither enslaved by inflexible tradition nor dragged at the heels of ill-conceived change. Changes are forever taking place in the living peoples. If flexible intel¬ ligence were always at the helm, a process of continuous and exact readjust¬ ment of our social institutions to the new situations these changes produce General Sessions 47 would be kept going. The result would be that society would never come to dramatic turns in the road where it had to undertake wholesale readjust¬ ments of its policies to new situations that leadership had long neglected. But, unhappily, this is not the way the race has functioned to date. There is always a lag between the swiftly changing life and the slowly changing institutions of a people. It is right that there should be some lag. Otherwise our institutions would be in a continuous St. Vitus dance of change that would make ordered life and productive enterprise impossible. We do not want our institutions to chase down the street after every Pied Piper who has snared a new notion from the cloudland of theory. Most new ideas are wrong. The race is lucky if experience ratifies as true one out of every thousand new theories it evolves. The overwhelming majority of the ideas that have survived the stress and storm of the centuries are right. We must build our lives — indi¬ vidual and institutional — mainly on ideas the race has hammered out on the anvil of experience. No generation can expect to add more than a little to the wisdom of its ancestors. The balance between tradition and change is a question of degree. A cer¬ tain amount of social lag is, as I have said, desirable in the interest of continuity and stability. But our institutions must maintain continuity with the future as well as with the past. Otherwise they will be left tenantless and dark by a generation whose allegiance they can no longer command. And their stability must be the equilibrium of steadied action, not mere inertness. Otherwise they become but so much lumber cluttering the current scene. But a certain degree of lag between institutional change and social change is, I repeat, necessary if civilization is to be kept a going concern. If, however, we permit the policies and procedures of our institutions, under the lordship of inflexible tradition, to lag too far behind the changes that are taking place in the society they were designed to serve, the glaring maladjustments that result produce a social instability that may lead an otherwise patient people blindly to break continuity with the sound as well as the unsound values of the past. This, I fear, is the pass to which we have permitted American affairs to come. It is impossible to read the two major volumes of the report of former President Hoover’s Research Committee on Recent Social Trends, together with the subsidiary volumes that elaborate its varied aspects, without real¬ izing that our civilization has become, both in its nature and in its needs, a civilization radically different from that which faced our fathers when they determined the major patterns and designed the major institutions of our political, social, and economic life. Under the impact of physical science and industrial technolog}", the problems that this changed and changing ci\ lliza tion puts to government, to business, to industry, to finance, to the chuich, to the school, and to the family, as these problems are surveyed in these volumes, are drastically different from the problems that faced us even a generation ago. And the report of this Hoover committee dramatizes as no 48 National Education Association document befoie or since has dramatized, the fatal lag between our old policies and our new problems. Most of the major patterns and most of the major institutions of our political, social, and economic life were designed in terms of a civilization in which the scale of enteipiise was small, the relationships of life simple, and the tempo of affairs slow. The institutions must now function in a civiliza¬ tion in which the scale of enterprise is vast, the relationships of life complex, and the tempo of affairs swift. The problem of this generation is to see to it that the sort of sweeping changes reflected in this Hoover report, and a rational adjustment of our institutional policies thereto, shall proceed as a guided reconstruction with¬ out levolt. And nothing save a flexible intelligence, mediating wisely between the forces of tradition and the forces of change, can insure this result. Mie future of mankind will be bravely imperiled,” said John Stuart MiH, ^ great questions are left to be fought out between ignorant change and ignorant opposition to change.” Gieat economic and social forces flow with tidal sweep over communities only half conscious of that which is befalling them,” said Viscount Morley. Wise statesmen are those who foresee what time is thus bringing, and try to shape institutions and to mold men’s thoughts and purpose in accordance with the change that is silently surrounding them.” It is this emancipation from inflexible tradition and this exercise of flexible intelligence, expressed and exemplified by the John Stuart Mills and the John Morleys, that constitute the most crying need of this distraught time. It is this sort of judgment and action that the schools must prepare men to bring to the readjustments that have become imperative as a result of the silent but sweeping revolution that science and technology are working in the political, social, and economic arrangements of American life. T. he question is not what we should think about some hypothetical revolt that the bogey-makers picture as stealing upon us unawares, like a thief in the night, hidden in the cloak of some professor who has seen and said that western capitalism must effect a sounder distribution of buying power if it expects to survive, or lurking in the surplice of some clergyman who has come to suspect that maybe war is not the whole will of God. The question is what this generation purposes to do about the actual revolution thru which the United States is now passing, the revolution which the Hoover Committee on Social Trends so ably documented. A thousand pressures — social, professional, and economic — will be put upon oncoming youth to spend its energies fighting the windmills of imag¬ inary thieats of revolt instead of bringing its intelligence carefully but courageously to bear upon that guided reconstruction of American life which is the only alternative to the increasing insecurity and ultimate collapse of our social and economic orders. It is the business of education to help men to resist these pressures. I here are frightened leactionaries who are sure that we are drifting into Communism. There are frightened radicals who are sure that we are drift- General Sessions 49 ing into Fascism. We shall be well advised to take these fears with a grain of salt. Nations never drift either into Fascism or into Communism. Nations go Fascist or Communist only when the soil is thoroly prepared for the seed and when there is behind the Fascist or Communist push a capable, clear-headed, and closely knit group able to get its hands on the levers of military and economic power. There is nothing in the American picture to indicate that we have reached or shall soon reach such a point. We may, I think, dismiss the chance of a Fascist coup. And a Communist overturn is, in my judgment, even less likely. Even the more moderate move¬ ment of American Socialism has not made dramatic headway during the last decade. In 1920, Eugene Debs polled more than 200,000 votes in New A ork State and more than 900,000 votes in the country as a whole. In 1932, in a time of incredible economic hardship when the wine of discontent was everywhere in ferment, Norman Thomas polled only about 175,000 votes in New York State and some 800,000 votes in the country as a whole. We are not an easily inflammable people. And, for this reason, I refuse to be stampeded by the alarmists. I believe that free capitalism and political lib¬ erty, corrected in the light of experience and adjusted to manifest economic facts, will be in the forefront after all of us now living have long been dead. But candor compels me to say that this prophecy can only be made contin¬ gent upon our willingness to face fresh facts with fresh minds and to rethink and recast our basic policies respecting wages, hours, prices, profits, and control, as well as the processes of democratic self-government, in the light of the new circumstances of this new age of science and technology. There is no area of our common life — whether it be politics, economics, or religion — in which the current situation does not call for flexible intelligence either to set new objectives for our institutions or to evolve new weapons with which to battle more effectively for old objectives that are still valid but in danger of being lost. Certainly flexible intelligence is needed in the field of politics. Political action has lately assumed a new importance for the American future. Donn Byrne, colorful weaver of colorful tales of his adored Ulster, once wrote, “I have never yet seen a government that brought heavier apples to the trees or heavier salmon in the rivers or a more purple heather and for this reason politics means nothing to me.” It was doubtless temperament that led this Celtic prose-poet to assume this cavalier attitude towards politics. But theie are social analysts who share this point of view on more objective grounds. And it must be admitted that, on the deeper levels of our socio-economic development, signs have not been wanting that we may be passing out of the age of politics. The tone and temper, if not indeed the very structure, of our society are increasingly determined by non-political forces. Forces of physical science! Forces of industrial technology! Forces of cultural revaluation! These, rather than the decisions of politicians, are the forces that, for the last half century have been making, unmaking, and remaking civilizations. And yet, at the moment, American destiny is, I am convinced, strangely dependent upon the quality of political thought and action we can contrive 50 National Education Association to bring to the direction of our industrial and international affairs in the months immediately ahead. It is, I suspect, a flexibly intelligent political leadership, and it alone, that can break the impasse to which the forces of science and technology, under the aegis of obsolete political and economic policies, have brought the American social order. W e cannot expect more than transient and insecure phases of recovery until we have rethought and recast our policies respecting wages, hours, prices, profits, and the control of economic processes generally in terms of the new circumstances brought about by science and technology, and until we have achieved a rationalized program of world relations. I am being driven reluctantly to the conclusion that, as American life is now organized, we may not find in the ranks of business, industry, and finance a leadership that can promptly enough effect the basic readjustments of economic policy that events are forcing upon us as the price of our recovery and stabilization, and that, for the time being at least, the initiative for these readjustments must come from political leadership. This throws a heavy responsibility alike upon political leadership and upon political followership. It was a call at once for firm adherence to the political and economic principles that time has tested and found valid and careful but courageous experimentation in the elaboration of new policies. Officialdom is normally conservative. It likes to play safe. It sticks close to the routineer and, at best, but flirts with the innovator, the pioneer, and the prophet. But an offiicialdom that does not now play a little more freely away from the bags at the bases will be broken. Dean Inge of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London has said that “mankind has honored its destroyers and persecuted its benefactors, building palaces for living brigands, and tombs for long-dead prophets.” Political leadership needs now to give a trial to the living prophets and to bring to trial the living brigands. And political followership needs now, regardless of party, to give ungrudging support to any political leader¬ ship that is willing so to do. Certainly flexible intelligence is needed in the field of economics. The fate of private initiative is definitely at stake in the whirl of affairs at Washing¬ ton today. Rugged individualism is on the run. This throws an unprecedented challenge to the sincere friends of private initiative. I count myself among the friends of private initiative. I am not at all enamored of the prospect of having my own and the nation’s life ordered about by bureaucrats. In the long run I doubt the wisdom of having political persons dictate in detail the plans and procedures of American industry. But I am, I hope, a realist. And I set it down as a deep conviction that a sustained study of the passing show has forced upon me that if the freedom of private initiative dies on this continent its friends will be responsible for its death because they failed to bring a flexible intelligence to its modernization. There is, as I have said, no dominant body of Fascist or Communist thought in the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt does not want to be dictator. But neither an intelligent President nor an impatient people will stand idly by and see a civilization sink just in order to preserve the dogma General Sessions 51 of private initiative. It lies, I think, with the leadership of American busi¬ ness, industry, and finance to say just how far infringements on private initiative shall permanently go. If the leadership of American industry will pool its varied genius in a nationally integrated effort to work out and to put into effect wage, hour, and price policies that will spread the normal national income widely enough to provide the toiling millions with money and leisure enough to make them a dependable market for the maximum output of our machine economy, if it will reconsider with utter realism the problem of industrial control in the light of the increasing tendencies towards ownership without control and control without ownership, if it will frankly put the social function of indus¬ trialism above the special interests of industrialists, if it will make the in¬ crease, the enrichment, and the stabilization of life for the millions its first business, and expect private profit to come, as it should come, only as a by-product of its statesmanlike administration of the social function of indus¬ trialism, neither Mr. Roosevelt nor Congress will spend much time trying to fasten any dictatorship on American industry — and, incidentally, indus¬ trialists will find the size and security of their total profits increased. If bankers will produce a thoroly dependable banking system that serves instead of sinks the enterprises of the nation, no one will lie awake nights to devise halters and hobbles for the banking system. Nearly everybody in America prefers private initiative — if it will only deliver the goods. The economic disaster that has befallen us is not, in my judgment, inherent in the nature of private initiative, but is the result of its gross mismanagement. Its preservation will depend, I think, wholly upon its practitioners’ bringing flexible intelligence to its operation in this new age of science and technology. Certainly flexible intelligence is needed in the field of religion if we are to preserve certain priceless values that are gravely endangered in this phase of social disillusionment. Many are rightly concerned over the widespread secession from belief in God, much of it unconfessed, that has been in evi¬ dence during the last quarter century. I know the barbarisms and indignities that fanatics have perpetrated in the name of God. I know the innumerable caricatures that short-sighted men have drawn of His countenance, reading their own lusts and limitations into His purposes. But I also know the myriad army of saints and seers whose lives, illuminated by the light of His countenance, have been given to fertilize the soil from which the faith and freedom of the race have flowered. And I am convinced that a civilization that exiles God from its heart dries up one of the well-springs of its power. I agree with Edna St. Vincent Millay, when she writes : Not Truth, but Faith, it is That keeps the world alive. If all at once Faith were to slacken — that unconscious Faith Which must, I know, yet be the corner stone Of all believing— birds now flying fearless Across would drop in terror to the earth; 52 National Education Association Fishes would drown ; and the all-governing reins Would tangle in the frantic hands of God And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction. How shall the forces of religion make God again believable to men who have lost all faith in any lordship of life? How shall we save men from cynicism? How shall we help disillusioned men to recapture a courageous confidence that life is not a blind dance of atoms, but a meaningful adven¬ ture worthy of deathless objectives? I shall not presume to make any final answer to these questions that have harassed mankind since the infancy of the race. But of one thing I feel sure: few, if any, men are today drawn to belief or driven into disbelief in God by the traditional dialects of the theists and atheists. Men’s belief in God is buttressed or broken less by the arguments they hear than by the way in which the world in which they have to live buttresses or breaks their lives. W e live our way into our thinking far more than we think our way into our living. A man whose life has been broken by the brutality of his fellows is less likely to believe in a beneficent God. “Friends should be kind to a despairing man,” said Job, “or he will give up faith in the Almighty.” And, in Gustave Frensen’s illuminating parable, the old farmer says, “I sowed my enemy’s field with corn in order that God might continue to exist.” And so, from an ancient scripture and a modern tale, come the corroborating assertions that men’s belief or disbelief in God may be but a reflection of what society has done to their lives. If we compel a man to live his life in a society bereft of love and its sterner counterpart, justice, we must not be surprised if he has difficulty in believing in a God of love and justice. We cannot expect a God of love to be convincing in a loveless world. And to ask men victimized by injustice to believe in a God of justice is, to say the least, optimistic. Men of flexible intelligence will not attempt to combat atheism or to cul¬ tivate a belief in God by sheer dialectics. They will realize that the fortune of religion depends less upon the explanations of professors and the exhorta¬ tions of parsons than upon the kind of world they and their fellows build. And now my argument draws to a close. I have exalted the virtue of flexible intelligence as the one hope of a stable and significant national fu¬ ture. It remains only for me to say that, in my judgment, the stimulation and discipline of this flexible intelligence is the greatest contribution the schools can make to this disordered and distraught time. Need I say that schools cannot stimulate and discipline this flexible intelligence unless they are themselves free to bring a flexible intelligence to bear upon the problems with which they deal? Yes, I think it must be said, for never before have there been so many pressures upon the schools, the colleges, and the uni¬ versities to mold them to a pattern, to soft-pedal their researches into living realties, to tell them what they may and may not say. There are three major systems of political control now functioning in the Western world— Fascism, Communism, and Democracy. Fascism and Com- General Sessions 53 munism have decided what they will do with their schools. They have de¬ cided that the laboratory must take orders from the legislature. There are no dissenting professors in Italy. Dissenters have either suffered exile or bought their posts at the price of silence. There are no dissenting professors in Moscow. They are nursing their wounds in Paris or picking up a liveli¬ hood as best they can elsewhere in the Western world. And now Hitler has put the sign of the Swastika upon German scholarship which, until now, has been the chief glory of that great people. As Charles E. Merriam has suggested, it remains only for the democracies of the West to say that they will not tolerate differences of opinion to make it unanimous, and then we can blow out the light and fight it out in the dark, for, when the voice of reason is silenced, the rattle of machine guns begins. THE DUTY OF THE STATE PAUL MCNUTT, GOVERNOR OF INDIANA, INDIANAPOLIS, IND. It is all very fine to say that men are free and equal and have a like right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But if vast numbers of the children of the people are left without real opportunity to make the most of themselves, such a saying is a mockery. Real democracy means that society at its best comes to the children of all the people and sets lessons for them, makes paths for them to all the occupa¬ tions which history has proved good. The most precious thing in the state is a child, whether it be your child or mine or the child of the hovel in the city or of the hut in the backwoods of the hills. The birthright of that child is equality of opportunity. It is the duty of the state to protect that birthright, which is the basis of all social progress. Democracy does not come merely with the granting of suffrage. Democ¬ racy comes when every man has a right to enjoy, in accordance with his capacity, the opportunities which science and nature offer to the world. There are certain obligations which the state cannot deny even in periods of greatest stress: the care of its wards and the education of its children. In the one, the obligation runs to the unfortunates themselves. In the other, the obligation runs to society as a whole. The hope for future prosperity and leadership lies in trained men and women. Children are born and grow up in periods of depression, as well as in periods of prosperity. It is im¬ possible to arrest their development. They have but one chance, which can¬ not be postponed. Roads and buildings may wait, but not the children. Adequate support of public education is one of the few paramount duties of an enlightened government. WTose is the loss if you fail in the complete performance of that duty? A man will feed his own, tho he himself goes hungry. And he will save one corner of the earth which he may claim: his house, his church, his 54 National Education Association school! The first is his. The other two he has a part in, according to the degree in which he puts his heart and effort into them. By his hearthstone he may live, safe and sheltered, but in these wider dwellings he finds the finer security of fellowship in communion with the invisible powers that inspire service. Loyalty weaves of spirit a stronger cord than common sense can furnish fiber for. Can it fail to bind you to our system of public education ? If there are moments when you say, “Our system of education is not all that I would have it,” think of this: Whose are the hands that have made, or forborne to make its traditions? If you have failed to lend it strength, now is the time to repair that error. Education moves forward to perform its service to society. Are you with it? If you are, to the limit of your power, you cannot be outdistanced by those of greater fortune or capacity. You have your place in the procession. If you choose to stand aside, whose loss is greater, education’s that you have forsaken it? Or yours, that it can no longer claim you? We hear much talk of economy in government. It is imperative that the cost of government be reduced and the burden equitably distributed. How¬ ever, it is possible to have rigorous frugality without false economy. False economy threatens some of our fundamental institutions. What we need is wisdom in governmental expenditures. If expenditures are wisely made, they will be economically sound. That is the important thing. Public education is a necessity in a republic such as ours. It is one of our ideals of government. Without it we turn our backs on the painfully accumulated wisdom of the ages and start back on the road to barbarism. The continuance of our gov¬ ernment depends upon the welfare and intelligence of the people. Have we come to the place in life where luxuries for private consumption are of greater social importance than governmental expenditures for neces¬ sities? Are we willing to pull out the foundation stone of economic progress because we are afraid that we cannot weather the present economic storm ? I grant that this is a critical period. There is in some quarters fear of worse. It is said that the whole structure of our society is threatened by the communism of Russia. Not alone by its propaganda, but also by its alleged power to undersell and thus to bankrupt the entire world. It is said that dull-witted, vain, and insolent, we slap roundly on the rump the four horses of the Apocalypse, and bid them prepare anew to trample the human herd. It is said that in spite of our science and invention, or because of them, we are approaching a period such as that which followed the decline of the Roman Empire. Ferrero, historian of Rome, says that. Spengler, in a book counted one of the weightiest of the century, says that we are approaching our swift coming, unavoidable doom. Even such a man as Henry Adams, descendant of presidents, student of affairs, both economic and political, says that he sees upon the scroll of destiny for the United States of America, four frightful choices: first , the pessimism of Europe’s dying civilization; second, the tyranny of capital or of labor ; third, a return to mysticism or to clerical dominion ; or, fourth, a ceaseless reiteration of the old processes under new General Sessions 55 guises at a monotonous level. Those are four frightful choices and they do not belong upon our scroll of destiny. Does Mr. Adams mean that he has lost faith in our people? Does he mean that he has lost faith in the ability of the masses, as contrasted with the heroes and the miracle men and their classes to work out by reasonably adequate methods the issues which are raised in the flow of time? Certainly he does not mean that. Every page of our history refutes such a statement. Does he mean that he has lost faith in the genius of the American people, a genius which has produced more by way of scientific achievement during the last decade and a half than has been produced in any half century of the world’s history? Certainly that genius is still with us. Certainly it can produce for us those things which are absolutely essential — health, security, some ability and some desire to make a worthwhile contribution to the sum of things as they are. I, for one, disbelieve the most of these frightening prophecies and defy the rest. Who are these prophets of evil and where have they been? To use the words of Carlyle, “They have been nowhere but where we also have been, and have seen it most a few handbreadths deeper than we now see into the ocean which is without bottom and without shore.” Rather than choose the words of Ferrero or Spengler or Henry Adams, or any of the great host of major and minor Jeremiahs, I would choose the words of two men who faced crises in their day. The first of these was Julius Caesar, who said, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste death but once.” The second was the man who stood at Valley Forge midst privation and suffering and kept his faith, kept his faith in his men, kept his faith in his nation which was to be, kept his faith in his God. Washington said then (and his words are particularly applicable now), “The game is yet in our own hands. To play it well is all we have to do. Nothing but honesty, harmony, industry, and frugality are necessary to make us a great and a happy people.” The game is yet in our own hands. To play it well is all we have to do. Nothing but honesty, harmony, industry, and frugality are necessary to keep us a great and a happy people. Three courses of action are open to our people. First, to surrender in the face of our manifestly serious problems. Second, to attempt to preserve those institutions which have grown up thru the years. The first course is unthink¬ able, the second, un-American. No nation stands in one spot; it either moves forward or it moves backward. Happily the faces of the American people have been turned forward. A third course is the only one open to us if we are to be worthy of the fine heritage which is ours, if we are to save our souls from damnation. That course is the one which Foch took during the darkest hour of the World War, when everything had gone against him, everything. He sent this message, “My left is giving way, my right is falling back. Therefore, I am ordering a charge, a decisive attack for the center.” We can order a charge and can move forward with courage, with determination, with intelligence, 56 National Education Association solve our problems and bring about a better social and economic era in this nation. However, it will not be possible for us to make this third choice if we deny our children access to the door of progress, which is education. Some states have chosen the third course. Indiana is one. The constitution of Indiana sets out what the General Assembly shall provide by law for a general and uniform system for common schools wherein tuition shall be free and equally open to all. It also provides that a tax may be assessed by the General Assembly for common school support. The first law, providing for a local tuition tax, was declared unconstitutional. Later, this decision was reversed with the result that local school tax rates increased and the state school tax rate decreased. The reduction in the state school tax rate and the unequal distribution of wealth gradually brought about conditions which made educational opportunity far from equal for all the children of the state. One township would have a term of 100 days while an adjoining township, where there was a railroad would have 180 days, both having the same local tuition tax rate. This inequality persisted until 1905, when the first school relief law be¬ came operative and the state provided enough money in addition to the local levy to have a six months’ term. The General Assembly adopted a salary bill in 1920 making the minimum salary for teachers $800. Consolidations and increased attendance raised school expenditures to such an extent that the General Assembly in 1921 increased the state school tax rate from 5.2 cents to 7 cents and set aside 30 percent of the 7-cent levy as a school relief or equalization fund. This relief covered all school expenditures except capital outlay. In 1929 it became neces¬ sary to increase the school relief fund from 30 percent to 45 percent of the 7-cent state common school levy, in addition to the receipts from the chain store tax. The minimum local tax rate to secure a school relief was fixed at $1.20. In 1932 the General Assembly passed the socalled $1.50 law, fixing the maximum levy for all taxing units at $1.50 on the $100. Where county tax adjustment boards declared no emergency under this law, many school cor¬ porations faced the possibility of reducing the term to three months. Some were not eligible for state aid and others had barely enough to meet bond requirements. To meet the obvious need and to save public education, the 1933 General Assembly enacted the school support law authorizing the state to pay $600 per teacher to the employing school unit, on the basis of an aver¬ age daily attendance of thirty-five pupils, or major fraction thereof, for the elementary teacher, and twenty-five pupils, or major fraction thereof, for the high-school teacher. One-room schools and all others unable to meet their requirements become emergency cases to be handled by the state board of education. The school relief law provides a state tax of 7 cents and authorizes the state board of education to fix the minimum local school tax rate and to make such other regulations as are necessary in order that the school units of low assessed valuation may avail themselves of school relief. This law enables General Sessions 57 all school units to have a minimum term of eight months and to have a prop¬ erty tax of $1.50 or less. The minimum wage law fixes the elementary teacher’s salary at a minimum wage of $1000 per school year. None of these laws prevents a school unit from having a longer term or paying a greater wage than that set out in the law if it so elects. This school program will be financed by a gross income tax and intangibles tax and the interests from the state common school fund. This is Indiana’s answer to the question how to save the schools during a period of economic stress. The Indiana program is important because it demonstrates conclusively that there is an answer to the school problem. The entire obligation in this hour of need does not rest upon the state. It also rests upon those who are actively engaged in educational work. It is necessary for them to make a critical and searching examination of all of their agencies, to see which, if any, have outlived their usefulness. This is the time for perfect candor — no bragging, no pretense that things are better than they are, no tolerance of what should not be tolerated. All must work together to preserve and improve our system of public education in order that the children of all of the people may claim their birthright of equality of opportunity. “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” TEACHERS ON GUARD FRANCIS G. BLAIR, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, SPRINGFIELD, ILL. I heard David Starr Jordan say that for twenty-five years after every great war the sons were shorter in stature than their fathers. It was his theory that in every great war the best men were killed and that the result was an inferior physical generation. He did not speak in particular about the effects of such a war upon the emotional and moral development of the children. It is a comparatively easy thing for even a casual observer to see the great material havocs that are wrought by every war. The destruction of cities, the blowing up of fortifications, the sinking of ships, the destruction of com¬ merce, the killing of thousands of men, and the crippling of thousands of others — all these are matters which the most superficial observer of any war can hardly avoid seeing. It may be possible for scientific observers to dis¬ cover that war stunts the physical bodies of the succeeding generation. But it requires a deeper discernment to see the much deeper and more lasting in¬ juries that every great war works upon the emotional and moral character of the children born and reared under the human clouds which gather with every war and linger after the actual conflict has ceased. The emotional strain upon the children during any war is something that cannot easily be measured. The overstimulation by the martial music and the exciting parades plow deep into the tender soil of the children’s imagination and leave ghastly furrows. The terrifying alarms which reach their impressionable ears of the death of dear ones produce emotional shocks which no psychiatrist can 58 National Education Association accurately diagnose. But the effect of a great war upon children goes even further. Children in their mothers’ wombs suffer terrible physical and mental deformities. Moreover, they suck from their mothers’ breasts some of the hatred and bitterness engendered by the war. The recent crime wave which has swept over all the European countries involved in the World War has brought before us some of the astounding facts that murder, banditry, and suicide have had an unprecedented increase in these years succeeding that war ; that such other crimes as, robbery, arson, and rape have increased to unprecedented proportions. But altogether the most alarming phase of this report is that practically all these crimes are committed by young men who were born during or since the World War. Who can doubt that the deep seated influences of that struggle upon these immature minds have helped to produce these results? The highly colored stories and novels of the war and the moving pictures have helped to in¬ tensify the effect. They have seen that under the rules of war property could be destroyed, lives could be taken, all sorts of things done which are considered crimes in normal times. Yes, it is easy for bankers and financiers, for great industrial leaders, to estimate what the effects of an impending war will be on industry and trade, on finance and economic conditions. It is easy for the average person to fore¬ cast the result of the number of men who will be killed and of their widows and of their orphans. It is fairly easy for anyone to see the number of crip¬ pled men who will walk the streets after such a war. But it requires a special discernment to see in advance the effect that every war will have upon the children living during the war or who are born immediately subsequent to it. It would be well, therefore, when any great war is contemplated for us to consider the children first. It matters somewhat whether the sons will be as tall as their fathers in the succeeding generation, but it matters a very great deal more whether these children will have their emotional life and moral ideals seriously disturbed and distorted by such a human catastrophe. Somewhat the same attitude of mind is taken by the public in every great financial crisis. It is so easy for us to concentrate our attention upon the banks which have closed their doors, upon the great industrial plants which are shut down, upon the long marching armies of the unemployed, and the number of men who have fled the country or have taken the short way out of their financial reverses thru suicide. I say it is comparatively easy for the busy public to see these gross material results of a great nationwide and worldwide depression. But it requires a higher degree of understanding and of penetration to see the consequences of such a panic upon the childhood and youth of the nation or the world. No one will overlook the fact that in times of great prosperity, injury may come to the growing boy and girl by over-indulgence and that the very presence of wealth and what it can buy may soften the intellectual and moral fibre of the youth. But there is something about the effects of extreme poverty and privation which brings very vividly to every thoughtful mind the mental and moral effects upon the children. It is so easy for us in the presence of such a financial and eco- General Sessions 59 nomic disorder to spend a great deal of our time and energies in talking about the tariffs and about taxation and remedial legislation of various sorts — all of which may or may not bring about any permanent relief. But amidst the confusion and disturbance it requires the sober judgment and the discern¬ ing eye to see that the paramount matter of concern should be a plan that will save the children from suffering damaging deprivations and irreparable losses. The older generation will no doubt suffer great inconveniences in the lower¬ ing of the standards of living and in their disappointed ambitions, but the effects upon the children will be more fundamental and further reaching than any of the temporary inconveniences which the adult population may suffer. Everyone will recall that when the great steamship Titanic had struck the iceberg and it became apparent that the ship would be lost, and prepara¬ tions were being made to lower the life boats and to save as many as could be cared for by this means, that the brave men upon that ship adopted the slogan “Women and children first.” It would be fortunate for the oncoming generations, if during this appalling financial crisis when fortunes are being destroyed over night, when great industrial concerns that it has taken a hun¬ dred years to build up are shutting down, when banks that have had behind them the keenest financial brains and the soundest integrity are closing their doors — I say that during the time when these things are happening it would be well for us in considering the tremendous retrenchments and reorgani¬ zations which must be made in order to adjust ourselves, that someone should take the position that in all of our remedial efforts our consideration should be of the children first. We can close down a great industrial plant and when the depression is over it may be opened again without any serious impaii- ment of the plant or to the product which it manufactures. Last June I drove past the great furniture manufacturing establishment at Grand Rapids, Michigan. It covered a large tract of land. I understood that when in opera¬ tion it employed thousands of men and women. On the day I passed it every door and window was closed. Here and there a guard could be seen moving back and forth outside of the building. One could spend a good deal of time in regretting the closing of such an establishment with the consequent addi¬ tions that it made to the great army of unemployed. But as soon as the panic lifts, the bearings of the machines will be oiled, coal will be put into the bunkers, and the machinery will start and the men and women will return to work. But it is very different if we turn our attention to the situation of our schools which it has taken hundreds of years to build. So far as the physical plant alone is concerned, there would be some ground of comparison between it and the manufacturing establishment, but in all other respects there is a fundamental difference. To close down our schools would be to produce certain permanent dislocations and certain permanent losses which no subse¬ quent opening of the schools could repair. Every person officially connected with the public-school system of this country knows that in this financial dis¬ turbance in which fortunes have been lost, in which the incomes of the 60 National Education Association people in every walk and vocation of life have been diminished, that such an institution as the public school, maintained by public expense, must cur¬ tail its program and adjust itself to these changing conditions. It would be stupid and foolhardy on our part not to see such a situation, and it would be unpatriotic in us not to make every effort possible to adjust ourselves to these changing conditions. But we would be untrue to our great calling, untrue to the interests of the oncoming generation, if we do not stand forth boldly and declare that in the consideration of these readjustments and re¬ organizations the interests of the children must be considered first. I believe, in this fight to protect the rights of the children as represented in the schools of this country, that the 800,000 teachers constitute the first line of defense and as long as they are on guard I have confidence in the belief that the interests of the 26,000,000 American school children will be safe. Nor will they be diverted from this great duty and obligation by charges that they are seeking to protect their own salaries. Recently I heard a certain member of a legislature, who seemed to have been born in the objective case and active voice, holding forth that the effort to save the teachers’ pension fund was evidence that these teachers were purely selfish, that their in¬ terest was not in the children, that they were interested only in adding to their own personal salaries. Of course, it could be difficult to advance any argument which would penetrate to the intelligence of such a person. If he had seen Annie Louise Keller as she divined the oncoming storm with its dangers, and as she called her little flock into the country school building in order to shield them from the storm; could he have seen her as she engaged them in a game trying to calm their fears, and as the shock of the storm broke could have seen her having the children get under their desks to protect them from falling bricks and timbers, and especially if he could have seen her as, after thus securing the children, she went to the door to brace it against the force of the wind, and could he have seen her after the storm had destroyed the building and had covered her with the great brick arch, crushing out her life, but with every one of the nineteen children saved from any harm whatever — even if he had seen all this, probably he would still have been saying that teachers never do anything for the chil¬ dren except when animated by selfish motives. Did Annie Louise Keller take counsel of her fears? Was she protecting the children simply in order to earn her salary? While her heroic sacrifice has been published in papers all over the civilized world, and a monument has been erected to her memory, there are hundreds and thousands of other teachers that are showing the same courageous and determined judgment in their efforts to save the schools and the children from the wrath of this great financial storm, and whose motives are just as free from selfishness as were those of Annie Louise Keller. Alfred Bayliss, my predecessor in office, was a member of a Michigan regiment in the Civil War. He told me that his regiment had attained the reputation of being a dependable regiment on guard. When the fighting had been hard and the soldiers of his division needed a good night’s sleep, General Sessions 61 the word would go up and down, “Sleep well tonight, boys, the Eleventh Michigan is on guard.” When people come to me disturbed and anxious about the schools, wonder¬ ing whether the rich content that has been put into our courses of study and the greatly enriched school opportunity which has been afforded to the children is going to be cut ruthlessly back by the hand of this depression, I would like to be able to say to them, “Fear not, the 800,000 teachers of America are on guard.” HOW THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION HELPS THE INDIVIDUAL TEACHER FLORENCE HALE, FIRST VICEPRESIDENT OF THE N. E. A. ; AND EDITOR, The Grade Teacher , new YORK, N. Y. In an address of this length, it is of course not possible to go very much into detail about the varied types of service which the N. E. A. renders to its members. To try to do so, anyway, would be much like carrying coals to Newcastle because all of you present here today are loyal N. E. A. members or you would not be here. Most of you, then, already know about the par¬ ticular types of service available thru the N. E. A. It is true, however, that there are thousands of teachers who are not members of the N. E. A. and who have very little idea of the help which the organization stands ready to give them. It would be a fine thing if every member present at this conven¬ tion would make it a personal matter to help spread this information among such teachers at a time when our profession needs organized action more than it has ever done in the past. We might give the general idea of such help in the words with which the N. E. A. ends one of its leaflets descrip¬ tive of the organization: “Lawyers have the American Bar Association; physicians have the American Medical Association; teachers have the Na¬ tional Education Association.” A very comprehensive description and analysis of all of the different types of service can be obtained by writing to either the publicity or research departments of the N. E. A. In condensed form, these data also appear in the reports which you have in your hands. You are all familiar with the splendid Journal of the National Education Association which, in itself, is worth the entire price of membership. I take it for granted that you all know that we have what is recognized as the finest educational research bureau in the United States. From our research people you may get imme¬ diately all of the facts, statistics, and aid which you may need suddenly in putting the cause of the teachers before your legislatures, your schoolboards, or meetings of taxpayers. Especially because of the nature of the times, I want to select only two of the many ways in which the N. E. A. does help the individual teacher. I think perhaps the greatest service rendered is the encouragement and oppor¬ tunity which the N. E. A. is giving the individual teacher to be a person in his own right. The fact that at this very meeting our two candidates for the presidency of the N. E. A. represent in a very large way the individual 62 National Education Association teacher, is significant of the progress which our Association has made in im¬ proving the condition of teachers and their chance for a “place in the sun.’’ One of our candidates is a representative of the classroom teacher group, while the other is an elementary-school principal. The younger persons pres¬ ent probably do not appreciate the significance of this occasion as we do who have been connected for so many years with the Association. Some of you, like myself, remember that it has not been so very long since the ready acceptance of a classroom teacher, for example, as a candidate for the presi¬ dency of the N. E. A. It was not so many years ago that teachers were sup¬ posed to keep silent in a convention of this sort and to accept thankfully, at least in public, the point of view and the projects handed down to them from college professors and superintendents of schools who directed almost entirely the affairs of the Association. In fact, about the greatest criticism of our Association from some of the people, even today, is that the Association is doing too much for the individual teacher in giving him this chance for recognition. It is hard for such critics, who were used to the old order of things, to realize that in school affairs, like public affairs, we are fortunately going thru the period known as a New Deal. There are no kings any more. Aristocrats are not so very popular. This is distinctly the day of the common people in all affairs of life, and it is fortunate for the N. E. A. that we have been getting ready for such a day so that we are right in the line of modern progress. I can well remember, and so can some of you, when the first proposal to lift a classroom teacher to the position of president of the N. E. A. was met with nothing less than horror on the part of some of the older members of the Association. They predicted dire disaster for the organization. Strangely enough, some of the most violent fears were expressed by members of great institutions who had cried the loudest for democracy in their classrooms. Well, the classroom teacher was elected and the organization, like the Washington Monument, still stands, and no very great disasters were entered upon the records of the Association as a result; I do not know just what these good critics thought would happen. Perhaps they thought the classroom teacher would be too timid to preside over the meetings of the organization, but any teacher can tell you that about the best preparation for doing that is the experience of having been able to discipline year after year rooms of from thirty to fifty children, not to speak of the schoolboard and the parents, who need discipline quite as much sometimes. I found from my own experience that presiding over a body of this sort required just about the same ideas of discipline as a successful teacher requires. Perhaps the critics also felt that the classroom teacher would be gullible and would be likely to embarrass the Association by running after all sorts of strange fancies and allowing all sorts of strange people to appear on the programs. Yes, that might be, but even great institutions sometimes are a little gullible. Anyone who is familiar with the history of technocracy during the last year or two knows that. Certainly, one of our great institutions will not have much criticism of the classroom teacher if he should make a mistake in this direc¬ tion since they have been thru the same experience and emerged with none General Sessions 63 too much credit from it. However, thus far, I think it can be said safely that the individual teachers, whose representatives have risen to high positions in our organization, have neither proved timid nor very gullible. I believe that this has been one of the greatest services that our organization has rendered to the cause of the classroom teachers all over the country and you who are members should not let this fact pass unnoticed when you are trying to enlist the membership of your fellow teachers. It is absolutely certain that the changed attitude of the N. E. A. toward the type of teacher which we have been discussing has had a very marked influence upon his general welfare in school systems, and this is entirely proper. I might refer again to some of the arguments which those of the old school advance along these lines. They have said rather plainly that if the classroom teacher were fitted to become an official of any sort in any great organization, he would not have remained a classroom teacher but would have become a supervisor, a principal, or superintendent of schools, by virtue of his ability. We know that such a sentiment embodies one of the most per¬ nicious points of view in the teaching profession, i. e., that a teacher must move on to some administrative position if he is to secure either a good salary or recognition. The weakness of the teaching profession is the great turn-over in the classroom teacher body, and the fact that just as soon as a teacher does become unusually strong in the classroom, his friends and he himself expect that he must be taken out of the work for which he is so admirably fitted and be promoted, as it is said, into one of these other positions. One of the greatest advances we have made in our thinking is that no teacher ought to be obliged to leave the classroom and the actual work of teaching children in order to secure professional recognition or a decent salary. After all, the work of the public schools is not the making of speeches or organizing programs so much as it is teaching the children of this nation. What is making most of our trouble today in trying to safeguard our school systems, and to keep our budgets from being cut and important subjects from being dropped from the curriculum? One of the reasons at least is the overwhelming number of voters in many places who have failed to understand the true mission of edu¬ cation and have not the respect for these subjects and for the whole idea that they should have. As time goes on, I believe there will be a more intelligent voting public, due to a more contented, more intelligent, and more ambitious classroom teacher body. Let us take the point of view of some of the leading educators in some of our colleges who have been so worried over the development of the ordinary classroom teacher. If their arguments are true that no teacher who has ini¬ tiative or splendid personality or a very high degree of intelligence will re¬ main long as a classroom teacher, then we might say, “Heaven help us all,” for there will be very little other help for these precious budgets and school systems which we are now trying to defend. Why? Because statistics show us that a surprising percent of our voting public leave school entirely at the end of the sixth grade, while a still larger percent leave school at the end of the eighth grade. A very much smaller percentage go thru high school and an extremely small percentage ever go to college. Therefore, it is evident that 64 National Education Association the character, civic ideas, ideas of the worth of education, and all these things which are to be implanted in the minds of the people who are to be the great voting public are dependent upon the classroom teacher in the grades, where they are now going to school in such great numbers. It may be true that the college professors and the people who are college graduates or the equivalent have a very fine idea of our school systems and what they ought to be, but if in each town or city there is an overwhelmingly large number of the everyday voters who know nothing about these things, who have been carelessly taught by a changing body of teachers, they can by their numbers defeat every one of the objectives of the people who have had the higher education. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important and necessary that every means shall be employed to see that the classroom teacher has initiative, is awake and alert and ambitious, and we all know that such qualities are not devel¬ oped when one is in a profession that seems like a blind alley. The University of Chicago is one of the outstanding institutions to recog¬ nize this fact. The vigorous young president, Robert Hutchins has, over and over again, this year come to the defense of the classroom teacher and reiter¬ ated his belief in him as one of the most important parts of the school system. I speak with no idea of bitter criticism or unkindliness toward those who have clung the hardest to the old idea of aristocracy in the affairs of the N. E. A. because I know that old ideas and long-established customs die hard. But the sooner they wake up to the fact that there is a New Deal and that nothing is being done today as it was in the past, the better it will be for them and for the institutions which they represent. If they have at heart, as I firmly believe, the real interests of education in this country, they will no longer seek to depreciate the value of our professional organization because it is seeking to help the individual teacher, but they will do everything they can themselves to help him, and they can do much. It will not be done, however, by a scornful attitude or by trying to regulate him back to his old machine position. It will not be done by high-sounding phrases in the classroom about democracy and the freedom of the teacher. It will be done by welcoming him to the organization, urging him to be ambitious to fill its highest positions, and then helping him to secure the best information and the best culture that they possibly can open up to him. Besides this particular sort of help to the teacher himself in improving his condition, in setting the example to the nation of his recognition as an impor¬ tant person and an important factor in the country’s life and welfare, the N. E. A. is also helping in creating public opinion by bringing the facts of education forcibly to the mind of the public. Teachers who are not members probably have little idea of how much more disastrous their position would be today had our great professional organization not been hammering away constantly in their behalf, thru radio broadcasts, each one of which, as our letters indicate, reaches an audience of many thousand people, possibly mil¬ lions. Moreover, the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education, of which John K. Norton is chairman, has been working unceasingly in every part of the country to support the teacher’s cause. I have time to give you only one quotation from a typical letter, but there have been many others like it. In a letter from Montana one of our members says: General Sessions 65 I am very glad to report that the special levy for the maintenance of the common schools carried by a vote of 192 to 64. Where there has usually been no opposition to this levy, still I was very fearful that because of the conditions during the past three years it might possibly be lost. I attribute this overwhelming majority to the fact that we have tried to carry out the policies recommended by the publicity depart¬ ment of the National Education Association and by the broadcasts which are sent out each Sunday afternoon. Teachers and members of the National Education Association, we have not yet begun to sense the power and opportunity which is in the hands of the teachers of this country if they only know how to use it. As Payson Smith, commissioner of education of Massachusetts, has said so forcibly during the past year, “There are no dangers outside of the teaching profes¬ sion that are as great as those within its very ranks.” And he has gone on to enumerate some of these as indifference, lack of standing together in emer¬ gencies, and a certain amount of selfishness — looking for the personal good instead of being willing to sacrifice something for a common cause. It is only thru being a member of a great professional organization, however, that one has a chance really to sense these things and to know how to cooperate in a large way. I might also say that there are no dangers that assail the National Education Association from the outside as great as those which assail it from within, due to much the same reasons that are true of the profession in gen¬ eral. I do not wish to be misunderstood, either, because I do not believe that the groups which seem to be trying to work disaster to the organization and thru it to the teaching profession in general, really themselves quite under¬ stand what they are doing. They have not become awake to this New Deal of which I am speaking. They honestly believe that we are going to rack and ruin because affairs are no longer in the hands of a small circle of people of what seems to them superior social intelligence and vigor. I call upon them to give the new type of organization which they represent a trial instead of criticizing, tearing down, or rushing into printed criticism. I ask them for the benefit of the whole organization and for the common good of education at this critical time to try to build up harmonv and to give of their great richness of opportunity, their superior educational advantages, and their high¬ mindedness to increase the equipment of those of us who have come up from the ranks and who, because of the struggle in doing so, may perhaps also have something to contribute to them in our courage, in our understanding of the common people, in our special opportunity to deal directly with the children of this country upon whom all of us, great and small, shall have to depend later on for the preservation of our educational ideals. In all honesty, do let those who sing the praises too loudly of the old days just look up the history of the organization in those years which have been so often quoted lately, and they will find that for the first sixty years of the life of the organization, the records of those same people show that the Association attempted to do very little but hold conventions and carry out programs, quite contrary to the impression sometimes conveyed by the adherents of the old days who rather indefinitely give us to understand that much greater accomplishments were carried on then for the teachers than now. Today the N. E. A. has these fine programs but considers them actually only a small part of the service it is rendering to the teachers of the country. 66 National Education Association EDUCATIONAL TRENDS AND THE GENERAL SOCIAL ORDER CHARLES H. JUDD, DEAN, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. A group of social scientists prepared, at the request of President Hoover, and published last January an account of the various social trends in Amer¬ ican life. They traced the movement of the people of the United States away from the rural areas toward urban centers. They described the rapid in¬ crease in mechanical inventions and pointed out the effects of such inven¬ tions on modes of living. They showed how governmental activities and agencies have multiplied until a complex, overlapping pattern of civil juris¬ dictions and taxing bodies has been evolved which is driving the people of this country to seek relief in precipitate reform. They traced a number of other movements and recorded their findings in as comprehensive an account of the social characteristics of the United States as has ever been formulated. When the details of the several studies are viewed in their relations to one another, it is possible to discover a general fact which is of large sig¬ nificance for the thinking of anyone who tries to understand what is happen¬ ing in our presentday civilization. This general fact can be stated in some such terms as these. While the current trends in government, in redistribu¬ tion of the population, in industry, in religion, and in the other aspects of the general social order all move forward at a rapid rate, the several rates of movement exhibited by the individual trends are not the same. The result is that the social order as a whole lacks internal integration. One trend has carried the nation to a very advanced position, while another trend matures less rapidly and operates in fact as an inhibiting influence. Not only so, but the various trends seem at times to be in opposite directions, or at least they are in such divergent directions that national advancement cannot be described in any single formula. Among the forces which contribute to the progress of society, there is none which in recent decades has been more aggressive and influential than education. The American people, like all the peoples of the world, have been greatly impressed by the advances in knowledge made by the natural sciences and the social sciences. All nations, especially our own, have been benefited by the applications of scientific discoveries. As a result, the com¬ munities of the United States have willingly, even eagerly, provided in every possible way for the erection of great institutions to advance knowledge and to make knowledge a common possession of all classes of society. To be sure, the progress of education has not been achieved without con¬ flicts. The other forces which make for general social betterment often lag behind education. Sometimes forces which are beneficial in many respects are harmful because of their misapplication at certain points. One example of backwardness in the civilization of the United States was brought to light by the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement in the section of its report which deals with the causes of crime. It is shown that General Sessions 67 the great cities of this country have areas which, by virtue of their untoward social and physical conditions, breed excesses of juvenile crime. Apparently, American cities, with all their improvements, have not learned how to or¬ ganize themselves so as to escape the social infections which result from certain forms of congestion and degeneration. Even tho the schools provide, in constantly increasing measure, wholesome conditions of life for young people, cities are guilty of tolerating for a part of the youthful population surroundings that are unfavorable to proper individual development. Another example of incoordination in the social life of this country is seen in the inability of the social order to give young people suitable oppor¬ tunities for the use of their energies. Each year, as the Office of Education reports, somewhat more than 300,000, or approximately 55 percent, of the young people graduating from high school leave the educational system. In addition to these 300,000 high-school graduates who do not continue their education, there are each year more than 125,000 graduates of colleges, uni¬ versities, and higher professional schools who pass into industry, the profes¬ sions, or unemployment. If to these 425,000 graduates of high schools and institutions of higher education one adds those who find it necessary to drop out of high schools and colleges before completing the curriculum, one real¬ izes the magnitude of the problem which confronts society of turning into useful channels the energies of young people which are released each year and are available for employment but, if not utilized, are sure to be dis¬ astrously misdirected. There is, unfortunately, much evidence which goes to show that society is not taking proper care of its young people. Inadequacy in the treatment of youth is not a mere passing symptom of the financial depression. For more than two decades industry and commerce have not kept pace with the grow¬ ing ability and desire of young Americans to contribute to the work of the world. One of the most important reasons why the secondary schools of this country are overcrowded is that the schools are the only places where boys and girls of the adolescent age can be occupied. If industrial leaders do not very soon recognize the fact that the unbalanced development of industry has created grave social problems affecting the youth of the land, there will come such incoordination within the social order that all progress will be jeopardized. I recently saw a copy of an official communication issued by a state chamber of commerce explicitly advocating a reduction of the school system to the status of 1870. It will be recalled that in 1870 secondary schools of the type now common all over the United States were practically non¬ existent. The writer of the communication to which I refer must have known something of the history of education, but he can hardly be credited with an intelligent grasp of the trends of civilization. To go back to 1870 in education is as impossible as to stay the human race in its conquest of nature and in its fundamental urge for the perfection of democratic insti¬ tutions. 68 National Education Association What I have been saying shows that, while industry progresses and edu¬ cation progresses, their rates and directions of progress are not the same. Industry has been moving very rapidly in the direction of extreme mechani¬ zation of all its processes. The schools move in the direction of cultivation of human intelligence and human appreciations. Shall an integration of these two divergent trends be sought in a surrender of the schools to mechaniza¬ tion ? Shall we drift back as a nation to a state in which the great mass of the people are denied the privileges of secondary and higher education ? Shall society once more be divided into classes and castes some of which are de¬ prived of the right to a knowledge of sciences and letters? Or shall the effort be made to instil into industry the ideals of the best possible human life? I, for one, have no doubt as to the answers which will be given to these questions. For a time the social order is halted in its progress by internal stresses and tensions. Education seems to be held back temporarily by the slow readjustments of industry. We see here an example of the difficulty of maintaining a uniform rate of movement in social trends. A third example of uncoordinated trends is to be seen in the slow progress which the United States has made in organizing government and reforming systems of taxation. Governmental organization is painfully backward. It does not keep pace with the rapid strides which are being made in human culture. Political science has called attention again and again to the fact that this country is burdened with governmental units which are far too numer¬ ous to render efficient service to the communities which support them. These numerous and often overlapping and unnecessary subdivisions of govern¬ ment are due in part to the insidious influences which exert their energies in creating positions for office-seekers, and in part to the fact that jurisdictions which were created when communication and transportation were slow and difficult persist and resist combination into units which are reasonable and economical in size for an age such as that in which we live. A single illustration of badly organized government will serve to indicate the indefensible situation into which we have come. The state of Illinois has twelve thousand school districts with forty-seven thousand members of schoolboards. This number of school districts is an inheritance from an age when a journey of fifteen miles was a day’s arduous task. Can the state of Illinois throw off the incubus of this antique system of school-districting? Apparently not without the cultivation of much higher civic intelligence than has been developed up to this time. Even the state officials in charge of public instruction are vague in their pronouncements on this ancient iniquity. The immediate consequence of the slow progress in modernizing American governmental organization appears in the difficulty which communities en¬ counter in supporting their wasteful and outworn systems of public service Irrational subdivision of governmental jurisdiction is accompanied by the survival of outworn systems of taxation, which make it clear that in matters of public finance the American people are in a state of backwardness that can be charitably explained only by assuming that they have never put their minds to the problem of setting their government in order. A kindly provi- General Sessions 69 dence has lavished on this nation vast unearned resources. Until recently the natural wealth of the land has covered up our folly. We are now learning that current trends in government and taxation are out of harmony with the more progressive trends of social organization. There is one very striking characteristic of the reactionary forces in human society. They show their lack of competency by their vacillation. Let me point out examples drawn from recent history. In 1917 certain manufacturers of this country who had formed an organization which had as its purpose improvement of the training of laborers, went to Congress with the demand that a large federal appropriation be made for the introduction into high schools of courses in vocational education. It was asserted, as a part of the justification for the demand for federal money, that vocational courses are expensive. One fact which distinguishes vocational courses from courses in history and English is that vocational courses often require machinery. Furthermore, it was pointed out in 1917 that well-qualified teachers of voca¬ tional subjects have to be paid higher salaries than are paid to teachers of academic subjects. The United States Chamber of Commerce joined with the organized manufacturers in persuading Congress to pass a law not only supplying a large appropriation but requiring the states to match the federal appropriation if they were to receive aid. The forces of industry and com¬ merce had their way. New subjects, and very expensive subjects, were intro¬ duced into the curriculum of American high schools. In 1933 the United States Chamber of Commerce refused to take part in a national conference on the crisis in education which was called because of lack of funds in many of the states with which to carry on schools. The manufacturers sent to the conference official delegates who fought at every step for a reduction in ex¬ penditures in schools. These advocates of reduction represented the same people who in 1917 had been insistent on an expansion of the school program. It is easy to parallel with many others this example of external pressure for expansion of the educational program and later advocacy of retrench¬ ment. The organized bankers of this country have carried on for years a persistent campaign to extend the school curriculum by the teaching of thrift. Their definition of thrift is to save money and deposit it in banks. The physicians and dentists have favored school clinics. The lawyers, who are now getting themselves elected or appointed to schoolboards for the ex¬ press purpose of enforcing the drastic retrenchments ordered by their clients, the financial and business leaders of communities, have for years carried on in a formal and organized way a campaign to compel the schools to teach children the fundamental law of the land in classes wholly separate from those which teach civics or history. These are not cases in which the views of interested promoters of expansion have been quietly expressed in private or in unsystematic ways. Every case which I have cited is a case of vigorous, organized propaganda for expansion. Each case is one in which expansion was effected. Each case is one in which educators are today being attacked for extravagance by some of the very people who a few years ago were insisting on expansion. I submit that, when any single organized group within Amer- 70 National Education Association ican society which formerly insisted on expansion, today allows its official representatives to advocate a return of the schools to the status of 1870, the time has come to call for nothing less than a public consideration of the need for internal social integration. My diagnosis of the reason why society has not kept up with education is that education has not concerned itself as fully as it should with the exposure of the retarding influences that hold society back. The schools have taught in a few advanced courses, and somewhat timidly, that outworn taxing systems are wrong in principle and inadequate, that they originated in a bygone age and need to be reconstructed in the light of presentday experience. I advocate that the schools begin, with the sessions of next autumn, to prepare lessons on taxation and present these in vigorous form to the citizens of the next generation. I am in favor of such a reconstruction of the curriculum, worked out cooperatively by educators, that the American people will be compelled to talk at the dinner table with their children about taxes and legislators and tax-reduction associations. I am further in favor of the discussion in schools of the governmental organization of cities and states. If it is said by those who are afraid to have light thrown on our national inadequacies that young children will be harmed by such discussion, my answer is that they are now harmed beyond measure by popular ignorance and lack of initiative in seeking reform. The teachers of this country have a responsibility for the training of young people and for the protection of the interests of youth. There will be some who will say that the proposed program of civic education is radical. There will be some who will accuse teachers of seeking to serve selfish interests. The answer to these charges is that no other organized group is competent to represent youth. I have confidence in parents, but they are not organized for the protec¬ tion of the birthrights of American children. When they are aroused to a recognition of the fact that powerful groups are attempting to reduce edu¬ cation to the status of 1870, they will react with vigor and with ultimate effect, but at present parents are confused and ill-informed. They do not understand the forces which are tending to break down the morale of young people. They have been made to understand the necessity of conserving the material resources of the nation. They have not realized the harm which will follow a neglect of human resources. I am glad to see the nation willing to build dams and plant trees. I am glad to see these laudable enterprises coupled with movements for relief of the material distress of families. I make a plea for equally intelligent attention to the needs of American young people. As the situation stands today, school sessions in all parts of the United States are being reduced by weeks and months. Some communities have closed their schools altogether. Curtailment of opportunity is being tolerated in this, the richest nation on the earth, at a time when the civilizations of Europe are opening new schools and making training at the higher levels available as never before to the common people. In France federal appropriations are being voted to make secondary schools free for the first time in the history General Sessions 71 of that country. In France free secondary education is a national political issue of the first magnitude. In the United States, where the free high school originated, selfish, narrow-minded leaders of public policy, who have grossly mismanaged their own affairs, prate about dragging the schools hack to the status of 1870. If France were alone in the movement to enlarge educa¬ tional opportunities, we might well be ashamed to be thinking about retrench¬ ment, but in Germany and England, where community budgets are strained to the point of despair, educational opportunities are being increased in number and scope because it is recognized that education is the force which will save the future. Shall American teachers be silent while crass spoilsmen shut the schools and incompetent leaders blind the people to the fact that the real difficulty is not in expanded opportunities for knowledge but in taxing systems which are iniquitous and in governmental units which are so badly organized that they destroy what intelligence has laboriously created ? I believe that, if teachers will ally themselves with the vigorous policies of the federal administration, a cure for the present retrenchment of educa- tion can be found which will be no less immediate and effective than the cure wdiich courage and insight have provided for industry. We have seen a wise executive mobilize the nation and turn its steps into the road that promises to lead to better life. I believe it is possible and proper for the educational forces of this country to join in the movement for immediate national recovery. There is a direct channel of approach to the President. The federal Office of Education and the Department of the Interior have never been fully utilized by the school people of the United States. The Office of Education has performed a large service. It has compiled reports which surpass in comprehensiveness and value the educational reports of any other nation. It has done its work on appropriations from Congress which have been so small that they attest the ignorance of our national legislators with regard to the needs of the educational system. Congress seems to have no remotest comprehension of what is necessary to provide for the fundamental develop¬ ment of the cultural forces of American society. Let us undertake a campaign of education of the people so that they will understand their educational system. We of the schools have devoted ourselves too exclusively to the routine of teaching and of administering the internal affairs of educational institutions. We have been divided in our associations into administrators of school systems, teachers in the grades, teachers and administrators in high schools, and teachers and administrators in colleges. We have been faithful in performing our several duties but inadequate in influencing national policy. I recommend and urge that we now call upon the Office of Education, which is the most inclusive educational agency in America, to bring together and make effective in national planning the best wisdom of the nation to the end that young people shall not be deprived of their right to a proper share in the democratic opportunities which this nation is able to afford. If there is a sphere in which national planning and prompt, 72 National Education Association decisive action are imperative in the interests of national safety, it is the sphere of education'. There was a time when I doubted the wisdom of asking for large federal appropriations for schools. I am now convinced that states and local com¬ munities are no longer competent under presentday taxing systems to secure for young people the schooling that they should have. I am in favor of an insistent demand for relief of local school budgets from federal sources. Either the national treasury must help communities, or the federal taxing power must relinquish its hold on the national income. I may be wrong in the view to which I have been converted. If I am and if others who hold similar views are wrong, we have a right to demand, under present conditions, that some plan be worked out which will be effec¬ tive in restoring to education the revenues essential to the preservation of American education. Again, there are many of us who hold, as I have already suggested, that the time has come for a “new deal” in civic training. We believe that the traditional curriculum of the schools has outlived its justification. In the name of the modern state, in the name of a new civilization, in the name of the future, we call for a curriculum that shall prepare young people for life in a progressing world. Again, we may be wrong in our eagerness for a reconstructed curriculum. If we are, we at least have a right to lay our arguments before some national planning agency which will be as impartial as are the agencies now working for the reconstruction of industry. Finally, there are many of us who believe that experts in the administra¬ tion of schools are handicapped and prevented from performing their duties by forces which are either unintelligent or sinister. In this connection I shall not even suggest, for the sake of making my point, that we may be wrong. We have witnessed of late crude and ignorant manipulations of school budgets much too often to permit the harboring of any doubts as to the motives behind these manipulations. We demand that an agency, broad enough in its vision and inclusive enough in the range of its influence, be brought into operation thru intelligent planning to show communities how to avoid the maladjustments which now put legislation and the actions of local schoolboards in the way of expert guidance of schools. The President of the United States, who has earned the enthusiastic loyalty of all of us by his strong and wise leadership, can do for American youth what he has done for American finance and American industry. Let us appeal to him to act thru the Department of the Interior and thru the Office of Education to provide for the creation and execution of plans which shall not only save but enhance the morale of American young people and shall assure adequate preparation of these young people for life in a new era to the end that the future shall not see a repetition of the mismanagement which has depressed a half-educated nation during the distressing years thru which we have recently passed. General Sessions 73 TEACHERS AS CITIZENS 1 WILLARD E. GIVENS, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, OAKLAND, CALIF. J AND PRESIDENT OF THE CALIFORNIA TEACHERS ASSOCIATION One hundred and fifty-seven years ago, July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted by prominent, patriotic citizens representing the thirteen original states. It asserts: “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, govern¬ ments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes ; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The United States of America from its earliest days has been guided by the great American ideal of an equal opportunity for each and every one of its citizens. This ideal has always been and still is our most vital national possession. It has been the cherished hope of millions of human beings during the last century and a half. Our people have always believed that it was possible to create and maintain a society in which every man would have the opportunity of rising to full stature and living the fullest possible life of which he is capable. It has been our belief in the genuine worth and value of each man and woman, the humblest as well as the most exalted, that has kept our ideal always high. This high spiritual ideal has now become badly confused with our materialistic avarice. The struggle for the dazzling prizes of materialism has destroyed in some measure not only our American ideal but our sense of social obligation. As a free and independent people we must face these facts in our situation. In 1914 we were faced with a World War, sudden expansion of trade, and huge profits. Our American dream was changed into a nightmare of gambling, corrup¬ tion, and mad speculation. Let me picture for you this situation by a simple, homely illustration :2 Ten men who were financiers chipped in ten dollars each and bought a fine cow that gave ten gallons of milk every day. The milk was divided at night and each man received one gallon as his share. Soon the neighbors far and near heard about the wonderful cow and said to one another, “Think of getting a whole gallon of milk 1 In securing suggestions for this address, I sent letters to sixty of my fellow workers. I am indebted to all of them for practical suggestions, but I am particularly obligated to three people from whom 1 have quoted at some length: Mr. George M. Thiriot of Oakland and Mr. Parke S. Hyde and Mr. F. J. Highfill of Los Angeles. 2 Quillen, Robert, in the Fountain Inn Tribune. 74 National Education Association every day. What a wonderful return on a ten dollar investment. I wish I had a share in her.” When this talk was repeated to the ten men, they held a conference, and one of them said, “Let us give these people what they want. Our shares in the cow cost us ten dollars each, and we can sell other shares at the same price.” So they went to a printer and obtained one thousand sheets of paper bearing the legend: “One share in the cow.” Then they sold 500 of these shares at ten dollars each, which brought them $5000, and divided the other 500 among themselves as their reward for being smart. Each man of the ten now had fifty-one shares, whereas in the beginning each had but one. But one of the ten began to worry. “Look here,” he said, “every fellow who bought a share in this cow will expect a gallon of milk tonight, and the cow gives only ten gallons. When the milk is divided into one thousand and ten parts these new shareholders won’t get a spoonful. Shares will drop to nothing. We’d better unload while we can.” So the ten men went out on the street to find investors, and each of them sold the fifty shares that had been awarded to him, and thus they obtained a second $5000 to divide among them. But now night was drawing near, and again one of the ten began to worry. “There will be a row at milking time,” said he. “Hasten abroad and persuade each of the shareholders to sign a proxy, which is a joker authorizing you to cast as you think best the vote to which his share entitles him. Then return with the proxies and we shall do some voting.” At twilight the men met at the barn, and in their hands were one thousand signed proxies to represent the absent shareholders, and the ten were entitled to vote in their own right, for each still held his original share. “Now,” said the one who did the talking, “we must organize. This company needs a president, a treasurer, and eight vicepresidents. That gives each of us a job, and since there are ten of us and the cow gives ten gallons, it is moved and seconded that each of us receive a salary of one gallon of milk per day. All in favor say ‘Aye’.” And then they milked the cow. We all remember October, 1929, when we were called upon to suffer the crash that came. The whole situation is too recent to need repeating. Suddenly in the midst of our hardship and suffering, we were faced with a dramatic banking holiday, which brought the American people to a sudden and keen realization of the fact that the spiritual values of life are more fundamental and important than material things, including the almighty dollar. We were brought to the realization again that the great American spiritual ideal must be relied upon, with faith in ourselves and in the future. Each one has to choose for himself what is permanently satisfying. We know that nothing wall prove lastingly satisfying which does not meet the needs of the deepest part of our natures. The present period of crisis is a pause between the materialistic orgy which culminated in October, 1929, and a new period which may he a great advance or it may be merely another money-crazed debacle in which our American ideal may be destroyed. The choice must be made by our citizens, a substantial group of which is the public-school teachers of America. From the beginning of our country, the public-school teacher has not had the privilege of exercising the full rights of an American citizen. We have been permitted to slip quietly to the polls and cast our ballots, but we General Sessions 75 have not been allowed to discuss political issues or to take any leadership in matters affecting the welfare of our government. We are now faced with the possible collapse of our economic order. We are called upon to save the nobler qualities of our democratic society and to help destroy the sarcomatous growths now ravishing our society. Shall we as teachers, before it is too late, assume the position of leadership until recently held by politicians, capitalists, bankers, industrialists, and profit- seekers of all kinds, and by means of enlightened and disinterested leadership serve the youth of our country by arousing them to wise and unselfish rebuild¬ ing of our whole situation out of the sorry mess that is now upon us? The situation calls for great effort. To succeed in but a part will require many changes, both in our present point of view and in our present practises. Education has been altogether too much concerned with the present. “Education is, as a rule, the strongest force on the side of what exists and against fundamental change; threatened institutions, while they are still powerful, possess themselves of the educational machine, and instil a respect for their own excellence into the malleable minds of the young.” 1 This more or less unconscious defense of the status quo has placed the teacher in an ignominious position. I well recall a young high-school prin¬ cipal who issued instructions to the teachers on the procedure to be followed during fire drills. Each of his bulletins ended with the emphatic injunction, “The teacher must follow his class out of the room and act as a leader.” The only opportunity which most teachers have availed themselves of in the past has been similar to this. They have followed along in the rear of movements over which they have had no control, and of which they have hardly been a part. Too often the worn-out catch words of business have been handed on to them. When salesmanship had made threadbare its selling service to the public, the teachers all over the country began to “sell education” to the people. It was situations like this that evoked the sneer of Bernard Shaw: “Education is always driving the tacks where the carpet was two weeks yy ago. Responsible citizenship for the teacher should mean the production of understanding citizens from among the students in the classroom. Here opportunity beats an anvil chorus. The opportunity is for the wise teacher whose mind ranges widely in the field of economics and world affairs. We must help break down our provincial attitude. Students can be made to realize that they “still have all that has sustained the spirit of man for cen¬ turies — the soil, the sky, the sea, spring and sunlight, music and books, and the love of woman. The first thing they must dismiss from their minds is that it is their responsibility to rebuild the world as it existed previous to October, 1929; that was an unbalanced and orgiastic world that held no promise of enduring happiness for mankind, and those who wish for its return are only holding back the hands of the clock.” 2 1 Russell, Bertrand. Why Men Fight. Century Co., New York. 1917. 2 Preston, John Hyde. “To the Class of 1933.” Forum, June, 1933. 76 National Education Association From the teachers of America should come the influence which will make our somewhat mad world of selfish people realize that democracy will have to adjust itself to reality. The citizen-teacher will have to be a quietly superior person, with economic and social vision, with little sentimentality, with a warm affection for humanity, high integrity, large patience, inde¬ pendence of thought, and scorn for the petty attitudes that so often enter into the practise of teaching. The citizen-teacher must not be a pessimist nor must he be a “vulgar optimist bustling in with his talk of silver linings.” 1 In the examination of life against the light of reality it is found to be “neither rosewater nor bitter aloes.” Can our present teacher-training colleges with their emphasis on method¬ ology select, train, and allocate enough such citizen-teachers? Can the present arministrative officers the country over give such teachers reasonable working loads? Can they secure academic freedom? Can they provide the amenities that will make teaching pleasurable and keep the citizen-teachers a long time in their respective communities? Can they surround such teachers with a strong arm of protection from the attacks of those whose present control of affairs is entrenched in a passing economic system ? The breadth of mind and spirit that the teacher can develop in the indi¬ viduals of the community will be the teacher’s best contribution to citizen¬ ship. His workshop is the classroom of the public schools. To vote regularly is important, but incidental. To hold public office is almost impossible unless some way is found to reduce the burden of hours and pupil load. To give advice and to conduct routine instruction are not enough. But to make a generation know that unlimited construction of machines is dangerous when the social implications of machinery are not known ; that to squander untold wealth in fighting devices for protection is folly when no one knows what they protect ; and that to worship progress is almost madness when no one knows whither the progress is leading us — these are the aspects of the imagination and the intellect and without them in a considerable and influen¬ tial part of its citizenry, no people can hope long to escape the fatal conse¬ quences of its own ignorance. Teachers for generations have been recognized as “good citizens,” as people who are devoting a lifetime of service to the training of the children of others that their children may grow into useful adults with the proper outlook on life and society. The teacher’s creed has always been one of giving, not getting. Teachers are not prone to shirk plain responsibilities. A large part of the salary of teachers goes to the support of less fortunate relatives and friends. Credit institutions seek the accounts of school teachers because they are good risks. Six to ten months’ work per year has been the teacher’s lot, and much of the time between the periods of employment has been spent on self-improve¬ ment to the end that he might better serve the children of the nation. No profession can boast of a more altruistic motive in life. Yet in spite of the 1 Priestley, J. B. “On Vulgar Optimists.” I For One. Dodd, Mead and Co., New York. 1924. General Sessions 77 teacher’s many qualifications as a citizen, he has been criticized, brow-beaten, threatened, ordered, sued, vilified, and otherwise maltieated when in an\ way he has turned his education or devoted any of his time to political endeavors. Just why seems to be quite a mystery. 1 he teacher is not recog' nized as a citizen with all privileges or rights of other free citizens. Let me quote you from the present rules and regulations of the board of education of one of our cities in one of our most enlightened states : Teachers and other employees of the school district shall not directly or indirectly engage in campaigns for the election or defeat of any candidate for a member of the board of education. This shall not affect their right to vote as they deem proper. We have cases where teachers have run for public office and have been ordered by boards of education to withdraw promptly from such degrading activities, or their immediate dismissal would ensue. It is interesting to note, however, that it has been established by court action that teacheis aie citizens and as such have a right to run for public office. Then why all this stigma to a teacher participating in politics? Why this censure of the teachers association for maintaining an advisory group at a state capitol during a legislative session when hundreds of measures affecting the very life and future of thousands of children of the state are under consideration ? Is all this feeling toward teachers participating in politics based on the assumption that politics is a rotten mess and teachers, being a lathei decent lot, might be corrupted and the quality of their teaching lowered, 01 is it based on the fear that if teachers ever do become politically conscious and act concertedly that some of the present practises in politics will be cleaned up? Let me quote to you from page 69 of the Review of Reviews for April, 1930, a passage with reference to the attitude of the board of education in the city of Chicago : And so it happened that for years about the only active agitation against the tax administration was that carried on by a group of teachers organizations in the public schools of the city. * * * The teachers of Chicago have virtually been placed in a position where they had to take the bull by the horns or be gored by it, and they courageously chose the former alternative. * * * They have been instrumental in concentrating attention upon tax conditions at times when no one else cared or had the courage to do so. The strongest evidence of their effectiveness in this respect is the extreme irritability with which their activities have been regarded by tax officials and other government representatives, culminating in a public threat by the piesi- dent of the board of education of Chicago to discharge any teacher who contributed to a proposed investigation of the tax system. I have just quoted to you from the Review of Reviews for 1930. Let me now give you a statement from the Nation of May 10, 1933: After going unpaid for nearly a year, Chicago’s 14,000 public-school teacheis staged an educational program of their own consonant with the modern learn by doing formula. The city owes them some $30,000,000, an average of $2,140 per instructor. Homes have been lost. Families have suffered undernourishment, even actual hunger. Their life insurance cashed in, their savings gone, some teachers have been driven to panhandling after school hours to get food. They had been advised by Jesse Jones, 78 National Education Association Director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to persuade the bankers to seek a federal loan to permit Chicago to discharge its indebtedness to the teachers. Under this plan, the banks would use the city’s tax-anticipation warrants as collateral. On Apiil 24, having tried vainly for months to negotiate for their pay, the teachers, 5,000 strong, formed into five columns and marched on the city’s five leading banks. At the City National, jeering reminders to the chairman of its board, General Charles G. Dawes, of his recent $90,000,000 loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, following his ‘technically” illegal loans to numerous Insull companies, evoked the foimer vicepresident’s ready profanity. “To hell with trouble-makers,” was his reply. W hen no relief was forthcoming from bankers or city authorities, the teachers dem¬ onstrated again two days later. On this occasion they were attacked and clubbed by police likewise unpaid, but not so much in arrears as the teachers. Chicago’s financial plight antedated the depression. Favoritism and collusion with powerful business interests resulted in flagrant discrimination in tax assessments and laxity in tax collections. Some taxes of the boom year, 1928, have not yet been col- ected. On the very day when the teachers were receiving an object lesson in civics from pohcemen s nightsticks, Colonel Robert R. McCormick, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, was denouncing before the Advertising Club of New York the pink doctrines” taught in the nation’s schools and colleges. h ^ld^l any/xal reaLS°n Why °ne m[llion of our best educated people should be barred from the privileges and responsibilities of real citizenship? h or years in this country while the teacher has been devoting his time o the altruistic pursuits of his calling, there has been developing the great cu t of the Worshippers of the Golden Calf,” the followers of the almfghty dollar. Money has become their god. We have built great temples of marble and granite in which to worship these man-made gods. We have called some of these temples stock exchanges in which, by much “abracadabra” and wand waving, we have wished ourselves wealthy by fictitious inflation of stock pi ices, when lo ! the magic spell bursts and we are brought face to face with real values. Our man-made bubbles of material, socalled wealth, have burst m our faces and left us bewildered. Institutions which we believed infallible have dissolved and the men who headed them have either been sent to the penitentiary or have left for foreign countries. ere lies the first assignment of the teacher-citizens in the present crisis. Young America must be taught that the simple spiritual virtues will in the end bring more real happiness than hoarded material wealth ; that spiritual values cannot be taken from us, but material things can be wiped out over¬ night. How much of the past “get-rich-quick” attitude of our country in general can we attribute to something lacking in us as teacher-citizens? he school is the coordinator of all the right-minded agencies in a con¬ scious effort to combat the growing and engulfing influence of graft, gang¬ sterism, and general breaking down of organized society. Teachers must ecome politically conscious and become aware (not so suddenly as to startle them) of the tremendous responsibilities which fall upon them in the definite woi ung out of our social program. This means that the highest type of individual must be induced to accept teaching as his profession. It means that those who seek public office must be carefully investigated before elec¬ tion, and after election carefully watched to see that public service rather than private gain is the controlling motive. General Sessions 79 Many will howl to high heaven when such a proposal is made and decry any political activity on the part of teachers, but where is the agency to come from to combat the evil forces which are all but engulfing us? If it is not the job of the teacher-citizen to educate to a higher basis, whose job is it? Only by education in its largest sense will we ever elevate ourselves to cope better with our economic, financial, social, and moral problems. Why do I say that in real situations teachers must head such a coordinating movement of all right-thinking groups? Because teacher-citizens are trained to serve and are altruistic in the main. No group has spontaneously developed any such ability or willingness to assume the responsibilities. Small organized minorities have ruled and gained power simply because the moral forces have been disorganized and inarticulate. With the American public school as a nucleus and the coordinating agency for all right-thinking groups, graft and corruption can be dethroned, both in business and in politics. A large order — yes. But who other than the teacher-citizens will volun¬ teer? Where can we find a larger call to real citizenship? America must have a spiritual reawakening on some basis above a gold standard if she is to assume real leadership. May I make clear what I am trying to say by a simple illustration. For a short time, I shall speak to you representing two groups of people. The thinking of these groups is vastly different in its nature. Perhaps heretofore very little thinking aloud has been done on this subject, but the time has now come when it is necessary for both these groups to lay all cards on the table in order that the public may know better how to analyze the situation. First of all, I shall represent Mr. Jones as a leader of the self-centered, self-seeking groups and special interests that have for many decades past constituted self-appointed committees whose duties were to control all governmental functions — local, state, and national. The thinking of Mt. Jones has never before been said aloud to the public. We shall now ha\e the opportunity of hearing him speak his mind to the school teachers of America : Ladies and Gentlemen. As the representative of many organizations, I stand before you as your friend to give you some very definite instructions. You are about to over¬ look some very pertinent facts which may cause you to jeopardize your jobs in the future. For many ages past you have been very quiet, inactive, and neutral in all matters of importance. I have come before you to demand that you continue the same policy in the future. * First of all let me inform you that you are not citizens of America in the full meaning of the term. You merely have the right to vote. But you have no right to full citizenship when it comes to influencing public opinion. You must not be quoted by the public press in regard to any political matters. When it comes to the election of officers whether they be local, state, or national, you may vote, but you dare not express an opinion in the presence of others. Regardless of the fact that you may be better qualified for the selection of the members of a board of education than any other group of citizens, remember that on all these problems you must be silent. Those who are primarily interested in the education of girls and boys must limit their activi¬ ties to that particular field and leave all political matters to those who have an eye for the making of money and the accumulation of wealth. On all matters of taxation and school legislation we again demand of you that you keep your hands off. You are 80 National Education Association entirely ignorant of the goal that our organizations constantly seek. Life to us is not the training of girls and boys, but the obtaining of the maximum amount of money with the minimum amount of effort. We have noticed that our dividends diminish in proportion to your activities. Therefore, stay out of politics. I recognize the fact that you have spent sixteen years of your lifetime in the public schools and colleges of America in preparing to be good, clean, broadminded citizens, but I maintain that public education is a failure in that it stresses morality and char¬ acter and citizenship, whereas we are interested in money. I am further aware of the fact that you cannot get a certificate to teach until you have had a course in “govern¬ ment,” but if by chance you gained any knowledge about the proper management of government, you must never reveal those facts to the public. You have also had courses in economic problems, but such courses teach you economy for the masses and do not contribute to our well-being. The very textbooks you have studied are opposed to such special interests as I represent. Therefore, I give you fair warning! Do not in any way lift your voices in opposition to our policy or practise. Our organization have been operating for ages past, and school teachers have shown but little concern. Now may I continue my instructions to you more quietly and even more secretly. We political henchmen do not know much about the theory of democratic govern¬ ment, but we do know a great deal about political graft and practical politics. Stand ye therefore at our command and move neither to the right nor the left. We do not ask you to boost for us, but we do demand of you that you remain silent. We are now lions at bay. Many of our civic organizations have turned against us. Investigating committees are after us on every side. If all the school teachers in America and all the rest of our college- and university-trained citizens were to exercise the full rights of citizenship just at this time, we would be doomed ! You must all remember that the long and tedious years of your training in prepar¬ ing for your positions which you now occupy have naturally placed you in direct opposition to crooked politics and grafting in public offices. I am further aware of the fact that yours is only one of the many groups who are paid a monthly salary from the funds obtained from the public thru the process of taxation, and that all these other groups — city employees, county employees, state and federal employees — do have the full rights of citizenship, but your case is different. ^ ou must not attempt to influence the mind of the public. The illiterate laborer who has never gone to school a day in his life has a right to say what he pleases in regard to the political conditions, but you must not. It is easy for us to deceive the masses in general, so long as the teachers, who can reach and influence every race and class of people, remain silent. I realize that the school teachers do reach more than 90 percent of all the homes in America today, and that if their influence were wielded for the good of the public in general, then all of our self-seeking, special interests would suffer. Our business cannot be jeopardized. I repeat it. You are not citizens, but school teachers. You shall not appear before our state legislature, nor our city council, nor even the board of education that employs you. Others have a right to say what they please, but you must be silent and let crooked politics have its way. Beware ! I give you warning. Be silent. Now in answer to the instructions given by Mr. Jones representing the self-centered interests, I shall speak for Mr. Smith who represents the school teachers of America : I am glad to reply to your threats and intimidations. I am speaking for the citizen- teachers of America. First of all, I want to inform you that we are citizens. We do have the full rights of citizenship. It is not only our opportunity, but our responsi¬ bility and our obligation to take an active part in our government and in all our civic affairs. Every red-blooded American school teacher is now ready to fight against the pernicious practises that helped to bring on this present nationwide situation. General Sessions 81 From the intimidations you offer, you infer that we are cowards, that we are afraid to take part in our government. You desire to hold over us a big political club and to intimidate us. You insinuate that if we do not remain silent and neutral that we are apt to lose our jobs on account of your political chicanery. Are our jobs so dear that we are willing to sacrifice the welfare of hundreds of thousands of girls and boys and honest, hard-working citizens in order that you may continue your pernicious practises ? No ! A thousand times, no ! If we cannot be public- school teachers and citizens at the same time, then we choose to be citizens. Our gov¬ ernment is face to face with a real struggle, and the public-school teachers of America are in the trenches ready to fight for a better, cleaner, and more wholesome condition. We will not remain silent and inactive in civic affairs. We are not cowards. We are red-blooded American citizens and taxpayers qualified by professional training for leadership in the war on civic corruption, aroused to action by the menace of that corruption to the new generation of citizens entrusted to our care, and we propose to exercise our full rights as citizens hereafter at any cost. A NEW CITIZENSHIP WILLIAM JOHN COOPER, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D-. C. One hundred and fifty-seven years ago today the United States declared themselves free and independent of Great Britain. It may be well to ask at this point, V hat changes have occurred in our national policies? What indi¬ cation have we that we are a nation in fact ? In the last part of the eighteenth century, it was difficult with poor com¬ munication, with no telephone, no telegraph, no radio, and with a very poor newspaper circulation, to get a spirit of real independence established in America. But we have been now a century and a half attempting to set up what we may call an American spirit. How far has this been accomplished ? Have we a real American culture ? Have we things for which we care enough to fight rather than to see them perish? It is to matters of this sort that we should give our attention. Very early in Washington’s first term as President of the United States the French Revolution broke out. Americans generallv sympathized with France, especially so after the other European nations sided against France, for France had helped us gain our independence. But the French representa¬ tive in this country, Citizen Genet, undertook to treat Americans as if they were really a colonial dependency of the French nation. Only a sharp rebuke to Genet on Washington’s part and the most careful statesmanship by our President saved the country from what would have been a most unfortunate coalition. Not only was there pro-French feeling thruout the nation but anti-English feeling also was generally aroused. There had been trouble over the Treaty of Peace with England. England still held military posts in our territory and had as yet failed to make the settlements which she had agreed to make for slaves and other property taken during the war. John Jay had been sent to settle these questions. Eventually he did make a treaty. But it did not cover all the points at issue, altho it did some things exceedingly well. And not the least of these was the time which it gave us to prepare for an actual war which came in 1812. 82 National Education Association But Washington did strive for and did secure one principle in American policy, namely, neutrality in all European affairs. This was the first great step in cutting us loose from a colonial attitude toward Europe and making us really a nation. It was reiterated by Jefferson in his famous inaugural statement, “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, en¬ tangling alliances with none.” And the statements of these two great Presi¬ dents were reiterated by Monroe who added his well-known doctrine. When in 1914-18. there came a great European conflict, our President issued a neutrality proclamation which was observed in the main for nearly three years. Then the Germanic powers having proved the more offensive, we entered the war against them. The events are well known. When we came out of the war we found ourselves in an entirely new position. We had changed from a nation which supplied raw’ materials and certain manufac¬ tured goods to Europe as interest on debts which we owed. We found our¬ selves suddenly the creditor nation of the world holding claims on all of the victors. And they in turn held claims on the Germanic powers. But we also found that we had the larger portion of the world’s gold supply in our own treasury. How could we proceed as before the war now when the rest of the world owed us ? But it happened that there followed in this country a period of great prosperity, not a period of prosperity for agriculture but a period of prosperity for nearly everything else. It seemed to loom up like a great ocean wave until 1929 when it subsided just as rapidly. Then we began for the first time to consider where we were. W ar debts came to the front, moratoriums were proposed, and various other schemes for deal¬ ing with a depression were suggested. It was time for us to consider care¬ fully our own situation. What had happened in those 150 years since we had gained independence? When Washington had declared for our neutrality and when Jefferson had talked of entangling alliances with none, we were a nation of approxi¬ mately, five million people, a fifth of whom were slaves. We were scattered along a coast line without good roads or other means of rapid communica¬ tion. But in 1929, we were a nation of over 120 millions spread out over a great continent and closely knit together by railroads and other means of communication which had not even existed in the earlier period. Not only had our country shrunk in size viewed from the time that it took to get over it, but the world also had shrunk. The Europe which was some ninety days away in the colonial period was, after Lindbergh’s famous flight, but twenty-six hours away. The prices of many of our commodities were no longer fixed by the goods to be had in America but were determined by the world’s supply of goods at prices recorded in the market at Liverpool. Should not this make a difference in our attitudes as citizens? Yet we were still teaching in our schools the foreign doctrines of Washington, Jefferson, and Monroe, just as we had been for one hundred years. In that hundred years a new policy to meet new conditions should have been developed. It required that on all goods manufactured outside this country a tariff designed not for revenue but for protection be levied. It assumed that all such goods could General Sessions 83 and should be manufactured in this country and with this policy we have had only short breaks. We did make concessions, however, in a period of this high protective policy. In the tariff bill of 1897 Congress gave the Executive power to make certain reciprocal concessions to nations and there was a period when we had trade relations of this kind. President Taft also attempted in a special session of Congress to get thru a trade agreement with Canada. In this he was eventually successful but the Canadian Parliament turned down the treaty and nothing came of it. But the highest point in protective tariffs was reached in the Smoot- Hawley Bill passed by the special session of Congress early in Mr. Hoover’s administration. This bill was a part of a national policy of isolation begun in 1920. A thousand economists are said to have petitioned the President not to sign this bill. It was not what he had asked for. Yet he signed it. Today we are participating in a World Economic Conference which is trying to sweep away trade barriers. Where did we err? I believe that at the conclusion of the war, we should have developed a new foreign policy if we desired to retain our world leadership. Our posi¬ tion in the world was unexampled. If that position were to be a policy of isolation, we should have forgiven and forgotten any claims for war debts. We should also have made provision for curtailing sharply our agricultural developments. Our war president, Woodrow Wilson, had proved himself a great statesman. In 1920 the Republican party was apparently in a very difficult position to reestablish itself. That was proved by the convention which nominated candidates for the presidency if by nothing else. Not one of the Republican leaders could command a majority. Finally the isola¬ tionists who controlled the Senate effected a compromise wffiich named one of their own members as a candidate. They succeeded in carrying the press of the nation with them, and after the election of 1920, Republicans con¬ trolled both Congress and the presidency. The party itself, however, appeared to be without leaders who understood the new position of America in the world. How could we who had most of the gold in the world and who did not care to enter into a period of free trade with other nations continue to sell our products abroad as we had during the war when we had virtually sold them to ourselves, for our own government had paid for them? But in no other way could wTe keep up the great agricultural output which had been developed during the war. For more than a year America had virtually fed the Allies. Should we take steps to curtail this agricultural production ? Otherwise agriculture must suffer, and it could not suffer very long without bringing the rest of our industries down with it. Had we chosen then to say farewell to all of our war debts and to have provided a system of taxation to pay these bills ourselves, we might have been able to continue on the policy that we had been pursuing for a hundred years. We could have produced practically all things that we needed with such outstanding exceptions as rubber, coffee, tea, sugar, spices, and a few other incidental articles. Most of these things we could have obtained on 84 National Education Association the American continent. W e could have done almost entirely without the few goods which we had been receiving from Europe. When we come to the present, we find the world at a low ebb. We are told that the depression is due to falling off of international trade — that it is necessary to get an international understanding before we can fully recover. The League of Nations at Geneva has called a great World Economic Conference at London. Of the sixty-seven nations invited to participate in it, all but the Republic of Panama have agreed. It was formally opened on June 12 by the King of Great Britain who called the attention of the con¬ ference to the very grave importance of their work. His Majesty said, “And for you gentlemen who from today begin the work of restoration the task is heavy. It will not be changed except thru goodwill and cooperation.” Presi¬ dent Roosevelt said some months ago, “The great International Conference . . . must succeed. The future of the world demands it.” Sir Arthur Salter, writing in the New York Times on “The Nations at the Crossroads,” said, “The questions classify themselves most conveniently into three categories concerning respectively, monetary policies, problems of credit and indebted¬ ness, and tariffs and trade impediments.” The writers in the magazines and newspapers of this country have put the matter in about the same way. “All agree,” says Arthur Crawford, “that continued low prices involving disquilibrium between prices and costs contribute to the continuance of the depression.” The price level for 1926 taken as 100, reached 60, we are told, as its lowest point on March 4, 1933, when the banks in this country were all closed. It is now supposed to be about 62. The 1913 level was 70; and the average level for 1931 was 73. Business depends upon stability of prices. It is not possible to restore trade and international business until we can agree on the relationship which should exist between the dollar, the pound, and the franc. It may be necessary for us to make some sort of price index in terms of which prices can be fixed if international trade is to be resumed. That is the first and perhaps the most important problem before the conference. After this agreement has been made, it will be necessary for the delegates to take up questions of public credit and indebtedness. Prime Minister Macdonald, in the opening address, said, “Behind the subjects I have just mentioned is another of front rank importance ... I refer to the questions of the world debts which must be dealt with before every obstacle of general recovery has been removed and it must be taken up without delay by the nations concerned. Lausanne has to be completed and this vexed question settled once and for all in the light of present world conditions.” This will be the issue which will try out the United States. The war debts to us were based upon Germany’s ability to pay reparations. These reparations have been scaled down at Lausanne to practically nothing. It stands to reason that the people who owe us cannot pay if Germany does not pay them. Should we cancel these debts outright? To do that means to add a heavy load to our already overburdened taxpayer. Or shall we cancel them in return for world disarmament? If this can be secured it General Sessions 85 might pay us for it would permit us also to disarm further, saving taxes. Or should we secure special favors of international trade in return for cancelled debts? Or will we refuse to act, allowing the debtor nations to default? If there is to be a default, should we extend more credit to the defaulters? This is a tough problem for our delegates but it is one that must be worked out and probably in one of the ways indicated above. The third item is now under discussion. Are we in any better position to consider it? Tariffs have been adjusted upward and quotas on imports have been fixed by most of the countries of the world since we passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill of 1929. We shall not go into detail on what the other nations did. We merely mention it as an instance. But in the summer of 1932, a conference of the British Commonwealth of Nations was held at Ottawa, Canada. It agreed to trade, as far as possible, with one another. This seemed to be the climax of our own high tariff. It appears then that if we desire to get back our world trade it is going to be necessary to change our tariff policy. This will be bitterly debated. W. B. Donham, dean of the Harvard School of Business, a life-long free trader says on this point : If we in this country change our tactics and start toward free trade, it will be because powerful groups are more interested in the industries based on mass produc¬ tion than in our other industries, and because they, lacking a general plan, uncon¬ sciously sacrifice these other industries on the altar of mass production and risk the future of this country on the hazards of international trade. The argument for a protective tariff presumes that the working man can have an automobile, a radio, an electric refrigerator, and other modern household appliances, and that he can dress better than can his competitor in other countries of the world. We have secured these things. We had them in 1929. Shall we give them up or shall we struggle to maintain them? It may seem strange to some that the President of the United States has kept the war debts out of this conference. He realizes only too well what happened to Woodrow W31son. The Senate itself is clearly opposed to the cancellation of these debts or perhaps to any concessions. ^ he Senate only reflects the will of the people of the United States. Wffen our govern¬ ment was founded it was clearly a compromise with the more aristocratic nations. Few persons in that day had any confidence in the people. The Senate itself had terms of six years. They were sc lected by the legislators of the states. This was in order to give them a chance to look ahead and do what was best for the country. The Jay Treaty would have never been ratified by a Senate selected as is our Senate today. Nor would we have ever ratified the treaty giving us Alaska, Seward’s Folly, as it was called. So it becomes necessary now for us to work with the voters themselves. We must inform them on what is good and what is bad for the country. Such matters as the debts and other problems arising from this world conference must be carried to them. Therefore I am asking that you consider whether the schools should not take up problems of this kind. I know that in some conservative communities, the schools will be criticized 86 National Education Association for any progressive attitude which they may take on matters of this sort, but I rather think that when the depression is over and when schools are looked to again, they will be expected to do work of this kind. This is only a small part of the great peace-time work which the schools can do. I recall that after the Civil War this Association passed a resolution after a thoro discussion that if the South had had public schools, probablv the war would not have happened. Be that as it may, schools were set up in the South, and they did undertake, along with all schools, a study of the government of the Lnited States. At first they memorized the Con¬ stitution exactly as it was. Little by little they began to discuss it. Then problems of trust came up and the Constitution course was expanded by adding to the federal Constitution a study of the constitutions of the states; and after 1900, when graft became so prevalent in our cities, we found it necessary to study them. There are now citizenship or civics courses in most schools. These consist of a program which emphasizes local, state, and federal governments, their form and some functions. But in no case are the fundamental laws under which these governments operate studied, and attempts to define their work and to tell what they ought to do are lacking. The point I want to leave with you is that it is today more important for us to know about the governments of the world than about our own government. We should have some understanding of the background of conferences of this kind and of the basic constitutions of these governments, how far they are responsive to their populations, and how those populations feel toward us. So I would advocate a year course in government to be entitled, “Some Problems of Democracy” and I should give approximately one-half of the time to these world issues. In this course I would stress internationalism. I would give some account of how this work has grown, how we came to be insistent upon pacific settlements of problems of international concern, how the League of Nations developed, and why it was that we ourselves would not go into it. In older days pure democracy flourished in Greece and later in Rome. It broke down when the population grew too large to meet and consider problems. Representative democracy then developed. It has had much success particularly in this country where it succeeded over a large area and with a large population. Now we should be studying it in Spain, in Italy, in England, in Germany, in France, in Russia, and even in the Lnited States. Possibly these dictatorships mean that there are some problems democracy cannot handle. Are there problems too complex for the average man? Or are there problems in which self-interest will not yield to the good of the whole? Unless we study these questions now how are we to become good citizens of democratic states? L nless we can understand these peace-time issues, how can we be prepared for possible war-time emergencies? I have an idea that after this generation has passed away and its problems do not beset us any longer, there will be another world war. By that time we shall be as far beyond fighting with General Sessions 87 guns as gunpowder was beyond the bows of medieval times. And it w ill be a world war since we are too close together now to permit a war betw een nations only. And the determining factor of the next war is likely to be the air. I suspect that the enemy of ours will send across the ocean enough aeroplanes and poison gas to wipe out an entire cit\ at one time. I belie\ e that as the last war developed the long-range gun whose shell was sent thru the stratosphere, so the next war will develop aeroplanes w hich w ill sail the stratosphere. I understand that German chemists are now experi¬ menting with such a machine. It has been estimated that they can cro» the ocean in four or five hours, or in a fifth or a sixth of the time which it took Lindbergh to cross. Piccard is today the daring explorer of the stratosphere. But once we know more about it, there will be many adven¬ turers in it. I expect therefore that if we have another world war, the^e adventurers will cross the ocean in ships w*hich, w*hen the\ get o\er one of our cities, will settle down until they can see it and then turn loose their shells of poison gas. When war gets to be this dreadful, I think that we shall take steps to settle our disputes in some other way. To study other ways and to get people used to them, I urge every democracy that now* exists to offer a year course on its problems. A NATIONAL OUTLOOK ON EDUCATION PAUL C. STETSON, PRESIDENT, N. E. A. DEPARTMENT OF SUPERINTENDENCE; AND SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, INDIANAPOLIS, IND. Anyone w*ho studies the history of our public schools during the past three years is convinced of at least three things: first, that the boards of public education everywhere, w*ith few* exceptions, ha\ e made a thoughtful and, in the main, successful effort to reduce expenditures for public schools; sec¬ ond, that the drive nationally on the part of certain organizations and indi¬ viduals for the reduction in governmental expenditures has been, and is, directed primarily at the public schools ; and third, that there is< an impera¬ tive need for the cultivation of a national educational consciousness. There is ample evidence to show* that boards of public education and ad¬ ministrators, nationally and locally, have recognized the need for retrench¬ ment in public expenditures and have responded to it to a degree not evidenced by the controlling bodies of any other unit of government. They realize that drastic economy is a necessity in our national, state, and local coi poiations. A survey of retrenchments in educational expenditures, published March 1, 1933, by the United States Office of Education, entitled Some Effects of the Economic Situation on City Schools and the studies made by the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education present the evidence which bears out this statement. The first study show*s that school operating expenses have been greatly curtailed ; appropriations for teachers’ salaries have been reduced in one-fourth of the cities from 12 percent to 43 percent and in one-half of them from 2 percent to 13 percent; the items for capital outlay have been reduced 57 percent at a time when building costs are less than 88 National Education Association at any time since 1914. Schoolboards have reorganized administrative and supervisory staffs ; reduced the number of teaching positions ; increased the size of all classes; curtailed the purchase of supplies and textbooks; elimi¬ nated such important activities as night schools, summer schools, and other agencies; and have cut appropriations for the physical maintenance of the school plants to the danger point. All this and more has been done in an endeavor to balance school budgets. From the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education comes cor¬ roborative evidence of retrenchments in school budgets. In a recent study by this Commission comprehensive statistical tables are presented which show that in 1932 and 1933 the total annual expenditures for public educa¬ tion in elementary and secondary schools is less than was spent in 1926. From the period between 1927 and 1930, $400,000,000 a year was expended for capital outlay. In 1933 these expenditures had reached the low figure of $154,000,000. In terms of expenditures per child this report shows that in 1933 there was spent approximately $74 per child as compared with $82 in 1928. Most of our business institutions were forced into drastic economies be¬ cause of the falling off in the volume of business done. The public schools, however, have drastically reduced expenditures in the face of a decided in¬ crease in the volume of their business. There were 329,000 more pupils en¬ rolled in the public high schools of this country in 1933 than there were in 1932. In spite of this increase there were 15,000 fewer teachers and the total expense for education was reduced $226,000,000. Boards of public education, from a local as well as a national point of view, come with clean hands before the court of public opinion on the issue of reduction of expenditures. It appears curiously inconsistent that the same studies which show how aggressively schoolboards have attacked their budgets should reveal evidence that nationally the drive for the reduction in expenditures has been directed with especial rigor at the public schools. The bulletin of the Office of Education referred to (Circular Number 79, February, 1933), presents evidence that this is true. The statement made in this bulletin is all the more emphatic because it is couched in the restrained and cautious language of the statistician. It says: “The trend to reduce tax rates for schools more frequently than for other government purposes is true of each group of cities. For example, considering only the 60 cities between 30,000 and 100,000 population, 56 percent decreased tax rates for schools, while only 41 percent decreased the rate for other purposes.” Perhaps one reason this is true is that it is easier and safer to attack public- school budgets than budgets of other governmental units because the former are in the hands, generally, of non-partisan boards of public education with¬ out political prestige or preferment. Those favoring still larger reductions in budgets for the operation of the schools raise the cry of “wasteful extravagance” in their management. At the same time they are careful to assert their concern for the welfare of General Sessions 89 public education. Let us be blunt and frank in meeting this charge. There undoubtedly were instances of extravagances during the “hectic twenties. Occasionally some school corporation may have over-Uuilt, over-equipped, and over-stocked school buildings. Such extravagances as existed cannot be excused, but they were those of the period. It was a period of expansion in material things. The long and increasing list of sumptuous hotels, apartment houses, and imposing office buildings going in receiverships is evidence that in other fields than education there was unwise management. To dispute such charges, to spend time in trying to locate the responsibility for the material expansion of our school systems is quite beside the point. We gain nothing by hurling charges and counter charges and calling names. We admit and deplore such instances. Such extravagances as existed are eliminated. Nationally public education has certainly put its house in order. In view of the evidence easily available of the drastic reductions in school expenditures, the extent of administrative reorganization, and the willingness of boards of education and officials to cooperate in any reasonable program of constructive economy, any further attacks upon the schools must be inter¬ preted as due to ignorance of the facts or selfishness or both. We welcome all suggestions for constructive economy. W e expect to continue to combat those who would destroy our school system. The third point is that we must develop a national educational conscious¬ ness. Historically our public education systems are local institutions. In only a few of our states has there been any large exercise of state control. In such states this control has been due largely to the fact that state subsidies for education were given to local communities. In the main the American people have thought of public-school systems in terms of local control. Our attitude has been that if Town A wishes to spend $100 per pupil for high-school education ; to house its pupils in a splendid building ; to engage highly trained teachers; and to have a modern course of study, such a course of procedure was peculiarly the province of that corporation. On the other hand, if Town B desired exactly the opposite we were not concerned, but regarded that, too, as logically a local problem. There are many evidences that we have changed our traditional point of view with respect to the financing of public education. Many of our educa¬ tional systems in the last twelve months have successfully appealed to state legislatures for relief. In Indiana a State Support Bill was passed by its 1933 legislature. In Michigan the 1933 legislature passed a Sales Tax Bill which is supposed to yield $14,000,000 or $15,000,000 for the support of schools there. Numerous other instances could be cited showing a tendency to expand our point of view. Unless there is a great change in the economic situation we may expect within the next twelve months to see an increasing insistence on the part of local corporations that a part of the financial sup¬ port of public education shall be transferred to the federal government. The Citizens Conference on the Crisis in Education held in Washington in January, 1933, incorporated such a recommendation in its findings. How 90 National Education Association revolutionary this is is apparent to anyone who knows the history of public education of this country. We, as teachers .and administrators, must think increasingly of public education in national rather than in local terms. This does not mean that we favor federal support for public education. It does mean that what hap¬ pens in any region to any part of our educational system is of concern to all. It is easier to analyze a situation than it is to propose specific cures for it. There can be no question but that the national outlook on education reveals a very distressing condition. Reports coming into the office of the National Education Association confirm our fears that this coming school year will he hard and difficult for all levels of public education and for private schools as well. Industrially the skies are clearing, but educationally they are still overcast. Our public-school systems and tax-supported higher institutions of learning are creatures of state legislatures. For this reason they, with some outstanding exceptions, did not feel the first effects of the financial upheaval as quickly as private businesses. Unfortunately they will be, be¬ cause of various laws which have been passed affecting the revenue of the schools, very much slower in recovery. Our public-school systems are now in a legislative as distinguished from an economic depression. There are three things which may be done on a national scale to aid in meeting this emergency in education : First, the formation of what the Journal of the National Education Asso¬ ciation calls a National Board of Strategy. This has been done. President Rosier of the National Education Association and retiring President Potter of the Department of Superintendence appointed the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education, of which Dr. John K. Norton of Teachers College, Columbia University, is chairman. This Commission has rendered heroic service to the cause of education in the short time it has been in existence. Second, the National Education Association, the Department of Superin¬ tendence, and all allied organizations must carry forward the unification of all educational interests. We must unite in one great common purpose 800,000 public-school teachers, 2,000,000 members of the various parent- teacher associations, 400,000 schoolboard members, faculties, trustees, and alumni of our various tax-supported higher institutions of learning, and the members of countless civic associations and noon-day service clubs. If this is done, we shall have forged a mighty weapon for the defense of public educa¬ tion. It should always be remembered that when we speak of “fighting” for public education we speak in metaphor. We are not fighting for our jobs or for ourselves, but for the educational birthright of the children of America. Third, we must so organize nationally and locally that the true purpose of the schools may better be interpreted to the public. There can be no ques¬ tion but that many who would be sincere friends of public education have been bewildered and perplexed by propagandists for destructive economy. It is our duty immediately to lay plans so that nationally a great drive may go forward to acquaint the American people with all of the facts about educa- General Sessions 91 tional expenditures. We must make it clear that we favor and are practising sound, constructive economies. To do these things and more is a gigantic task. It calls for the best we have of strength, ability, and courage. We may be misunderstood, we will be criticized, we may be ridiculed, but the task is so much worth the doing and the stakes are so great that nothing, I am sure, will keep us from its accomplishment. THE TEACHERS AT THE HELM MRS. F. BLANCHE PREBLE, PRESIDENT, N. E. A. DEPARTMENT OF CLASSROOM TEACHERS; AND PRESIDENT, ILLINOIS STATE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION, CHICAGO, ILL. As we view the wreck of our vaunted western industrial civilization it is comparatively easy for all of us to see now what many individual thinkers have always seen — that we must build up a social civilization to take the place of industrialism. There is some tendency to say that democracy has failed, but most thinkers agree that democracy has not been tried ; that what we need is a true democracy that will give us a social civilization. But now the question comes — how can we proceed so that we may achieve a social civilization ? We have two outstanding examples across the Atlantic of such achieve¬ ment thru dictatorship ; but thinking Americans are inclined to believe that it can best be accomplished here thru united political action. Paul Douglas in his recent book, The Coming of a New Party, says that such procedure means that our millions of manual workers, farmers, and consumers must learn to think and act together. That means that there must be an organization that can reach every person in these groups and arouse him to the best action of which he is capable. Mr. Douglas says that that organization will be a new political party brought forth for the pur¬ pose of making government function for all the people. Now of course that will call for an organization that will reach every state, every community, every home. Already we have an organization that does just that; it is our public-school system, provided we are able to stop the wholesale closing of schools. Teachers are so placed and so equipped that they are the natural leaders in a social civilization. Teachers touch life everywhere. We have never been considered important nor really necessary in the industrial set-up, but even our enemies will admit that as a class we are socially minded, and so I say that teachers will be the natural leaders in a social civilization. But of course to be a leader in the establishment or the re-creation of a govern¬ ment one must be a fully qualified citizen. If you agree with me that teachers are the natural leaders in the movement for a socially minded government, then let us proceed to a consideration of what is necessary in order that teachers may become fully qualified citizens able to participate in effective political action. And here let me say an encouraging word to those of you who still draw back with reluctance when you think of entering politics, 92 National Education Association by again quoting from Paul Douglas: “Politics may be an art as truly as music, painting, or sculpture,” and I would add as truly an art as teaching. In addition to the necessary educational qualifications a teacher must have the following four things: (1) freedom from hampering dictation from those above her in the system; (2) an adequate, permanent, and fairly ad¬ ministered salary schedule; (3) a sound retirement plan; and (4) tenure of office. Good teaching is an artistic performance ; it is creative, and we all know that an artist must be free from dictation. Of course even the artist must abide by certain rules and must work within certain well-defined limits. So the teacher must be willing to recognize that she is a part of a system and cannot be a law unto herself entirely; but she must be left free enough so that she can develop her own individual thinking and from that the in¬ dividual thinking of the child. We have all come to recognize in recent years, that the best aid in the development of children is to have them take the lead wherever possible and learn the things that we feel they must know by following activities proposed as far as possible by themselves. And so it is with teachers, the more freedom that can be given them the more will their own powers be developed. The kind of citizenry that is going to work out a new social civilization to take the place of the industrial wreck must be a thinking people; and if teachers are to take their natural place as leaders in this movement they, too, must be free to think and to act. To an audience of teachers I need not dwell on the necessity for an adequate and fairly administered salary schedule. But I shall discuss one or two phases. If a salary schedule is set up with the idea that a certain small percentage, say 10 percent, of the teachers are going to receive higher salaries than the others, it should be borne in mind that while it may have appeared that such a plan would result in a great individual effort on the part of teachers to achieve the highest rating and thus the highest salary, what actually occurs is that we have 10 percent of the teaching body suffering from a superiority complex and 90 percent laboring against a feeling of inferiority or of injustice according to the natural bent of each one involved. Also, if a salary schedule is so planned that a teacher must choose high school in order to reach the top when she is better fitted to work with little children, and is happier with the little ones, then some adjustment is needed there. But I think we are pretty well agreed on the merits of the single salary schedule. In spite of the fact that in many of our states not a single teacher is protected by any kind of pension plan, I am sure that it is not necessary here to argue the point that the welfare of education demands that all teach¬ ers be protected in this way. We need to keep working very aggressively for a long time to come in all our organizations for the improvement and exten¬ sion of the pension idea. This brings me to the fourth point — tenure of office for teachers. I have put it last in the list of conditions necessary that a teacher may become a full-fledged citizen because I consider it the most fundamental. No teacher can apply her thinking povcers to the solution of a political problem such General Sessions 93 as we have before us in America today if she must think first of how any¬ thing she may say or do may affect her ability to hold her position. The teachers, as well as thousands, if not millions of other Americans, are going to have to think and to think freely and constructively and then to act boldly and wisely to save our people from annihilation by the machine age. Now I come to the question — how are teachers to achieve adequate sala¬ ries, pensions, tenure, and freedom from dictation? And the Classroom De¬ partment answers in this way — by organizing first locally, then on a state¬ wide, and finally on a national basis in groups composed of classroom teach¬ ers only. Too long have teachers been content to believe that their sole duty lay within the four walls of their schoolroom, and that the establishment of school policies and the defending of school programs was the duty of the administrators alone. It is becoming fairly easy now to convince school people that it is going to take all that all of us can do to save American education ; but there are still too many of us, among both teachers and administrators that do not yet realize that the teacher cannot have any real opportunity to develop himself except in groups composed of his own kind. We must have leaders, many of them, leaders chosen because of their qualities of leadership, and because of their ability to gather up a following and to inspire that following always to strive for better things. Our teachers associations the country over have done a magnificent piece of work in developing education to the point it had reached five years ago. Our state associations and their divisions, our local groups, often embracing every educational employee in an entire system, have made their contribution in past years. But now we have reached the place where each individual mem¬ ber of every organization must be aroused to do a very definite part of the work that is necessary. The Classroom Department was organized on the principle that if teach¬ ers are to be aroused to the point where they are willing and able to carry their share of the responsibility for originating and defending school policies they must meet in groups by themselves. The administrators, superintendents, and principals who are present, know that as they meet their teachers in their regular faculty meetings that those teachers are often indifferent and unwilling to take any responsibility for establishing policies. The great majority of them show no signs of even having any ideas about the subjects which the administrator may be so anxious to have them discuss. But if these same principals and superintendents could see those same teachers in a meeting of their own, as I have seen them and many of you have seen them, attack the same or similar problems with vigor and intelligence they would realize what we mean when we say that teachers must be organized first in groups where the power of position and the voice of authority of position may not be heard. The classroom teachers associa¬ tion forms a true democracy. The leaders who are chosen to represent a group that is really democratic will be found to be such leaders as will carry out the ideas and ideals of the group. If, however, the organization is not 94 National Education Association truly democratic, and if the leaders when chosen, cut themselves loose from the organization, they may make many mistakes. It might seem to a man in the business world that the way to get teachers to apply themselves to a problem is to tell them to study it, but we who have been following classroom teacher work since our Department was organized and before that know that the way to get teachers to attack prob¬ lems vigorously and intelligently is for them to meet by themselves often enough so that their own leaders may be developd and so that the ideas of the group may be crystallized and followed by united action. When teachers have their own organization the first place they will go for advice will be to the superintendent, provided he has their confidence. He can say to them what, in precarious times like these, he may not be able to say to his board of education. But if the teachers adopt his idea they can take it to the board as the decision of the teachers, and if it is a decision made by a good majority of those in the system the board will heed it instead of taking off the head of an individual who might have proposed it. The wise superintendent cherishes his teachers organizations and learns to use them to put over his own propaganda. But it must be for the good of all if it is endorsed by the teachers. Nowr to come back to the teachers as a political force, to teachers who have freedom from dictation, an adequate salary schedule, a sound pension plan, and tenure of office. How strong will they be and how much can they accomplish in time of great social need ? Chicago’s teachers tho often hungry and poorly clad were strong enough to keep the schools open, and in thou¬ sands of cases gave the children food for their bodies as well as for their minds. We are strong enough to continue to carry on until we and our fel¬ lows thruout the country have learned how to bring out from the wreck of industrialism a social civilization. We are strong enough to keep our freedom, our pension, our tenure and, in the end, our salary schedule. The struggle is not yet ended but we are tightening our belts and facing forward. When the story of the second American Revolution is written, and we hope it will have been a bloodless one, who can say how much of the victory that is to be won was due to the fact that in the middle of this country stood 14,000 teachers who thru 30 years had won for themselves the things that make teachers able to stand by when trouble comes. Now let me say in conclusion to the classroom teachers: Go back next year with a determination to meet by yourselves and thrash out to the end all the problems that are facing you. Get information and advice wherever you can, but form your own policies by free discussion among yourselves, then go into the larger all-inclusive groups of the state and the national or¬ ganization with these policies and stand by them. Let me say to the administrators that if the majority of the teachers in your system are not now in an organization of their own do everything you can to encourage such an organization. To those of you who have such groups encourage them in every way so that the problems that have gone General Sessions 95 far beyond being solved by the administrators may be solved by the teachers as leaders in the new social democracy that must be evolved for America. TEACHER TRAINING FOR THE NEW AGE H. L. DONOVAN, PRESIDENT, EASTERN KENTUCKY STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE, RICHMOND, KY. The old order is changing, giving place to the new. What will be the character of the new order? It is essential that one have a vision of the new social order before attempting to outline a program of teacher education for the new age. Dr. Harold Rugg, in a very stimulating volume recently published entitled The Great Technology , says that civilization may take one of five different directions. That American civilization is at the crossroads is apparent even to the superficial student of social trends. We may have the choice of a number of different directions, but it appears to me more likely that we shall move in one of two directions. First, we may produce on this continent a civilization best represented by Millet in his picture, “The Angelus,” and by Markham in his poem, “The Man with the Hoe.” In such a society the masses, possibly a hundred million or more people, will constantly live in dread of poverty. They will become peasants or peons. Above these will be the middle class of ten to twenty millions. This middle class will be permitted to enjoy a limited degree of prosperity to keep it satisfied. It will be composed mainly of members of the professions, government officials, managers and clerks of businesses owned largely by the upper class. At the top of this social structure an autocracy of wealth limited in number to a million or less will control and direct the destinies of all the others. This is the direction in which our civilization has been moving until recently. It is the course which the vested interests and “money changers” of our nation are attempting to chart for us. If this is the type of civilization which the new age is to bring, then the character of the program needed for the education of teachers will be a mech¬ anistic training designed to produce automatons who will accept orders and obey commands, for theirs will not be to reason why. A social order of this pattern will provide for the masses elementary education of only the most rudimentary character. Secondary and higher education will be provided exclusively for those who are able to pay for it. Who among you has not heard such a social philosophy advocated in recent years? It comes from the privileged classes who believe the masses must be kept in ignorance to be kept satisfied. They recognize that ignorance is their ally, as it has always been thru the ages the ally of kings, potentates, and tyrants. But will the American people who have been led in the past by such leaders as Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and are now being led by Franklin D. Roosevelt, permit such a social order to be clamped down upon them? God forbid! The 96 National Education Association struggle, however, between the autocracy of wealth and the interest of the great common people goes on with the betting odds at present in favor of the people. In this battle for democracy the American school teacher can be a very vital influence in determining the outcome if he has the courage and dares enlist for freedom. So confident am I of the future that I refuse to consider outlining a program of teacher education for such a social order as that which I have just described. I prefer to think of the new era which we are now entering as a renaissance more glorious than that ever experienced by any nation in the centuries past. St. John on the isle of Patmos reported a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. If we have the imagination, the courage, and the passion to make dreams come true we can create on this American continent at least a new earth. That the time is ripe for the actual organization of a new society is evident to many of our foremost thinkers in education. I thoroly agree with Dr. George S. Counts when he says: “We hold within our hands the power to usher in an age of plenty, to make secure the lives of all, and to banish poverty forever from the land. The only cause for doubt or pessimism lies in the question of our ability to rise to the stature of the times in which we live.” Dr. Rexford G. Tugwell, in his new book, The Industrial Discipline, is our authority for saying: “We possess every needful material for Utopia, and nearly everyone knows it : it is a quite simple conclusion in most miads that control ought to be taken out of the hands of people who cannot produce it (Utopia) from the excellent materials at their disposal.” Dr. Harold Rugg has convincingly told us that we are now approaching: “The first epoch on the time-line in history in which man can bring forth a civiliza¬ tion of abundance, of tolerance, and of beauty. A potentially great culture, because having invented efficient prime movers, man need no longer be a cringing slave of nature. . . . Great — because the scientific method can at last be applied to the man-man relationships as well as to the man-thing relationships. In a word — great — because man can live creatively both as Artist and as Technologist.” Some of the problems of this new civilization into which I trust we are entering are well outlined by Stuart Chase in his book, A New Deal . He says: “More important will be the problem of how to live; how to use fruitfully one’s leisure time; how to improve the biological stock; how to educate ; how to love and marry without emotional miseries which now beset us; how to develop the arts; how to get the most out of life. These are the real problems of a civilized people who have yoked a billion of mechanical horse power. To go on stumbling thru economic pits and mires, under a sky recurrently black with the horror of insecurity and even starvation, is tragic and needless waste.” And, finally, this new social order is to be dominated by a new ideal best expressed by a sentence lifted from the inaugural address of President Roosevelt: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative work.” General Sessions 97 I dare to believe that in the new age we will think in terms of human values rather than in terms of vast stores of material possessions for a few favored members of society who cannot consume them. If we do, then man for the first time can turn his attention primarily to life as an intellectual and spiritual adventure. It is for a social order in which the masses can give a major portion of their time to the errands of the mind that I wish to forecast a teacher-training program for the new age. In a social order where human values are paramount the teacher will become a much more important agent in molding the character of our civilization than he has been in the past. The nature of the service which the teacher renders makes of him little less than the architect of society. The real progress of a nation is conditioned very largely by the work of its teachers. If the intellectual level of the masses of our nation is to be raised, it will come about by teachers sharing their culture with the children who attend our schools. The administration at Washington, in drafting teachers — Moley, Tug- well, and Berle of Columbia; Sprague of Harvard; Dodd of Chicago; Morgan of Antioch; Dickinson of Pennsylvania; Oliphant of Johns Hop¬ kins ; Myers of Cornell ; and others — to help reclaim the Republic from the debacle into which she has drifted, has given recognition to the expert service which they can render a society attempting to escape from laissez- faire to a social order with some plan and design. It is a confirmation of Plato’s conclusion made more than two thousand years ago that a republic should be governed by philosophers. These observations lead me to a statement of the first proposition I would lay down relative to teacher training for the new age: In the new age the teacher must be an educated individual. This has not been true in the past nor is it true today of many teachers. It would not be an exaggeration to say that at least 25 percent of the elementary teachers of our nation are half-educated persons. Eliminating towns and cities, we find that over 60 percent of the rural teachers fail to meet the lowest standard of preparation accepted as minimum training by any authority working in the field of teacher education. This means that approximately 200,000 to 250,000 per¬ sons are “keeping school” in this country, drawing public funds for a service which they are incapable of rendering, and denying little children their social and intellectual heritage. One of the tragedies of this situation is that in most communities there are well-educated and professionally trained people available for many of the positions now held by incompetents. Many of America’s best teachers are unemployed today. This state of affairs is not due to an economic condition which denies communities better trained teachers and forces them to employ persons inadequately prepared for teaching. It is all too frequently the result of nepotism, political chicanery, personal favoritism, and in some cases the actual sale of schools to the highest bidder. I do not censure too severely these thousands of poorly equipped individuals who are so desperately holding on to their positions thru the machinations of inadequate certification laws. I pity them. They are, how- 98 National Education Association ever, so much dead wood in the profession. They keep education from moving forward at a more rapid pace. They tend to cause the public to discredit the entire profession, for many people do not discriminate between the educated and the half-educated. Our profession has more than an academic interest in this condition. It should move with all its force to arouse the public from its lethargy on this problem. It should, particularly in rural sections where the condition is worse, educate public opinion to a realization that the school is maintained in the interest of the children and not to give the teacher a job. It has been my observation that the public is willing to accept the lowest standard of excellence any professional group will tolerate. Higher quali¬ fications of entrance to a profession, nobler conceptions of its service to society, and more efficient practises have to come from within the profession. Our profession should attempt, therefore, to see that every member bears the stamp of an educated and professionally trained individual. Would it be too much to ask that the last teacher in America should have at least four years of preparation on the college level for his work by 1950? Nothing short of this will, in my opinion, be adequate preparation for the teacher of the new age. In the new order we must not make the mistake of believing that four years of general education beyond the secondary school is adequate prepara¬ tion for teaching. This fallacy prevails today in the mind of the layman. It is so deeply rooted in the public conscience that it will be hard to eradicate. Nowhere will you find people believing four years of general education prepare young men or women to practise medicine, law, or engineering, or to qualify them for the ministry. Just why this misconception regarding teach¬ ing exists is hard to understand. Its explanation is probably found in what we term the cultural lag on the part of both the lay public and the profession itself. Reporting to the American Association of Teachers Colleges, Dr. E. S. Evenden says: “Estimates indicate that more than 1100 of the 1490 institutions of higher education are concerned with the education of teachers.” Suppose this condition were true in medicine or law. Picture what a chaotic order would prevail in these professions. Why is it that there are not some 1100 institutions engaged in turning out members of these professions? The explanation, I believe, lies in the constructive and positive attitude of such splendid organizations as the American Medical Association and the Amer¬ ican Bar Association, which fix standards that bar the pseudo-medical school or law college. The profession and the public are thus protected from half- educated doctors and lawyers. The example of these associations should be an inspiration and a challenge to the National Education Association to aid in making a similar contribution to the profession of teaching. Just how many of the 1100 institutions attempting to train teachers are prepared adequately to perform this service for society no one is able to say. That more than half of the number do not have a laboratory school or access to such a school is a known fact. That a laboratory school is an essential factor in the education of a teacher is a principle accepted by every authority of any note in this field. It would, therefore, not be inaccurate to say that pos- General Sessions 99 sibly half of those institutions attempting to educate teachers are not prepared to produce a professionally educated teacher. By inference my second proposi¬ tion is: The new age will demand that the institution attempting to educate teachers shall provide curriculums designed to serve the needs of teachers. This proposition implies the operation of a laboratory school, or the control of an affiliated school, which may be used for this purpose. It is as easy to educate a doctor without a hospital as it is to prepare a teacher without a laboratory school. Some of you may interpret this as a thrust at the liberal arts college. It is not so intended. No one could possibly have r higher regard for these colleges than I have. I go so far as not to object to allowing the college of liberal arts to prepare teachers so long as it will not attempt to prepare them by way of the liberal arts curriculum. No institution has a right to regard the preparation of teachers as a by-product. If these colleges are to insist on the education of teachers, they should be expected to offer a teacher-training program of studies comparable to the best to be found in the teachers colleges. The teachers college that adopts a liberal arts curriculum — and some of them are guilty — and attempts to educate teachers thru it deserves far more crit¬ icism than does a college of liberal arts. The teachers college of the new order must be distinctly and exclusively a professional school. Certain guiding principles should govern our thinking in the preparation of curriculums for the education of teachers. They may be stated briefly as follows : 1. Each curriculum should include courses to give adequate instruction in and preparation for a specific teaching position. 2. Each curriculum should include a common group of piofessional courses. 3. Each curriculum should include a group of informational and cultural courses representing the fields of English, languages, mathematics, science, and social science. 4. Each curriculum should make some provision for individual choices of students so that their work may be planned to permit them to pursue certain individual interests, aptitudes, and preferences. 5. Each curriculum should include a common group of physical education courses designed to promote the health and recreational needs of students. My third proposition is: The teacher of the new social order must be educated in the “ creative , expressive activities” of society. In the past teachers have been prepared to teach children to fit into a working world. We empha¬ sized the three R’s because they were thought to be practical. They helped in the making of a living. Value was placed on those subjects which resulted in winning for the individual material gain. They were called fundamental subjects, and all other subjects have been regarded as frills. But when a civilization adopts a thirty-hour working week with approximately eighty hours of waking time, left for leisure, which are the fundamental subjects? Which is the more important if one had to choose between them — a com¬ mand of the processes in arithmetic or an appreciation of music and some skill on the amateur level as a musician ? Which will add more to the sum total of human happiness in a lifetime — the skill to write or a knowledge 100 National Education Association of art which comprehends something of the beauty of a sunset, the loveliness of nature, and the stateliness of good architecture ? Shall we not have tc change our thinking in the new civilization with respect to those subjects formerly regarded as fads and frills? Nothing is more fundamental, in the life of an individual in this new order in which we suddenly discover that we have an abundance of leisure, than music, art, literature, dramatics, play, health education, industrial arts, home economics, and all other forms of creative arts. These are indeed the fundamental subjects in a culture deeply concerned in the development of the personality of its people. If this is a valid conclusion, the teacher of the new age will be required to secure far greater preparation in music, art, literature, and health, than has been expected of teachers in the past. The teachers college that does not have a vision of the development in these fields is losing its opportunity to make an early contribution to the new social order. Another even more significant change has taken place. So important is it along with other changes that the historian of the twenty-fifth century will probably record the year 1933 as the end of an epoch and the beginning of a new era. We may expect in the years immediately ahead even greater cataclysmic changes than we have yet known. The teacher of the past has traditionally lived a cloistered life. His habits of life have all too frequently been somewhat monastic. He has been willing to seek seclusion behind sheltered walls and view life much as one enjoys a motion picture without ever participating as an actor in its drama. Vicarious experiences have been accepted as substitutes for the hurly- burly activities of society. An attitude of mind on the part of the public has driven the teacher to pursue a sequestered life. In literature, on the stage, and in legislative halls he has been pictured as the impractical pro¬ fessor. The teacher of the new age must be an active, aggressive , competent, and effective participant in society, possessing a fundamental knowledge of government, politics, economics, sociology, and social psychology. This is the statement of my fourth proposition in the preparation of teachers for the new school. Such an outcome may be difficult to achieve, for it means breaking with tradition. The teacher in the new deal must not be timid. Frequently he should be willing to walk where angels fear to tread. His voice should be heard in the land, but when he speaks let him speak as one having authority, for he should always be armed with the facts and with logic. He should participate in politics, not necessarily as a partisan of a political party but rather as the champion of great and fundamental issues. He must be willing even to sacrifice his position if the cause be just and the need for a leader be paramount. Sometimes he must leave the schoolroom and offer his leader¬ ship for public office. Society' must recognize in the teacher of the new order an active participant rather than a professor viewing the panoramic picture of life passing before him. The preparation for such leadership means a new emphasis on the study of social trends. We shall in the teachers college of the future study pos- General Session’s 101 sibly not less history but more of contemporary civilizations and their prob¬ lems. We shall not be as much interested in looking backward as we shall be in scanning the possibilities of the future. The teachers college should today be requiring of its students as a preparation for teaching in the new school a thoro acquaintance with government and politics, the elements of economics, sociolog}', and some knowledge of social psycholog}'. The student should be so thoroly interested in these fields of study that he will continue to pursue them thru a lifetime. The teacher of the new age cannot properly direct the children and youth of the land without possessing a fundamental knowledge and an appreciation of the problems of the social trends of our civilization. It is a fact revealed by a number of different investigations that the great majority of students who plan to enter teaching come from homes where their social background has been limited. What they lack in social graces may be compensated for in a measure by a ruggedness of character which they usually possess. Nevertheless, this deficiency in social training should be provided for in their education. Since it is the hope of our people that our nation shall advance to higher levels of culture, this development will be conditioned to a considerable degree by the culture and refinements possessed by the teachers of the nation’s children. This leads me to a state¬ ment of my next proposition: The teacher of the neu' order will place greater value on the virtues of politeness, courtesy, urbanity, gentleness of manners, social graces, and the refinements of life. The teachers college should surround its students with an environment charged with the amenities of life. As far as possible students should live on the campus. Every type of social program, both formal and informal, should be provided. The extracurriculum activities are no less important in a college of education than its curriculum activities. My last proposition is: The new age will demand that every teacher be professionally trained, skilled in the technic of teaching, possessing sufficient scholarship to have a philosophy of education and an appreciation of the meaning of professional ethics. Professional training is secured in the atmosphere of a professional school. Students living together on the same campus, thinking the same thoughts, reacting to the same stimuli are in the process of being professionally edu¬ cated. While I would not go so far as to say that the subjectmatter of every course in a teachers college should be professionalized, I would agree that every instructor should have a dynamic professional attitude toward his work to the end that he might exemplify the finest characteristics of his profession. The program for the preparation of teachers for the new school will emphasize participation in a laboratory school for the master}' of technic. Less and less academic or book instruction, will be given on methods of teach¬ ing. Prospective teachers will spend much time observing, analyzing, and participating in teaching under actual classroom conditions. The amount of student or practise teaching will certainly have to be increased beyond the time allotted to student teaching in most teacher-train- 102 National Education Association ing institutions today. The laboratory school will represent the most modern practises in education. Newer educational methods and ideals will shape its program. It will be sensitive to the procedures developed in the experimental and progressive schools of the nation. T he laboratory school will, in fact, be a progressive school. Older patterns of teaching will be discarded for activity teaching. The training school will radiate the progressive theories and practises and it will be dominated by a philosophy that children learn to do by doing. In the laboratory school, teachers in training will see and hear and teach according to the most modern ways of instructing children. Students should be required to live and work in the laboratory school as the intern is required to stay in the hospital for much of his professional education. Every person may be said to have a philosophy of life. Every teacher like¬ wise has a philosophy of teaching, but in many cases it may not be very definite. For most teachers I suspect it is drifting with the current stream of thought. A meaningful philosophy can come only from much thinking and as a product of excellent scholarship. T his leads us to return to our first proposition — that the teacher must be an educated individual. A constructive philosophy of education is an essential attribute of the successful teacher. An intelligent appreciation of the ethics of one’s vocation is a by-product of professional preparation. If the new age demands an education of its teachers somewhat comparable to that which I have just described, teaching will become truly a profession for all who are engaged in it. We shall then see the end of teacher transiency such as is shown today in statistics released by the National Survey of the Education of Teachers pointing out the fact that in the one- and two-teacher rural schools of this country two out of every five teachers are new to the schools each year. Entrants to the profession in the future will be selected from the fittest who apply for admission. We shall not educate for teaching more persons than society will employ. Equivalent qualification will be re¬ quired of elementary and secondary teachers and no discrimination will be made in the salary schedules of these divisions of the school. Marriage of women will not and should not serve to bar them from the classroom or disqualify them for the profession for which they have prepared. I vision for the new age a new teacher, a new school, and a new civilization. FORGOTTEN BUILDERS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM EDGAR G. DOUDNA, SECRETARY, BOARD OF NORMAL SCHOOL REGENTS, MADISON, WIS. Forty years ago at the annual meeting of the American Historical Asso¬ ciation held at the World’s Fair in Chicago, Professor Fredrick J. Turner read a paper on The Significance of the Frontier which has revolutionized the study and writing of American history. Until Turner developed this thesis the historian generally described the growth of America as a westward movement into the wilderness of a relatively static social order. He made much of the conquest and exploitation of the natural resources, but hardly General Sessions 103 noticed the impact of the frontier upon the settler. Turner’s interpretation was a germinal idea, as fruitful in American history as Darwin’s theory of evolution has been in biology. W e may assert with some assurance that the three most important expressions of our American dream are to be found in the Declaration of Independence, Emerson’s American Scholar , and Turner’s Significance of the Frontier in American History. Professor Turner showed that the existence of “an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American devel¬ opment.” Instead of a projection of a ready-made civilization into a new and undeveloped area which was claimed from the Indian and converted into the conventional European community, he asserted that “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primi¬ tive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.” The American ideal of the independent citizen, free to live his own life unhampered by artificial barriers of government, economic privilege, and social stratification, did not burst full grown from the mind of some god-like American living on an intellectual New England Mount Olympus. The American dream was a slow growth which has been developed even now only in merest outline. Our European ancestors brought to America not their hopes and aspirations alone but their traditions and their spiritual inher¬ itance. Here in a new environment utterly unlike that of the old world they began the conquest of a continent. Slowly but relentlessly the westward movement went on until in 1890 the director of the census reported that the last of the free land had been taken and the old days of pioneering had passed. This was the end of an era in American history. On the edges of the slowly moving frontier where civilization was battling with savagery the main concepts of democracy had been slowly developing. The pioneer emphasized individualism, strong but selfish ; nationalism, in¬ tense and local ; freedom of political action almost to the point of anarchy ; and he clung with unswerving faith to his belief in the fundamental equality of all men. This democratic faith developed on the frontier, nurtured in the middle border, and all but lost in the machine economy of an urban society has been the basis of a creed of equality of opportunity to inspire millions with high purpose and hope. For it they have lived, and sacrificed, and died. Its extreme results have sometimes been unlovely and disappointing. Undue emphasis upon individual success in a ruthlessly acquisitive society has at times nearly ruined us. We have had our periods of jingoism and we have shouted bombastically of our greatness. But by and large it has been a wholesome ideal, a faith worthy of any people, a dream which we devoutly pray may yet come true. As the historians have explored the past, have re-created the passing scenes energized by the masterful figures of the human drama, and under the influ¬ ence of Emerson and Turner have written the American epic, they have, it seems to me, become so occupied with the material conquests, with the growth 104 National Education Association of industry and business and of political and economic conflict, that they have underestimated or neglected entirely the influence of the two institu¬ tions which preserve and protect the cultural and spiritual inheritance and stimulate the growth of the inner life, namely, the church and the school. Only indirectly do they refer to the teacher, and except for the missionaries, who are usually considered in the category of explorers, ministers, and priests are seldom mentioned. These pioneer builders have been too long forgotten, but some day we shall have a new American history which will set them in their proper places in the picture. T hey will not be in the foreground, it is true, but in the story of the westward movement the men and women who carried books and learning as the pioneer carried his ax will be a symbol of the development of America’s greatest contribution to civilization free, universal, state-supported schools. Educational statesmen have found their place in history. The foundation work of Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington; the immortal paragraph in the Ordinance of 1787 ; the influence of Horace Mann and Henry Barnard; and in every state the leaders in the formation of the various state school sys¬ tems have been more and more brought into the story of our national devel¬ opment. In my own state of Wisconsin we were busily occupied a few years ago debating as to whether Michael Frank actually was the founder of our school system. Certainly we cannot overestimate either the evangelical or the constructive work of these men. Our profession should honor them as the bar honors John Marshall or surgery repeats the story of its Murphys and its Mayos. This is not enough however. For all any system can do is to provide the means of bringing together pupil and teacher undei the best possible conditions for effective learning. The teacher always has made the school. Administration may take the glory and the cash, but the credit belongs to the unadvertised, underpaid, overworked teacher who day by day in the classroom quietly, contentedly, and effectively leads his boys and gills thru the schoolroom routine. I certainly don’t want to be sentimental and maudlin about a host of teachers who did their work, enjoyed it, and stepped out into other fields, or remained thru life loyal teachers of American youth. There is no value in such an emotional excursion, but there is a story to tell which our histories of education — to be specific — and the general historians of America have left untold. It is the influence of the school and the school teacher upon our American life, the effect of an education of book learning upon generations whose environment was supplying the experiences, setting the tasks, and developing the problems which the modern school tries so uncertainly to solve with projects, laboratories, shops, and the like. Life was difficult on the frontier and the school, hard and harsh as it looks today, was a refining and alleviating influence in the relatively simple but difficult communities where our founding fathers lived, and worked, and died. The most serious defect of histories of education, with one or two notable exceptions, is the selection of material to show by conti ast with the modern school how bad, how unbelievably poor were these schools of the frontier. General Sessions 105 Ichabod Cranes and Hoosier Schoolmasters are the literary contributions to our pedagogical hall of fame. Yet Nathan Hale was a schoolmaster and an inspiring one. How the autobiographies of some of our greatest men seem nostalgic with the memories of their school days! Whittier’s schoolmaster in Snowbound , a composite portrait of the itinerant schoolmaster, Joshua Coffin, and the Dartmouth collegian, George Haskell, is a fair example of what the times could and did produce. We need, it seems to me, a reexamination of the old school and we need to judge it by what it did and not by what it might have been could we put a reverse gear on Time and move our modern educational system into the elemental life developing on the outposts of civilization. The frontiersman had a difficult task to perform. He did not know that he was evolving a new intellectual attitude, a new social order, a dynamic democracy. He only knew that he must clear the wilderness, or break the prairie sod, that he must convert the area he had chosen for his home into a livable community for his family. He built log and sod houses, made corduroy roads with back-breaking work and with the crudest of tools. His agriculture was primitive — he worked and toiled until in middle age he seemed a broken old man. His wife worked even harder as she cooked, and spun, and wove, and served. Her lot was not easy. One cannot read the letters, papers, memoirs of any period without being convinced that for the children the woodsman and the plainsman planned and dreamed and worked. Into every little settlement came a minister or a priest. Crude meeting houses, but as good as the homes, were fashioned by tired hands for the gatherings where man could have God interpreted to him and where he could hear the old, old story of a better life. A frontier doctor composed the old gospel hymn “Sweet Bye and Bye” and another “The Little Brown Church in the Vale.” You can’t forget this phase of our emergent life if you read Giants in the Earth, Death Comes for the Archbishop, or any comparable novel with a setting in any state and in the time when the long thin line between civiliza¬ tion and wilderness was being given a second and third dimension. Equally anxious was the settler that his children should have at least the beginnings of an education. His faith in the transforming power of the school was touched with mysticism. Perhaps he thought some miracle could be wrought. But his boy and his girl must learn to read, to write, and to do simple sums. The three R’s to a man far away from the intellectual life*, may have seemed wildly ambitious. But he wanted a school, a local school, a school controlled by him, — not one handled for his community by a benevo¬ lent despotism from a central point far, far away. So he built a log or sod schoolhouse and to it his children went and in it they learned to read and write and cipher, and not a few were touched by a divine spark that set them afire for learning. That story is an old one repeated how many thou¬ sands of times upon this continent. May I illustrate. Not far from where 300 years ago the intrepid Jean Nicollet first set foot upon the soil of the middlewest and near the oldest city of my state — Green Bay — there is the little village of New Franken, first settled by German 106 National Education Association immigrants in 1845. They built crude log houses; they cleared the land of the huge maple forests ; they erected a stone windmill to grind their wheat, a saw mill to cut lumber. They organized their little community of about twenty families into a social unit. One of the men wrote to a relative, “I am at present occupied with many special duties; 1 am postmaster, notary public, justice of the peace, farmer, and schoolmaster. Last fall the governor of Wisconsin appointed me with two other men to designate school localities in two counties and to appraise these school lands.” They organized a school district as soon as possible after statehood and proposed to build a school- house but one John Schauer offered his log house for the purpose. At the school meeting with eighteen votes they resolved: (a) to purchase a stove; (b) to require the parents of children attending school to provide the school with stove wood ; (c) to provide for lumber for desks and blackboards and for stove pipe to levy a tax of $30 on the taxable property according to valua¬ tion ; (d) that the teacher’s salary be raised by a tax of four shillings for each eighty acres of land irrespective of its value. There were many school meetings, but finally a teacher was employed for thirty-six dollars for a term of three months. Twenty-one children from seven to thirteen years attended and studied Webster’s Spelling Book, Davies’ Arithmetic, and Morse’s Geography. The report of the school district at the end of the year showed $118.28 assessed taxes; $12.90^2 delinquent, but a balance in the treasury of $68. (At least as good a showing as our great cities make today.) One significant item is an allowance of $1.25 to the treasurer for ‘‘two walks to Green Bay to receive school money.” 4 here is a story typical of the organization of the rural district. Before roads, before almost all else was the school and the dream of an educated people. It is hardly fair, it seems to me, to pick the school out of its primitive setting in the backwoods and laugh at it. Into it the pioneer built his hopes and out of it has come more, much more than we have recognized, but which our profession would do well to honor. As the frontier moved westward the middle border with villages and cities united by systems of transportation and communication took its place and the school developed with it. The profession of teaching became more stabilized, curriculums expanded, better schoolhouses were built, state school systems were organized, and all education became, not more important, but more highly differentiated. Division of labor was unknown on the frontier but it was the essence of the new society and the school teacher and the school system were passing thru their adolescent period. Into better buildings went better teachers and they too influenced the future life of our nation, more perhaps than we can at present realize. Now and then a biography of some man who later achieved fame or notoriety calls attention to the personal influence of the teacher — a factor which in our machine age of standardized living and with an objective and scientific attitude in education we have been neglecting until the emergence of the guidance movement again stressed personality in the development of life. General Sessions 107 Again may I illustrate, this time from the story of a not very savory char¬ acter from the city of New York — the Tammany leader, Big Tim Sullivan. Let him tell it : It was way back in 1873 and a boy named Sullivan was goin’ to the Elm Street School where there was a Miss Murphy who was a teacher. The boy had an old pair of shoes, and one day she asked the boy to stay after school. He thought some other boy had done something and put it up to him and he was goin’ to stand for it. He said, “Miss Murphy, if I’ve done anything let me know because I want to get away and sell papers,” and she told the boy he hadn’t done nothing, and she gave him an order for a pair of shoes. I needed them shoes then, and I thought if I ever got any money I would give shoes to people who needed them, and I’m going to buy shoes for people just as long as I live. Later when he was state senator he was the only Democrat to vote for woman’s suffrage and his reason was Miss Murphy who had once bought him a pair of shoes. Such stories as this, too, could be repeated endlessly for our library shelves are loaded with biographies awaiting for some educational Turner to study them and show their significance in the building of our American dream. When the frontier passed as a historical phenomenon and the middle border was maturing we saw the secondary school and the college repeating on a larger scale and with the advantages of increased wealth and technical knowledge the story of the elementary school of the frontier. America has become a nation of schools and in them has found its most effective conserving and integrating force. Today we have reached the point in our history where the school system is being revalued and at many points mercilessly criticized. The platforms of educational conventions are often the sounding boards from which our differing opinions are sent out over the nation carrying sugges- tions of uncertainty, discord, and conflict. In the expansive days of the nineteen-twenties this was a wise procedure, but in these days when we are on the defensive perhaps we need to point out our agreements, our conquests, and our hopes. Without any feeling of self-satisfaction our profession, it seems to me, owes it to the nation which is in large part a product of the schools, to assume once more a positive and constructive attitude. If we could by some miraculous power move America back to 1890 when the old frontier reached its last outpost we might possibly utilize the expe¬ rience of forty years to make this a better and a more useful society. But chastened as we now are we can reexamine our social order and our schools and plan for a better day. We have a new frontier to develop in which the creed of self-reliance, of intellectual equality, of individual initiative and responsibility are not enough. There is a new world in the making — and the schools will have their part in the planning and building as they have in the past. With all of its faults our American system of government is perhaps the best that has yet been developed. Unchecked individualism with its mate* rialism, its waste, its loose business ethics, and its huge concentration of wealth and power has brought some results which make us distrustful of democracy in practise. But I think in the light of our present knowledge and with the powerful influence of the school we can so order it that the ideals 108 National Education Association which have been developed as civilization moved to the west can yet be made the most useful and hopeful method of social control. We must, how* ever, preserve the historic American attitude toward the individual, his opportunity, responsibility, and his potential power. I suppose our feeling for this is at bottom the justification for such movements as that which naively calls itself progressive education. Creativeness, freedom, respect for person¬ ality are the educational bases of the democratic ideal and they have developed as America has developed. But in the new order which is building, a new attitude toward the individual’s place and function in society is certain to develop. Things have been happening on the frontiers of education which those working in the established system which we call our educational ladder are perhaps apt to underestimate. A tremendous force outside of formal school¬ ing is modifying the results of the school. The newspaper, cinema, radio, automobile, to mention only the most obvious, have educational influences both positive and negative which so far as any conscious understanding is concerned are largely uncontrolled except as economic forces direct them. But in the field of formal education there has developed a whole new system of part-time education, which brings the school back into the lives of boys and girls employed in industry. This group of young people are salvaged for society, many are re-educated into new trades and methods of earning a liv¬ ing. Adult education is only beginning and it, too, has to fight for existence against forces which do not or cannot understand that education is a life¬ long process in which formal schooling is only a beginning. Libraries, Four-H Clubs, and the like make their contribution. Truly the American dream of education for all has expanded and developed beyond the hopes or even the imagination of Jefferson and Horace Mann. And if we are wise enough to see the social revolution that the schools have already produced, and if we seize the opportunity offered in cohesive professional organizations which reflect the mass thinking of the teachers of America we shall indeed have a rebirth of that dynamic democracy which, coupled with social vision, will remake our society. Certainly the achievements of the schools in America since 1890 when the old era closed have been little short of miracles. The scientific movement, expanded and enriched curriculums, new procedures and methods, the testing movement, the expansion of the school into undreamed-of fields, magnificent school buildings, modernized supervision and administration have come upon us with a rapidity paralleling the social changes produced by our technolog¬ ical advances. We may be uncertain as to our destination, our educational philosophy may be immature and theoretical, our school organization may be too imitative of centralized business practise, but we have developed a tradition of free universal education as the center of our democratic society. In America we have as our principal integrating agency the common school, the common denominator of our civilization. We adhere to the concept of mass education and accept the statement of Jane Addams: “It is better to raise the many ever so little than the few ever so high.” Our group — the General Sessions 109 common school teachers — have potential power unequalled in the history of the world if we use it rightly, and exercise a leadership based upon inner control without external compulsion. But let us not forget the past. Out of the frontier came the dream that sees beyond the years. The old school was a teacher-centered school in the best sense. Alice Freeman Palmer could write from the city of Saginaw on the edge of the pine woods to her future husband: “While I teach them solid knowledge, and give them school drill as faithfully as I may, I will give, too, all that the years have brought to my soul. God help me to give what He gave — myself — and make that self worth something to somebody; teach me to love as He has loved, for the sake of the infinite possibilities locked up in every human soul.” That attitude we still need to recognize for most of us are changed most by the great people we meet and the books that we read. Books, too, had a place in the holy of holies of the old school days. They were few but they made life-long impressions. They were read and reread, and they built themselves into the hearts of those who hungered for food for their souls. McGuffy made the classics familiar to millions. How can one teach who doesn’t love books, who does not thirst for literature as the hart panteth after the water brooks? Teachers, books, and above all the Book. For religion was central on the edge of the world. Crude, energetic, and in some of its extreme forms, as the camp meeting, it was an emotional orgy. But at bottom in the silent places there was much walking and talking with God. So from the past we can carry into the future a love for books as guides into the kingdom of the mind ; religion as the energizer and director of those inner forces which generate our dreams, our visions, our aspirations, and our ideals ; and personality as evidenced by the powerful forces which great teachers have unloosed. No school can be great without them, no nation be worthy of its heritage which forgets them. And because of them we have the democratic ideal — the daring experimental ideal ; the failures, the glorious failures of men reaching for the stars. The American dream was made possible because of teachers, unknown or famous, perhaps those casual teachers who later became our statesmen, authors, and generals; teachers who in crude surroundings taught themselves with their books and who in a simpler age unlocked the doors into the empire of the spirit. We could to our profit set them in the temples of our memory and let their influence guide us in the new era and the new world in the making. COOPERATION FOR HEALTH BETWEEN HOME AND SCHOOL W. W. BAUER, M. D., DIRECTOR BUREAU OF HEALTH AND PUBLIC INSTRUC¬ TION, AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, CHICAGO, ILL. Perhaps you will pardon me for reverting to the elementary and calling your attention to the fact that cooperation means working together. The term itself excludes consideration of any project or scheme by which all 110 National Education Association the responsibility and all work of maintaining or advancing the health of our children is thrown upon either the home or the school without sharing the burden with the other. Fundamental to the consideration of this topic is a realization that the school is the extension of the home. When there were no public schools those who could not afford to hire tutors for their children and thus educate them in the home, were forced to go without education. T. he public school is a device whereby the home may delegate certain of its responsibilities, usually those of a more complex nature, to persons specially trained for the discharge of such function and working in an organization and atmosphere which is supposed to be conducive to the more efficient discharge of these special func¬ tions. In considering how far the school ought to go in relieving the home of responsibility, we must recognize at the outset that there are two funda¬ mentally divergent philosophies, not of education alone but of community organization. Depending upon which of these philosophies you embrace, you will either agree with what I am about to say, or you will disagree. In either case, as educators, you will recognize the desirability of a frank statement by your speaker of what he considers a desirable situation with respect to cooperation for health between the home and the school. First, let us visualize the home in its relation to the community. It is popular today to speak in terms of a century of progress. A cynical observer is credited with the remark that all motion is not necessarily progressive in the sense that we generally use the word “progress” to connote movement toward a better state of affairs. There has been a very definite change in the position of the home in the community in the last hundred years. One by one, its functions have been taken over by agencies which many persons consider able to carry them out better than they could be carried out in the home. Mills have replaced the home spinning wheel ; bakeries have taken the place of the family oven and thus carried us forward at the same time to the twentieth century and back to primitive times when community ovens were the rule ; sewing at home has been unable to compete with the specialty shop. Home millinery has succumbed to the $1.88 emporium for most of us and the more expensive establishment for the privileged few. T he cutting of firewood, except as a vacation necessity or a suburban affectation, has been superseded by the ordering of fuel from the community dealei. The community has changed, as well as the home. Primitive methods of communication have been replaced by the telephone, the telegraph, the cable, and the radio. The technic of news-gathering and dissemination has advanced almost unbelievably. M^edical science and its allies in the scientific world have taken greater strides in the last hundred years than in all the previous centuries of recorded history. The riding horse and the stage-coach have given way to the motor car, the speeding passenger train, and the air-craft. Entertainment in the home, typified by the magic lantern of our childhood, has been replaced by the swifter tempo of talking pictures and radio crooners. All in all, the setting in which the home finds itself has undergone revolu¬ tionary changes. General Sessions 111 There is no use to sigh for the “good old days,’’ because we are not going backward and there were enough disadvantages in the old ways, so that whatever may be the shortcomings of the new, we would scarcely wish to turn back the pages of the calendar a hundred years. At the same time there are elements in the trend of our civilization which ought to cause us to pause and to look, if not with alarm at least with careful attention to see whither we are going. Perhaps the keynote of our situation today is interdependence. Almost everything from the food we eat, the light by which we read, the energy which moves our motor cars, our refrigerators, and our trains, the news of world events, all medical service, hospitalization and the preservation of our health depends upon someone else. No individual today can be self-sufficient without becoming a hermit. We no longer produce by labor of our hands the commodities and the services which we desire. Instead we earn or other¬ wise procure a more or less sufficient supply of a medium of exchange and then proceed to try to make it meet our wants. At present the net outcome of a century of scientific and industrial progress seems to be a collection of problems such as man has never faced before. Among these problems is the relationship of the home to the community and as a part of this relationship the cooperation of the home and the school for the better health of the child. The home as an institution must be conceived primarily as a device of civilization for the protection, rearing, and education of children. The school is an extension of the home and must have the same ideals and purposes. As soon as either the home or the school begins to live selfishly, the former for the parents and the latter for the teachers, failure of each is inevitable. It is to the credit of our civilization that regardless of multiplying respon¬ sibilities and perplexities, regardless of economic chaos, financial bewilder¬ ment, inability to find honest labor or to collect for services honestly rendered, many homes and schools have stood fast and held to their ideals with such uniform constancy that the exceptions still are notably conspicuous. We are faced today with the need for retrenchment in all our activities. We must scrutinize all expenditures and ask ourselves, not once but repeat¬ edly, if they are necessary and useful before we venture to authorize them. There can be no escaping the need for economy, but economy does not mean penuriousness. It means, as I shall use it, wise spending. Putting aside all prejudices and preconceived ideas, we must scan the school health service with a critical eye — and I use the word critical in its original connotation and not in the commonly accepted sense. Public usage has corrupted the word to denote an antagonistic attitude but I do not use it in that way. To criticize, if I read the dictionaries aright, means to examine with care and to pronounce a just opinion. School health service consists of two principal factors, health education and health service. It is the duty of educators to train children for a com¬ plete, useful, and happy life and that means invariably a healthy life, tho I recognize that health is but one of the essentials for complete living and that it is not in any sense of the word an end in itself. Health education is 112 National Education Association necessary because knowledge in medical and allied sciences has gone ahead much faster than the public has been able to keep pace with it. In conse- quence we have the spectacle of life-saving knowledge not disseminated to all the people in spite of the efforts of the medical profession, public health and school agencies to keep the public at least measurably informed about progress in modern medical science. As the late President Coolidge pointed out, in his address to the American Medical Association in 1927, “We do not do as well as we know.” Perhaps the principal reason for that is that so many of us do not know. Health service for disease prevention and improvement of the health of the school child, as distinguished from education, presents a problem of which the solution is not simple. The home has relinquished many of its former functions to the school and in some instances schools have usurped the place of the home. Perhaps the function which it has relinquished most completely is that of training the child and yet the child cannot be trained by the school alone because the home controls the entire sleeping program of the child ; largely determines his diet, recreation, and rest outside of actual sleeping hours ; furnishes the environmental background against which he lives, and above all surrounds him with the influence and example of parental attitudes which are stronger than any program of didactic instruction can ever be. This home, as we visualize it, is bombarded by new and strange influences, leaving the parents many times bewildered and groping for guidance. Re¬ stricting our comment to the field of health alone, we can observe that the home is subjected to what passes for health instruction from a number of different sources, many of them assiduously purveying misinformation because cf warped judgment or downright rascality. We observe the home getting dependable health information from doctors and dentists, from public health departments, voluntary health agencies, and reputable medical writers. Com¬ mercial organizations also attempt to educate the public according to their particular interests thru the various advertising media, such as billboards, direct mail, zeppelins trailing pennants, or any other device which a skilled ballyhoo artist may conceive and which commercial interests with advertising appropriations grown faster than their civic consciousness, may choose to sponsor. The parent, naturally enough, is bewildered, and his or her reaction depends upon individual personal characteristics. There will be some who will cynically disregard all health advice ; others who shuttle back and forth between this and that viewpoint in their confusion ; some will pick what they want to believe, and still others in disgust at the babel of tongues will resign themselves to taking matters as they come, thinking that after all they could fare no worse by taking a chance than by attempting to chart a course in the treacherous rapids, shoals, eddies, and rocks which now sur¬ round the safe harbor of good health. It should be sufficiently obvious that there can be no success in health education without cooperation between the school and the home. The health service as it exists in the schools — and again I call your atten¬ tion to my purpose to speak with utmost frankness — is susceptible of much General Sessions 113 improvement. Without going into detail, I wish to call your attention to certain types of health service which all of you know exist. Quite likely each of the descriptions I am about to give you will call to your mind a definite school system where such a condition prevails. The first type of school is the one in which there is no health service of any kind. There may be a pretense at health education, consisting principally of reading a required textbook and requiring recitations about factual mate¬ rial. This is not health education in the true sense of the word because it does not adopt modern principles of education, by which, as I understand them, teaching is now conceived as the creation of situations and the dem¬ onstration thru them of proper solutions for problems. A school system cannot teach health without demonstrating health practises. A little further up the scale we find a system where efforts are made to teach health thru the creation of situations which call for solutions. Coupled with these will be a certain amount of demonstration activity and possibly as part of it a health examination of the school children. It is when we come to the health examination that we find weaknesses most prevalent because what is commonly known as a school health examination is very frequently not a health examination at all. Not long ago I had an inquiry about the examination of children in school. The inquirer wished to know whether a complete and adequate physical examination could be made and recorded in three minutes ! This question could not have been asked if pretended health examinations were not being made and recorded at a rate of three minutes each. I happen to know that they are being so made and recorded in a number of school systems, large and small. Such an examination is neither good public health procedure nor good economy, and certainly such a group as this will characterize it as poor educational technic. Abolition of such socalled exam¬ inations cannot be accomplished too quickly. Next we have a school system doing a good job of education in health and linking it up with an excellent health examination for demonstration pur¬ poses. Such schools are not nearly as common as they ought to be. They are meeting in full their obligation to point out the availability of medical knowl¬ edge and means of using it for better health thru the wise application of modern educational principles. Tf hey should be commended, emulated, and multiplied. It is when health education reaches this standard of excellence that it begins to meet new dangers, namely the danger of superseding and thus undermining the responsibility of the home for the health of the child. As a result of high-grade programs of health education and health examination, there has developed a consciousness of physical defects and bad health habits and a natural and entirely laudable desire to do something about it. Then follows the establishment of clinics for dental service, of provisions to furnish eye glasses to children with defective vision, and to procure the removal of tonsils and other corrective work as the need arises. It is interesting to note that one does not commonly hear of artificial limbs being purchased for school children, nor has the furnishing of hearing devices become a regular 114 National Education Association practise. Yet these are but logical steps from the filling of teeth, the purchase of glasses, and the underwriting of defect correction of various other types. The school must function as an educational agency; it cannot in my judg¬ ment also be a charitable agency and a practitioner of medicine unless it proposes ultimately, as was suggested at a recent conference, also to furnish free legal advice and investment service for the families from which it draws its children. The school must define the limitations of health education and must definitely limit itself in the furnishing of health service only to that which is furnished as an educational necessity. If limitations are not clearly recognized, sharply defined, and scrupulously respected, the school will spread itself out so thin that it cannot do justice either to these extraneous functions or the ones for which it is properly responsible. More important, it will injure the self-reliance of those whose preparation for efficient living is its primary responsibility. We hear much from educators about teaching, not by what Turner re¬ cently referred to as “intra-cerebral injection of facts,” but by creating situa¬ tions and problems to which the proper solution must be found and in the finding, education acquired incidentally, unconsciously, and therefore without much pain. When the schools create a situation in which everything is done for the health of the individual and no call is made upon him to use his own resources, they are not educating him ; they are merely leading him around by the hand. They are making of him a citizen who cannot exist except under a paternalistic government. It is a grave question in my mind whether we are justified in spending money for school physical examinations, socalled, until we have a more defi¬ nite idea of what a school physical or health examination ought to be. I observe from the reports of the White House Conference that the cost of school physical examination ranges from something less than 75 cents to almost $4 per child. It is a recognized fact that the school physical examina¬ tion can do nothing more than point the way and that in the last analysis we must go back to the family doctor for a complete picture of that child’s health, not a still picture at one moment, but the unfolding sequence of the child’s development. This can be observed only by the doctor who sees the patient repeatedly from birth up thru infancy, preschool years, and so into adult life. I do not believe that the community ought to furnish a health examination for a child more than once, except in instances where families, for economic reasons, cannot make the provision. A health examination should be a school entrance requirement and an annual examination should be required for re-admission to successive grades as a condition of promotion. The community may properly furnish these ex¬ aminations to those who cannot afford the service themselves and in the dis¬ charge of its educational obligation may properly demonstrate the examina¬ tion to those who have not sent their children to school with a record of an examination acceptable to the school authorities. To such demonstrations parents should be invited. If they do not choose to come, unless they have excellent reason for not coming, they should have no further claim upon General Sessions 115 the examination service of the school and the money which would otherwise be expended upon them should be devoted to other purposes. In short, I propose that the school shall teach health and in that teaching shall demonstrate, insofar as may be necessary, the principles which it pro¬ pounds. I propose further that where economic inability makes the parents unable to respond to the requirement for a health examination the com¬ munity may properly furnish it, tho not necessarily or even preferably thru the school. Where parents fail to interest themselves the examination need not be repeated, while at the same time the school should continue its educa¬ tional efforts with respect to such parents thru the school nurses, thru bulletins or literature, thru parent-teacher organizations, visiting teachers, parent-education departments, or other extension provisions. The school, obviously, can never abandon its educational obligations but there is no reason why it should go on indefinitely rendering medical service to those who possess the means and presumably the intelligence to provide their own. I know that to provide medical service is just as logical as to provide cloth¬ ing and I know that the schools are providing clothing. I do not think that they ought to provide clothing. I do not believe that the schools need to shoulder the whole responsibility for community social service. Of course, they must cooperate with social agencies. Let us remember that the school controls the child and can control the child only during a fraction of that child’s life. The school cannot overcome adverse influences in the home thru the child alone. It must enlist the co¬ operation of the home. There is no better way to enlist cooperation than to share responsibility. Every member of an organization knows that the way to wake up the lazy members is to put them on committees. Unless you put every home on your community health committee you are going to have the kind of a committee that is all too common, namely where one fellow, the school, is doing all the work and the others are reaping the benefits with¬ out effort. Persons who get something for nothing usually appreciate what they get at precisely what they pay for it. The committee has been facetiously described as an American substitute for intelligence. Whether it is that or not, it is certainly coming to be a substitute for individual initiative. Communities are getting to be much like committees, where none of the members do any work except the chair¬ man — namely, the government. In my experience as a health officer I have seen the spectacle of persons who had purchased or otherwise acquired dogs for pets, demand that the health department assume the care of the dogs at public expense when they became ill. I have seen police departments criti¬ cized following an automobile accident involving two reckless drivers be¬ cause there was no policeman on the corner. I have seen a city sued for an accident to a small child whose parents had permitted it to wander many blocks from home unsupervised. These are evidences of a popular spirit which has been encouraged by increasing tendencies toward paternalism in govern¬ ment. To all intents and purposes the American citizen in another genera- 116 National Education Association tion or two will require a personal guardian unless we teach him to accept and discharge his own responsibilities. I have said little about costs. I am not going to say more. It is not a ques¬ tion of cost; it is a question of principle. If the American people are con¬ vinced that something is worthwhile they will probably have it and will undoubtedly find a way to pay for it. If a policy is bad for the American people they ought not to have it, whether or not they can afford the cost. Health education is merely a part of education as a whole. As I under¬ stand the modern educator’s definition, education is preparation for living a complete and satisfactory life. A complete and satisfactory life includes freedom to exercise individual judgment and presupposes the existence of judgment to exercise. Eternal guarding and leading children by the hand does not encourage or further their development, according to leading educa¬ tors. If we are going to have citizens in the coming generation who can lead us further on the trail of progress in the next century than past genera¬ tions have in the century behind us, we must develop self-reliance. The only way in which self-reliance can be developed with respect to the public health is by cooperation among the community agencies for health, which I pro¬ pose now to name for you in what I regard as the order of their importance: 1. The home, because it controls the ultimate application of hygienic measures to the family group 2. The doctor, the dentist, and other allied scientific groups, because thru research and clinical observation they develop the knowledge on which all health education must be based 3. The schools, because they are the most important channel for disseminating facts and establishing health practises among children 4. The public health agencies, official and volunteer, because they are accessory to the schools as educational influences, especially among adults 5. Reputable medical writers contributing to lay publications. Unless these groups just named cooperate, we shall continue to contem¬ plate in the American scene a lush field for exploitation by the unscrupulous commercial advertiser, the uninformed or sensational free lance writer, the scatter-brain faddist, and the wily quack. THE PUBLIC AND ITS SCHOOLS JOSEPH ROSIER, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION ; AND PRESIDENT, FAIRMONT STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE, FAIRMONT, W. VA. When Horace Mann abandoned the law profession to accept the leader¬ ship of public education in Massachusetts in 1837 he made the following declaration : God grant me an annihilation of selfishness, a mind of wisdom, a heart of benevolence. How many men I shall meet who are accessible only thru a single motive, or who are incased in prejudice and jealousy, and need not to be subdued but to be remodeled ! How many who will vociferate their devotion to the public, but whose thoughts will be intent on themselves! There is but one spirit in which these impediments can be met with success: it is the spirit of self-abandonment, General Sessions 117 the spirit of martyrdom. 1 must be a fluid sort of man, adapting myself to tastes, opinions, habits, manners, so far as this can be done without hypocrisy or insin¬ cerity, or compromise of principle. In all this there must be a higher object than to win personal esteem, or favor, or worldly applause. I have faith in the impiov- ability of the race, — in their accelerating improvability. If we can get this vast wheel into any perceptible motion, we shall have accomplished much. I have abandoned jurisprudence, and betaken myself to the larger sphere of mind and morals. Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmal- leable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Strength expended upon the latter may be effectual which would make no impression upon the former. Let the next generation be my client. In that early day movements had already started in various parts of our country for a system of education at public expense and in the course of events Horace Mann was called to the leadership of this greater movement. He possessed those qualities of unselfishness and devotion which have moti¬ vated the workers in public education thruout the history of the public-school system. The same spirit of self-sacrifice and effort which led Horace Mann to give his life to the welfare of the children of his time is still a character¬ istic of those who carry on the work of the public schools. The teachers of the nation are today advocates and guardians for the children and these chil¬ dren are still our clients. The torch which M^ann lighted and cained among the people of his generation has been handed from leader to leader and today is borne aloft by thousands of men and women who have consecrated their lives to the training and the education of children. There are still those who are “incased in prejudice and jealousy” and the educational leaders of today are faced with the same sort of opposition and criticism which met the leaders of the public-school movement in the days of Horace Mann. In discussing the present situation I shall first consider the criticism which is quite prevalent concerning the present educational leadership in this coun¬ try. We read in some magazines and newspapers and we hear from some platforms statements that there has been a deterioration in the quality and preparation of those who direct the public-school systems of this country. Criticism of our leadership shows rather interesting contradictions. We have those who claim that high-powered educationalists have over-developed the school systems of our country and we have others who charge that the work of our educationalists is largely mechanical and lacking in breadth of vision and scholarship. I think it is fair that we should face these criticisms and take a square look at the professional leadership of the public schools. Philosophically and theoretically may I say that criticism emanating from colleges and universities ought to be ruled out in view of the fact that^ our modern educational philosophy has been evolved from those institutions. Such weaknesses as may be found in the public schools of our country can be charged to our educational philosophers just as much as to those who carry on these educational activities. I claim that the most important factor in the present emergency as it affects the public schools is the modern teaching pro¬ fession. We have in this country today thousands of men and women who in preparation, scholarship, and professional knowledge are the peers of men and women in any of the learned professions. Our critics may apply any 118 National Education Association sort of yardstick they choose and they will find iust as high an average of academic attainments and professional preparation in our educational lead¬ ership as they will find in any other profession. If there is any doubt about this I refer them to the records in the graduate schools of the colleges and universities, and in the teacher-training institutions. There are still differences of opinion about the sort of educational preparation our leadership should have but surely no one would charge that the courses of training for educa¬ tional leadership are any less definite or more chaotic than those provided in the preparation for the other learned professions. In discussing this matter 1 demand that our critics be fair and that they consider the leadership in education upon the same basis as the leadership in all other forms of voca¬ tional and specialized activity. I assert that such an impartial survey of all the^ learned professions will show that the profession of education will not suffer in comparison. W e are also told that there has been a slump in the leadership of the organized educational forces of the country. Here judgment must be based upon the achievements and the results of our educational organizations. The National Education Association has a long and honorable record. I pay high tribute to those who have carried on the work of this association in the years past. They rendered a fine sendee, and on the part of the present leadership I express deep appreciation of the services which the leaders of the past have rendered to the cause of public education. I assert, however, with equal confidence that the National Education Association in the past two or three years has adjusted itself and its activities in a fine way to the demands of the new age. Lnder the present management and that of the immediate past thru the modern facilities of the radio, the cause of education has been presented to millions instead of to thousands as in the past. The leadership in this organization has been alert in taking advantage of every modern facility for bringing support to the public schools of this country. The activi¬ ties of its headquarters staff, its publications, and its contributions have been abreast of the times. The power and the influence of an organization like the National Education Association in this modern dav are felt not thru any one person but in a combination of many working in a united effort for the achievement of great purposes. Pleasured in this way every member or the National Education Association may well be proud of its achieve¬ ments. May I divert to pay tribute to the great state associations that have rendered such distinct service in this emergency. In everv legislative center and on every firing line the representatives of the state associations have r>een pre:>ent. The national association and the state associations in all the states of the union have cooperated wholeheartedly in the past year and the results speak for themselves. The real educational leadership in public education in this country is found in the state departments of education, in the offices of city superin¬ tendents and high-school principals, and in the state and national associa¬ tions which bring together classroom teachers for the advancement of their profession and the protection of the welfare of our children. This country General Sessions 119 has witnessed no finer exhibition of patriotism and loyalty than that of the teaching profession in the past two or three years. In the face of reaction and retrenchment and in the presence of mean and unjust criticism these men and women have carried on. May we remind our critics that it would be well for them to look to their own houses and compare their own leader¬ ship in academic attainments and professional equipment with the great body of men and women who are earn ing on the work of public education. The critics of the public schools are finding fault with educational re¬ sults. We are told that public education has resulted in a sort of dead level of mediocrity among the people. \\ e are not told what might have been our condition without such training. I do not claim any degree of perfec¬ tion for the American public schools. Its critics cannot reasonably expect it to be free from the weaknesses of modern society. It is our hope as educa¬ tional leaders that public education might prepare the rising generation for better things. Those of us who base our educational philosophy upon the teaching of Horace Mann know that “an inconceivably great labor is under¬ taken. With the highest degree of prosperity, results will manifest them¬ selves but slowly. The harvest is far distant from the seed-time.” This is no time to indulge in extravagant claims about the function of education. We simply hold to the principle that we cannot have a modern society with¬ out a certain minimum knowledge and intelligence. This must be universal among the people. Any other condition would mean the complete change of our governmental and social structure. Much of the criticism of educational results in the public schools is due to the feeling that the masses of our people cannot profit from educational training. These critics regard the com¬ mon people as boobs and yokels. It is an easy matter to assume the attitude of an intellectual snob and to look down on the masses. It is quite difficult, however, to get those masses to look up to those who assume airs of su¬ periority. In my judgment it is a little hazardous to decide that the in¬ telligence and human qualities desirable for success in modern life reside exclusively with any one group. Magazine writers and sensational platform speakers may be intellectually smart and clever but there are a lot of common people who have learned in the public schools to discriminate between bunk and truth. The hope of this country is that an ever increasing number may learn to make that discrimination. We have struggled for a long time in this country to eliminate illiteracy and to teach all of our people to read and write. We are approaching a one hundred percent record in that effort. Our next goal will be to remove other forms of illiteracy. To the public schools of this country can surely be given the credit of achieving the first result and to them we must look with hope for higher results. The public school may have many of the imperfections which its critics have claimed but the fact remains that it is the only instrument we have for developing a citizen¬ ship that is universally prepared to deal intelligently with the complexities of modern life. We therefore suggest that those who criticize the results of public education propose a better means of qualifying people to live in a democracy. 120 National Education Association We are told by another group of critics that public education is costing too much money. Here we are brought face to face with the obligation of parents for the education of their children. If this type of critic believes in modern democracy he must accept the obligation for the training of citizens in that democracy. In the course of time the modern public school has become a cooperative effort among the parents for providing desired educational training. Of course, we have those who are financially situated so that they can provide for the education of their children in a highly effi¬ cient manner thru private enterprise, but the community and the state very soon confront that larger group who cannot provide such educational train¬ ing without general cooperative effort. Since the days of Horace Mann we have in this country established first the principle that an elementary educa¬ tion should be provided at public expense to all the children of all the people, and rather reluctantly in a more recent period the providing of sec¬ ondary education at public cost has been generally accepted altho in this emergency there have been reactionary voices crying for a curtailment of public secondary education. We still have with us those who are opposed to any general expenditure for free public higher education. The basic prin¬ ciple underlying this whole problem is found in the obligation of parents to children, of age to youth, of one generation to the succeeding generation. May I enunciate the principle which I have stated repeatedly this year that in a democracy the education of the children constitutes a first mortgage on the wealth of the community and the state. We are confronted now in this period of depression which we hope is near the end, with those critics who claim that this nation cannot afford to provide free public education to its childhood and youth. The educational leadership of this country in the presence of this situation recognizes the fact that expenditures must be adjusted to the ability of the community and the state to pay. We do claim that the education of children is an essential serv¬ ice and that in the adjustment of public expenditures funds for education should have a priority of consideration. May I submit some facts concerning the spending habits of the people of this country, when they want to satisfy their own personal needs for display or amusement. Official estimates of the United States Office of Education place expendi¬ tures for public elementary and secondary schools for the school year just concluded at approximately $1,900,000,000. This estimate was made last December and many additional reductions have been made in school expendi¬ tures. It is safe to say that our total bill for public schools in America in 1932-33 was well under two billion dollars. At the same time, our annual expenditures for gasoline were approximately $1,982,000,000. We spent as much to propel our automobiles as we did to educate our children. Expenditures for cigars, cigarettes, and other forms of manufactured to¬ bacco have fallen off greatly during the depression ; nevertheless, even last year we were able to find $1,212,000,000 for tobacco products. "I he com- General Sessions 121 bined public-school systems of 38 out of the 48 states were operated for less than the amount spent by the United States for tobacco. The annual income of a single chewing-gum company in 1930 was laigei than the income for public schools in any one of 26 states. Our expenditures for admissions to moving pictures, theaters, prize-fights, cabarets, and the like, amounted to $1,240,000,000. The nation that will close kindergarten and night schools while it continues to spend these huge sums on amusements, often of doubtful value, is pursuing a dangerous policy. As long as the combined expenditures for tobacco and amusements are 50 percent greater than the combined expenditures for all public elemental \ and secondary schools, we shall be unable to take seriously the statement that we can no longer afford to give our children a decent education. These contrasts between expenditures for education and for other pur¬ poses are even more striking when we consider conditions in a fairly normal year. Thus, in 1928, we spent $2.60 for candy, chewing gum, theater, to¬ bacco, jewelry, and similar luxuries, for every dollar spent for schools. Even as late as 1930, we were spending fifty percent more for life insurance premiums than we were for public schools, over twice as much for building construction as we were for public schools, and about five times as much for passenger automobiles as for public schools. In making these comparisons, there is no thought of depreciating the importance of expenditures for life insurance, for buildings, for transportation, or for luxuries. It is granted that factories built for the production of automobiles or cigars cannot be converted over night into schoolhouses. It can hardly be denied, however, that there is a large element of choice in the way in which we distribute the national income. Scarcely a state in the country could not maintain its expenditures for education provided its people were willing to forgo the purchase of other goods and commodities. Once the pioper support of public education is recognized as a matter of first concern, the schools can be adequately supported even tho we may not have as much as we like of material luxuries and comforts. A wise national policy will find ways and means by which the economic support given to vaiious commodities and services will bear a close relationship to the relative human values of these commodities and services. Most of the curtailments in public education have necessarily fallen on the salaries of teachers and other employees. Teachers do not object to rea¬ sonable reductions in salaries when it is evident that the community under present conditions is unable to maintain the former schedules, but teachers and many other citizens are beginning to wonder why it is that the lower salaried groups always seem to feel the heaviest brunt of a period of de¬ pression. The salaries of the presidents of twelve large railway systems, for instance, run from $61,000 up to $135,000. The average reduction in these large salaries between 1929 and 1932 was only 10 percent. The five largest life-insurance companies pay their presidents salaries ranging from $100,000 to $200,000. Four out of the five companies increased the salaries of their presidents by $25,000 between 1929 and 1932. It is reported that the presi- 122 National Education Association dent of a large tobacco company was receiving in 1932 remuneration from salary and bonus amounting to nearly $800,000 a year, while in 1930 the same official received over a million dollars a year in salary and bonus. While the railroad and insurance companies were paying salaries of this type to their leading officers, the federal government was loaning them large sums of money thru the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. At the same time, thousands of school teachers whose salaries in normal years were not ex¬ cessive, were going without pay entirely and were unable to secure from Congress any legislation which would permit the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to loan money for their relief. It is conditions such as these which lead us to suspect the motives of those who are taking the leading part in the national drive against the financial support of public schools. It is no longer popular, as it was a century ago, to oppose the support of public education as a matter of principle. The American people have accepted the public-school system and will not turn from it. Can it be possible that those who do not at heart believe in a democratic system of education but who dare not openly announce their opposition to it are using our present sufferings as a method by which they hope to weaken or destroy it? We need in this country today a new conception of human values. There must be a radical change in our estimates of success. Democratic ideals of the greatest good to the greatest number must be made a reality. We have too long preached the principles of equality and justice while practising in¬ justice. The badge of dishonor should be pinned on the man who achieves selfish purposes by unfair treatment of his fellows. The American public- school system represents the effort of a great modern democracy to establish equality of opportunity among all of the people. In this land of ours the sons of the struggling farmer, the wage earner, and the small salaried person must have the same opportunity for the development of their intellectual tal¬ ents as do the sons of the privileged classes. This is of the essence of democracy. Social, political, and economic leadership in the new period ahead of us must be based upon ability and character. Ralph Waldo Emerson once made the statement that the greatest human enterprise is the care and the culture of men. May I say that the greatest need of this country today is for men who are honest and fair in their dealings with their fellow men and who are true and loyal to the ideals and principles of modern democracy. From the days of Horace Mann down to the present moment the American public school has been dedicated to the greatest of human enterprises. In the face of unfair criticism and selfish opposition one million teachers in this country carry on with supreme devotion to American ideals and modern conceptions of human success. These teachers call upon the representatives of wealth to join with them in the care and the culture of the rising genera¬ tion. American institutions cannot be preserved and perpetuated by educat¬ ing the children of a few. They can only be made permanent thru the broad¬ cast education of all the children of all the people. The debt which age owes to youth for culture and education must not be defaulted. General Sessions 123 SOME RECENT LEGAL TRENDS CLARENCE MARTIN, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION, MARTINS- BURG, W. VA. Certainly the opportunity is propitious to tell you how deeply indebted the people of this country — aye, of the world — are to the teaching profession. The American Bar Association, which I have the honor temporarily to represent, numbers in the legal branch of the teaching world, many of its outstanding figures. Each of them adds presence, prestige, learning, and, generally, conservatism to its work. Doctor Rosier told me that the slogan of this meeting was to evaluate education. Presumably, then, you are determining the worth of applied education. And this brings me directly to the subject of this discourse, for law, in its scientific sense, is the reflection of society, at any given time, and depends upon the breadth of thinking the lawgiver possesses at the moment of the formulation of any given precept. Or, as the lawyer aptly puts it : the history of a people is a history of their law. What will historians say of the present legal trends when they are weighed in the scales of retrospec¬ tion ? May I discuss with you a subject kindred in its nature to that with which the teaching profession is faced in every state in the country — that of the standard of education required for admission to the bar? When Abraham Lincoln, regarded as our outstanding example of equal opportunity, was a member of the Illinois legislature, to the surprise of many of his colleagues, he championed the passage of a statute which required an examination to ascertain the fitness of those who aspired to teach in the com¬ mon schools of the state. That problem, then existent, has been solved to a greater or less extent, to the satisfaction of the teachers of America. The legal profession has had a similar problem, the solution of which has not been so easy. There seems ingrained in the non-legal mind the thought that every young man, if he so resolves, irrespective of his qualifications, should have an opportunity at the bar. Legal minds differ from this con¬ ception. The American Bar Association some years ago adopted minimum standards for admission to the bar. These require at least two years of col¬ lege work, or its equivalent, and at least three years of law school study. There is then some reasonable assurance that those who are licensed to charge a fee for legal services will be competent for the work they are called upon to do. Nineteen of the states — led by West Virginia — have adopted these requirements. These standards, adopted because of the experience of years, have been set with due regard to the dictates of prudence and reason, and the Association’s responsibilities to the public. It is indispensable that the lawyer be well grounded in those studies necessary to equip him to par¬ ticipate in the economic and political life of the country upon an equal basis with those with whom he comes in contact. The lawyer, too, when called to the bar, should have a properly educated and balanced civic conscience, an intimate and complete knowledge of his 124 National Education Association ethical duties towards the public and towards his client, as well as a due regard for the high moral obligations about to be assumed. This require¬ ment, stressed in this generation and developed because of the peculiar de¬ mand for its existence, is founded upon sound public policy. The leading law schools of the country are meeting this requirement with practical unanimity. The rule inures solely to the wellbeing of society. The legal profession seeks your cooperation, and thru you that of the general public, to assist it in making these minimum requirements the universal standard of the country. It craves merely the right to make a learned profession more capable of handling the problems the centuries have referred to it and stable enough to meet the demands the future may make upon it. For the law student of today is your judge, your legislator, your diplomat, your presi¬ dent of tomorrow. There is a growing sentiment, too, and a just demand for revision in the adjective or administrative branch of the law, popularly called the “law’s delay.” It is truthfully said that delay in trial is denial of justice. There is delay and too much of it. Every unselfish lawyer of any consequence knows it and deplores it. It is the system, not the lawyers, which is at fault. We have in America today an archaic system of procedure, certainly ancient in Lord Bacon’s time. The courts do not make their own rules of procedure, nor may they change them. The legislatures of our states, with a few excep¬ tions, have relegated that function to themselves. Time and again, in every manner in which the bar can speak, it has called the attention of our people to the woeful condition of legal procedure. If the courts were given that power, which lawyers describe as the rule-making power, the courts would assume that responsibility. Delay, then, would be obviated and the cost of litigation materially reduced. Nor are the rules governing and the conditions surrounding the trial of criminal actions less deplorable. There was once a period in our legal history when the accused was presumed to be guilty until he proved himself inno¬ cent. Now the presumption of innocence follows the accused at every stage of the trial. And with this presumption, and because of it, there have grown up many theories intended to protect the accused, which, if innocent, the accused does not need for his protection. The pendulum has swung too far the other way. For this reason, socalled third-degree methods, as illegal and deplorable as the commission of the original crime, have developed. A pru¬ dent regard for the ends of justice requires that commonsense rules and methods of trial be used which are in accord with presentday thought. Trials should be legal arbitrations and the courthouses temples of exact and concrete justice, instead of neighborhood showhouses, to which the public may resort for amusement or to satisfy their insatiate curiosity. After years of study by competent men, the legal profession is about to present to the nation a new criminal code, which, if adopted by the states, will eliminate most of the evils and secure a quicker administration of criminal justice. General Sessions 125 Justice, you will admit, demands relief from archaic and unjust rules o^ procedure and evidence, both in the civil and criminal realm. That refoim. we hope, is now definitely on the way. There is no more disconcerting trend in the legal realm today than the law of marriage and divorce. There is, indeed, no subject of more vital importance to the nation. Let me emphasize it simply. While the popula¬ tion of this country from 1867 to 1929 increased 300 percent, marriages in¬ creased 400 percent and divorces about 2000 percent. Over a period of sixty-odd years, the rate of divorce has advanced five times as rapidly as the marriage population. Marriage partnership has given away to a limited liability stock corporation, according to W orld’s IV ork. The number of divorces to marriages has now increased to one divorce in every six and a fraction marriages. No such condition exists in any other civilized nation, unless it be in Communistic Russia, where statistics are not available. In America, too, we have developed what is known as a migratory divorce, that is a divorce gotten at some place other than the actual residence of the parties. Keen competition has arisen among a few of the states. Nevada once required a six months’ residence. Arkansas and Idaho reduced the period required to three months, and Nevada, to save its business, made its juris¬ dictional period one of six weeks. Mexico is bidding for business. Divorce, in that country, can be gotten by consent of the parties. It is possible, under the present regime, to secure a divorce and remarry within a period of two hours. It was suggested that the problem would be solved by the granting of the voting privilege to women. But in the last ten years of equal suffrage, divorce has been growing and wives seek the divorce court three times as often as the husbands. And fewer cases are contested by wives. Last week in Chicago, a learned professor, speaking before the Associa¬ tion for the Advancement of Science, proposed divorce by agreement of the parties. Some churchmen replied in the press. All should have examined the statistics on the subject. Of the 189,863 divorces granted in this country in 1930, 163,320, or almost nine-tenths, of the cases were uncontested by the defendant. This statement brings to the fore the charge that at the present time most divorce suits are the result of agreement or collusion between the parties — that, in legal parlance, the socalled controversy is one in name and not in fact. Every lawyer knows that, in any other character of case when so great a percentage of non-contests exist, that a friendly suit is pending. Indeed, every lawyer of any experience has heard of some case where the defendant furnished the plaintiff with evidence, for evidence there must be to satisfy the demands of the law. If these statements are true — and they are — we have divorce in this country by agreement of the parties, which, while not so bold and open an arrangement as in Russia, or its prototype — our neighboring nation of Mexico, is nevertheless just as effective. South Carolina grants no divorces. New York, with one jurisdictional ground, has one divorce to every twenty marriages ; the District of Columbia, with a similar condition, has one in forty; Nevada, with its generous stat- 126 National Education Association utes, has one divorce to every two and a fraction marriages. And one-third of divorcees remarry. Banns should be published ; marriages should be celebrated at the domi¬ cile of one of the parties; Gretna Greens — of which there are sixty-odd, according to the Department of Commerce — should be abolished ; migratory divorces ought to be prohibited ; and the all-important question — the right to remarry — should be granted only in case of annulments on grounds exist¬ ing at the time of the marriage and not for divorce upon causes arising afterwards. 1 his was and is the common law. And the glory of the common law was and is that it is founded upon the precepts of the natural law. You are interested in the children. The larger the family, the fewer marriages end in divorce. In four out of five cases, children are granted to the wife. It is true that the mother regards divorce as a severance of the marital relationship only ; for the father, divorce generally signifies loss of parental relationship, as well. And while statistics are meager, the reports of orphan asylums and homes for children show a greater and growing number of children of divorced families utterly dependent for their rearing and education upon these institutions. Indeed, one eminent writer goes so far as to say that “divorce and crime go hand in hand, and juvenile crime is sheltered beneath its wing.” The children of this country are the peculiar care of the teachers. For the sake of them alone, this problem should arrest your attention and demand your serious consideration. And, while we are upon the subject of children, let me say a few words on the socalled Child Labor Amendment. There was a time in the country in the not distant past, when we had a growing sore of child employment. It was not peculiar to any section of the country. You could find it in spots wherever grasping employers existed who had neither love for little chil¬ dren nor respect for social justice. In every state now there are laws, more or less stringent, forbidding and prohibiting the employment of children under fifteen at any kind of labor and under sixteen, at least, at hazardous occupations. School attendance, too, has become compulsory. Child labor is inhuman. Sentiment for its suppression found articulation in two efforts at Congressional action — both of which laws were adjudged to be federal usurpation of state authority. Then came the submission of the socalled Child Labor Amendment. Its ratification has been and is urged by many well-meaning people. It has the endorsement of the American Fed¬ eration of Labor — the most conservative labor organization on earth. Let me briefly give you these facts pertaining to the subject at the time of submission : According to the 1920 census, there were forty millions of people in this country under the age of eighteen, the age line set by the amendment. Of these 12,502,582 were between ten and fifteen years of age. Inasmuch as the Census Bureau statistics for 1920 were founded upon the then existing law, the figures given cover these ages. There is a difference between child employment or “children in gainful occupations,” and child labor. “Children General Sessions 127 in gainful occupations” include those who work on the farm for the parents, during vacation, after school hours — in fact all kinds of intermittent work outside of school hours and in perfectly legal employment. Child labor implies any kind of work, but generally continuous labor, whether paid or not. Of the 12,502,582, above referred to, 1,060,858 were employed in gainful occupations, a decrease of 46.7 percent from 1910. Or to put it another way there were almost double the number of children working in 1910 than in 1920. Of these 1,060,858 children, 647,309 were engaged in agricultural pur¬ suits. Eighty-eight percent were unpaid, working after school hours or dur¬ ing vacation on the home farm, and 12 percent worked either for, or under the direction of, their own parents. Of the 413,549 engaged in non-agricultural pursuits, 364,444 were legiti¬ mately employed. There were 49,105 only, less than fifteen, whose employ¬ ment was a matter of legal concern, and of these 12,789 were newsboys, leaving only 36,316 children out of a possible 12,502,582, or not quite three- tenths of one percent, actually engaged in child labor. Apparently the amend¬ ment, when submitted, intended to take care of those 36,316 children scattered over the land. The statistics for 1930 are far more favorable. Time does not permit comparison. It is apparent that, because of proper public sentiment, what was once a real has become a phantom problem. Let us avoid another con¬ stitutional blunder. We must not substitute sentimental emotionalism for the realm of reason. Let me briefly say this of the Child Labor Amendment: The proposed amendment is the broadest grant of power ever attempted to be given to the national government. No reason now exists for the grant. It applies to agricultural and domestic labor, as well as all other exertion. It can be used to prevent children under eighteen from laboring, as well as nationalize education and be the basis for required military training. It is not a Child Labor Amendment. It was not so intended. It is a socialistic measure. Altho advocated by many well-meaning people, it is a communistic effort to na¬ tionalize children, making them responsible primarily to the government instead of to the parents. It strikes a blow at the home. It appears to be a part of a definite, positive plan to destroy the republic and substitute there¬ for a social democracy. It is opposed to the ideals of our American institu¬ tions. Fourteen states have ratified it. If you respect our constitutional struc¬ ture, under which we are now functioning, you will do your utmost to defeat it. It was defeated when submitted. It can be done again. It con¬ stitutes an ever-present threat, because it contains no time limit for state action. It should be relegated to the storehouse of political blunders and a perpetual timelock placed on the door. The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable advance in the realm of substantive law — most of it in the domain of social justice. i 128 National Education Association Workmen’s compensation and insurance, in its various forms; the recog¬ nition of the principle of collective bargaining and the relative rights and duties of organized labor ; the changed status of women ; the complete regula¬ tion of public utilities, their charges and their earnings; the enlargement of the municipal function ; the abolition of special privileges in business and the regulation of unfair competition ; the resumption of control and regula¬ tion of natural resources upon the part of the states; the growth of gov¬ ernment by commission; the development of the commerce and “general welfare” clauses of the Constitution ; the spread of education and com¬ pulsory attendance in the primary grades — these may be mentioned as a few of the contributions of this generation to our system of jurisprudence. Hardly had the automobile thrust itself and its tortious and contractual incidents into the legal field of endeavor, than the radio and the aeroplane came into being, for the relative rights and duties of which, we had no guid¬ ing precepts from the centuries beyond. Today, the profession is struggling with the theory as to whether an act, which would be a tort if committed upon the ground, shall become a happening damnum absque injuria , if com¬ mitted, without wantonness, by a falling plane from the air. And upon this theory, properly settled, will depend for centuries to come the relative rights and duties of property owners and airmen in the American law. Cognizant of the anti-social trends of the age, many men of contemplative minds wondered where the present criminal trend would lead us. Political corruption in the municipal realm, the underworld man, complete defiance of unpopular statutes — each has brought disrespect for all law. If, as sta¬ tistics tend to prove, there is a change for the better, certainly it is a matter of congratulation. The teachers of this country, thru their researches and studies, owe a duty to society to discover the origin and help the people to correct this unfortunate and alarming situation. Is it any wonder, then, in this rapidly changing atmosphere of economic thought, in the reflection of these social trends, that the law, without precedent, has made so many mistakes and has found and is finding diffi¬ culty in administering justice between man and man? Is it amazing that the unthinking, groping in this labyrinth of social unrest and of material progress, should find their consolation in blaming the lawyers and especially the courts for this condition ? The wonder is that our legal system still lives. The amazement is that the anti-social forces were not able to substitute the rule of majorities for the concepts of the natural law. No one denies that defects exist in the body of the law or its adjective principles. A simple statement of the facts just enumerated, proves it. It was ever thus. It will be so until the end of time. Legal concepts are always changing, legal dogmas are superseded from time to time ; some cherished and, to us, vital rule, today, may become a fiction or disregarded precept tomorrow. The object of the lawgiver, whether the autocrat or a free people, should be to reduce these changes of law, as the adjective of justice, to a minimum. General Sessions 129 Never in the history of law, has a legal system been so strained, so con¬ fronted in so many different ways for good and evil, than our system during the present century, both in public and private law. If, then, our courts have seemed ultra-conservative, it has been in the interest of justice. The trend of their decisions shows that they have an inherent hesitancy, born of wisdom, to construct new paths along new avenues of thought. Certainly they have tried to make the crooked road straight, to cut down the hills, to level up the depressions. But let it be noted that they have been as careful as the courts of yonder years to ascertain that the slopes and banks of public wel¬ fare on either side of the road were properly constructed and sufficiently strong to stand the strain. Their duty to civilization, alone, demanded it. As education becomes more widespread, as ideas change, as invention forces some new method upon us, the law absorbs it. Let us not, then, eulo¬ gize or condemn ourselves. We find forces for good and evil in every stage of history. Each generation contributes some thought of material value to the sum total of human intelligence, and, it may be, that history will accord to this age more substantial contributions than other periods of time. For that very reason our endeavor should be to avoid embracing every social whim, every ill-conceived formula, and attempt to give it the force of law. We must not substitute state socialism for social justice. We must not ex¬ change the fleeting conceit of the times for the experience of ages. In the interest of the commonweal, we must maintain inviolate the fundamental principles of our constitutional structure. Education and regulation will bring their own reward. Duelling, imprisonment for debt, and slavery are gone. Other problems of today, with the help of an enlightened and edu¬ cated people, will have their solution tomorrow. Remember, the concepts of justice, as distinguished from law, never change. They are enduring with the centuries. They are the basic principles of right, described by Justinian as the constant and perpetual desire to give everyone his due. They live, tho the law thru which they once sought to demonstrate themselves, falls into the discard and is lost, save to the period of history of which it is a part. Here, then, lies the duty of this Association. Upon you largely lies the future of this republic. Yours is the duty to train the next generation. Upon you do we rely to give us men and women who will be morally sound, lovers of social justice, equal and exact liberty, advocates and practitioners of the fundamental principles of right; men and women into whom has been inculcated a respect for law* an adherence to and knowledge of our form of government, and an abhorrence for graft and crime. If your task is success¬ ful, and we pray it will be, then will we be able to continue the construc¬ tion and maintenance of a system of American law, dedicated to the cause of justice, that will be the controlling factor in the maintenance of peace and the perpetuation of our American institutions. 130 National Education Association EDUCATION AND THE NATIONAL DEFENSE LOUIS A. JOHNSON, NATIONAL COMMANDER, AMERICAN LEGION, CLARKSBURG, W. VA. \ When your president was good enough to offer me the privilege of ap¬ pearing before this distinguished gathering, he suggested that I take for the title of my remarks, “Education and the National Defense.” I can think of no subject I would rather discuss. I can think of no subject that is more important to our country. The two terms are synonymous, and reduced to their common definition they mean security, prosperity, and peace. Those are goals that the National Education Association and the American Legion are striving together to win for posterity. It is only natural, of course, that when a former soldier gets up and talks about national defense, many perfectly intelligent and well-informed persons immediately suspect that he is biased, that he is militaristic, and that he would burden the country with unnecessary armaments merely to satisfy some pride born of his former service. Let me say to you that there are no more ardent lovers of peace in the world than those of us who witnessed the horrors of modern warfare a decade and a half ago. I believe I am safe in saying no group in all the world more devoutly prays that the curse of war never again shall afflict this fair land than the million or more men who comprise the American Legion. We who went thru the baptism of fire know what it is to leave com¬ fortable homes and travel half across the world to spend months of horror in mud and blood. We know how it feels to crawl into dank, musty billets, wondering how soon a phantom wave of poison gas or the sudden crash of shrapnel is to send us to join that host of gallant comrades we saw fall in combat. I am sure that there are among your own membership, seated here in this auditorium, many who can testify by personal experience to the truth of these statements. Be assured that we, veterans of the greatest war in history, are among the most peace-loving of the world’s inhabitants, and because we so sincerely cherish the security of our national institutions and the contentment of happy homes, the American Legion always has stood firmly for an adequate national defense. We ask only that our national defense shall be sufficient to assure proper protection for the country we were ready to die for and our happy homes. We would energetically oppose any program of aggres¬ sion. As I have said repeatedly, we of the Legion take our theory of national defense from the Bible, from the good book Luke, from which I quote: “A strong man well armed keepeth his palace in peace.” We but seek that America shall be sufficiently strongly armed that no foreign aggressor shall come to disturb the peace of our shores. The keystone of the Legion’s national defense program is education, and we are proud to salute you, who have been entrusted with the high duty of preparing the coming generations for the responsibilities and joys of American citizenship, and to offer you our heartiest cooperation in every General Sessions 131 field of your great work. The future of our country is in your keeping. As you mold the young minds of today so the American of tomorrow will be fashioned. That is a heavy responsibility, but a glorious one. If we, the custodians of the youth of our country, work to build strong bodies and healthy minds, America has nothing to fear from the future. But our job is not as simple as it was twenty years ago. The depression, a heritage of the great war, has closed many of our schools, many of our teachers are working without pay because state, county, and municipal gov¬ ernments are too impoverished to meet their financial obligations. Insidious influences are battering at our gates, striving to force upon us a government of slavery for the free democracy our forefathers builded and bequeathed us. I do not want to seem prematurely optimistic, but I am sure we all sincerely believe the night of the depression is near its end, that already the light of a new dawn of a better day, is breaking over the horizon. That is a challenge to our courage, to our patriotism. We have all suffered hard¬ ships. Unfortunately, the hand of the depression has fallen more heavily upon some of us than upon others. But let us all banish any lingering bitter¬ ness from our hearts, let us gladly accept the opportunity for high service, for the molding of a healthy, courageous American citizenship that is within our grasp. I have pointed out to you that education is the keystone of the Legion’s national defense program. I should like to outline to you in a few words some of the things we are doing to help prepare our boys and girls for good citizenship, because, of course, the education of our youth is the primary objective. I trust that it will not appear unbecoming for me to admit genuine pride when I tell you that approximately fifty percent of the income from the Legion’s $5,000,000 endowment fund is used for child welfare work, for the building of sound bodies and happy, healthy minds. The other fifty per¬ cent is used for the rehabilitation of disabled World War veterans, regard¬ less of whether or not they are affiliated with the Legion. I am proud of such a program. On the one hand we are contributing liberally of our time and money to prepare our future generations for the duty that awaits them, and on the other we are doing our bit to lighten the burden of those of our comrades who fell in defense of this glorious country. I challenge any organi¬ zation to show me a more worthy program. Education must be the foundation of any well-balanced national defense program. We can build vast armies and powerful navies to protect us for a day, but unless we make sure that the citizens who step into our places as we pass on are true Americans , that they will be as zealous as we have been in passing our form of government on to their successors, we shall have labored in vain. I have said before, and I repeat it again, our children are our second chance. In our brief span of life we cannot hope to realize all of the ambitious objectives we work toward, but thru our children we can realize our fondest destiny, the dreams of every true American: 132 National Education Association A nation that shall make good the longings and ambitions of all mankind, a nation that faces the consequences unafraid, a nation that will lead on. No nation can stand still. To be contented with what we have is the first step toward retrogression, decay, and oblivion. Our forefathers founded this nation upon the simple principle of equal opportunity, freedom of initiative, the right to worship God according to the dictates of our conscience, and the perpetuation of an indivisible union for the common good. From that beginning we have builded a nation that today is the hope of a troubled world. We shall pass the torch on to a generation that is well prepared to carry it ever onward to the ultimate goal of lasting peace, plenty, and goodwill among all nations. In the field of education the Legion endeavors to encourage the qualities of honor, courage, scholarship, leadership, and service among boys and girls thru the American Legion School Award plan. To the student who attains the highest standing in these high qualities in each of our state departments we award a medal. Teaching a true sense of the obligation every citizen owes to his flag is another part of our child-training program. We work in close cooperation with you, the members of the National Education Associa¬ tion, in the observance of American Education Week, and with the Constitu¬ tion Educational Association in the observance of Constitution Week. We believe that a strong body is essential to the development of a healthy mind. To that end we help to train our youths to coordinate physical and mental alertness. We combine lessons in citizenship and patriotism with physical training. And, parenthetically, let me tell you that those who would impose the slavery of Communism upon us recognize as well as we that the age of adolescence is a fertile field in which to plant their propaganda. It is well known that Communist groups in this country establish camps every summer, and there teach boys and girls between the ages of 12 and 21, class hatred and contempt for our national institutions. It has been proved that their curriculum demands a daily salute and pledge of allegiance to the red flag of Communism. We shall continue unhesitatingly to combat such activities not only thru our own youth activities program but by cooperating closely with such worthy organizations as the Boy Scouts. In the Boy Scouts of America we have one of the most effective avenues possible for encouraging good citizen¬ ship — which, after all, means only love of country, respect for law, honesty, cleanliness of mind and body, and good sportsmanship. Our 10,760 posts are engaged energetically in helping to organize Boy Scout troops in their respective communities. The national heads of the Boy Scouts of America recently paid tribute to our service in this direction by declaring that the American Legion has become the greatest single influence for extending the activities of their organization in the country. We reach out to assist in the training of those of our younger generation who have gone on to high school and college by supporting and assisting in the formation of Citizens’ Military Training Camps, the Reserve Officers Training Corps, the 4-H Clubs, and similar organizations. Ours is not General Sessions 133 merely passive support. We give of our time, energy, and resources to see that these beneficial activities are continued. In the present need for economy, some of them, particularly the C. M. T. C. and R. O. T. C., have suffered severely. The latter two may even be abandoned for the present. That only means to the Legion that we shall have to fight all the harder for their continuance as essential elements in training for citizenship and the establish¬ ment of an adequate national defense. Back in 1917 and 1918, we were taught that there was no such word as “retreat.” That is a lesson we have never forgotten — particularly when we are standing up for the security of our government. The American Legion’s citizenship and national defense program does not stop with our youths. It includes instruction of immigrants for the honor and privilege of citizenship and the teaching of a good community spirit among the adult members of our individual communities. The pledge in the preamble to the Legion’s constitution — “To inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the community, state, and nation” — commands us to carry on in this work. We have preached the gospel of civic pride thruout the land, we have founded playgrounds in untold numbers, our post clubhouses serve hundreds of communities as their sole centers for civic meetings and activities, we have established community emergency relief units, we initiate safety- first programs, wage campaigns for the elimination of fire hazards, urge the conservation of natural resources, and work in more ways than I can take the time to tell you about today to encourage a good, healthy, and patriotic citizenship. Our posts are engaged in over two hundred projects for the betterment of their communities. Thus we have builded the foundation — the keystone — of our national de¬ fense program, and I pass on to the second phase of that important work. It concerns the maintenance of an army, navy, and marine corps of sufficient strength to insure that no foreign foe may ever land an expeditionary force on our shores, and to safeguard our right of free commerce with all the world. Regardless of what special condition may have afflicted you individually in the last three years, the depression thru which our country has passed is a result of the World War. It would be even more correct to say it is part of that war. The guns may have been silenced fifteen years ago but the read¬ justment still remains for you and me to settle in an orderly way. That is a duty that calls for continued service, and perhaps further sacrifices, from all of us. It was inevitable that out of a cataclysm such as the World War there should come overwhelming economic disorders and political chaos. Many generations will pass before the price of that war has been paid in full. Every field of endeavor has suffered, but I can think of none that has suf¬ fered a blow more disastrous to our very civilization than that which has fallen upon our educational system. When education is put in disorder it is time, indeed, to take counsel. 134 National Education Association In hundreds of communities in this country schools have been closed en¬ tirely; in many more, school hours have been curtailed severely. Thousands of teachers have worked for months, many for even years, without pay. Legions of young men and women have been graduated from colleges only to find that there was no field in which to apply their energies. The effect of such a condition on our growing generations is appalling. We who had the benefit of an education can bear the temporary suffering of this period, but those who are denied an education by it are handicapped for life. Are we to let this condition beset our country again? We of the Ameri¬ can Legion say most emphatically, No! That is why, from the day we took off our uniforms and returned to our chosen vocations, we have insisted that our country maintain an army, navy, and marine corps adequate for the defense of our country. We shall continue our fight for that principle. We are determined that the danger of another war involving our country shall be minimized to the lowest possible degree. As long as world conditions are what they are, nothing but reasonable military preparedness will give us assurance of peace. If the United States had been adequately prepared in 1917, I doubt that the incidents which forced us to enter the war ever would have occurred. Certainly, if we had been properly prepared when we did go in, the war would have ended months sooner and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. If we had been armed in proportion to our needs in 1914 I question whether the war ever would have occurred. The greatest military experts in the country agree on all three of these premises, yet we are in a fair way to making the same mistakes all over again. It is entirely right and proper that the United States should work to bring about a reduction in armaments and to hasten that day we all pray for, when world peace shall be established permanently and all nations shall live as brothers. But that day is not here, it is not even in prospect, and we of the American Legion will fight to the end to prevent our country from disarming, either as a beau geste in the hopes that the other nations will follow our example or on the false premise of the need for economy. It is no economy to throw away the lock to your strong box, and by the same token neither is it economy to destroy the army and navy that safeguards our government, our homes, and our individual possessions. The American army and navy are both far below the strength that is nec¬ essary to give us equality with other first-class powers. There is serious talk in Washington of still further reductions in the army. We cannot afford another cut. I am glad to note that at last we are about to make a substantial start toward bringing our navy, at least, up to parity with the other powers. Let us hope that a way will be found to organize our army too, on a basis sufficient to our needs. As a nation we should be willing to reduce our armaments in equal pro¬ portion with the other powers, but at the same time, insisting upon maintain¬ ing the accepted principle that the United States is entitled to a navy second to none and an army of sufficient strength to serve as the nucleus for a land General Sessions 135 force in time of emergency adequate to protect our country against foreign invasion. There is nothing militaristic about such a program. It is only com¬ mon sense. If every other nation were willing to accept as little the world, indeed, would make a substantial step toward universal and permanent peace. And now, as I must end, I want to give to you a picture. I see an army of 24,000,000 American boys and girls in the schools of this country, marching up to fill the ranks as we of the American Legion and the generations to which we belong gradually pass out of time. That vast army of children in grade and high schools, students in colleges, will come forward year by year, replacing us. I thrill as I see them today, getting ready for their heritage — in classrooms, on playgrounds, wherever I go, bright-faced, untouched for the most part by the troubles which come with age, happy, confident, eager to reach the promised land of maturity. Oh, that land is not as they picture it, but who would shatter their illusions! We hail them today, citizens of tomorrow, and invoke blessings for them as they come close to their destiny. WHAT NEXT IN EDUCATION? A. F. HARMAN, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF EDUCATION, MONTGOMERY, ALA. Coming from a state whose educational adversities have been cast to the four winds I am perhaps expected to return a gloomy answer to the ques¬ tion, “What Next in Education?” I am not to speak either apologetically or defensively. I prefer to speak, not so much as the representative of a state or a section, but rather as an American citizen. In our present dilemma it would seem that the experiences of states and sections are of worth prin¬ cipally as they contribute to the solution of the whole' big problem of the future of education thruout the nation. We in the South are more or less inured to the cruel poverty that follows war. It is needless to recount the deprivations and the sufferings of that long period of depression ended with the dawn of the present century. Added to paucity of resources, there were the skepticism and often the open hostility of a proud and once wealthy people with reference to public schools. If by dint of great sacrifice money was to be had for education, the hurdles of selfish individualism, pride, and prejudice must first be surmounted. By dis¬ tressful experience we are learning now for the second time what it means to lack money for schools and, moreover, what it means to struggle against opposition to schools supported at public expense. Depression is not entirely without its compensations. Retrenchment and economy are not new words in our educational terminology. Between the upper and nether millstones of economic necessity, during that long period prior to the year 1900, we mastered the practical art of making a few dollars go a long way in the maintenance of an educational system. Out of economic adversity came also a group of professional and lay lead¬ ers, men like Aycock and Mclver, Page and Alderman, of North Carolina; Dabney and Claxton, of Tennessee; Curry, Phillips, and Abercrombie, of 136 National Education Association Alabama, prophets and priests of education, proponents of a new philosophy of government that gripped the imaginations and stirred, the enthusiasm of people everywhere. At last our civil polity contemplated education for a whole people at public expense. With respect to education, our govern¬ mental structures were democratic and sound. It should not be necessary to recount the admirable progress made in edu¬ cation thruout the South during the thirty-year period immediately preced¬ ing these unhappy times. According to the tangible evidences we still ranked low among the states with respect to educational facilities. Suffice it to observe the susceptibility of these tangible evidences to correction on account of the intangible influences that permit only theoretical measurement at most. Suffice it also to note the vast and ever-increasing expenditures during the period, in town and in country, both for capital outlay purposes and also for the current operation of schools. In our cities, magnificent, million- dollar structures for the education of high-school children are not uncom¬ mon ; in villages and open country, modern consolidated schools are to be found everywhere. Until depression came, inadequacy of educational facili¬ ties was principally a problem of rural education. If during good times educational facilities were still comparatively poor or inadequate, we were making such progress with respect to the organiza¬ tion, administration, and supervision of education as perhaps was being made in no other section of our country. In such matters as transportation and consolidation our record is altogether creditable. Indeed, there are those who believe that our enthusiasm for these recently developed instruments and agencies for the improvement of education has run ahead of our business judgment. Until a few years ago we were rapidly eliminating the district school, now predominantly taboo with students of educational administra¬ tion. Best examples of the larger unit of administration (usually the county unit) were to be found in the South. We were open-minded. We were not averse to experimentation. In such matters as curriculum-making, super¬ vision, the selection of superintendents and other administrative and super¬ visory officials on the basis of merit, we had abundant evidence of a bold and aggressive leadership at work. All the circumstances considered, we think we were carrying our share of the work for American education. In the midst of progress came depression — so far as education is concerned, financial chaos would be an apter phrase. Again, it is unnecessary to recount our presentday financial difficulties. Whether on the basis of actual needs or on the basis of comparison with other states or sections, funds for the sup¬ port and maintenance of our educational systems have always been inade¬ quate. When depression came funds were no longer in sight for the further advancement of any educational interest or institution. At first the financial problem of education in Alabama growing out of this situation was primarily one of prompt payments by the state of its assumed obligations to the vari¬ ous county and city boards of education and other boards of control, and of holding fast as well to the school revenues heretofore obtainable from the various local sources. General Sessions 137 Our program of education, always inadequate to our needs and always more or less restricted, has now suffered the most serious curtailments. In certain rural areas there have been shortened terms of school. In some places schools have closed. The alarm is constantly sounding that still other schools must close. City school authorities are pleading desperately that the state come to the rescue. Salary schedules very generally have become inoperative. Following the old paths of least resistance, those in authority have reduced salaries that were always low enough. More is the pity, that teachers have gone unpaid, many of them for months. In the cities, in the rural areas, and at the institutions, our creditable building programs have practically ceased. Consolidation, transportation, supervision, standardization, and teacher train¬ ing, all, on a praiseworthy and soundly progressive basis, if not in jeopardy, must await the return of a better day for further advances. The property tax, principal source of state and local revenues for schools, diminishes as would be expected in times such as these. Appropriations for education, payable from the general treasury of the state, have been drastically reduced, by the legislature. The state is behind with its obligations to the various administrative educational units in the sum of approximately $15,- 000,000, with no definite assurance as to when these obligations shall be met. Our recently enacted Budget and Financial Control Act balances the budget of the state but thru its system of prorations makes impossible sound budgetary procedure by any board of education or board of trustees of an educational institution. In a recent opinion of the attorney general of the state, inter¬ preting the Budget and Financial Control Act, the astounding tenet is ad¬ vanced that education is not an essential of government. In these circumstances, naturally enough there are those who believe that our entire public-school system is threatened with collapse. To the contrary, there are those who believe that life is like the dance; that life is rhythmical; that it is a series of ups and down. There are those who believe with the Psalmist of old that Weeping may tarry for the night, But joy cometh in the morning. We in the South, particularly in Alabama, are for the second time in the midst of persistent, continuing depression. With the possible exception of a few places, like Chicago, so far as public education is concerned, we are face to face with depression at its worst. Ours, therefore, is the big job of determining what the future of education shall be. This we believe to be the job of good leadership — leadership that brooks no discouragement, ad¬ mits no defeat, accepts the present plight of the schools only as a temporary affair, a passing consequence of hard times. I have sketched hastily and quite superficially the dire effects of two periods of depression upon education in Alabama and in the South. In such times as these we inevitably turn our attention first to the financial plight of the schools. All our schools from lowest to highest are, indeed, in desperate need of money. But the roots of the present trouble strike far deeper than our financial difficulties. 138 National Education Association It is difficult to view with complacency the celerity with which many educators have moved to effect economies that in the long run may not prove to be economies at all. In the present emergency we need to distinguish retrenchment from economy. The public has the right to demand economy in educational administration at all times. It should expect retrenchments only as financial reverses and limitations may make them necessary. We must not overwork words. We must be practical people. We must com¬ mand the attention of the whole public and its sympathetic understanding of the problems of educational administration. Critical and searching in¬ vestigations of the various aspects of the cost of education are neither to be feared nor to be opposed, provided only that all such investigations shall be made of all governmental functions and agencies and that all shall be scrapped that shall be found to have survived their usefulness. Curtailment of educational expenditures by force of necessity is one thing ; to admit extravagance and to set up permanent or long-time programs of education on reduced bases in the name of economy is quite another thing. To rush headlong into readjustments in the name of economy may subject us, not without show of reason, to the charge that we have all along been parties to indefensible extravagance. Salary reductions and other adjust¬ ments in educational expenditures are of course to be expected and defended in the present circumstances but the failure to provide for a quick readjust¬ ment to the decreased purchasing power of the dollar or to increased cost of living due to any other cause is not to be tolerated. Temporary adjust¬ ments to meet present conditions ; reorganization as a part of an intelligent, honest, and harmonious plan for the reorganization of all the functions and agencies of government; subjection to the strictest scrutiny and tests as to educational needs; but not abject surrender! We who are professionally engaged in education are not mainly responsi¬ ble for the extravagances — if there have been extravagances — in the cost of education. Our plants and equipment, our magnificent and costly school structures, beautiful temples of light and love, erected to the glory and dedicated to the education of youth, our extensive teaching staffs of trained and competent men and women, our ever-expanding curriculum offerings, all these, have been provided in orderly and legal ways, if not upon the demand, certainly with the willing consent and with the loving sacrifices of citizens in general and of the constituted authorities. Who shall be so bold as to say that we were more thafi parties affiliated with the citizenship of all America in an era of idealism as well as of realism ? The times are propitious for the work of radicals and reactionaries. Demagogs, designing politicians, and self-seeking opportunists thrive on mis¬ fortune and discontent. The significance of the educational problems grow¬ ing out of the present economic depression does not lie in the mere fact that the onward march of schools and institutions for the time being is estopped but rather in the disturbed state of the public mind. There is no wholesome, dependable, composite judgment with respect to education. Solidarity is lacking among the beneficiaries of the educational system. General Sessions 139 There is no unanimity of purpose, no concert of action, among those to whom we ordinarily look for guidance. Our interests conflict. We are selfish. We do not think in terms of larger educational units. We do not act harmoniously, for the common good. Skepticism is the corollary of demoralization. It is no wonder, if in times of economic distress, coordinated educational effort goes to wreck. If re¬ trenchment becomes necessary or even appears to be necessary, it is no wonder if those in authority or if those who are in any way concerned begin to look for educational appendages. We all remember Napoleon’s famous saying: “An army moves on its stomach.” If economic distress threatens even a part of the population with hunger ; if banks are forced to close ; if divi¬ dends dwindle and fortunes disappear, we must face bravely, painstakingly, intelligently, honestly, the questioning of all who are in doubt, particularly of the unthinking and the uninformed, concerning the various services essential in a comprehensive educational system. We must match wits with those who would seize the advantage of hard times to sacrifice democratic ideals of education upon the altar of selfishness. This is the great necessity. This is the fundamental problem growing out of the present economic distress. Education for the present, let us say again, depends principally upon business management, upon retrenchments, upon the extent and kind of services to be maintained with the money at hand. But education for the future depends upon the success with which we cope with those selfish inter¬ ests that seize the opportunity provided by a demoralized and skeptical public mind. It is difficult to escape the use of a much overworked and inept word. But it is certain that the public does not understand or appreciate the necessity for public education on its present bases. Protestations to the contrary, I suspect, are as old as time. Let me quote a sentence to illustrate: “The highest welfare, safety and power of a city consists in able, learned, wise, upright, cultivated citizens, who can secure, preserve, and utilize every treasure and advantage.” These modern-sounding words were spoken more than four hundred years ago by Martin Luther. I wonder that some diligent researchist has not found that the first demagog won his political victory shouting for a free school and never did anything about it. However that may be, we have failed to imbue the public with sound, lasting, democratic ideals with reference to education. Education has not failed. It is more needed today than ever before and doubtless will be needed more and more in the years to come. The progress we have made in the arts and sciences, we have made principally on account of education, not in spite of it. Education did not create this depression. If we are to be rid of it, we must repose our trust in men and women whom we ordinarily think of as educated. We must look ultimately to education for successful outcomes of all our religious, social, political, and economic affairs. Education at its best must provide for speedy readjustments as may necessarily arise from social or economic change. But social or economic changes in the future must be subject to the dominant influence, if not to 140 National Education Association the direction and control, of education. Ours is the job to see to it that the common man — the mythical average man — is informed and taught to think about these things, particularly as problems of government. Discussion, agitation, commiseration among ourselves as a professional group will do little or no good. The future of education will depend princi¬ pally upon the understanding, the interests, the decisions, and the demands of the general public. The money-changers apparently desire to control, if not to monopolize for a small, selected group, leadership in all fields of endeavor. At least that is the inevitable consequence of restricting oppor¬ tunities for education at the higher levels. We need a bolder self assertion. We need to redefine clearly and as permanently as may be the aims and objectives of education with respect to its organization, administration, and supervision. I hold it to be a major problem of those professionally and officially engaged in education to define and expound its philosophy, to fix its objectives, to determine wisely the amount and kind of education that should be provided in a democracy. We need to explain, to argue, to urge, to protest, to warn against the evil consequences of thoughtless, ruthless, and indiscriminate curtailment of the present educational program, and, above all, by the dominant assurance and authority that come of knowledge, tc win the hearty support and approval of those who must pay the bill for American education. It may be a platitude to sound the call for educational leaders, profes¬ sional and non-professional, who shall show us the way out of the quagmire of demoralization, skepticism, ignorance, misinformation, selfishness, and all those other forces that combine and conspire to prevent or to retard the educational progress always to be desired and sought for in a democracy. This is the great necessity of the state and section whence I come. We must go back and do over the work of the fine and courageous leaders who have gone before us. We have failed at publicity. We have been indolent. We have lacked courage. We have resorted too frequently to defense ; too infrequently to challenge. We must. expect demoralization among those who are un¬ organized and undirected. We must expect skepticism of those who are uninformed. We must expect extravagant utterance of those who dare. We may not expect the public mind to be reflected in educational progress except as it is made to understand and moved to appreciate the inseparableness of education and the common good. We in the South must produce another generation of leaders. We must look to another prophet and priest like J. L. M. Curry of Alabama, good “Educational Bishop of the South.” We must look to another Captain of the Hosts like Charles B. Aycock of North Carolina, who died tragically but gloriously with the word, “Education,” literally upon his lips. We must look to the lay group. Among our public officials, among our business and professional men, manufacturers, and farmers, we must develop leaders who will have vision, who will have sympathy for human suffering, who will heed the holy mandates of truth and duty, who will have time and strength and courage to preach the democratic doctrine of equality of educational General Sessions 141 opportunity for every child. We need leaders that there may be judicially authorized definitions of the legal status of education ; that education may be accepted for all time as an indispensable agency of government. We need for leaders, captains that there may be discipline; interpreters, that there may be understanding; messengers, that the word may be carried every¬ where. Then, in spite of confusion, demoralization, skepticism and selfish¬ ness, in spite of the discouragement that comes of the present distressing lack of money, may we not say of the future of education — “Joy cometh with the morning?” THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY A. DUNCAN YOCUM, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, PHILADELPHIA, PA. Never in the history of mankind has a people so widely distributed and representing such conflicting interests, met what has been falsely called “depression,” with such glorious self-sacrifice and such magnificent self- control. Our democracy has kept pace with our century of progress, and, until now, our material progress has contributed to our democracy. So when, in a recent meeting of the National Council of Education, one of the dis¬ tinguished speakers, with a bit of the quality which Richard Le Gallienne once called “a certain cynicism of the American people,” interjected the question, “What is democracy anyhow?” I felt that I answered quite ade¬ quately with what I am sure many others may have thought an “empty abstraction” or a platitude. “Democracy,” I said, “as each one of us well knows, is not an institution, a declaration, or a constitution; but a common and controlling state of mind in every individual and every group — a con¬ tinually growing strength , responsibility , love and faith , exercised toward a continually more inclusive body of people and a continually broadening and continually finer common welfare But when President Rosier asked me to answer the question, “What is the function of education in a democracy?” and I unhesitatingly replied to myself, “To teach each individual and every group how to preserve, per¬ petuate, and aid an ever-growing democracy, and how to maintain the peculiar conditions which have made possible the success of the American experiment,” I felt, and I now feel, far less confident that the statement will mean to all Americans and to American teachers what it means to me. Perhaps Miss Chari Williams gave you a more human and impressive idea of what I mean, when she so dramatically presented at one of our current meetings, the four Chicago boys who recently journeyed to Washing¬ ton as the official representatives of 250,000 companions, to urge upon governmental commissions and officials, financial action helpful to Chicago schools. Their clear and clean-cut arguments for their cause, the favorable im¬ pressions they made both in Washington and before the National Education Association, and their gentlemanly demeanor and social adaptiveness as guests of a gracious hostess exemplify in a way highly creditable to their 142 National Education Association Chicago high-school training important phases of what direct education in democracy ought to be. When democracy is defined, however, as generally as I defined it above, I firmly believe that the history of civilization itself — even tho written in the cynical fashion of Mr. Wells, is the story of the steady march of all mankind toward a continually completer democracy. From the brutal in¬ dividualism of the caveman to some future community of “men as gods,” thru families, tribes, kingdoms, alliances, empires, free cities, republics, and leagues of nations, men have concerned themselves with a continually ex¬ panding commonalty, and sought to give to more and more groups an ever- increasing common good. I believe that the Soviet, Hitler, and Mussolini are alike, consciously or unconsciously engaged in applying what are perhaps the only means by which their several peoples can be made to concern themselves with a common good. I know that it has become popular to insist that our spiritual development has lagged behind our material growth. But there is a relativity in human progress as well as in the movements of the celestial spheres. The too obvious contrast between material and spiritual advancement loses sight of the fact that the spiritual growth of a race is of necessity slower than its material progress. A single scientist or inventor can create a new epoch in material civilization. A developing democracy demands a higher level for the whole social mass. More than this — prosperity and luxury often in themselves make spiritual growth more difficult. When, for example, Dr. Bagley finds that the ordinary Frenchman is more moral than the ordinary American, it is due to the fact that the French peasant has far less material temptation to go wrong. It is harder to be good in America than in provincial France, and harder to be good in the great city of today than along some old colonial frontier. In the face of all this, I am not at all sure that our spiritual growth has not outstripped every other phase of our civilization. But it is in the United States alone, that majority rule, less a “tradition” than a belief that all men are created free and equal, has attempted the vast experiment of a government of the whole people, by the whole people, and for the whole people — a majority rule which is true to the experiment sublime, only when it is characterized by a common desire to further the common welfare, and which, like any other experiment, can be successful only under favorable conditions rigidly maintained. The threat to American democracy today does not lie in the extraordi¬ nary but definitely defined powers temporarily conferred by the people themselves upon a trusted executive in a tremendous emergency. The legalistic accusation made bv distinguished constitutional lawyers such as my fellow Philadelphian, Mr. Beck, that the national Congress is sur¬ rendering constitutional safeguards entrusted to it by the states and the people, loses sight of the fact that the most democratic feature of the United States Constitution is its abundant provision for change. If the common welfare is to grow, democracy must experiment. And Congress has given General Sessions 143 the President the opportunity to experiment anew, because an overwhelm¬ ing majority of the American people are anxious that new conditions shall be met by new solutions tho some of them will succeed and others fail. There is no danger to democracy in a limited absolutism temporarily conferred and subject to prompt repeal. The danger comes from the dis¬ turbance of conditions favorable to the American experiment, in the ab¬ sence of which we will lose all the peculiar advantages we possess in the inclusiveness and unity of our people and in the quality and the scope of our common good. From the standpoint of an inclusive and harmonious people, there must be no intereference with the personal liberty, the equality of opportunity, and betterment in living conditions, which more than any other factor, has made us a happy and contented people. We have no Jewish pogroms; no Kulaks dispossessed of property won thru superior industry and frugality; no nuns and monks driven from ancient establishments distinguished for devotion, service, and learning. From the standpoint of the common welfare, we must not, thru a pre¬ mature and interfering internationalism in finance and commerce, put the American workingman or the ordinary American in general — who after all, whether teacher, clerk, or physician, usually is a workingman — on the lower economic and spiritual level resulting from the displacement of American-made goods bought by American-earned income, with products made by cheaper labor in England, Germany, or Japan. And, most fundamental of all, we must have no impairment of the American system of education which is the essential means both to democratic equality and to the superiorities to which we have become accustomed in our standards of living. This education should, of course, include the academic instruction de¬ pended upon by our forefathers as the sole preparation for the duties of citi¬ zenship. The stern struggle of Horace Mann for a truly public education materially contributed to the onward march of democracy. Dr. Bagley in his comparatively recent study of European education found that in general, democracy, at least in governmental forms, existed only in those nations which have systems of public education. And in spite of Hitlerism — with school children and athletes alike still marching to the goose step, so far as the permanent growth of democracy is concerned, this still holds true. More than this, in the face of racketeering and of an equally ruthless profiteering in high finance at the expense of the whole people, education, as our own Association’s recent study scientifically proved, still results in a lessening of crime. Education for democracy must continue to include, as it does now include, the nationwide emphasis of the social studies which followed upon Dr. Judd’s cooperative scheme for adapting the social sciences to schoolroom use, and the report of Dr. Dawson’s committee on the Teaching of the Social Studies. Such emphasis has had not a little to do with preparing the public mind for 144 National Education Association legislation and executive action under the advice of the “brain trust.” One of the greatest needs of a democracy seeking a continual broadening of the common welfare is a growing faith in experts — conditioned, of course, by an increasing number of experts who inspire such faith, not only thru their common and trustworthy scientific attitude of mind, but thru their un¬ questioned devotion to democracy itself. Neither the passing of intelligence tests, the committing to memory of declarations and constitutions, nor familiarity with the causes of poverty, nor any purely academic political or social training, will take the place of a universal personal familiarity with the common welfare, both matter-of- course and as determined by trusted experts; and of a loving and an eager personal furtherance of it thru any self-expression which aids it and insures each individual his own share in it, and thru any self-sacrifice which is neces¬ sary in demanding it and securing it for all others. This is what the old National Council Committee meant by the “Teaching of Democracy.” It involves not only an intelligent knowledge of the “prob¬ lems of democracy,” but an intelligent and self-sacrificing love of democracy itself. The public school must not leave as much as it has been accustomed to leave, the training of citizens in self-sacrifice, to the patriotism inspired by war or the charity compelled by disaster. Democracy grows and becomes personally controlling more thru the pettier self-sacrifices which we make or withhold in the ordinary affairs and the usual situations which confront us in everyday life. While for a specification of democracy essentials I shall have to refer you to the reports of the Committee on the Teaching of Democracy in the N. E. A. Proceedings from 1917 to 1924, beginning with the Democracy Questionnaire which so many superintendents were self-sacrificing enough to fill out, I shall attempt to illustrate the direct teaching of them all thru that of the democratic equality which so sharply contrasts itself with the equality of communism, sovietism, and even of socialism in its less radical forms. Perhaps it is first of all necessary that American children should learn that the most fundamental difference between the equality of democracy and that of every other sort of institution and government, is that it demands no more self-sacrifice on the part of individual or group, than is indispensable to the good of all individuals and all groups. This difference is fundamental and determining for all other democracy essentials. Beyond this, democratic equality has as its peculiar factors, first: E — Equivalent Return, from a fair bargain such as Professor Tufts once defined in his True Business of Living, to highest performance and fair play in labor, and compensating service in return for political rights. American children must be taught that there is such a thing as too much freedom — free admissions, free passes, free luncheons, free concerts, free schools, free art, and free religion ; that in a democracy, if democracy is to endure, when much is given much must be given in return ; that even the forced labor of the Soviet is more democratic than the English dole or our General Sessions 145 American unemployment relief; that relief should be universal and ade¬ quate, but that not one cent should be given to able-bodied men and women, free from the care of young children, the sick, or the incapable — without some form of equivalent and compensating service which preserves their in¬ dependence and their self-respect. Our children must be taught that the American people must not be im¬ poverished thru an international finance and commerce which surrenders our superior living conditions ; but that even should we be impoverished, we must not be pauperized ; that we cannot have as a political slogan “a full dinner pail and a high standard of living for every worker” without adding to it a full and an honest and generous day’s work in return for a living wage.” The shirker in industry, whether plumber or farmhand, is as undemocratic and un-American, tho no more so, than the profiteer in the country store, the pawnshop or, when he happens to be there, the private bank. Every politi¬ cal right and privilege has a compensating duty. Even the spiritual inheritance of the race carries with it the obligation of making it one’s own. As thru municipal orchestra or the radio or thru public museums and academies of the fine arts, the finest achievements of mankind in music and in art are made accessible to us by a princely private munificence or the wise expenditure of public funds, we owe to artists who starved in garrets and to musicians who composed their masterpieces in deafness or in blindness, the one equivalent return we can give them — an ever-growing discriminat¬ ing and sympathetic appreciation of what they created. Q — Qualification for Equality Thru Self -Qualification. The development of an ever-increasing appreciation, together with other factors in democratic equality, is impossible without self-qualification. We must teach that equality as a right must thru self-effort become equality as a personal achievement; that no laws prohibiting Jim Crow cars or no elbowing of one’s way into a desirable society can take the place of the hard won personal acquisition of the qualities necessary to unem¬ barrassed and unembarrassing participation in the activities of every social group. School children must learn that public schools and state colleges and universities, the right to pursue any sort of career, and even the privilege of entering upon the spiritual inheritance of the race, do not exist for any citizen who thru lack of self-qualification fails to improve the opportunity to enter into possession of his equal rights. Most of the equalities which charac¬ terize democracy must be self-earned. U — Unlimited Achievement and Compensation. It is especially necessar)r that all citizens just now shall be taught to realize that from this self-quali¬ fication to the equality of achievement which comes thru highest effort, there must be no limit to individual accomplishment and compensation, except when they interfere with the common welfare. We must never forget that the common welfare cannot continually broaden and be ever increasing in the worths and the finenesses made accessible to all, if the worker, the scholar, the inventor, and the capitalist are not permitted to attain the highest achieve- 146 National Education Association ment or to seek to attain it, thru the stimulus of unlimited possible compensa¬ tion. So long as the Soviet prohibits any extra material reward for the indi¬ vidual who works harder, accomplishes more, and does better work, daily achievement and the realization of Five-Year Plans will be limited to the dead level of what the least efficient or the less efficient can accomplish. America cannot afford to discourage superiority. Excessive taxes imposed upon “excess profits” will surely lessen or wholly prevent some of the most adventurous types of achievement. There have been no James J. Hills and no building of Northwestern Railroads where vast capital is risked in tremendous adventures helpful to the common good, since excess profits have been reduced by extra taxation into small returns disproportionate to the great financial risks involved. Notwithstanding bank failures and the misuse of our national resources, prejudice against “capitalism” will not gain ground in America, if children are taught to discriminate between local capital and local credit which while meeting local needs and serving local interests, can be invested with reason¬ able risks in great industrial or commercial undertakings where there is prospect of proportionate gain; and capital which drains the smaller com¬ munities and rural regions of credit needed for local enterprises, and makes banking and financing too remote to be personal and human. They must come to know the difference between capital loaned to en¬ courage legitimate business, and capital loaned for speculation on margin, which creates fictitious values and saps like a vampire bat the life blood of bolder achievement. A concentrated control of capital must not be used to discourage new enter¬ prises by demanding the lion’s share of profits and by hijacking or racketeer¬ ing successful businesses which, seeking legitimate expansion, have subjected themselves to the risk involved in the premature calling of great loans. It must not use its power to consolidate American industries, transporta¬ tion, and public service, into vast combinations, and to inflate stock values on the basis of prospective savings which could have more justly been used to reduce taxes or costs for the individual citizen or property owner. It must never again lend in Europe and in South America billions needed at home, on indifferent, doubtful, or rotten security, in order to give favored financial interests enormous commissions on money which they themselves do not risk, but which represents the life savings of both the poor and the well-to-do and the spending power, and therefore the earning power, of the whole people. And finally, capital drawn from the bank deposits and the insurance premiums of the nation, must not be used to create a vast private financial control which dominates American industry and commerce, commands or limits political action, and then seizes upon legal technicalities to avoid pay¬ ing to the American people as a government, the taxes on the commissions which are but a small fraction of the taxables which were lost both to owners General Sessions 147 and to government thru the insecure transactions upon which the commissions were acquired. The vast majority of the American people have learned, and American children must be taught to remember, that no patriotic service, however loyal and efficient, on the part of individual members in such a partnership, and no princely patronage of the fine arts and endowment of institutions of learning, can justify the replacement of local control of local credit, by a cosmopolitan, international, and undemocratic financial system which pre¬ vents rather than aids the unlimited individual achievement and compensa¬ tion which have made America prosperous and great. Democracy does not demand like the Soviet, that money (to use the phrase of Dr. Butler) “be dethroned and expelled from the high place which it has been occupying for some 400 years.” Money in some form or other — some highly stable and unfluctuating form — is essential to the exchange of goods ; and the higher the degree of fineness of goods included in the common wel¬ fare, the higher the place which money must occupy in democratic society. The democracy of capital depends upon the way in which it is used, which is only another way of saying that the capitalist must be the most democratic of all citizens. “Control of money and constant association with money,” Dr. Butler goes on to say, “are perhaps the most demoralizing of human occupations. There is something about the contact and control which ob¬ scures moral principles and human values, and tends to develop a stiffly legalistic attitude toward every human relationship. This contact and control are uniformly accompanied by secretiveness, and secretiveness without any actual falsehood whatever is one of the most effective instruments of deceit.” Every American should be taught to realize the fundamental nature of this courageous pronouncement by President Butler. Capital will not be safe for America nor America for capital until the great financiers, whose affairs thru relationship to public prosperity, tho private, can never be kept secret, and perhaps with them, the distinguished lawyers whose advice keeps their activities “legalistic,” have been so steeped in democracy, that they can exclaim with the psalmist, “My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto thine ordinances at all times.” All this it is the function of education in a democracy to teach. A — Abilities and Skills Unequal, but Equal Rights and O pportunities. It is an obvious corollary of unlimited achievement and compensation, that unequal abilities and skills will for the most part remain unequal ; and that equality of achievement lies only in highest individual effort. So far as the common good is concerned, all men are equal who serve it with all their might. The equality of democracy is rather an equality of rights and of opportuni¬ ties which, thru its very exercise and the provisions made to insure it, trains and educates unequal individual abilities into still more unequal skills. But in a period of reduced taxation and lessening public income from taxation, it is necessary that both in our teaching and in our allotment of public funds, we should hold in mind the fact, that to maintain and insure 148 National Education Association equality of rights and of opportunities, a truly democratic education must continue “universal,” as Dr. Spaulding used to call it — universal in its in¬ clusiveness of the kinds of education fitted to the needs of every individual and every group ; universal in its inclusiveness of the common culture which gives every man the opportunity of being civilized and humane. L — An Equality thru Leveling up in Place of Leveling Down. And finally, equality as regards the common welfare — social and spiritual as well as material, must be brought about thru a leveling up rather than a leveling down. A living wage as shown in a continually improving standard of living — more comfortable housing, more attractive dressing, more auto¬ mobiles and radios, is only at best a favorable condition to a fuller and a finer self-expression and appreciation — a continually completer individual participation in the spiritual inheritance of the race. America cannot afford to permit a leveling down. There is nothing char¬ acteristic of night club and roadhouse, which cannot be better done in the African jungle. Barbarians and savages can dance longer, drink harder, and make louder whoopee. They can even be more naturally and effectively nude. The street cleaner who sings the “Venetian Boat Song” or snatches of Italian opera, when he first lands in America has not risen to a higher level when he learns to enjoy jazz and the blues. Better an old Spanish serenade played by a Mexican sheepherder in Arizona or New Mexico or even “Sweet Adeline” sung by a male quartette, than the sickly sentiment of the crooner. When a Swedish-born Chicago citizen spends $250,000 in reproducing an ancient Chinese temple in Boston, and then directs the archeologist who inspired the idea, to build another one in Chicago, he leads the way to a higher level of taste and appreciation, than is represented by a nationwide sale of imitation Satsuma or Cloisonne stamped “made in Japan” without the completing statement which is in the mind of the Japanese who made it — “made in Japan but only for sale in America.” Among the most powerful factors which make for a higher social level in America today, are the public art collections provided by men and women of wealth and culture; the broadcasting of symphony and grand opera by national advertisers who have not yet lost confidence in popular taste; the insistence by the American Federation of Labor upon a public education which over and beyond vocational training, will teach a love of the beautiful and insure an unembarrassed and unembarrassing participation in the finer phases of social life; and — the most fundamental factor of the four — the emphasis of literature, the fine arts, and training in good manners and social usages, which narrow minded taxpayers are even now seeking to exclude from public-school instruction. The whole social level of democracy is leveled down, to the extent to which each American citizen is not a gentleman. Whatever the land or the nationality from which he or his forefathers came to our shores, he should contribute to the land of his adoption what is finest in the life and the culture of the country and the people which he left behind. He will not be unembarrassed and unembarrassing if he is not suffi- General Sessions 149 ciently practised in the use and unhesitating choice of correct grammatical forms. However socially experienced he may be, he may occasionally fail to use the right fork or spoon unless he keeps his eye upon the more significant movements of an ambitious and original hostess. But he must with an un¬ varying wish to be pleasing to others, at least live up to the code of courtesy adopted some years ago by Chicago high-school boys and girls. He must be interested in what interests others and learn to play the games which others play. He must come increasingly into those finer tastes and appreciations by which men who are human and humane have come to measure the progress of civilization. These are only a few of the things which it is the function of education to teach, if the democracy which we now possess is to grow into a democracy which is more complete. When I attempt to gauge our development — in spite of many an individual failing and national fault, and in the face of .what reformers and students of civil government have called the breakdown of democracy in our great cities — even in the midst of alarms, I am heartened by an optimism which comes from familiarity with our national history and pride in the strength and the courage with which we have weathered every storm. When I feel discouraged at our incompleteness and inequalities, there always comes to my mind the rejoinder of the young foreign-born American when I complained of a breach of good manners in a railroad car and de¬ plored the lack of the truer and finer democracy of which it was a sign. “After all,” he exclaimed, “ought we not to be very proud of the fact that we have more of it than any other people?” Sometime or other in the history of every people there comes a gigantic catastrophe or an extraordinary prosperity which constitutes the crucial test not only of its form of government but of its national spirit and the civiliza¬ tion which is its highest expression. Both in prosperity and catastrophe our democracy, even in its incompleteness, has so far seen us thru. We are already democratic enough for democracy to endure. We still must learn how to be democratic enough for democracy to grow. To teach us this, is the most characteristic function of education in a democracy. THE ELEMENTARY PRINCIPAL MEETS THE EMERGENCY CASSIE F. ROYS, MEMBER OF EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, DEPARTMENT OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PRINCIPALS, AND PRINCIPAL, WALNUT HILL SCHOOL, OMAHA, NEBR. During the past twelve or thirteen years, there has been rapid growth in the development of the elementary-school principalship. The wide expansion of our public-school program during these prosperous years demanded leader¬ ship in the field of elementary education. This demand for leadership called for professional preparation, sympathetic understanding, and a personal enthusiasm. The elementary-school principal assumed this leadership. 150 National Education Association Now that the prosperous days are no more and we are facing a crisis in education, the demand for intelligent professional leadership and service is stronger than ever. These difficult days do not find the elementary-school principal unprepared. His previous training and preparation have made it possible for him to meet this emergency with poise, with unflinching cour¬ age, with skill and initiative thru four different fields of service. In the first field, he finds it necessary to exercise and promote the strictest economy in the administration of his school, on account of reduced revenue ; in the second field, thru public relations with his community, he is the inter¬ preter of the program and policy of his school, so that the laymen will know what the school is doing and why; in the third field, on account of so much unemployment, the problem of public welfare becomes a very serious one; in the fourth field, it is the duty of the principal to maintain the morale of his teaching staff. APPLYING ETHICS TO ECONOMICS ROBERT C. MOORE, SECRETARY, ILLINOIS STATE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION, CARLINVILLE, ILL. This address will be a discussion of four propositions, as follows: 1. The present abnornal economic conditions and detrimental maladjustments sig¬ nify a breakdown in our economic system. 2. The main cause of the economic breakdown and resultant suffering and distress has been the violation of ethical principles or natural economic laws. 3. Certain ethical principles must be applied in our economic system in order to rehabilitate it and make it work. 4. The public mind must be informed of the evils of the present system of economics, and our collective conscience mu§t be aroused to correct them by the application of ethical principles. 1. The present abnormal economic conditions and detrimental maladjust¬ ments signify a breakdown in our economic system. In this land of intelligent, ambitious, and energetic people, of bounteous natural resources, and of untold reserves of power, a feeling of economic insecurity and dread of the future exists too generally among the people. In this very city, while Big Business proudly points to the gigantic Exposi¬ tion celebrating a Century of Progress, teachers whose instruction produced the progress of the century go unpaid and destitute. In this commercial community, where hundreds of millions of now van¬ ished dollars were invested in certain holding companies based only upon the imagination of a great exploiter, and where it is alleged that millions of other dollars are being collected in overcharges by two or three of the constituent companies, nearly a million unemployed and poverty-stricken people have for over a year been fed at public expense. While dairy farmers in their desperation pour cheap milk into sewers, and wheat farmers feed their product to hogs, the plaintive voices of weak and hungry children beg their sorrowing mothers for bread and milk. General Sessions 151 While millions of bushels of corn, lacking a market, are rotting in Illi¬ nois cribs or are being burned as fuel in Iowa stoves, millions of unemployed men and their families are being doled out a scanty allowance of food by public or private charity, altho these men would rather work to earn their food by making the things the farmers need and want and would buy if they could sell their corn above the cost of production. There are gigantic reserves of gold and enormous bank deposits in America, but there is also an alarming and paralyzing shortage of money in circulation. Hundreds of banks have failed, thousands have closed their doors for a time, and many have been bolstered up with public funds raised by taxation. Great factories stand silent and motionless and their smokestacks point to the unstained sky like monuments to a former period of prosperity, while ten million people are unemployed and these and other millions desire and need manufactured products. Bankers, railroad presidents, and other business men organize to oppose taxation and to beat down the cost of education, and at the same time they demand of the government financial aid raised by taxation in order to save their banks, railroads, and business. One banker, who has little patience with teachers who insist upon being paid for their services, recently obtained about $90,000,000 of such public funds to prop up his tottering financial throne. It now appears that some of the great men who have been held up to the admiring youth of this country as the very personification of patriotism, power, profits, riches, and income, have not paid any income tax in this coun¬ try for two or three years, while others who have a hard time to meet their bills have paid, and now by comparison feel like bloated plutocrats. Altho this nation is called a great democracy and the land of equal op¬ portunity, there are the widest possible differences in the possession oi piop- erty and the greatest inequalities in the distribution of wealth. In The Com¬ ing of a New Party } Paul Douglas says: Some years ago, Dr. W. I. King, after conducting a careful investigation, concluded that 2 peicent of the population owned 60 percent of the wealth, leaving 98 percent of the people to get along with 40 percent of the wealth. A more recent investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over a wider field has shown that his figures underestimate the degree of concentration which exists. In 1918 the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that 70 percent of all incomes above $2,000 went to 2 percent of the income recipients.” In Fighting Business Depressions Roger Babson, the great financial writer, declares: “Great inequalities continue to exist under capitalism. It is said that 70 percent of those dying every year do not leave property enough to have their estates probated. A study of income tax returns shows that about 5 percent of the people of this country own over 80 percent of the countn s wealth. Furthermore, such study seems to indicate a constantly increasing concentration of both income and property, in the hands of a smaller pei- centage.” 152 National Education Association Harry Elmer Barnes, in Can Man Be Civilized f, makes these compari¬ sons : Y ear Over $5,000,000 Annual Incomes Over Over $1,000,000 $100,000 1921 . 6 1929 . 36 21 2,352 504 14,701 “The total income of these 504 super-millionaires in 1929 was $1,185,- 135,000, giving an average of over $2,300,000 proving that there must have been some vast incomes to bring the average up to this point. In 1928, 15,780 persons out of 120,000,000 received one-eighth of the total national income. ” There is much evidence that the amount of money income or property possessions bears little relation to productive labor or other real service to society. In fact there are glaring examples of people rendering useful or necessary service and receiving very little remuneration, while others whose methods and activities are predatory rather than useful reap large financial gains. Some peiform slavish toil for almost nothing, and others reap riches by easy and questionable practises. So we are again reminded of what an American philosopher, Henry George, in Progt ess and Poverty , realized over 50 years agor “Everywhere the increasing intensity of the struggle to live, the increasing necessity for straining every nerve to prevent being thrown down and trodden underfoot in the scramble for wealth, is draining the forces which gain and maintain improvements. Civilization has begun to wane when, in proportion to popu¬ lation, we build more and more prisons, more and more almshouses, more and more insane asylums.” Poverty amid plenty ; starvation surrounded by surpluses ; penury among people having powers of production ; pauperism and prosperity ; poorhouses and pampered plutocrats; men and money, machines and materials in super¬ abundance, but all idle while millions need and desire what they could pro¬ duce; teachers without salary rendering society a necessary service in a city boasting of its wealth and a Century of Progress — these inconsistent condi¬ tions, incompatible practises, and incongruous or conflicting rules of the game have pioduced such serious maladjustments in our economic system that it is wrecked and there is much distress and suffering among our people. 2. The main cause of the economic breakdown and resultant suffering and dist? ess has been the violation of ethical principles or natural economic laws. Expressed in general terms, the economic sin now bringing its retribution is parasitism, or the practise of living, possibly luxuriously, upon the labor of others. This is nothing new, since it was old in 1858 when Abraham Lincoln said : It is the eternal struggle between the two principles, right and wrong, thruout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in General Sessions 153 whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ ” In these words, Lincoln clearly stated that economic parasitism is wrong, or is a violation of a principle of ethics. Or we can go back still farther. In fact every great moral leader held in respect by the people denounced parasitism — for instance, Jesus, Moses, Buddha. Sir Edwin Arnold, in The Light of Asia , tells us that when the last-named was a young man known as Prince Siddartha, son of the king of a state of India, the king one day took him to the fields and woods to show him the beauties of nature, the works of man, and the glories of his kingdom. As the king proudly pointed to these things and eloquently pro¬ claimed their beauties and benefits, the prince was at first impressed by the materialistic ideals of his father: But looking deep he saw The thorns which grow upon this tree of life; How the swart peasant sweated for his wage, Toiling for leave to live; and how he urged The great-eyed oxen thru the flaming hours, Goading their velvet flanks; then marked he too, How lizard fed on ant, and snake on him, And kite on both ; and how the fish-hawk robbed The fish-tiger of that which it had seized; The shrike chasing the bulbul, which did chase The jewelled butterflies; till everywhere Each slew a slayer and in turn was slain, Life living upon death. So the fair show Veiled one vast, savage, grim conspiracy Of mutual murder, from the worm to man, •Who himself kills his fellow; seeing which The hungry ploughman and his laboring kine, Their dewlaps blistered with the bitter yoke, The rage to live which makes all living strike — The Prince Siddartha sighed, “Is this,” he said, “That happy earth they brought me forth to see? How salt with sweat the peasant’s bread! How fierce The war of weak and strong! In the air what plots! No refuge e’en in water. Go aside A space, and let me muse on what you show.” So saying the good Lord Buddha seated him Under a jambu tree, with ankles crossed As holy statues sit; and first began To meditate the deep disease of life, What its far source, and when its remedy. It seems that the same thorns are still growing on the tree of life, and that we are still asking, “Whence the remedy for this deep disease of life?,” other¬ wise known as selfishness and greed, which causes business in its economic strife to revert to the law of the jungle, the observation of which, about 500 B. C., was the initial inspiration to Prince Siddartha to become Buddha. But let us see what reputable writers of the present day say on this sub¬ ject, specifically in relation to our present economic crisis. W. H. Kilpatrick, 154 National Education Association in Education and the Social Crisis , says : “We forget that ‘success’ under the new conditions is generally if not necessarily based upon a real exploitation of many others.” He says also: “The more we study speculation and its schemes of promotion, the harder it is to draw any satisfactory line between speculation and speculative promotion on the one hand, and racketeering on the other. Each is trying to get something for nothing. . . . Getting some¬ thing for nothing at the expense of others is socially evil and wrong, how¬ ever it is named.” Henry S. Dennison, in Ethics and Modern Business, refers to the unethi¬ cal practises of business as follows: “In the course of its history business has had a lurid variety of standards of behavior ; and sometimes it has had none at all — not even the rather elusive brand called ‘honor among thieves.’ ” Ernest D. MacDougall, in Crime for Profit, puts it this way: “What is it that leads otherwise honorable and respected bankers and brokers to abuse the power intrusted confidently to their hands by an unsuspecting public? The answer is: Avarice, covetousness, cupidity, greed.” And again the same author says: “Some say the industrial depression is the inevitable result of ‘cycles’ of business — a sort of seasonable recurrence — or, maybe, a freak of nature. It is nothing of the sort! It is the result of criminal acts committed by our leading bankers and brokers.” John T. Flynn, in Graft in Business, says: “I am in no great state of agitation over the operations of the financial outlaw. His peculations are small compared with the huge losses inflicted upon investors by gentlemen who occupy positions of trust in our social organization.” The unethical exploiters have various ways of collecting for their own use the earnings of others. For instance, one of the simplest ways is to reduce workers’ wages far below their actual earnings and barely above minimum subsistence, and at the same time appropriate to themselves enormous salaries, dividends, and bonuses. This practise and its evil results are mentioned by an eminent sociologist, Cecil Clare North, in Social Problems and Social Planning, as follows : “We permit such a large share of the returns of manu¬ facturing establishments to be taken in profits that these profits are ex¬ pended in expanding the equipment of the plants to three or four times the size that can be utilized. And at the same time we permit the employer to pay such a low wage that the workers cannot buy enough of the products of the plants to keep them running.” Thus we see that we all suffer to¬ gether when the greed of capitalists ruins their market by the expansion of their plants to produce goods instead of expanding the purchasing power of the workers to buy goods. When the markets are ruined, men and machines are both idle, and capital and labor both suffer. Some believe this to have been one of the main causes of the great depression. We quote Ella Wheeler Wilcox who, over thirty years ago, in Poems of Power, expressed herself concerning the evils of machine multiplication and monopoly: Said the great machine of iron and wood, “Lo, I am a creature meant for good. But the criminal clutch of a Godless greed General Sessions 155 Has made me a monster that scatters need And want and hunger wherever I go. I would lift men’s burdens and lighten their woe, I would give them leisure to laugh in the sun, If owned by the Many, instead of the one. “If owned by the people, the whole wide earth Should learn my purpose and know my worth. I would close the chasm that yawns in our soil ’Twixt unearned riches and ill-paid toil, No man should hunger, and no man labor To fill the purse of an idle neighbor; And each should know when his work was done, Were I shared by the Many, not owned by one. “I am forced by the few, with their greed for gain, To forge for the many new fetters of pain. Yet this is my purpose, and ever will be, To set the slaves of the workshop free. God hasten the day when, overjoyed, That desperate host of the unemployed Shall hear my message and understand, And hail me friend in an opulent land.” Lack of time forbids a discussion of all the unethical practises in the eco¬ nomic field. We shall merely mention an additional two or three, as follows: obtaining control of government by means of large campaign contributions to candidates and support of candidates by propaganda thru a subservient press ; a form of bribery by the sale of stock at less than its market value to men of power and influence in politics; high pressure sales of stocks and bonds to the public at much more than they are worth ; forcing bonded prop¬ erties into receiverships for the purpose of looting them ; dodging taxes by means of “fixed” assessments, false affidavits, political influence, or tax strikes, thereby shifting to others the cost of the government that protects the lives, property, and business of all — in fact, any practise that enables any individual or company to obtain money, service, or property without a fair compensating return. In this connection, and to teachers paid by public taxation, we cannot re¬ frain from comparing taxation for public benefits with levying tribute for private gain. Business men in the very highest strata of commerce, industry, banking, and other economic institutions presume to criticize the cost of the schools and other public institutions, altho they certainly know that it has not been taxation to pay for public service that has wrecked our economic system so much as it has been the levying of tribute on the public by powerful predatory individuals and corporations. Midwest Securities and similar com¬ panies have done far more damage to the economic system of Chicago than has taxation for school purposes. The exploiter’s dollar was stolen, but the school dollar purchased a necessary service. Insull extortions left wreckage, distress, ruin, and rancor in their wake; school revenues produced informa¬ tion, constructive thought, ideals, character, hope, and patriotism in a genera- 156 National Education Association tion of young people. Therefore, a fair consideration of both the amounts collected and the results produced forces us to the conclusion that enforced tribute for private gain is much more costly to the people than taxation for public purposes. The following quotation is from Outlines of Sociology , by Blackmar and Gillin: “While it is generally conceded that political and civil government should be carried on for the mutual benefit of all members of society, the theory that a man has a right to accumulate and use wealth as he pleases, regardless of the wellbeing of others, has permitted the perpetuation of ancient forms of piracy and brigandage under new forms of industrial life, which men excuse by calling them ‘business.’ ” 3. Certain ethical principles must be applied in our economic system in order to rehabilitate it and make it work. Too many people seem to believe that the principles of ethics or morals are to be applied only to personal affairs, such as one’s thoughts, whether pure or impure; to one’s language, whether reverent or profane; to one’s sex desires and habits, whether conventional or otherwise; and to such matters as have little social significance. In the last fifty years of rapid development of the industrial and com¬ mercial interests of the great corporations, Americans have accepted the principle of laissez faire to such a large degree that until recently few ques¬ tions were asked as to whether the decisions and practises of business men were right or wrong. Commerce and industry seemed not at all concerned with ethics, and seemed to believe that business and ethics have little relation to each other. It seemed to be accepted that “business is business,” and that ethical principles could not be applied to it. Cecil Clare North, in Social Problems and Social Planning, rather cyni¬ cally states the situation in these words: “Self-reliance, competitive prowess, frugality, ‘rugged individualism’ are the traits still held up for admiration in the pulpit, in the popular magazine, and in the injunctions of statesmen. The individual who can, unaided, plow thru heavy difficulties and win indi¬ vidual success is the popular hero. And in forcing his lone way to personal achievement, he need not be overscrupulous about the rights and feelings of others who may be in his way. The domineering, exploitive, fighting indi¬ vidual who aims at something he wants and rides over all others in attaining his goal is forgiven his disregard for others. The only thing that is not for¬ given is failure to reach his goal. At the same time, ability to cooperate with others, willingness to sacrifice some personal prejudice or individual advan¬ tage for the sake of the group, a recognition of the common good as of more importance than individual success, these moral traits which are so greatly needed in modern life have not yet been elevated to a position of prominence in our moral teaching.” However, we notice that this author, in the latter part of the paragraph quoted, does name some ethical practises which he evidently believes ought to be adopted. And both he and other writers in the recent trying times are more positive and optimistic in some of their statements. For instance, this General Sessions 157 same sociologist says : “Without effective control of competition there is no guarantee that the awards shall be on the basis of services rendered. Society has always had some sort of regulation of competition ; and in recent years considerable additions have been made in this direction. It remains to push the principle much farther than it has yet gone. One objective of the efforts to adjust culture to presentday needs is a society that places its primary emphasis on cooperative rather than upon competitive effort.” In Fighting Business Depressions Roger Babson says: “Equality, either in income or in property, will probably never be possible ; but such malignant inequalities as now exist must be remedied. Poverty means unsanitary living conditions which develop unwholesome fear, and a pinched life which is unsuitable for a parent of the next generation. Jesus said, ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.’ Surely this thought should encourage every movement to make a healthier, happier, and more prosperous people.” John T. Flynn puts it this way in Graft in Business : “Business must do a great deal to clean its own house, to set up ethical standards that are couched not in general terms, but aim directly at the specific vices which are so well known. In addition to this, the subject, at least in a nation like ours, should get some treatment in our schools. This is a task for educators. I offer no suggestions as to how it ought to be approached, but content myself with laying the problem on the doorsteps of our schools and their rulers.” W. E. Creed, who is advising business men how to save themselves and their business from the wreck, says in Safeguarding the Future of Private Business: “At all times, the business man must be conscious of his obliga¬ tions to help right what seems wrong or in the light of more knowledge may hereafter seem wrong. The safeguards of the future of private business are the men in its ranks who believe its fundamental purpose is to serve society ; who are conscious of their duty to keep its tendencies; who give their best energy and devotion to bring about positive accomplishment in the public interest ; who are frank with the public, and can, without fear, let the public know what they are doing and why.” When we study the present practises in the economic world and observe their social results, we are forced to conclude that many such practises are unethical, since they are harmful to society. And now appear many critics of such practises who agree that our sick society can be cured only by the application of ethical principles to economic activities. The remedies recom¬ mended are such old-fashioned social virtues as honesty, justice or fair play, cooperation, service, altruism, and equality. Men engaged in big business affairs must practise the same honesty that is considered necessary among neighbors; they must not resort to tricks nor take advantage of the weakness or ignorance of others to make unearned profits for themselves. The rules of the economic game must be based upon justice and must be carried out in such a spirit of fair play and good sportsmanship as will cause 158 National Education Association any player to spurn opportunities to advance his own interests at the ex¬ pense of others. The cooperation of altruistic individuals must characterize our business affairs, rather than the fierce, junglelike competition of an unrestrained “rugged individualism.” The spirit of service must direct the purposes and practises of our cap¬ tains of industry and kings of commerce. They must be willing or must be forced to render to society a service as nearly as possible equal in value to the financial fruits they gather from society. All Americans must remember that the fundamental principle upon which our institutions are based is equality. The very birth cry of our nation an¬ nounced to the world the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” This does not mean equality of talents, abilities, or other innate or acquired personal qualities. Neither does it mean exact equality of possessions. But it does mean equality of rights and opportunities, and therefore, no special privileges ; it means equality of duties, responsibilities, and service in propor¬ tion to abilities; and it means equality of compensation from society in pro¬ portion to services rendered to society. Some people may say that all this is but an idle dream, and that business has nothing in common with ethics, altruism, or humanitarianism. Let us remind such people that the violation of ethical principles certainly had something to do with the breakdown of the economic system ; and that, there¬ fore, we are proposing to remedy conditions by the application of ethics. If capitalistic business does not become more righteous, it will suffer total collapse. Harry Elmer Barnes, in Can Man Be Civilized ?, says: “If capital will not come to terms with the humanitarians, its leaders may, in the not distant future, have to reckon mainly with those who have as little regard for the principles of industrial capitalism as the capitalists now have for the essentials of humanitarianism.” William C. Redfield in Have We Kept the Faith by Prosser and Allen, is quoted as follows: “There is no righteousness and there will be no peace growing out of partiality and special privilege. The way to crime and chaos lies plainly in the exploitation of our men and women as if they were coal or oil. In our free America there must be industrial and social freedom.” 4. The public mind must be informed of the evils of the present system of economics and our collective conscience must be aroused to correct them by the application of ethical principles. In harmony with the American philosophy of equality, there should be a general diffusion among the people of the knowledge, the ethics of justice, the idealism, and the spirit that will make other forms of equality actual and effective, including equality in the application of ethical principles to all our human activities and relations. Such diffusion is in part the work of teachers, since they are teachers and molders of the minds of youth. Teachers must have a real understanding of General Sessions 159 the wrongs in recent economic practises , a burning zeal to correct them , and an abiding faith in the ultimate triumph of justice. W. H. Kilpatrick says in Education and the Social Crisis: “Must they not — teachers as well as others — so burn with conviction in season and out to tear down the selfish tradition and build instead the needed tradition of su¬ preme allegiance to the common good? If I really have convictions that matter to me, I cannot possibly teach independently of them. They are an essential part of me.” In The Great Technology Harold Rugg says: “More than all else we need to instil attitudes of integrity and courage in teachers. Perhaps the greatest need today is courage. Courage to combat the prevailing culture of dishonesty, the widespread mood for getting something for nothing, the flagrant temper of hypocrisy. Courage to introduce youth to an honest, clear understanding of our modern economic and social system. Courage to dig to the very roots of controversial issues. Courage to live only one’s own per¬ sonal life as an individual of integrity.” Thus do these authors emphasize the need of teaching both the youth and the adults of this country the ethics of economics. In order to assist even the zealous teachers to perform this function prop¬ erly, it may be necessary to revise the curriculums of our schools. This does not mean necessarily that new subjects must be introduced, but that empha¬ sis be shifted and redistributed to make more prominent the social studies and to make more effective the teaching of good citizenship, moral training, and an aggressive defense of justice in the light of the lessons drawn from our recent bitter experiences. The Committee on Social-Economic Goals might well be succeeded by a committee to revise the curriculum and devise methods of teaching to enable the generation now in school to reach those goals. Teachers must prepare themselves and the public to accept a greater de¬ gree of industrial and economic planning and control than we have hereto¬ fore had for the advancement of the general welfare. We have reached the stage in the evolution of our economic system where we are compelled to abandon the theory of free competition, laissez-faire, and “rugged” indi¬ vidualism and turn to a definitely planned economic system based upon the general welfare, which means upon genuinely ethical principles. As Rugg says: “An interdependent economic and political system must be designed. It is now axiomatic that the production and distribution of goods can no longer be left to the vagaries of chance — specifically to the unbridled com¬ petitions of self-aggrandizing human nature.” Kilpatrick puts it this way: “The people of this country must recognize the economic and social facts and plan accordingly. Must we not first of all see to it that our inclusive economic machine shall in fact work — not break down every few years? And even more if possible must we not further see to it that our industry be not a mere Juggernaut machine, but a system — a consciously managed system — which shall work for the welfare of all ?” 160 National Education Association But whether we revert to the old form of capitalism or turn to a new form of controlled industry and managed economics, it will be necessary to adapt the system to the principles of ethics. Otherwise under any system the unrestrained greedy will lap up all the cream, and leave honest people only a small amount of curds and whey. The masses of the people in the future should ask, and in our opinion will ask, “Is it right?” and they will mean, Is it in accord with true principles of justice, and equity, and fair play?” In a word, “Is it truly democratic?” I eachers should have a deep conviction that ethical principles must apply to all without discrimination. This is only another application of the Ameri¬ can philosophy of equality, or democracy. It means simply that the acts of all must be in accordance with the rules of justice and fair play, whether they be rich or poor, high or low, humble workers or “go-getter” financiers, successful men or poverty-stricken failures. Too long have we tolerated economic practises by the high and mighty that have really been more harm¬ ful to the general welfare than similar practises by the poor and lowly, which we vigorously condemn or punish as crimes. Too long have we held up as models the rich exploiters and held in pity or contempt the real producer who is too honest to get rich. The lazy or unfortunate man who “bums” his rides on freight cars and begs his food from door to door is scornfully called a bum, a hobo, or a tramp. But very few of us hold in equal contempt the gilded youth who tours the Mediterranean or the Caribbean on his private yacht with dissolute companions and luxurious food, drink, and equipment altho he is a more pernicious parasite than the tramp. We very properly teach boys that it is wrong for them to play truant and then tell their parents they were at school and their teachers that they were at home ; and the poor wretch who, on the witness stand, swears to a lie to save himself is guilty of perjury. But we tolerate the rich tax-dodger who swears to a false assessment schedule and thus robs many boys of their proper schooling; and nothing is done to punish the public utility officer who gives his property a high value on which to fix rates to charge customers and a much lower value on which to pay taxes. The vile miscreant who works in the secrecy of his basement and makes bogus money is properly recognized as a criminal ; and, if his crime is de¬ tected and proved, he is severely punished. But it seems that the public, at least in the past, has held in high esteem as a success and a pillar of society the great financial wizard who sells watered or bogus stock to the public at a great profit, and who himself collects dividends on watered stock, the value of which is based only upon his power to collect excessive and un¬ earned rates for service. Recently a newspaper story held up to contempt both the Italian fruit vendor and the policeman concerned in a case where it was said the fruit vendor frequently gave fruit to the policeman to win special protection and privilege to use the streets without paying a license fee. This was called a mean type of bribery. But I could not help thinking of the more dangerous acts of the great corporation magnate who gave hundreds of thousands of General Sessions 161 dollars to candidates for governor, senator, and other offices, when they needed the money for campaign funds. Two high-school boys caught shooting craps in an alley recently were se¬ verely reproved — which we admit should have been done. But why should they not feel encouraged to gamble when their fathers and their fathers’ neighbors are speculating or dealing in futures on the Stock Exchange or the Board of Trade? The man who breaks into a bank or who takes from an individual $1000 is a thief, and if caught is sent to the penitentiary. But the man who by legalized privilege or by unfair manipulation of our economic machinery levies an unearned tribute of say ten cents on each of our 120,000,000 people and thus “makes” $12,000,000, is considered a success, and a model to hold up to our youth. If some sneaking pickpocket finds you in a crowd, slips his hand into your pocket, and takes your purse, you consider him a most disreputable criminal. But some of our most eminent and “respectable” citizens have been promot¬ ing the sale of stock of corporations, holding companies, and super-holding companies at much more than it is worth. Which is really the dangerous pickpocket ? Not long ago I heard an orator give as an example of cowardice a young man who trembled and grew faint in the face of gun-fire in battle. But how about the great super-patriot and former chairman of the Illinois State Council of Defense, who stayed safe on this side of the Atlantic in time of the Great War and plead with our young men to go across; and then, after the war was all over and the officers of the law wanted him here, he fled across the Atlantic and took refuge in Greece, but continues to draw a pension paid by users of American utility service? The man who gives aid and comfort to our enemies in time of war is guilty of treason and is severely punished if convicted. But even greater damage has been done to our government by the people who fight against proper taxation, build up resistance to necessary taxation, and thus break down our government and its institutions ; or by the great banker who sells his stock holdings to his wife at a great loss in order to evade paying income taxes, knowing that he could have back or profit by those stocks at any time he desired. We are taught to fear and hate the disreputable thug who jumps from an alley and grabs ladies’ handbags, or the thief who breaks into our house at night and carries off our valuables. But now it seems that the real danger to society has been the bankers who have been speculating with other people’s money, and that the most contemptible highwaymen are the bankers who beat down the price of tax anticipation warrants held by teachers and then have their brokers purchase such warrants for them to hold to make large profits. Therefore, we may conclude with MacDougall, in Crime for Profit , that “crimes of the upper-world, such as business frauds and financial swindles, 162 National Education Association committed by men who move in respectable circles of society, are as danger¬ ous to society as the cruder forms of crime, and even more so.” Our standards of righteousness must be raised , our concepts of success must be modified , and our application of ethical principles must be general . Teachers must develop a passion for fair play and an enthusiasm for teaching the real ethics of economics. They must see clearly that anyone who gets money or service from others without fully earning it is a thief, no matter how high his social standing ; and that anyone who earns money or service without getting it is cheated or robbed. When the great majority of teachers reach this stage of ethical and professional development, our economic prob¬ lems will be on the way to solution, and our maladjustments will gradually disappear. If the masses of the people will accept and act upon this principle, all will have plenty, no one will be in want, and nobody will have great un¬ earned superfluities. When service, instead of privilege or unfair methods, is accepted as the only proper measure of our possessions, they will more nearly approach equality. Too long have the molders of the public mind accepted the ideals and practises of the exploiters as being right, or at least as not being improper and dangerous to the public welfare. Predatory business has had ways and means of directing the public mind as it chose, and of making it unpleasant for teachers, preachers, editors, and others who taught the sinfulness of un¬ earned profits and unfair exploitation. And too many teachers have looked upon “successful” business men as guides for themselves and models for their pupils. But the present crisis and the lessons we are learning from it are teaching us that from now on we teachers ought to ally ourselves with the workers and producers rather than with the idlers and exploiters. We are but workers or servants in the employ of the public, and should sympathize with all other workers. Our welfare depends upon the welfare of other work¬ ers; our economic problems are the same as those of other workers; and we must work with other workers in solving those problems. W e ought to strive to elevate the producing proletariat into comfort, culture, and plenty, rather than to hope to elevate ourselves into the exploiting aristocracy. The one is socially ethical and constructive, and the other is individually selfish and demoralizing. According to John T. Flynn, in Graft in Business: “No good purpose is to be served by the incessant fawning and laudation of business and business men which is indulged in, not so much by business men themselves as by those parasitic gentlemen of the quill and cloth and the academy who have invented a form of graft of their own, and who, not having the talent for making money for themselves, find a way to feather their nests by fawning on the able and practical men who do know how to make it. Most of the silly adulation of modern business honesty has come from writers and preachers and professors.” Teachers who see the vision of universal justice, who become inspired by ideals of righteousness, who consecrate their energies to the establishment and the practise of ethical principles in men’s economic relations are really General Sessions 163 promoting the principles enunciated by the great teachers of the ages. They are teaching a modern and necessary application of the Mosaic law thundered forth from Mt, Sinai : “Thou shalt not steal ; thou shalt not covet what is thy neighbor’s.” They are teaching the ethical principle expressed by the Great Teacher, and so characteristic of His rules of social conduct as to be called the Golden Rule : “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them.” They are in perfect harmony with the very first principle of our nation: “We hold these truths to be self-evident — that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Such teachers are the most effective supporters of our Con¬ stitution; for they are training a generation of citizens “to form a more per¬ fect union, to establish justice, to insure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defense, to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” EDUCATION AND THE PUBLIC MIND ROBERT HUTCHINS, PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. Your president some months ago asked me to speak about the depression. Now that the depression is over, I am deprived of a subject. Anybody but a university president would make this statement and sit down. This neither my personal habits nor my professional status will permit. Since I have you here I shall say a few words, not about California, or even about the Uni¬ versity of Chicago, but about Education and the Public Mind. Perhaps the Public Mind involves a degree of flattery. Perhaps I should say the Public Temper. At any rate I propose to discuss the public attitude toward educa¬ tion, to suggest what is responsible for it, and to indicate what may be done about it. We have been passing thru the first serious mass attack on the American educational system. In the past, as has been frequently remarked, education has been the American substitute for a national religion. But almost at once when this depression started, the onslaught on education began. Of course, salaries were reduced, school terms were shortened, school buildings post¬ poned. These things are comprehensible, if not intelligent. What is less easy to understand is the readiness of our people to withhold salaries when earned, to regard demands for them as extortion, and to deliver themselves of ex¬ tended orations on frills in education. I have never been able to discover what a frill is. Apparently it is something that is good for the child, and good for society, but which the school was not able to do fifty years ago. On this theory Mr. Roosevelt’s recovery program might be called a frill in government. Certainly the responsibilities now laid upon the schools are such that an attempt to meet them with the three R’s would be as futile as trying to deal with the economic situation with the slogans of Harding and Coolidge. 164 National Education Association The attacks that I have mentioned have been partly led by selfish groups : by people who wanted their taxes reduced irrespective of the needs of the community, by people who had never attended the public schools and who could afford to send their children to private establishments. Thru their con¬ trol of part of the press and other avenues of propaganda they have succeeded in convincing some unselfish people that the educational system is an inflated extravagant colossus, instead of being, as I shall show later, an organization entirely too restricted for the needs of the present day. The attacks of selfish groups can be understood and combatted. They are not so serious and so discouraging as a certain unconsciousness of education which has lately been exhibited by our most able and disinterested leaders. The Couzens bill, which almost passed at the last regular session of Congress, was an unkind cut ; for its author in his laudable desire to provide for the wandering youth of our country could think of nothing better to do with them than to put them in army camps. The possibility of offering them educational opportunities apparently never occurred to him. And so with all the earnest effort to care for the unemployed, adolescent and adult, it has never been suggested that the best investment we could make would be to put them in school. With billions appropriated for dams, trees, roads, postoffices, court¬ houses, and even warships, not a word has been said about schools, schools the construction of which would provide as much construction as battleships, if construction is what you want; schools which might eventually give us an intelligent nation. The lamentable consequences of stupidity and igno¬ rance are visible everywhere about us. You would have supposed that one result of our recent experiences would have been a determination on the part of our people to establish an educational system that would teach us how to be wiser in the future. On the contrary, amid all the talk of public works and reemployment, education has not been mentioned ; and in all the expenditures for banks, railroads, and public works not one cent has been put forward for education. We expect to be fought by our enemies; it is hard to be ignored by our friends. At the same time our friends and enemies have presented us with burdens that would have overwhelmed us in the best of times. They have thrown some millions of young people out of work and denied employment to some millions more. These young people have become our problem at the very moment when those who presented them to us were depriving us of the means of helping them. Praiseworthy efforts to restrict child labor as proposed, for example, in the new textile code, will make our task more difficult ; and that task is to take care in some way or other of the enormous number of boys and girls between 14 and 20 who have been ejected from industry or who have not been permitted to enter it. I do not need to tell you that the most baffling question with which the high school has had to deal in the last three years has been the question of the high-school graduate. Cut off from earning a living, he has clamored for more education, and the high school has had to try to give it to him, in spite of overcrowded buildings and inadequate General Sessions 165 funds. The makeshifts resorted to have been unsatisfactory; we must de¬ velop permanent measures. Another obligation that the educational system must assume is the obli¬ gation of adult education. This is a vast uncharted area that has as yet been scarcely touched. As long as we could delude ourselves into thinking that everybody was working twelve hours a day we could believe that this prob¬ lem could be left to a few well-intentioned social workers who could handle it as a side issue. Now that we may be sure that the six-hour day and the five-day week are coming, we may be equally confident that we cannot dodge the problem of adult education. Whether we like it or not, therefore, we must accommodate the young people of the country up to their eighteenth or twentieth year ; industry will not absorb them earlier. We shall also be compelled to organize the leisure time of the bulk of our population from the end of school onward. This is an educational problem ; we shall be held responsible for its solution. And the atmosphere in which we must conduct these enterprises is one of hostility and indifference. What is the explanation of this atmosphere ? Partly, I have no doubt, it is that laissez-faire economics which the nineteenth century left us and which could tolerate nothing unless it paid. Even public works, then and even in the last administration, could be undertaken only on a “self-liquidating” basis. A society which will not create tangible assets unless it can get 6 percent and its money back can hardly be expected to show enthusiasm for an undertaking the results of which are impossible to translate into financial terms. But I believe that the responsibility for our present plight must rest after all on us. It is our fault. I do not sustain the charges made by illiterate sec¬ tions of the press; we have not been extravagant or silly. But because of the rapidity with which we have had to develop popular education for a tremendous nation we have not had time to think what we were doing. How could we expect the public to understand it? The layman cannot comprehend what an elementary school is, what a high school is, what a college is, or what a university is, and we can make only the feeblest efforts to illuminate him because we are confused ourselves. The elementary schools cover eight years for no better reason than that Horace Mann, when he went to Germany to find a school to imitate, imitated the wrong one, and imposed on this country as a preparatory unit a school that was terminal in its native land. The high schools are largely dominated by collegiate requirements that have no application to the ma¬ jority of their students. The junior colleges are frequently two years more of high school or pale imitations of the first two years at the state university. The colleges of liberal arts sometimes seem to duplicate the high school at one end and the university at the other. The universities are weird mixtures of general education, specialized study, professional training, and college life. If we are ever to alter the public attitude toward education we must 166 National Education Association clarify the functions of all these organizations and their relationships to one another. The object of a university is the advancement of knowledge. It has no interest in education except as it contributes to this end. It may therefore properly carry on two types of educational activity : investigation of the educational process, and the education of people to advance knowledge. “Education for citizenship,” for example, has no place in a university except as a subject of study. Unless a university is interested in educational experiment it should abandon its freshman and sophomore years. The work of these years should be conducted by numerous local institutions. They must be numerous be¬ cause they will be instruments of popular education, which the university is not. They must be local because most of their students will not be able to meet the cost of living away from home. What will happen in any such division of labor to the colleges of liberal arts? Many of them will abandon their junior and senior years. But many others will find a place which cannot be filled by any other organization. They can develop a three-year curriculum beginning with the junior year and leading to the Master’s degree, a curriculum of non-professional spe¬ cialization in arts, literature, and science. I am clear that such a course of study can be given far better by a strong college of liberal arts than by a university, the atmosphere of which should be scholarly and professional from the junior year on. Having clarified the function of the university and the college of liberal arts let us examine further the numerous local institutions to which I have referred. Certainly they will not be intelligent if they give their attention primarily to preparing students for the universities. Most of their graduates will never reach them. They should direct their energies to the development of terminal work; they should prepare students “for life.” In setting out on such an enterprise they will find that a two-year organi¬ zation which graduates 50 percent of its students every year cannot do for them what it ought to do. They will find that a three- or four-year period created by the union of the last years of high school and the first years of college is an admirable unit in which to administer education for life. And they will find that they cannot meet the needs of most of their students by giving them a purely cultural education. They or other institutions parallel with them must construct courses of study of a sub-professional business, technical, or homemaking variety to take care of the vast number of students who do not want and should not have a general education alone. General education should be the core of all education at this level; some institutions should be devoted to it exclusively. But these organizations are to be instru¬ ments of popular education. They must be open to everybody. They must avoid the temptation to pour everybody into the same mold. They must provide differentiated courses of study adapted to the needs and capacities of the individual. General Sessions 167 We should thus have a terminal unit of three or four years beginning with the beginning of the junior year in high school and ending with the end of the sophomore year in college. It would supply the need for general and technical, education for all our youth, and at the same time create new and important centers of adult education in our local communities. These collegiate and technical institutes would be parts of universities only if a given university wished to conduct studies in general and technical education for the benefit of institutions laboring in these fields. Preparatory and definitely preparatory to these collegiate and technical institutes we should have the high school, a three- or four-year unit beginning with the seventh grade. There is no reason for perpetuating Horace Mann’s mistake. It is now established that the work of the primary school can be accomplished in six years. With a six-year elementary school, a three- or four-year secondary school, and three- or four-year collegiate and technical institutes we may hope to take care of the educational needs of our people thru their eighteenth or twentieth year. Each one of these institutions has a definite and distinctive function. Its performance can be tested in the light of its own ideals. The function of the university, the advancement of knowledge, is made equally clear, and the university is rid of obligations it had no business to assume. To confine myself to my own sector of the educational front, I venture to say that at present there is not a single university in the United States, not one, that is, that will answer to any rational definition of a university. I am inclined to think that the same situation obtains in those parts of the system with which I am less familiar. How can we hope to secure public support in the great tasks that lie ahead if we have not clear in our own minds what we are trying to do, and if when we have finished we cannot tell whether we have done it? Local government in the United States requires radical revision. The system of taxation needs thoro overhauling. Schoolboards should be recon¬ structed or exterminated, and the schools should be taken out of politics. The relationship of federal, state, and local governments to education must be more adequately defined. But we as educators cannot demand these things on behalf of education unless we have a system that can be understood and defended. You will say that such a system as I have outlined will be enor¬ mously expensive and we cannot get the money for the one we have. My answer is that we cannot get the money for the one we have because it is a bewildering and incomprehensible maze. If we can present to the country an intelligible program we can get the money to support it. If we shrink from the task of clarification we may find taken away from us even that which we have. 168 National Education Association EDUCATION, THE BASIS OF SELF-GOVERNMENT HAROLD L. ICKES, SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR, WASHINGTON, D. C. I was one of those fortunate persons who had the privilege in 1929 of being present in the stately and beautiful cathedral that is called a chapel at the University of Chicago when a young recruit from Yale was inaugurated as the youngest college president in the United States. Preceded in the cere¬ monies by the presidents of three great universities, one of them with a national reputation for wit and brilliance of speech, I found myself hoping that this young man might acquit himself worthily. I was soon to discover that my concern should have been for the presi¬ dential elders instead of for the man in whose proper induction into high academic office we were so interested. Standing in front of a critical group of professors, facing the intellectual, the social, and the business leaders of Chicago, this outstanding addition to the citizenship of Chicago delighted his audience with as brilliant and charmingly phrased an address as anyone there had ever listened to. Clearly, logically, in precise and discriminating English, that most beautiful of all languages when it is in the hands of a master, he made an impression that cannot be forgotten. No one left the campus on that occasion doubting that the trustees of our great University had chosen wisely, or that under the able and vigorous leadership of Dr. Hutchins, new vistas of usefulness would be opened for an institution already numbered among the greatest of its kind in the world. In telling less fortunate friends, who had not been able to hear President Hutchins that day, the impression that he had made, it never occurred to me even to harbor deep down in my consciousness the expectation that I would ever be placed in any situation where I would suffer by comparison with him. Nothing was further from my thoughts than that we would ever occupy the same platform in such circumstances as these. Dr. Hutchins is qualified to speak to you. He is not only the head of a great institution of learning, but his very youth, taken in connection with his commanding position, bespeaks outstanding aptitude and unusual quali¬ ties of leadership in the educational field. Of the technical side of education I am as blissfully ignorant as the child who sits upon the dunce’s stool, if that instrument of intimate, refined torture still exists in a schoolroom anywhere. I know as well as does anyone here that I was not asked to speak because I could add a single jot to the sum total of accumulated wisdom upon educa¬ tional matters. I was graciously invited to come because, by a fortuitous cir¬ cumstance, I am at the moment head of that department of our federal government within whose all-embracing arms is gathered the Office of Edu¬ cation, and within which there will shortly also be found the Board for Vocational Education. But altho disclaiming any knowledge or even any opinion worth expressing on the technical side of education, I do have certain ideas about education in general and particularly about the value of education in a democracy. My views are not unique nor am I distinguished as the sole possessor of them. General Sessions 169 What I think about education and its relationship to our political and social institutions I think in common with all citizens of our country who have any claim to be regarded as of at least average intelligence. It seems so self-evident as hardly to be worth expressing that there is a direct relationship between education and government. We all know that we cannot hope to govern ourselves wisely unless we have at hand to use intelli¬ gences that have been trained by our study of the past to recognize the pitfalls of the present. Not even are we prepared for self-government unless our imaginations have been developed so that we can evoke a vision of the future. If our form of government were an absolutism we would certainly wish our tyrant to be not only benevolent but educated. We would reason that holding our lives and our property in the palm of his hand to do with as a passing whim might dictate, we would be less likely to be the victims of a transient and obstinate passion if our tyrant knew something about the arts and the sciences and had been well grounded in history, literature, political economy, political science, and sociology. While during the past few years a stupid bleating has gone up from certain business men, and even from some supposed intellectual leaders, for a political dictator, none of them would willingly risk his welfare and happiness in the hands of a despot whose igno¬ rance was as absolute as his power. And to that degree that mob ignorance with its potentialities of terror and destruction is more to be dreaded than ignorance on the part of an arbitrary ruler of men, is it the part of wisdom to expand the minds and train the intelligences of ourselves and our children if as a people we are to approach the task of self-government with even moder¬ ate assurance of our capacity for it ? Economically, we are sitting in sackcloth and ashes. Sobered by our fall from the height of an unlamented jazz age, we can now soberly, even if somewhat despairingly, take an inventory of our immediate past. It is, of course, not worth anyone’s while to cry over spilt milk but it is not out of place to consider how the milk was spilled in order to avoid a similar catas¬ trophe in the future. A letter came to me a few days ago from a wise elder statesman who for many years was active, with credit to himself and with beneficial results to his country, both at Washington and at the capitol of his state. He was com¬ menting favorably upon an article that I wrote some two or three weeks ago for the New York Times , in which I had dwelt pessimistically and impa¬ tiently upon the dissipation, by selfish, greedy, and unpatriotic men, of the irreplaceable and tremendously important oil resources of our country. He was kind enough to say that it was an appropriate and a timely article and then he concluded: “We have always been living off our capital in this country. That accounts for our great prosperity. We have not been a prudent or a careful people. And our children will have to pay the price of our extravagances.” This elder statesman was right. When we have time to stop to think of them we are proud of our schools, our universities, our libraries, and our art galleries. But how few of us have had any real concern for the things of the 170 National Education Association spirit, for the graces of life? We are a practical people, a race of go-getters, attuned to a jazz age. Our outstanding characteristic is acquisitiveness. I don’t mean miserliness. As a people, with rare exceptions, we do not accumu¬ late property or the tokens of property in order to have the sensations of the miser dribbling his gold thru his fingers. We are acquisitive because of our urge for power, because we want to experience the feeling of expansive self- satisfaction and condescending urbanity that are the perfect blooms of power. Even there are those who accumulate wealth for the satisfaction of giving it away, more or less freely, for fine causes. A wonderful chapter in our history is the recital of deeds of prodigious generosity on the part of rich men for the public good. But in acquiring we have at the same time been ruthlessly destroying. Our methods of exploiting our natural resources have been wasteful. By hewing down our mighty forests in careless and indifferent fashion we have caused the destruction of timber products the value of which, if we had them now, would reach staggering figures. Denuded of their natural and necessary pro¬ tection, our streams have carried and continue to carry to the sea, hundreds of thousands of fertile acres. We have wantonly destroyed our fish, bird, and animal resources to satisfy a sadistic desire to kill. Our pioneer fathers, push¬ ing ever westward from the sterile fields of New England, have taken up new farmsteads only to exploit them without sense of obligation to restore the fertility that they drained into their abundant crops. In time has come another abandonment and a renewed search for virgin soil whose capital of fertility in its turn could be drawn upon until exhausted. We have opened more and more coal mines, producing far beyond con¬ sumptive demands with consequent cut-throat competition among operators and starvation wages for our miners. We have shot billions of feet of natural gas into the air and have allowed what might be called the very life blood of our modern civilization, oil, to be produced wastefully and unsocially, resulting in enormous losses. It goes without saying that we cannot continue indefinitely thus to dis¬ sipate the natural resources upon which our health, well-being, and future prosperity depend. In scattering these prodigal riches with a lavish hand, we are, as has been said, using up our capital. Some of this capital by its very nature can never be replaced. Some of it can be built up again, but only by a long, tedious, and costly process. A tree a thousand years old can be cut down in a few minutes but it will take another thousand years to grow a similar tree. We have gone on the theory that so vast is our country, so rich is it in resources, that we need give no thought to the morrow. We have believed that our children and theirs will have the same opportunity of early acquisi¬ tion of easy wealth that we have had, and that our fathers had before us in even greater degree. Nor have our natural resources alone been at the mercy of ruthless exploiters. We have even stood contentedly by and permitted our human resources to be thrown into the hungry jaws of the Moloch of acquisitiveness. Our first human victims were the original possessors of this vast an . General Sessions 171 Tricked, despoiled, and driven back at the point of the sword, the Indians were finally herded onto reservations of sterile soil and rigorous climate. If we later discovered that we had underestimated the economic possibilities of the land that we had given to them, we would proceed to dispossess them again and again until in the end only such land was theirs as the white man felt he could not possibly find any use for. When to our consternation we sometimes found that even inhospitable and barren desert might possess rich treasures of oil or other mineral wealth, we would proceed once more to despoil the Indians by methods more subtle than mere dispossession, since we could not openly take from them those ultimate deserts which were the last bare bone of their original holdings. Brought to our shores originally by enterprising merchants who dealt in human bodies just as one would deal in any other commodity, the Negro became a mere chattel. Altho later freed from slavery at an enormous cost in treasure and blood, he has never ceased to be exploited. Like the Indian, he has not had a fair chance, and how hollow in his ears must sound that phrase that we so love to use: “All men are created free and equal.” Following our importation of slave labor we induced immigrants from Europe to come to our shores in untold thousands. We were building up an industrial empire. We needed cheap labor and we knew how and where to get it. These men and women, speaking strange languages, unused to our customs, ignorant of their rights under our laws, were driven to work under ground in mines or herded above ground in factories for long sweating hours of arduous toil, for which they were paid wages insufficient to main¬ tain decent standards of living. We have not even stopped there. We have destroyed the bodies and souls of little children in our greed for profits and the things that profits will buy. Nor have we cared whose children we were sacrificing, provided only that they were old enough to toddle to their tasks and work long, exhausting hours in crowded, insanitary surroundings while tending dangerous machinery. But gradually our consciences became stirred. We came to realize that the under-privileged were entitled to some chance at life. And we rightfully concluded that the best chance we could give was to provide them with opportunities for an education. So we began to pass compulsory education laws. Along with these laws, in state after state, we decreed that children below a certain age might not go into the factories to work under sweatshop conditions for pitiful wages. We went in for night schools. We began to think of adult education. We provided continuation courses for those who wanted to pursue their studies even after they found employment. We have honestly been trying in these later years to build up and enhance the value thru education of our human resources. This awakened appreciation of our obligation toward our fellow human beings interestingly enough has de¬ veloped concurrently with a realization that we must conserve and rebuild our natural resources. Possessed of easily acquired, abundant wealth, and with a disposition to be prodigal with that wealth, we have not begrudged the money demanded 172 National Education Association of us to build schools, to employ teachers, and ever to widen our curriculums, altho our money has not been equitably or wisely expended. Some sections have been oversupplied while others we have left in want. But we have reached the crossroads. There is a feeling of doubt in the land about our ability further to carry on in our educational program, and a question even as to its desirability, granted the ability so to do. This is natural and under¬ standable. The material things of life have always been the most appealing to us. It has been our theory that wealth covered a multitude of sins, includ¬ ing the sin of ignorance. I wonder if it isn’t a fair statement that while we have indulged ourselves liberally, if unevenly, in education we have not done this so much for the sake of education itself or to add to the culture and graciousness of life, but because of the general belief that by educating our¬ selves and our children we have been making it more possible to win in the race for the acquisition of wealth? Now there is general evidence that we are facing a real crisis in the educa¬ tion of our people. Doubts as to whether education is achieving what we had expected of it, as well as impaired ability to finance our educational institu¬ tions on the scale to which they have grown accustomed, are helping to develop a situation and a public temper which may result in a further waste of human resources. Many thousands of children in this country have never yet been provided with schools; this past year millions were added to this group as schools thruout the land were forced to close ; additional millions have never had a chance at the education which their special handicaps or abilities required. Recently even the beginnings of these special provisions have been abolished or attacked as luxuries. Many communities, despite our prodi¬ galities in some directions, have never yet had buildings enough, or equip¬ ment enough, or teachers enough to care adequately for their children, and yet the past year has seen further decreases in such communities. The price¬ less human resources of youth, with its ability and time for study, with its eagerness to be prepared for service, and its confidence in the wise provisions made for it by a generous government which it hopes to serve, are being dissipated or allowed to remain undeveloped. We are seeing on all sides a willingness — in some cases it has almost seemed like an eager desire — to curtail and limit educational possibilities for this generation. Citizens of a certain type are always willing to begin their economies with the schools and end them there. Our school buildings, they find it easy to assert, are too elaborate. They should be as devoid of ornament and as lacking in architectural interest as the barest school cabin in bleak, puritan New England. As they reason it out, why spend time except on such rudimentary subjects as the three R’s? Many of them have succeeded in life without any of the educational embellishments, and if they have been able to make a living, possess themselves of the essentials for material comfort, and in their turn beget children in their own self-satisfied images, why be concerned that others should have more education than they themselves have so brilliantly succeeded on? General Sessions 173 That many of our schools had been expensive and often times wasteful up to the time that we found ourselves on the verge of the economic disaster in 1929, I do not believe any intelligent friend of the schools themselves will deny. But I find it difficult to blame the schools when practically all of us, individually and thru every association, were fully as reckless and unheeding. At least it may be said to the credit of the schools that their money, even if unwisely spent, was for the benefit of our children. There was a social vision and an altruistic motive associated with this over-expendi¬ ture. The most important question requiring an answer today at the hands of the American people is: What are we going to do about our schools? Shall we maintain them on such a basis as will give our children an education in those essentials absolutely necessary to equip them as individuals and as citizens to lead such lives as men and women must be equipped to lead in a self-governing republic of free men, or are we going to let them slip back into an era of unenlightenment, bigotry, and ignorance? I give it to you as my deliberate opinion that the last place to put devital¬ izing economy into effect is in our schools. I say this because to my mind ignorance is incompatible with free institutions that are the expression of the carefully reasoned choice of the people themselves. Unless as a people we are given a constantly enlarged background of history and the social sciences ; unless we know something about government and its operation ; unless we are acquainted with contemporaneous national and international events ; unless our spirits thru education are made as free as possible from prejudice, superstition, and bigotry; unless we are trained to be mutually tolerant and understanding of one another, building up within ourselves a will to understand the other man’s point of view ; unless all of these things and more are offered to us, our free institutions which were established that we might be able to live fuller and nobler lives, are in grave danger. Except by means of a broad and generous education freely provided by the people for our children as a whole, we cannot hope to have put into the hands of those children essential tools with which to carve out a happy destiny for themselves and for their own children in their turn. If at this critical stage we continue to deny educational opportunities to literally millions of our children, our country will suffer when those millions, grown shortly to be uneducated men and women, are called upon to undertake the responsibilities of government. When I speak of education as an absolute prerequisite for self-government, I mean education. I mean more than that. I mean universal education. The ability to read and to scrawl a signature at the end of a badly written letter may take one out of the illiteracy class, but it is a far cry from being educated. Every person in this country should be educated to his fullest possible capac¬ ity. If we undertake to build a factory we insist on having the best equip¬ ment that the genius of the inventors is able to supply. If a youth can run one hundred yards in less than ten seconds, a conscientious trainer will not think he is doing his duty if he shows him how to run in eleven seconds. If 174 National Education Association we are sending a squad of woodsmen into the forest to cut trees, we do not withhold from them highly tempered axes with sharp edges and give to them instead rusty and dull implements. Of how much greater worth than factories and athletic skill and work¬ men’s tools are human minds? The waste in human capacity really to live resulting from our carelessness and indifference with respect to education is amazing. Customarily we have regarded a child as educated if he has passed the eighth grade or if he has a high-school diploma, or has graduated from a college, depending more or less upon the social background of the child. We show more interest in developing our horses than in building up the minds and bodies of our children. Just as every race horse should be developed to the utmost of his capacity, so should every child be given an education to the point of highest development. I do not mean by this that every child should have a college course and perhaps go on for a higher degree. I mean just what I say — that every child should be given every possible opportunity in the schools to unfold to his utmost intellectual and spiritual capacity, regardless of where along the long road of education that means that any particular child should stop. Capacity for education is our one distinguishing characteristic as members of the animal kingdom. Economy in other directions for the sake of main¬ taining and improving our educational facilities would be only common sense. Here is the last place where we should economize and the first where we should increase our outlay. After all, America used to get along without all the conveniences and all the luxuries and all the non-essential appendages of life that we now consider so essential. The truth is we do not want to give up the luxuries that have made life so soft and easy. We are unwilling to make personal sacrifices even for the education of our children and the future welfare of our country. We are willing to let them, and thru them, the country, pay with interest the heavy costs of our own self-indulgence and of our reckless ways of life. I am tremendously concerned about the present and future welfare of our country. I know that without a highly educated electorate our system of government cannot be maintained; certainly it cannot be developed and perfected. I know that an intelligent government based upon an intelligent citizenship does not spontaneously grow. Both must be fashioned by care¬ fully fabricated, highly tempered intellectual tools. Our chief interest as a government, therefore, is education and unwise economy that will cut at the roots of our system of free and universal education, our American system, may prove to be a fatal economy. To be great and noble and ftee, America must be educated. General Sessions 175 THE CIRCUIT RIDER OF AMERICAN EDUCATION J. W. CRABTREE, SECRETARY, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. It is said that Dr. A. E. Winship did not leave wealth. By that is meant that he did not leave dollars. He left, however, a wealth in affection, in serv¬ ice, and in achievements which cannot be measured in gold or silver. Few men have done so much to carry forward the principles and causes 'that promote education and that maintain civilization. He did it largely by building men and women. He not only helped to give the nation confidence in such early leaders as Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, William E. Sheldon, and W. T. Harris, but he helped to build up confidence in the next group of leaders such as Thomas E. Finegan, Susan M. Dorsey, C. G. Pearse, Homer H. Seerley, Ella Flagg Young, Charles W. Eliot, David Starr Jordan, Lucy M. Wheelock, and a score of others whose names stand out. While giving strength to the arm of these leaders, he was also inspiring and bringing forward another group to take their places as they would retire from active service. More than a score of this third group are attending this convention. I am amazed as I talk with them and hear them refer to the encouragement which they received from Dr. Winship — amazed that the influence of any one man could have reached so many people and that it could have impressed them so deeply. For more than forty years Dr. Winship was a source of inspiration to me personally. He helped me to realize the importance of teaching. He encour¬ aged me to have faith in myself. He helped me to know the points in educa¬ tion where progress could be made and where leadership was most needed. When I did something worthwhile he commended me. If I seemed to be taking an unwise course he pointed out the dangers to me. Always in demand for conferences and addresses, he was continually on the go, swinging around the circle of the states in a ministry of faith and encouragement to the teachers of America. He made seventy round trips from the Atlantic to the Pacific, lecturing to teachers and to citizens and visiting schools. This gave him the title “The Circuit Rider of American Education.” Wherever he stopped his eye would turn immediately to what was best. His keen constructive mind would store away the details for later use. Dr. Winship had a genius for understanding people. He did not pay much attention to the details of a newly erected school building, or to a beautified campus but he did see every teacher and every pupil in that school, and he saw them as important personalities. Just as practically all outstanding na¬ tional leaders owed much to him, the leaders in localities and in the states feel that much of their success has been due to his kind advice. Some have said that it was just Dr. Winship’s nature to take an interest in other people. But I learned from him many years ago that what he was doing was part of a well-thought-out plan of life. Only recently, however, 176 National Education Association was my attention called to his statement of this creed over fifty years ago in one of the first issues of his Journal of Education. Read it and you will understand his life better than before. The following is taken from his March Journal , 1886: The Journal will do all in its power to popularize those who are doing good work in the profession. It is a disadvantage under which the profession has labored for the past thirty years, especially, that its leaders do not receive the same popular recognition that men of equal prominence attain in other professions. A clergyman, author, lawyer, or statesman with the same intel¬ lectual grasp, culture, or national popular gift attains greater public fame by half than the teachers.” The teachers of America have not been unmindful of the great service which Dr. Winship performed in their behalf. On his seventy-ninth birth¬ day, he was honored by a remarkable luncheon held in connection with the Department of Superintendence at Chicago in 1924. He was presented with a volume of personal letters of appreciation from every section of the coun¬ try and from every branch of the profession, reflecting the amazing range of his service and acquaintance. At the 1927 meeting of the Department of Superintendence, on his eighty- second birthday, he was presented with a beautiful gold watch chain made up of forty-eight links with the name of each state engraved on the link which it had given. In 1932 he was elected an honorary president of the National Education Association which he had served so faithfully thruout his professional life. This is the highest honor conferred by the National Education Association. Much that Dr. Winship worked for is yet to be achieved. There is still the call for pioneers. This age — like his — is an epoch of change and growth. The schools face the task of adapting themselves anew to the life around them, and of helping to make that life worthy of our great American herit- age. It is for us, therefore, to carry on the great work to which Dr. Winship gave his life. It is for us to take new inspiration from this noble character and to dedicate ourselves anew to the ideals for which he stood. Reports of Committees MUCH of the most significant work of the Asso¬ ciation is accomplished by committees. The scope of the work carried on by committees during the past year is indicated by the following pages devoted to their reports. Unless otherwise in¬ dicated the reports were adopted by the Representa¬ tive Assembly at Chicago. For discussion concerning reports see Minutes of the Representative Assembly in the latter part of this book. Complete lists of the membership of each committee are also given else¬ where in this volume. L 178 J REPORT OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON HEALTH PROBLEMS IN EDUCATION THOMAS D. WOOD, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y., Chairman The Committee on Health Problems in Education was created by the Na¬ tional Council of Education at San Francisco in July, 1911. In the same year a cooperating committee of the American Medical Association was ap¬ pointed. These two committees were soon fused into the Joint Committee on Health Problems in Education. Dr. Thomas D. Wood has been chairman of the Joint Health Committee since its organization in 1911. At the an¬ nual meeting in Des Moines, in July 1921, the Health Committee of the National Council of Education was formally adopted by the National Edu¬ cation Association and, in cooperation with the corresponding committee of the American Medical Association, became the Joint Committee on Health Problems in Education of the National Education Association and the American Medical Association. Education and health officials, child health organizations, and many other organizations and individuals in our own and other countries have turned to this committee for information, advice, and leadership relating to litera¬ ture and standards dealing with many phases of the health conditions and health programs of schools. Since. 1912 the following reports have been published: 1. Country Schoolhouses, prepared in 1912 by the late Dr. Fletcher B. Dresslar, and distributed by the United States Bureau of Education. 2. The Health Chart Set, prepared in 1917, comprises sixty charts, each 22 x 28 inches. Nearly 100,000 individual charts have been distributed in our own and in foreign countries. 3. The Health Chart Report, prepared in 1917, is now in its third edition. This pamphlet not only serves to illustrate and explain the health charts, but is used extensively for health instruction, and also as a guide in making health posters and scrapbooks. # . 4. Minimum Health Requirements for Rural Schools, prepared in 1914, revised, in 1920, established standards which have had a far-reaching effect in improving the health conditions of rural schools. The sum of $3000, required for the printing of the first edition of this report (750,000 copies), was provided in a special gift from the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund of Chicago.. 5. Health Essentials for Rural-School Children, prepared in 1916, revised in mi, has served as a supplementary text in normal schools and as a practical hand¬ book for rural-school teachers and supervisors. 6. The Teacher’s Part in Social Hygiene, published in 1921,. revised in 1926, was prepared thru the cooperation of the American Social Hygiene Association, i.he report, together with its splendid bibliography, has supplied excellent material for many teachers. . , 7. Daylight in the Schoolroom, prepared in 1921 by a subcommittee, under e chairmanship of Dr. Edward Jackson, contains valuable material dealing with school lighting. . f 8. Health Improvement in Rural Schools, published in 1922, was in the process o preparation for several years. Following considerable painsta ing worK y well-trained teachers and supervisors, the bulletin was revised and completed [179] 180 National Education Association thru the substantial cooperation of the staff of the Elizabeth McCormick Me¬ morial Fund. 9. Health Service in City Schools of the United States, published in 1922, contains the results of a questionnaire survey with a summary of information from 340 leading school superintendents thruout the country. 10. Ventilation of School Buildings, published in 1925 thru the cooperation of the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund, and under the chairmanship of Mary E. Murphy, director of this fund, contains valuable material dealing with "this important health topic. 11. Conserving the Sight of School Children, published in 1925, revised in 1928, in cooperation with the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness, fur¬ nishes standards for protecting the eyes and vision of school pupils. A revised edition of this important report is now being prepared by the Na¬ tional Society for the Prevention of Blindness to bring the report up to date. This revised report, as in the case of the original report, will be furnished to our Joint Health Committee in the introductory edition by the National Society. This organization is planning two additional special reports, to be prepared in near future and to be issued, if approved, by our Joint Health Committee with the cooperation of the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness. 12. The Deafened School Child, published in 1928 in cooperation with the Ameri¬ can Federation of Organizations for the Hard of Hearing, has been used ex¬ tensively by teachers, supervisors, and health workers as a standard for providing improved conditions for children with defective hearing. This report is now being carefully revised with the cooperation of a special committee representing the federation just mentioned, and will be published in the near future with the improved title: The Hard of Hearing School Child. The completion of this revised report waits for the improvement to a satis¬ factory point of important technical tests of hearing. 13. Health Education. The most important report prepared by and under the direction of the Joint Health Committee is entitled Health Education — A Program for Public Schools and Teacher-Training Institutions. The first edi¬ tion of this report was published in 1924 after two years of preparation, with the constructive cooperation of twenty-seven health specialists. In the six years after this report was published, the increasing demand for it provided gratifying evidence of its recognition as the outstanding authorita¬ tive statement of principles, aims, and general objectives in health education. This report was extensively revised in 1930 with the active and constructive cooperation of a technical advisory committee of fifty specialists to keep step with progress in general education, in health education, and in the sciences from which subjectmatter in health education is drawn. This second edition of the report, thoroly revised and enlarged by nearly 100 pages, is meeting everywhere with a most favorable reception. The opinions regarding it ex¬ press high praise with reference to the scientific and educational value of this report. The following new materials and reports, approved by the Joint Health Committee at the annual meeting, are now in process of construction : 1. Health Inspection of School Children, with blanks for recording the results of such inspections. This pamphlet, with copies of the accompanying blanks, has been tried experimentally. This report is being printed and will be ready for distribution by July 1, 1933. 2. N evo Series of Health Posters. Ten health posters, to be printed in colors, are now ready and have been approved by the Joint Health Committee. These posters will be published as soon as economic conditions are sufficiently improved. They are particularly planned for rural and small town schools, Reports of Committees 181 and the subjects to be presented represent the carefully tabulated results of the opinions and judgments of teachers, artists, and those experienced in poster making and publication. 3. Mental Health for School Children — What Every Teacher Should Know. This report is now being prepared thru the cooperation of a special joint committee of the American Orthopsychiatric Association and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. It is confidently expected that this much needed report will be completed and, if economic conditions permit, will be printed within the coming year. 4. Mouth Health for School Children. This report is now being prepared thru the cooperation of a special joint committee of the American Mouth Health Association, the American Dental Association, and the American Society for the Promotion of Dentistry for Children. It is expected that this report will be completed, published, and ready for distribution within the coming year. 5. Home and School Cooperation for the Health of School Children. This report is being prepared with the cooperation of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers. A special committee representing the Joint Health Committee and the National Congress of Parents and Teachers has been appointed, and it is hoped that this report will be completed and available in print a year from now. 6. Safety for School Children, to be prepared with the cooperation of the Na¬ tional Safety Council and the National Bureau of Casualty and Surety Underwriters. It is expected that this report will not duplicate any present reports, but will attempt to meet certain needs of the schools with reference to safety which may be effectively met by school teachers and other school officials. The Joint Committee on Health Problems in Education is striving ear¬ nestly to give constructive service in proposing optimum essentials, in clarify¬ ing health procedures, in conducting research, preparing reports, and disseminating knowledge for conserving and improving the health of school children and of teachers. Cooperation of national groups and organizations has been, and continues to be, indispensable to progress in our Joint Committee program. Such con¬ structive and substantial cooperation is being given to our Joint Committee in generous measure, even during this period of economic depression. For all of this splendid help our Joint Committee is deeply grateful. To continue the work of the Committee, and to provide for carrying thru and completing the projects which have been approved at annual meetings of the Committee after careful deliberation, the Committee expresses the hope that an appropriation of $500 for the work of the Committee during the coming year, 1933-34, will be approved and granted by the National Education Association, with the expectation that, as has been the custom for many years, an equal sum will be made available by the American Medi¬ cal Association for the expenses of the Joint Health Committee. 182 National Education Association REPORT OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION AND THE NATIONAL CON¬ GRESS OF PARENTS AND TEACHERS MRS. HUGH BRADFORD, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL CONGRESS OF PARENTS AND TEACHERS, SACRAMENTO, CALIF., Chairman The Joint Committee of the National Education Association and the Na¬ tional Congress of Parents and Teachers has been functioning for four years in an effort to support more effectively the educational program which is de¬ pendent on mutual effort and cooperation. During the last two years the Committee has urged that states have similar ' committees in which there should be representatives from state departments of education, state teachers associations, and leaders of the state branches of the parent-teacher associations. This has been done in practically all of the states. During the educational crisis these groups have stimulated and di¬ rected public opinion in support of education. From thirty-four states have come definite reports of activities which include asking the governors to call legislatures into special session in order to formulate plans for keeping schools open; defending good school legislation and defeating the adverse; holding regional and local meetings in defense of educational standards; informing the public that parents as taxpayers are seeking a proper estimate of educa¬ tional costs and school maintenance in all budgets ; and arousing interest in school budgets by radio talks, by community gatherings, and by state and national bulletins, by resolutions, letters, and telegrams. Thru every possible channel these groups have stood for school maintenance, for libraries, and other educational facilities. These committee meetings are called at the conventions of the National Education Association, the Department of Superintendence, and the Na¬ tional Congress of Parents and Teachers. At the last meeting it was urged that emphasis be placed on a study of budgets and of the relative costs of education. This Joint Committee desires to continue the program of the past by interchange of bulletin material for use in teachers’ and parent- teacher magazines, for the promotion of parent education, and for the pro¬ tection and upbuilding of educational standards. REPORT OF THE JOINT COMMISSION ON THE EMERGENCY IN EDUCATION JOHN K. NORTON, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y., Chairman Some fifteen years ago, conditions growing out of the World War caused the National Education Association to appoint an emergency commission. To the epoch-making work of this war-time commission may be traced many of the most significant advances achieved in education during the decade of the twenties. Reports of Committees 183 The development of the depression has created conditions which, by the beginning of the current calendar year, justified the creation of a second emergency commission. Sensing the seriousness of the situation, President Rosier of the National Education Association and President Potter of the Department of Superintendence together appointed a Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education. The members of this Commission are listed in the Official Manual for delegates. The Commission was instructed to inquire into the difficulties, financial and otherwise, which the schools were en¬ countering, and to take action aimed to meet these difficulties. The Commission met immediately after its appointment, outlined policies to govern its procedure, and began the development of a program of action. One of the early decisions of the Commission was that the time had been reached when an offensive, rather than a defensive, attitude should be taken concerning these groups and forces which were operating to undermine the integrity of the public schools and colleges of the nation. It was also decided that the Commission would create as little additional machinery of organization as possible. Active national, regional, state, and local educational organizations are in existence. It was the decision to work thru the officers of these organization and thru the officers of the various state and local school systems. As a third policy, the Commission decided to base its program, insofar as resources permitted, upon factual information and the advice of competent authorities, both within and without the teaching profession. Fourth, the Commission organized as a board of strategy, to serve as a rallying point for the forces made up of teachers, parents, and public-spirited citizens interested in the maintenance and improvement of America’s system of free public schools. Its aim is to exert the full force of the million mem¬ bers of the teaching profession and of the many millions of parents and citi¬ zens interested in preserving the idea of free public education and of making that idea increasingly articulate in improved schools and colleges. The administration of the program of the Joint Commission has been car¬ ried on thru the headquarters staff of the National Education Association and of its Department of Superintendence. The headquarters staff, in spite of the reduction in resources, which has resulted from the depression, has graciously accepted and efficiently performed the large amount of unexpected and addi¬ tional work, which the program of the Commission has required. The brunt of this work has fallen upon the Division of Administrative Service, the Research Division, and the Division of Publications. Every worker directed by Secretary Crabtree and Secretary Shankland has responded with prompt¬ ness and vigor to every request made by the Commission. The Commission has been heartened by the nationwide cooperation which it has received from officers of educational associations and of school systems thruout the country. The United States Office of Education, the state de¬ partments of education, the state teachers association, and the departments of the National Education Association, are but a few of the agencies which have wholeheartedly responded to the call of the Commission. Eaually cordial 184 National Education Association response has been received from lay organizations, of which the National Congress of Parents and Teachers and its state and local branches are a conspicuous example. The members of the Delegate Assembly have already come in contact with some of the elements of the program of action, which the Commission has vigorously developed during the six months of its existence. I am ready to submit briefly for your consideration the things which have been done or are now under way. adise0thrd r 476 regi0nal1COnjSuItrtS has been appointed to work with and s h Commissmn m the development of its program. These consultants smte d lffitT f T'°na ’ regl0na1’ and state educational organizations, of . e and local school systems, of parent-teacher organizations, and of school- oard associations, are being called together in a series of regional conferences. Thus far members of the Commission have met the regional consultants in onferences held in Kansas City, Chicago, Atlanta, and Cincinnati. A na- al conference of all regional consultants was held last Monday afternoon as a pait of President Rosier’s convention program. It is the plan to continue these regional conferences until all sections of the country have been covered, and until emergency conditions cease to exist. 1 he regional conferences already held have been well attended and actively participated in by the officers, both of educational and lay organizations advhee the cenCeS ^ ^ ^ the fi""g - opportunity To advise the Commission as to its program ; have permitted the pooling of offTrSeTTerning “nStrUCtIVJe act,on almed at emergency problems ; and have o ered an opportunity to disseminate material and advice bearing on the structed 1 UCatl0n' Th°Sae a“ending the regionaI conferences have been in- s tructed to come prepared to give and to receive help. The Commission has ca^ hat rbm T™ C°nferences- Letters fr™ many regional consultants indi- cate that they have also received assistance. suIt“y T!TCttr h3S been Sent * the Commission to regional con- tants. These letters have transmitted statistical information as to the theTelsI TCh°° * C °Sed’- thtextent of the denial educational opportunity nln t l.effUatf10rVnTle Vari°US StateS’ and °ther fa«uaI information concerning the effects of the depression on the schools. ren[inf™-1SS1°n h3S deVeI°ped a Plan for the regular collection of cur- ■ ent information concerning the effect of the depression on education This f;ri“ "" ?rr,m wi,h ~ <» piogiam. it has furnished live material for newspaper releases and be£n USed Wfdely “ radi° broad— dealing with A series of twenty-five radio broadcasts by well-known laymen and educa tors was presented during April and May under the auspices of the Toil hTokTps well the, f 7rgency in Education. These broadcasts over national pane and the Co T « f° 1 C°UrteSy °f the Nat''°nal Broadoasting Com- To lems oM I" lalTadCaSt,ng SyStCm' They dealt witb educational i roblems growing out of the emergency. The carefully prepared addresses of Reports of Committees 185 the speakers who appeared on this radio series constitute a store of unexcelled material in brief form concerning vital educational problems growing out of the current crisis. Copies of these addresses were promptly distributed from the headquarters of the National Education Association in response to a na¬ tionwide demand. A continuing survey has been begun of organizations which are critical or antagonistic toward public education. The documents and other materials assembled in this connection are providing valuable informaton as to the motives behind the attacks on the public schools. Such information has been of great value to the Commission in developing its program and in supplying information to those on the firing line. It is the plan to use this material in eliminating opposition to the schools which is based on false information, and in planning offensive action against those out of agreement with the idea of free public education. This survey will also provide a means of discovering the shortcomings of our schools and will thereby offer a basis for future progress. A parallel survey is being made of agencies favorable to public education. This material will later be used in developing more dynamic cooperation between educational and lay organizations. Another project seeks to secure a thoughtful appraisal by large numbers of intelligent citizens of the purposes, scope, and methods of public education. Under cover of the depression, proposals are being made which strike at the very roots of the principles upon which free education has been developed in this country. It is our belief that we should not shrink from these attacks, but should meet our opponents on their own grounds. Do the parents of this nation wish high-school education to be provided only for a limited few? Do they wish the payment of tuition to be set up as a prerequisite to admission to secondary schools, as has been proposed by certain organizations? Does the principle still hold that every child should have the particular oppor¬ tunities which are required in order that he may develop such talent as he may possess ? That is, do we still believe in the educability of every boy and girl? We should seek mandates from parents and from the rank and file of citizens on questions such as these. With this project in mind, a series of questions similar to those just raised, has been prepared concerning the organization of public education in the United States. It is proposed to suggest these questions as the basis of open forum discussion in many communities. A publication, entitled Appraising the Schools, is being prepared for use by those anxious to organize and par¬ ticipate in such forums. This publication, which will be available early in the fall, is being developed in cooperation with and thru the financial as¬ sistance of the Phi Delta Kappa Educational Fraternity, which has offered the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education indispensable support in the development of a program. This project grows out of the belief that the principles upon which free public education has been developed will bear scrutiny even in a time of economic depression, and that such scrutiny will 186 National Education Association serve to clarify and strengthen the democratic ideals which lie back of our system of free public schools. A second important outcome should be the development of wider interest on the part of the general public in the purposes and procedures of public schools and colleges. It is our belief that the public schools have everything to gain from critical consideration of their procedures on the part of the people who are the stockholders in the great enterprise known as public edu¬ cation. Teachers should be the last to claim that the schools are perfect. There is no more dangerous disease to which education can fall prey than self- satisfaction. We cannot disclaim any responsibility for the evils which now beset the nation. To do so would be to proclaim that the school is a futile organization. It is true that we have done the best our vision would permit. But our vision may have been too short. There are frontier thinkers, both within and without the profession, who believe that fundamental revisions in the purposes and methods of public education are demanded by the characteristics of contemporary civilization. They believe that the schools should play a more dynamic role in accomplish¬ ing the fulfillment of the promises of the New Deal. Shall we resent the criticisms of those conscientious thinkers or shall we profit from them? The latter is the more intelligent course. It is of the greatest importance that teachers and other conscientious citizens should re¬ appraise the role of public education in the light of the better economic, po¬ litical, and social order towards which all constructive thinkers are working. A series of publicity projects has been sponsored by the Commission. News¬ paper editorials, statements by well-known citizens, and other materials fa¬ vorable to education have been collected. This material has been widely dis¬ seminated and has been reprinted in hundreds of educational and lay pub¬ lications. A bulletin, entitled Meeting the Emergency in Education , has been prepared and widely distributed. A series of brief leaflets, dealing with questions of peculiar importance to the crisis in education is being prepared. The first of these, entitled Before You Cut That School Budget, is already available. There has been assembled a comprehenisve collection of material issued by various state and local school systems in dealing with educational problems growing out of the depression. It is of great importance that all states should profit from the publicity programs which have been developed in Pennsyl¬ vania and many other states. An exhibit of this material is presented at this convention. You are invited to inspect it and to receive other help concern¬ ing educational publicity at Exhibit Booth A2. A bulletin, entitled Helpmg Citizens To Know Their Schools , which draws heavily upon the experience of state and local school systems in de¬ veloping programs of educational interpretation, is being prepared and will be issued during 1933-34. American Education Week, sponsored by the Na¬ tional Education Association, the United States Office of Education, and the American Legion will be developed this year around the work and plans Reports of Committees 187 of the Joint Commission. The theme for the Week is Meeting the Emer¬ gency in Education. Close contact has been maintained by the Commission with developments in the nation’s capital, which are of direct concern to education. A special report was prepared and distributed concerning the federal pay cut and its implications for teachers’ salary schedules. We are closely watching the in¬ flation program in order to determine its probable influence on the cost of living and teachers’ salaries. The chairman of the Legislative Commission of the National Education Association is a member of the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Edu¬ cation. The Commission has assigned Dr. Hall the responsibility for phases of its program affecting the relation of the federal government to education. A grant of $4750 was recently obtained from the Carnegie Corporation for the work of the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education. Part of this sum is to be used in conducting a National Conference on the Financing of Education. To this conference, which is to be held at Columbia University during this summer, there has been invited a small group of educational offi¬ cials in key positions from various sections of the United States. This con¬ ference will have the assistance of technical experts in the fields of school finance, public finance, and taxation. Members of the conference will draft a report dealing with the principles and policies which should govern the financing of education in the United States. It is hoped that this report will provide the Commission an authoritative basis for a dynamic program of activities, bearing on the financing of educa¬ tion, which will be promoted with the cooperation of the regional consultants and others interested in developing sound bases of school support. The Joint Commission has been in existence for six months — all too brief a period to permit any confident appraisal of the present outlook for educa¬ tion. In that time, however, we have employed every facility at our com¬ mand in order to appraise the situation. What message do we bring to the teachers of the nation? It is not a mes¬ sage of despair, but one of hope. We do not wish to underestimate the seri¬ ousness of the present crisis, or to depreciate the dangers which lie ahead. For nearly four years the country has been in one of the most serious pe¬ riods of economic stagnation of its history. As one reviews the impact of this period upon the public schools, a number of significant facts stand out. The period of the depression has reemphasized to all thoughtful people the importance of the public school. The very nature of our civilization makes imperative increased emphasis on education. The depression has served to clarify certain characteristics of our civilization which are of great import to education. We have come to realize that we are living in a society in which intelligent cooperation as opposed to ruthless individualism must be increasingly emphasized. Ours is a society in which profound changes are occurring with a rapidity that has never been equaled before in the history of any nation. Ours is a society of tremendous complexity, dependent upon science, technology, and specialization. Perhaps, most important of all we 188 National Education Association have come to realize that our order offers possibilities for material, cultural, and spiritual well-being which entirely surpass those held out to any other- generation. Each of those characteristics of our civilization carries with it inescapable implications for public education. If we are to have less ruthless individ¬ ualism and more intelligent cooperation, education must produce citizens capable of conducting their enterprises on a high level of cooperation. If rapid changes are to occur in our economic, political, and cultural life, then we must have people trained to recognize the significance of these changes and to make the adaptation in individual and institutional life which they call for. As science, technology, and specialization increasingly influence our ways of living, we must not only train scientists and technicians but also be sure that these scientists and technicians realize the social implications of their callings and appreciate the personal obligations to society of the man and woman of expert knowledge. If we are to realize the possibilities for material, cultural, and spiritual well-being which science and the machine make possible, education must create citizens who not only understand the unique potentialities, but who resolutely and continually demand the fulfillment of these possibilities. This is all merely another way of saying that the whole trend of American life in recent decades, and particularly since the onset of the depression, has emphasized the fundamental importance of education to the state. The present situation opens up three possibilities for the future. These are chaos, revolution, or evolution. The choice which we make will determine the emphasis we will put on education. The first possibility is that we will continue to drift, as we did during tne fiist three and a half years of the depression, permitting the swings of the economic cycle to gyrate with increasing amplitude until chaos results, civilization retrogresses, and most of the things which we hold dear are swept away. Such things have happened before in the history of the race. They could happen to us. If this is to be the outcome the schools can be closed tomorrow. In fact, that would be one of the best ways to proceed if chaos is our goal. But most people would prefer some other solution. There is a second route. We might adopt some form of dictatorship. A competent dictator would probably straighten up the present mess in a year. Some nations have chosen this road to stability and prosperity. We may not be so far from it. The bankers are already virtually telling some cities what they may and may not do. If this is to be America s way out of the present situation, or some similar situation in the future, we can close up many of the schools. A few must be kept to educate our rulers. A few more will suffice to give the elementary training required by those who are to be ruled. But most Americans recoil from dictatorship, whether of the Russian, the Italian, or the German variety. The past experience of the world with oligarchies does not recommend this as a permanent solution. Reports of Committees 189 The third way out lies along the route of democratic evolution. If we take this road it will be necessary to make fundamental revisions in many of our public and private institutions. But we will make these revisions under democratic control. This is the route which the great mass of Americans would prefer to take. But if we are to travel this road, education will have to become one of the most fundamental concerns of the state. Democracy is never a perfect form of government. Its only hope for reasonable success depends upon the production of an adequate supply of intelligent leaders with large concern for the general welfare, and a great mass of followers sufficiently intelligent to require and to permit the leaders to make the revisions of our economic, political, and social institutions which changing conditions demand. It is these considerations which make so tragic the shortsighted view which certain vested interests have taken toward public schools and colleges during the depression. A small but active minority of business and financial leaders have so little realized the fundamental importance of education to present stability, and future progress, that they have permitted their influence and money to be used in a ruthless campaign, which has had as its aim the indiscriminate slashing of all public services. They have organized economic councils, tax¬ payers leagues, and other agencies designed to hammer down taxes at any cost. They have justified their selfish and reactionary activities under the inde¬ fensible economic doctrine that the depression was caused by public expendi¬ tures, and that economic recovery is dependent upon a ruthless slashing of these expenditures. An illustration of the methods by which these short-sighted enemies of the people have sought to mislead the nation is found in an advertisement which recently appeared in a number of great metropolitan newspapers over the name of a large public utility company. This advertisement carried the heading: “Why Don’t Taxes Come Down with Incomes?” It pointed out that the average man’s income had been cut to a mere fraction of the 1929 figure, and urged that taxes should be simi¬ larly slashed. Here we have an example of the attitude, which is more responsible for the recent deprivations of the American people than any other single factor. This great utility organization is not worried by the fact that great numbers of the American people have had their wages and salaries cut until millions are unable to purchase even adequate amounts of food and clothing. What disturbs this company, to such an extent that it expends large sums for news¬ paper advertising which you and I help to pay for every time we use some gas or electricity, is that equally deep slashes have not been made in public expenditures. What this utility organization wants is educational starvation equal to the physical starvation, which has threatened growing numbers of our people since 1929. When the peasant standard of living, to which millions have 190 National Education Association been reduced, is matched by a peasant standard of educating, this public utility will be satisfied. The time has come to give a frank answer to the selfish and reactionary vested interests, which are asking, “Why don’t taxes come down with in¬ come ?” and which, under the cover of the depression, are seeking to wreck our system of free public schools. School costs have not come down as some vested interests have advo¬ cated, because the average man wants his boy and girl to have the educational opportunity, which should be the birthright of every American child. The average man has resisted the conspiracy against public education into which a minority of business leaders have entered. The average man has had something to say about school taxes. He has insisted that his child shall not be made the victim of the economic blunder¬ ing of our socalled business leaders, which a growing body of evidence is revealing to be a basic cause of the depression. It is unfortunate that the average man has not had equal ability to resist cuts, which have been made in his wage or salary. It is time that those who are asking, “Why don’t taxes come down with in¬ come ?” should be answering some questions which are becoming increasingly annoying to the average man. Why is it that for nearly four years, while the average man’s income was dropping to poverty levels, the business and financial leaders of the nation did little to stop this drop, but demanded indiscriminate slashes in public services, and spread the economically inde¬ fensible propaganda that the depression was due to excessive taxation ? Those who sit in the key places of business and financial control in this country have had in their hands half of the economic power of the world. What have they done with it ? They have spent large sums for advertising in an effort to beat down expenditures for schools and other essential public services. They have organized themselves into self-appointed committees, which have sought to usurp the budget-making functions of the legally elected rep¬ resentatives of the people. They have been so little interested in the welfare of the children of the average men, that they have made little effort to discriminate between es¬ sential and non-essential public services. They have employed clever lawyers to show them how to evade income taxes, which any socially-minded citizen of great wealth should have been glad to pay in a period such as the present. At the same time, they have urged that the nation’s wealth is so meager, that the schooling of the average man’s boy and girl must be limited to the rudiments of the three R’s and a narrow vocational training, lasting but a few years. But they have not told us what boys and girls are to do with their time when they leave school to enter a labor market already glutted with twelve million unemployed. Only recently the textile manufacturers have resisted the proposal that child labor should be barred by the trade agreements which were being worked out for the textile industry. Reports of Committees 191 It is high time that such peace-time “slackers” should be called to account. The New Deal is long overdue. There is no defensible reason why the average man’s income should have come down. The natural resources, the machinery of production, the workmen, the transportation facilities, everything essen¬ tial to the maintenance of an American standard of living and of an Ameri¬ can standard of educating exist in unparalleled abundance in this country. It appears that under the slogan of the New Deal constructive forces are being put into operation, which will lift the nation from the economic morass, in which it has been floundering for nearly four years. When the seventy- third Congress recently adjourned in Washington, it had completed what was described by one commentator as one of the most momentous one hun¬ dred days of legislative action in the history of the world. Whether this comprehensive effort to bring intelligence and cooperation into our economic life will be wholly successful cannot be predicted at this time. It would be a miracle, if this pioneer attempt was completely successful in its actual administration. But there is one fact which is clear. The posi¬ tive effort which is being made to do something about the stupid economic impasse, which has afflicted us for nearly four years, deserves the constructive support of all forward-looking citizens. If weaknesses develop in the methods which are being used to put the wheels of our marvelous economic machine in motion, then these methods should be modified. We should never again be satisfied with a do-nothing policy, which permits millions to sink to a pauper level in the presence of abundance. All signs at present indicate that the American people want neither chaos nor dictatorship. They want an honest and continuing effort made, to work out under democratic control, the revisions in our economic, social, and political systems which the times demand. It is for this reason that we bring a message of hope, rather than one of despair. If the years which lie ahead are to be marked by a constructive and liberal policy, education is bound to be of increasing importance to the na¬ tion. Between now and 1950 we are likely to witness a period of un¬ paralleled educational expansion and improvement. One of the phases of the New Deal, as it develops in the years that lie just ahead, should consist of a general overhauling of the purposes, scope, and procedures of public education, in the light of the new demands of the twentieth century. In fact, such a reappraisal and strengthening of the in¬ fluence of education is essential if the New Deal is to be something more than a mere “flash-in-the-pan.” It is these considerations which justify courage on the part of those who work in the held of education. The twentieth century offers American teach¬ ers the greatest challenge ever presented to any group of professional work¬ ers. Are we ready to qualify ourselves to meet this challenge? Have we the intelligence and the courage to build a system of public education that will play a dynamic role in the development of the New Deal? If we can give an affirmative answer to these questions, we may indeed look to the future with hope. 192 National Education Association REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE ECONOMIC STATUS OF THE TEACHER B. R. BUCKINGHAM, BOSTON, MASS., Chairman In 1927 at the meeting of this Delegate Assembly in Seattle, the Com¬ mittee on the Economic Status of the Teacher was created. The circum¬ stances were peculiar. The leaders of your body had never contemplated the creation of such a committee and they never told you to come to the floor of the Representative Assembly and introduce a resolution to that effect or vote for it. Nevertheless, for some unforeseen reason, somebody to me un¬ known, altho I have diligently sought to ascertain his or her name, proposed this Committee and it went thru. The point I want to make is that the creation of this Committee was essentially a teacher measure rather than a superintendent measure or a principal measure, and more recent events in the work of the conduct of the Committee will continue to exhibit to you this fact of the peculiar inter¬ est which the teacher has in this Committee. I was uncertain when accepting the chairmanship of the Committee what it was all about. I could see the importance of it but I could not see readily the means of getting at the solution of the problem. Now the problem, as I understand it, is this, to throw light upon the financial standing of the teachers; to appraise on a basis of ascertained fact, the satisfaction which teaching affords in freedom from financial worry and in economic inde¬ pendence. What life values, dependent upon financial resources, accrue to the teacher? Now this is something more I submit than salaries. If it were that or that mainly the work of this committee would be of no particular value or sig¬ nificance. The question of salaries is being covered adequately. We have re¬ ported from the various districts of the state and nation the salaries of the teachers in those districts. We know the trends; we know the amount. There would be no sense in a committee created by this body duplicating the work of others who are concerned with the salaries of teachers and who are doing the work well. The core of this question — and I am trying to abbreviate what I have in mind — the core of this question seems to me to lie in full account in relation to local conditions of the income and expenditures of teachers. The reason why that is true, the reason why salaries alone are insufficient as a basis for estimating the economic status of teachers is first because we must know what the salary will buy. In other words, we must know something about the cost of living ; and, in the second place, we must know something about what the salary is expected to buy. Life in the open country, life in the vil¬ lage of less than 5000 is far different from life in the city of a million. The expectation of the community is by no means the same and one has not ap- pioached the question of the standard of living on the community basis when Reports of Committees 193 one has merely compared the cost of given commodities in the village and in the large city. And so we have what we may call the community standard of living. Again we have a professional standard of living. Lawyers and doctors and clergymen do not, like teachers, go back to school after they have en¬ tered service. They do not throng the museums of Europe. Now teachers don’t do those things because they have so much money. They do those things because it is a professional requirement and has got to be provided for in their scheme of living. I am inclined to think that the tourist trade would be crippled and that summer sessions would more or less vanish and a lot of other cultural institutions and activities of the country would be dimin¬ ished and go backward to elementary organizations if it were not for the teaching body. And in addition to this cost of living and in addition to both community and professional standards of living, there is a third reason why salaries are insufficient as a basis of appraisal of the economic conditions and that is the way the teacher manages his money. Of all courses that we as teachers have taken or may yet take while in service, I can think of none which would be more helpful than a course in money management. If the story were mine to tell, I could give details for the reason I believe this. We as a committee have been receiving this year from a few thousand teachers of the country details as to their money management and let me say merely that it is a varied and absorbing story. It seems to me that the Committee must make a frontal attack upon this problem. Two years ago we brought out a report on supply and demand in teacher training. Now the relation of supply and demand to the economic status of the teacher is evident, but it is not true. The Committee felt that it was skirting the edges of the problem and that the thing to do if it were to meet the needs of the hour was to obtain nothing else than a budget statement from such teachers as were willing to participate and, moreover, that budget statement would have to last for a round year, and that looked pretty drastic. It caused the Committee to deliberate long and painfully and it nearly wrecked the Committee. In fact one member resigned rather than set his hand to the proposed action. Nevertheless, last February the Committee rounded out a budget in the form of a booklet providing twelve monthly reports to be submitted to the teachers of the country, and in April it threw itself upon the mercies of the educational public by sending a copy of this booklet together with a letter of transmittal to fifty-one superintendents of the country. These fifty-one superintendents were selected because they were in the fifty-one cities of the country for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics furnishes the cost of living data. Now these superintendents reacted in vari¬ ous ways. Some of them never answered the letter. Some of them decided not to participate in the enterprise and did so on their own notion. Both those who did that and those who failed to reply were themselves deciding for their teachers whether or not these teachers should participate. One said, “I regret very much that after consideration at two meetings of our board of 194 National Education Association superintendents, it was decided not to participate in the study of the eco¬ nomic status of teachers,'’ Now I think this superintendent really did give the matter serious atten¬ tion. I even think that he was right in hesitating to impose this task upon his teachers. But why should there be any imposition at all since it is a teacher question? Why not put it up to the teachers and let them decide? Some superintendents in deciding the question were rather antagonistic. One said, “I do not care to ask any of our teachers to keep such a monthly record of expenditures as the suggested inquiry blank enclosed in your letter.” Another said, “I feel that the blank is improper and that no one will fill it out honestly. I do not see how anyone can consent to take part.” But the majority did take part. In fact we are now receiving returns from thirty-seven out of the fifty-one cities. While a few superintendents merely wrote in effect saying that “our city will help in this project,” the usual procedure was to refer the question to the city teacher association. Your Committee knows of but one instance in which when this was done the teachers failed to respond favorably. This is what I meant when I said that the problem upon which the Committee is engaged is of special interest to classroom teachers. It is their status rather than the status of other groups in the educational hierarchy that is of real importance. It is important not only to the teachers themselves but also to society. I have a few excerpts from letters received from participating teachers that have a certain human interest and I would have read them to you if’ I had had time, but I can assure you that there are about 3000 of these teachers in these selected cities who are striving mightily to do for you thru your Committee the thing you want done. Now, finally, I would not have you suppose that the Committee stopped in its thinking with mere figures reported on these blanks. Money, whether paid to the teacher or spent by him, is only a symbol. To the teacher it stands for opportunity. It means in a small or large degree the realization of per¬ sonal and professional aspirations. On the other hand, in regard to the com¬ munity, money is equally symbolic. Taken in connection with ability to pay, it is the truest measure beside which mere verbal hypocrisies are valueless of the esteem in which the teachers and the teachers’ calling are held. Ac¬ cordingly I ask you, insofar as possible, to support this inquiry in your com¬ munity, to say a good word for it, and to uphold the hands of the Committee. I commend to you, therefore, this inquiry upon which I hope a year from now to make a full report for the economic status of the teacher. Reports of Committees 195 REPORT OF THE LEGISLATIVE COMMISSION 1 SIDNEY B. HALL, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, RICHMOND, VA., Chairman In February, 1933, the present chairman of the Legislative Commission was appointed to succeed the late Dr. Thomas E. Finegan who had held this office several years. Dr. Finegan was influential in the set-up of the Legis¬ lative Commission in 1920, and he served as a member of this body until his death. He was devoted to its ideals and purposes, and the Commission as well as the whole educational field will miss his fearless and courageous leadership, his inspiration, and enthusiasm. Immediately upon his appointment, your new chairman made several trips to Washington to confer with members of the staff of the National Education Association. These conferences, his correspondence with mem¬ bers of the Commission and leaders in the Association, and a study of records of the Commission have helped him to an understanding of the scope of the work of the Commission. Reviewing the constructive work of Dr. Finegan and of his predecessors, the chairman is conscious of his responsibility to carry forward the work of the Commission on the same high plane of efficiency and service which characterized the work of former chairmen. With the help of the membership and of the Association, policies developing the purposes for which the Commission was established will be pursued. Legislative Commission Meeting in Minneapolis Closely following the appointment of the new chairman, a meeting of the Legislative Commission was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At this meeting the chairman submitted to the Commission the following brief program of action which was unanimously approved by those present: X. Continued support of a federal Department of Education with a Secretary in the President’s Cabinet, and the introduction of a bill for such a Department in the present Congress. 2. Continued efforts to bring about a satisfactory coordination and unification of federal educational activities in the proposed plan of reorganization of the federal government. 3. Support of bills in Congress proposing to amend the Reconstruction Finance Corporation Act to authorize federal emergency loans to school districts. 4. Broaden scope of the Commission’s work to include advice and assistance to state legislative programs. 5. Appointment of a small executive committee of the Commission to advise the chairman on all matters needing immediate action. With the exception of the last item, this program is based upon the platform and resolutions of the National Education Association. The Executive Committee of the Legislative Commission Whenever possible matters requiring action by the Legislative Commis¬ sion will be referred to the whole membership. On certain occasions, how- 1 Presented by George D. Strayer, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y., in the absence of the chairman. 196 National Education Association ever, when immediate action is necessary, this will not be possible. In such emergencies it will be helpful for the chairman to have the advice and assistance of a small executive committee whose proximity to Washington will enable the members to come to the capital upon short notice. Acting upon the authority granted him by the Commission, the chairman has ap¬ pointed the following committee: Ben Graham, superintendent of schools, Pittsburgh, Pa.; John K. Norton, professor of education, Teachers College, Columbia University, and chairman of the Joint Commission on the Emer¬ gency in Education, New York, N. Y. ; David Weglein, superintendent of schools, Baltimore, Md. ; Jessie Gray, member, faculty of Philadelphia Nor¬ mal School, Philadelphia, Pa. ; Lee Kirkpatrick, superintendent of schools, Paris, Ky. One meeting of this committee was called on April 10 to advise and assist the chairman in assembling data to submit to the Secretary of the Interior on the following day. Conferences with the Secretary of the Interior After a number of conferences with high officials in Washington and Vir¬ ginia, the chairman decided to lay before Hon. Harold L. Ickes, the Secre¬ tary of the United States Department of the Interior, certain aspects of education of national importance. On April 5 the chairman had the first con¬ ference with the secretary who gave him a very sympathetic hearing. He outlined to Secretary Ickes three propositions to be placed before the Presi¬ dent of the United States at the time the secretary deemed best. These propo¬ sitions, which were submitted to Mr. Ickes along with supporting data pre¬ pared in advance at the headquarters of the National Education Association, w^ere : 1. A radio address in behalf of education by President Roosevelt over a nation¬ wide hookup 2. Federal emergency aid for public school districts 3. The reorganization of federal educational activities. The secretary’s request for further data on certain phases of these questions necessitated a second conference wdth him. To prepare this additional data, the chairman asked the executive committee of the Legislative Commission to meet him at the headquarters building of the National Education Asso¬ ciation. Paul Mort, director of the School of Education, Teachers Col¬ lege, Columbia University, was asked to meet with the executive committee, and his suggestions and advice were very helpful. At this conference addi¬ tional information desired by the secretary wTas discussed and assembled ; and on April 11, it was presented to Mr. Ickes by your chairman. It is the opinion of the chairman that the interest of the Secretary of the Interior in public education in this country was thereby strengthened. A stirring radio address in support of adequate educational opportunities by Secretary Ickes on May 20 may be interpreted as the Administration’s recognition of the soundness and justification of the appeals laid before the secretary. Reports of Committees 197 Conference with Vocational Educational Leaders Even before his succession to this position, the chairman of the Legislative Commission felt that a more sympathetic understanding between those en¬ gaged in general and vocational education would result in more solid sup¬ port of all educational facilities. Accordingly the development of such a relationship was one of the first things attempted by the chairman. On March 13, your chairman arranged an all-day conference at the head¬ quarters building of the National Education Association and invited repre¬ sentatives from both the general and vocational fields of education to attend. After a full day’s discussion, the following points were agreed upon : 1. We approve the principle of responsibility and aid for education from the federal government; 2. We believe that support should be given at once by the federal government to the states to meet the present emergency in general education; 3. We believe that federal aid as now constituted should be continued and ex¬ tended as needs require ; and 4. We believe a conference should be held with the President of the United States for the purpose of soliciting his support for public education. Efforts to Help with the Reorganization of Educational Activities In line with the resolutions of the National Education Association as well as the program adopted by the Legislative Commission, the chairman has devoted considerable time to conferences with high officials in the United States Government on the question of the reorganization of federal edu¬ cational activities. Several trips to Washington have been made for this purpose. Besides the important conferences already mentioned with the Sec¬ retary of the Interior, the chairman contacted Hon. Swagar Sherley, Hon. Daniel C. Roper, and others who did the preliminary work on President Roosevelt’s reorganization plan. After the new administration came into office, contacts were established with Hon. Lewis Douglas, Director of the Budget, who has the program for reorganization in charge. Correspondence setting forth the aims and hopes of educators was carried on with Director Douglas and a copy of Federal Relations to Fducation, the final report of the National Advisory Committee on Education, was placed before him. Conferences on this subject of reorganization w’ere held with the United States Senators from Virginia and other leaders in both houses of Congress. Conclusion Sixteen years ago the National Education Association alarmed by the weaknesses of the public schools revealed by draft figures for the World War, appointed in cooperation with the Department of Superintendence a Joint Commission on the National Emergency in Education. A survey of the educational situation thruout the country by the Commission disclosed a shameful neglect of the rights of childhood in many sections. The Asso¬ ciation immediately accepted this challenge to its leadership and projected 198 National Education Association a national program of education which aroused the country to the necessity of providing educational facilities more comparable to our national needs. In 1920 the Commission submitted its final report and on its recommenda¬ tion the present Legislative Commission was established to carry out the program of the Emergency Commission. Today the progress of education thruout the country faces a more peril¬ ous situation than it faced in 1917,. and gains of a decade are in grave danger of being swept away. Again the Association has accepted the challenge and has appointed a second Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education which is now studying the unfortunate educational situation created by the present financial depression with a view to recommending policies for the reconstruction of American education. It was the consensus of those attending the meeting at Minneapolis that the Legislative Commission should aid in every possible way to carry out recommendations proposed by the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education. The chairman of the Legislative Commission calls upon every member to cooperate with the Joint Commission to the end that school systems everywhere may continue to offer that educational opportunity to every boy and girl which the welfare of the social order demands. REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON RETIREMENT ALLOWANCES ANNA LAURA FORCE, PRINCIPAL, LAKE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, Denver, colo., Chairman On account of reduced revenues for schools, the Committee has never had more serious problems to consider relating to teacher retirement allowances. In some states the teachers are not enrolled in any joint-contributory retire¬ ment plan. Under present conditions, they may be unable to provide for their own security in old age. In some states, retirement systems that had already proved inadequate now influence public opinion against retirement systems in general. Even where systems have been operating on a sound basis, increasing pressure is being exerted to undermine their organization. Now is the time to reaffirm the Committee’s statement of the fundamental principles of a teacher retirement system.1 Especially appropriate are the principles that recommend joint support of retirement systems, regular ac¬ cumulation of funds, maintenance of reserves, and return of accumulated deposits. In the light of present conditions, the Committee wishes to supplement and reinforce the principles, by stating that : 1. The integrity of the retirement funds must be preserved. 2. Adjustments, even tho temporary, in the administration of the retirement funds, should be based only upon expert advice and careful study. 1 National Education Association, Research Division. “Fundamental Principles of a Teacher Retire¬ ment System.” Research Bulletin 8:226-29; November, 1930. Washington, D. C.: the Association. Reports of Committees 199 3. Expert supervision should govern the investment and accounting of retire- ment funds. 4. Retrenchments should not lead school systems to retire competent, experienced teachers, involuntarily, immediately upon attaining the age for optional re¬ tirement. 5. School systems at present unable to adopt retirement provisions for their em¬ ployees, should continue, nevertheless, to study the problem. Committee members will be especially interested in the report of 1932-33 retirement legislation. Nineteen states and the Territory of Hawaii consid¬ ered retirement proposals during legislative sessions in 1932-33. A total of 62 bills was introduced. Twenty-one bills were passed and approved. Of the 21 bills defeated, 12 never came to a final vote. Final action has not been reported on 20 bills, 4 of which have been enacted and await approval. In 1930-31, teacher retirement bills before state legislatures numbered 34. The increase in 1932-33 results from the introduction in several states of meas¬ ures attempting to cope with present decreased school revenues. How do the 1932-33 proposals and enactments affect the status of teacher retirement sys¬ tems in this country? What temporary financial adjustments have been made in administering the funds? The introductory statement in the report points out only the most significant measures. The state-by-state review describes the 62 bills introduced. Teacher retirement systems in effect — In 1933 New Mexico adopted a law to establish, under control of the state board of education, a joint-con¬ tributory retirement system for teachers in the public schools and higher institutions. This law will not take effect until January 1, 1934. A bill to provide pensions for disabled public-school teachers in Delaware, was passed by the state legislature, but has yet to receive the governor’s approval. Vir¬ ginia and Delaware defeated in 1932 and 1933, respectively, a proposed statewide retirement bill for teachers. In 1933 bills attempted to repeal state retirement laws operating for teachers in Arizona, Maryland, Michi¬ gan, and Wisconsin. Payments from public funds — A third of the retirement bills concerned state contributions to teacher retirement systems. Maine altered the method of making payments to the retirement fund established for teachers entering service after July 1, 1924. The Connecticut legislature included in 1933-35 budget an amount sufficient only to maintain the retirement fund on a cash basis, but later adopted a measure to prevent temporary suspension of the statute that requires the pension fund to be maintained on a reserve basis. A special appropriation bill, enacted and approved in 1933, makes up a defi¬ ciency of $1,500,000 due the School Employees’ Retirement System from state funds in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania will extend over a longer period than originally contemplated, the payments on account of prior service. Similar action is under consideration in the Territory of Hawaii. Nevada removed the tax levied by counties that supplemented the state tax in sup¬ port of the teacher retirement fund. This action is not expected to interfere with the payment of allowances in this state. Illinois proposes to increase 200 National Education Association the tax rate for the state teacher retirement fund. Bills to eliminate amounts contributed from public sources in California, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin did not come to a vote. A bill recently before the Washington state legisla¬ ture to prevent payment of pensions from public funds, was not reported out of committee. Members' deposits and equities — New Jersey and New York enacted laws to provide that current salary adjustments will not affect retirement deposits or benefits. A Pennsylvania law now permits teachers to decide whether they will contribute on the basis of full or reduced salary. The state and local districts’ contributions will be based on the salary on which the teacher elects to contribute. A decision of the Connecticut state supreme court in its March, 1933 term, indicates that teachers’ deposits toward retirement annuities shall be based on salary actually received, altho such salary may have been re¬ duced below contract salary. Illinois proposes to increase the amount re¬ quired in teachers’ deposits. In this same state, the senate committee recom¬ mended for passage a bill to protect pension rights of Chicago school em¬ ployees, if forced to leave school work on account of non-payment of salaries. Bills were defeated in California and New York to retire teachers at age 65 ; and in Pennsylvania, to retire teachers at age 62. At least two of these bills provided for an allowance proportionate to that originally promised. Minnesota, which was the only state to enact a Teachers’ Retirement Law in 1931, reports that this law has operated to the entire satisfaction of its sponsors. The confidence in the new law is evidenced by the steady growth in membership. The 1933 legislature did not attempt to amend or alter the law' in any sense, due largely to the vigilance of the teachers of the state and to representatives in the legislature friendly to their cause. Progress in teacher retirement legislation, according to reports from Idaho, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia, must await more favorable conditions. The Kansas State Teachers Associa¬ tion contemplates establishing a fund, thru increased membership dues, to provide for its own members at retirement. In Colorado reorganization of the state financial system, of necessity, takes precedence over teacher retirement legislation. The Nebraska State Teachers Association reports as follows: “Because of peculiar economic conditions, we did not present retirement legis¬ lation to the 1933 session. We have continued our state committee on retire¬ ment and we have attempted to further local interest by means of articles in our state journal, radio addresses, and a presentation of retirement facts to group meetings and conventions. It is our intention to continue our profes¬ sional interest and, as far as possible, our statewide interest in this very im¬ portant problem, until such time as we again feel able to present a bill for legislative enactment.” Following an actuarial study of data on the teaching personnel in Louisi¬ ana, a committee of the state teachers association drew up a joint-contribu¬ tory retirement plan, to be administered by a special board of trustees. The April, 1932 Journal of the Louisiana Teachers' Association contains the de¬ tails of this retirement plan. When the State Committee on Teacher Retire- Reports of Committees 201 ment completes its program, the campaign for a retirement law will be in the hands of the state association’s Legislative Committee. However, teacher retirement legislation in Louisiana must be subordinated to the two other projects of increasing state appropriations for public schools and securing adequate support for state institutions. The Committee of One Hundred on Retirement Allowances has sum¬ marized in this report the teacher retirement legislative proposals or enact¬ ments in 1932-33, using material published in journals of state teachers asso¬ ciations and reports submitted by school officials. The state-by-state summary brings up-to-date the review of legislation contained in the Committee’s re¬ port of July, 1931. While some of the proposals or enactments during the two-year period are encouraging, every legislative year has its quota of destructive measures threatening established retirement funds or the general progress of teacher retirement. In 1933 there were attempts to repeal three statewide teacher re¬ tirement laws, to place restrictions on the use of state funds for retirement purposes, and to reduce or eliminate amounts contributed from public sources. Proposals to remove the tenure rights of teachers who reach the age for optional retirement, accompanied the general movement for economy in school expenditures. The cooperation and enlightened efforts of teachers, legislators, and friends of public education, prevented the passing of these destructive measures. Let us bear in mind that in such cases the campaign of education, carried on by our Committee during the past years, is now revealing its results. How¬ ever, the Committee must not overlook the effect of such proposals upon the status of established retirement funds or upon retirement provisions as a whole. It is evident that the Committee cannot at this time afford to relax its campaign of education and research. The 1932 report formed the basis for several of the Committee’s activ¬ ities during the past year. An article entitled “Some Accomplishments of Teacher Retirement Systems,” summarizing data in the report, was sent to secretaries of state teachers associations for publication in the state education journals. In November, 1932, representatives of the National Council of Teachers’ Retirement Systems and the Committee held a conference at head¬ quarters. The data included in the 1932 report formed the main topic for discussion. The Committee has supplied material from its files to assist the Associa¬ tion in preparing several publications; namely: 1. “Estimating State School Efficiency.” Research Bulletin 10:75-132; May, 1933. 2. Graduate Theses on Teacher Retirement, May, 1932. Mimeographed. lOp. 3. State School Legislation, 1931. Studies in State Educational Administration No. 10, February, 1932. 4. State School Legislation, 1932. Educational Research Service Circular No. 5, April, 1933. The chairman and other Committee representatives have answered many questions during 1932-33. A few of these inquiries were: 202 National Education Association 1. What age is required for retirement of teachers who have prior-service credit? Seventy years old. 2. What information is available describing retirement provisions for college and university professors? In some states the retirement system includes, as I read about one state this morning, these institutions. The new law in New Mexico includes the higher institution and anyone wanting information on this, I will refer to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 3. What compulsory retirement age has been established by school systems? Mainly seventy. 4. What are the names of some of the consulting actuaries employed by teacher retirement systems? The names of competent actuaries are furnished by the American Institute of Actuaries. This information can also be given to you by the Research Division. 5. Where is information available relating to retirement of teachers in foreign countries? I will refer you to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The 1932 report developed from a study of 45 state, territorial, and local teacher retirement systems in operation. In the present report, the Committee brings up-to-date its 1931 statement concerning current legislation, and the number and location of the systems in effect. A brief list of publications issued during 1932-33 by the National Education Association, and other organiza¬ tions and authorities, is also included. REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON RURAL EDUCATION 1 WILLIS A- SUTTON, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, ATLANTA, GA., Chairman The Committe on Rural Education submits the following recommenda¬ tions : ( 1 ) Whereas, in the thinking of our agricultural leadership the place and purpose of education is definitely defined as never before and the recovery of agriculture as a basic industry along with the security of our civilization depends upon the education of our people and their willingness to cooperate unselfishly, we declare it to be more important than ever for the schools of the farmers’ children to be assured proper support, intelligent direction, and efficient operation, to meet the changing needs of this transition period. W e recommend that the teachers of the nation, rural and urban, become more sensitive to the needs of the rural schools and more active in properly interpreting them to themselves and to the public. (2) In order to accomplish this end, to preserve gains already made, to see that no child is deprived of a minimum program of education, and to achieve steadier progress toward the equalization of educational opportunity and support, we reiterate our previous finding that rural education should be represented on the staff of the National Education Association and repeat the recommendation that this member of the headquarters staff be given the responsibility of interpreting rural education. Without such specialized service, the progress of meeting the needs of half the school children of our 1 Presented by Agnes Samuelson, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Des Moines, Iowa, in the absence of the chairman. Reports of Committees 203 land is haphazard, slow, rather than deliberate and accelerated. We hope the exigencies of the budget will not too long delay the recommendation of this most important expansion of the service of the office of the National Educa¬ tion Association. (3) We note that the Rural Department has reduced its requests to the Budget Committee from $500 to $300 and we respectfully request that the same be allowed, that the Department may continue to function on behalf of our rural-school children. (4) We point out the increased migration from urban to rural commu¬ nities and the educational implications of the same. We stress the need of a constructive and comprehensive program of rural education during this period of reconstruction, and to that end we recommend that the Committee on Rural Education be continued. REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE TO COOPERATE WITH THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS IN COLORED SCHOOLS N. C. NEWBOLD, STATE DIRECTOR OF NEGRO EDUCATION, STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, RALEIGH, N. C., Chairman This committee was established by the National Education Association at the Philadelphia meeting in 1925 having its duties enlarged at subsequent meetings of the Association. Its main objectives are ( 1 ) to cooperate with and encourage the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, (2) thru subcommittees, to encourage studies in problems of negro educa¬ tion and life, and (3) to help promote interracial goodwill. This Committee holds two annual meetings — -one at the regular summer meeting of the National Education Association, the other at the February meeting of the Department of Superintendence. While tentative reports in progress of several of the subcommittees have been received, only one or two are prepared in written form and included in this general report. The subcommittee, working in cooperation with the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, is doing what it can to help this important association of teachers keep going at reasonably satisfactory levels in these trying times, but no formal report is filed. The subcommittee to find out what white colleges and universities of the South are doing to promote wholesome interracial relations, reports that more than forty colleges sent representatives to George Peabody College in August 1932 for a three-day conference on this subject. R. R. Moton, principal of Tuskegee Institute, was invited to deliver an address to this group in conjunction with 2,000 teachers and public-school administrators attending Peabody summer school. The report was published in pamphlet form under the title of Education and Racial Adjustment by Peabody Col¬ lege. A similar conference is called to meet at Peabody in August 1933, at 204 National Education Association which time very definite reports of what these colleges are doing will be made, including a source hook and syllabus on Negro life and education for use in these white colleges. The subcommittee to find out and secure the publications of important theses and dissertations that may contribute to the improvement of Negro education and health is doing effective work, but has no formal report at this time. No definite report of the subcommittee to study the distribution of federal funds for Negro education is filed. I he subcommittee ( 1 ) to study what is included in elementary and high- school history and civics textbooks, and (2) to promote a moving talking picture portraying Negro history and life in America, makes the following written report of progress. The subcommittee appointed in Washington on February 22, 1932, was reappointed by President Joseph Rosier in 1932, the present personnel being S. L. Smith, Chairman; Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University, Arthur D. Wright of Washington, and W. T. B. Williams of Tuskegee Institute. 4 he report of this committee in two parts follows under (a) and (b). (a). The Negro in textbooks — Before offering any specific suggestions the Com¬ mittee is attempting to encourage graduate students and efficient organiza¬ tions to make careful studies to see to what extent this race is included in textbooks, beginning with history and civics books, adopted in southern states for basal and supplementary textbooks in elementary and high schools. Thru a small grant from the Southern Interracial Commission, James O. Butler of Tennessee, a graduate student of Peabody College, majoring in history, made a. survey in 1932-33 and wrote his thesis for his master’s degree on The Treatment of the Negro in Southern Textbooks. His study includes the examination of sixty textbooks now in use in fifteen southern states. He has found that the writers of history do not ignore the Negro in American life but that more space and attention are given to the Negro as a slave prior to 1860 than is devoted to this race as citizens and as a factor in modern life since 1860. Of the twenty-eight civics and problems of de¬ mocracy textbooks examined, nineteen make no mention of the Negro. Another graduate student of Peabody College, majoring in problems of a dual system of education made a careful study of some textbooks used in upper elementary grades to determine to what extent the Negro is included. His findings are substantially the same as those of James O. Butler. During the past year a committee of white and Negro educators under the direction of Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University and Fred McCuistion of the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools has been pre¬ paring a source book on the Negro covering the various phases of his de¬ velopment and progress. The purpose of this source book is to supply authentic information and materials for use by instructors in white and Negro colleges in courses or discussions dealing with the Negro. Writers of future textbooks would find this source book most helpful in furnishing authentic material for integration into elementary and high-school as well as college textbooks. The subcommittee proposes to encourage further research work on this subject the incoming year, including a careful examination of adopted read¬ ers, and books of literature, music, and art for elementary and high schools, and hopes to make a report on these at the meeting of the National Educa¬ tion Association in 1934. No specific recommendations will be made until the facts have been gathered and carefully analyzed by some of the ablest con- Reports of Committees 205 sultants available. In the meantime, the committee hopes that school adminis¬ trators, authors, and others may give some thought to this subject and offer suggestions. (b). Moving picture portraying Negro life in America — The committee’s progress report on this project was made a year ago. Since that time the work has not developed much further, due to economic conditions. In recent weeks the chairman of the subcommittee has renewed corre¬ spondence with the moving picture producers and distributors, and is en¬ couraged over the outlook in this project. The committee is of the opinion that the picture should be built around the Negro’s contributions to modern progress and civilization thru the medium of business, cultural, and educational accomplishments, and that it should include such entertainment features as will appeal to all races in all sections of America. The chairman has had conferences here in Chicago this week with one of the ablest consultants in educational moving pictures of America, who came here from New York for this purpose. He offers important sug¬ gestions and seems willing to cooperate fully with the committee. The subcommittee’s greatest need in both of these projects is a small amount of money to help do the necessary preliminary studies. REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ANNIE C. WOODWARD, SOMERVILLE HIGH SCHOOL, SOMERVILLE, MASS., Chairman Since its creation the Committee has sought by every means at its command to emphasize the contribution which education can make to the solution of international difficulties. The report of the chairman this year is intended : first, to take stock of some of the most significant progress that has been made in this field ) and second , to outline some of the problems which now face us. Recent Progress In reviewing some of the gains that have recently been registered as a con¬ tribution of education to international understanding, only a few of the major fields can be mentioned. Curriculum revision — The last fifteen years have witnessed great activity in the revision and improvement of school curriculums in all subjects and at all levels. In this process of improvement and modernization it was natural that international attitudes and ideals should receive prominent attention. It is not essential to place in the crowded curriculum of the common schools new courses of study, but to adjust materials to the studies already installed. Geography, history, civics, literature, the fine arts, commercial studies, and applied science offer abundant opportunities of this adjustment. Care must be taken to keep a level keel and not be carried away by the emotionalism so common where fundamental changes in attitudes are in the making. The newer courses of study in history, geography, and social science have allotted a generous portion of time and material to the study of world prob- 206 National Education Association lems. Here, for example, are some of the topics from the new state course of study adopted by South Dakota in 1932: 1. The development of worldwide methods of exchange 2. A study of group action 3. How men learned to overcome distance and time 4. How nations become interdependent thru the exchange of commodities. Kansas has also undertaken a statewide program. Thru the initiative of the supei intendent of schools and a group of graduate students, definite work was undertaken and a course of study prepared for the high schools of Wichita. This proved so constructive that the World Federation of Education Associa¬ tions adjusted it to the Herman-Jordan plan. Under the state superintendent of public instruction it was placed in all schools as a part of the state course of study and definite credit given. In Ithaca, New York, the last half of the ninth-grade study of social science is entitled. Economic Problems: World Relations” and includes these six main headings: 1. Producing Goods 2. Exchanging Goods 3. Convenience of Trade 4. Management of Income 5. The Problems of World Peace 6. Changing Governments and International Relationships since the World War. Similarly in Denver, Colorado, the last half of the ninth-grade social science course is devoted to a unit entitled “Governmental Civics and Inter¬ national Relations. Some schools follow a definite and impartial study of the League of Nations, the World Court, the International Labor Organiza¬ tion, the Pan American Union, and various other types of peace machinery. Thus, young people become informed about these powerful organizations to which our government sends representatives whether we are members or not. It is possible, not only to encourage the scientific studv of these organiza¬ tions, but also to keep cognizant of the events occurring daily in Geneva and elsewhere, in connection with such problems as disarmament, munitions em¬ bargoes, war debts, and foreign trade. Emphasis is put on the Kellogg-Briand Pact and, most recently, upon the speeches and messages of President Roose- velt These are but a few of the new materials and courses of study that might be mentioned which give prominent education to the international point of view. Nezv textbooks Along with the development of the course of studv there has been a parallel trend in the content of social science textbooks. Even the tit es of some of these newer books, International Civics: the Community of A at ions. Changing Civilizations in the Modern World , Nations As Neigh¬ bors Jf orld History , and the like, indicate the emphasis that is being placed on the international aspects of the social science curriculum. Special school activities— In addition to the revision of courses of study to include references to international problems, there have been several attempts to develop an independent program of study and activities in international Reports of Committees 207 goodwill in the elementary and secondary schools. Special courses in interna¬ tional relations have been offered in colleges and universities for many years and the practise of offering such courses is now quite general. The idea of giv¬ ing special emphasis to international problems in high schools is, however, rela¬ tively new. One of the best illustrations of this development is the program of training in the world friendship which has been built up in the public- school system of Los Angeles. The book describing this course is now in its third edition. Copies of this book have been ordered by the hundreds for use in school systems in all parts of the country as well as in the foreign lands of France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and South America. The Los Angeles program at present includes these phases : 1. Two or three times a year at the request of the superintendent, a teacher from each school in the city attends a meeting to hear a talk on world affairs given by some eminent authority. At these meetings plans for the teaching of international relations are discussed. 2. Special occasions, such as Armistice Day, November 11, Pan American Day, April 14, and World Goodwill Day, May 18, are celebrated every year by nearly every school in the city. Plays, pageants, songs, and addresses play important parts in these celebrations. The World Federation of Education Associations and the National Education Association have jointly prepared suggestions of procedures and materials to be used on such occasions. This is one of the most interesting and fruitful fields for cultivation. During the assembly period, students may give talks on important world happenings, may debate issues of various sorts, and present short dramas and musical and artistic exercises. 3. During the last five years an annual oratorical contest on world friendship has been held. Hundreds of students are involved in this enterprise. The winning orations are delivered at one of the sessions of the Los Angeles County Teachers Institute. 4. Over eighty schools exchange portfolios with schools in other lands. This ex¬ change is carried on either thru the Junior Red Cross or thru the ministers of education in the foreign countries. 5. The League of Nations has been studied as an important international enter¬ prise. Many high schools have presented in dramatic form a reproduction of an actual session of the Council or of the Assembly of the League. 6. World Friendship clubs have been organized in most of the high schools in the city and a federation of these clubs has been created. These organizations now have a membership of over 3000 boys and girls. They plan programs on interna¬ tional subjects. 7. About eighty schools prepared exhibits for the meeting of the National Educa¬ tion Association in Los Angeles in 1931. These exhibits displayed the interde¬ pendence of all nations. What is being done in Los Angeles is also being done in similar fashion by many other school systems. Boston, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and many others could be mentioned. Recent research in world citizenship — One of the most encouraging trends in the field of education for world citizenship has been the constantly increas¬ ing amount of accurate information on problems related to this field. When the Committee on International Relations was created, practically nothing had been done to study this project objectively. Today a large body of specific information exists which has a definite relation to our problem. We have 208 National Education Association important studies on student opinion and public opinion with respect to the teaching of international goodwill and peace. We have discovered many tools and methods for modifying prevailing points of view toward more construc¬ tive and wholesome objectives. We have made important progress in our abil¬ ity to measure the results of our efforts. Activities of teachers organizations — An important item of progress in the last fifteen years has been the degree to which local, state, and national teach¬ ers organizations have taken an interest in the relationship which education may have to the solution of international problems. In Texas, Massachusetts, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois, and elsewhere the state and local teachers associations have appointed committees to study this whole matter and see what the schools can do about it. The work of the Colorado Committee is excellent and fairly typical. The Committee aimed to empha¬ size the great interest and importance of its field. Representatives were appointed in every important school system to cooperate in carrying on activi¬ ties. Circulars weie sent to rural teachers thru the county superintendent. These circulars carried an endorsement by the state superintendent of public instruction and contained suggestions for reading and devices for teaching international goodwill. On World Goodwill Day programs were given in many schools. A list of recommended books and periodicals for the study of international problems was published in the journal of the state education association. The State Federation of Women’s Clubs was very helpful in the work of the Committee. International clubs in the high schools were estab¬ lished and international correspondence was fostered. In all of its work the main reliance and hope of the Committee has centered around the usual class instruction and school routine. It has not urged the introduction of new subjectmattei , but has sought to capitalize the methods and emphasize the attitudes in the teaching of the present program. TV orld Federation sof Education Associations — The Committee on Inter¬ national Relations has always had close and friendly contact with the World Federation of Education Associations. The first chairman of our Committee is now the Secretary-General of the World Federation and his first report as chairman of our Committee urged the calling of the conference in San Fran¬ cisco in 1923 which resulted in the establishment of the first world organiza¬ tion of educational interests. Since that time the World Federation has held a series of important biennial meetings and a number of special conferences. It has 01 gamzed international committees to study problems of common inter¬ est to the school people of all lands. It has encouraged the international exchange of teachers and students. It recently arranged a most successful international broadcast in recognition of World Goodwill Day. It should in time become a great clearinghouse of ideas and ideals for world understanding. Teachers accept a new responsibility — The most important gain that has been regFteied in the last fifteen years cannot be described in statistical terms. It is, however, the gain which means most to the accomplishment of our objective. Teachers thruout the United States have become increasingly aware of their opportunity and responsibility in forming attitudes which will be Reports of Committees 209 favorable to the peaceful settlement of international issues. Once this atti¬ tude becomes well established among the teachers of America, it will be a matter of relatively little importance what particular methods are used in teaching it. Without this spirit the most elaborate program of international activities and the most effective formal teaching methods are very nearly useless. Future Problems Our review of some of the achievements of the past indicates only too clearly that most of our work still lies ahead of us. Have we developed suffi¬ cient world-mindedness to solve the problems that have arisen and will con¬ tinue to arise in this new interdependent world? Have we reached that stage of enlightened nationalism which enables us to understand that no country can prosper at the expense of others? Have we begun to realize that the nations of the earth must stop fighting each other and unite against the com¬ mon enemies of mankind: crime, disease, and poverty? The gains that we have made need to be consolidated and further advances must be made all along the line. As a conclusion to this report a few of the most important current problems will be mentioned. The education of teachers — Altho progress has been made in some institu¬ tions, the education of teachers at present is not adequate in quantity or quality to develop the broadminded, well-informed recruits which the teach¬ ing profession must have if it is to make a significant contribution to the solution of any of the great social and economic problems which face us. Many of our textbooks on educational philosophy and educational sociology give inadequate attention to the implications of world interdependence for education. Traditional content and methods can no longer serve adequately. There is need for a broadening and enriching of the program of teacher train¬ ing so that there may be added to mere professional technic those social atti¬ tudes and ideals which are so much more important than any teaching method can possibly be. Many colleges are already working on this idea. Under the direction of Henry L. Smith of the University of Indiana, working with the World Federation of Education Associations, much pioneering has been done. The Herman-Jordan plan will contain valuable materials on this phase of the work. Comparative education, comparative governments, international law, international machinery for settling disputes, world civics, the com¬ munity aspect of great literatures, and applied science and its universality are appropriate elements of professional training in the field of education. Interest on the part of state and local education associations — Our state and local education associations have not yet given adequate attention to this important problem. Every one of these associations should have a committee on international relations which would consider ways and means for awaken¬ ing the teaching profession to its responsibility in this field. Such a committee could stimulate the holding of round-table conferences in each school system in the state to consider ways and means for teaching international understand¬ ing. In all of this work the Committee on International Relations of the 210 National Education Association National Education Association should serve as a center of information and as a clearinghouse for facts and procedures. Interchange of students and teachers — The interchange of students and teachers with foreign countries should become much more common than it is at present. A philosophy of education in terms of world citizenship — Into the work¬ ing philosophy of every teacher we must incorporate the concept of world citizenship as an educational goal — not as a separate and unrelated objective, but as an integral part of the whole educational program. It is evident that our young people need training in new fields. To live in this day of rapid steamships, navigation of the air, hourly news service, and radio, they need a new training which will enable them to react in a whole¬ some way to world news. Newspapers today are filled with news from the four corners of the earth and our students must interpret the happenings in London, Paris, Geneva, Tokyo, and other distant parts of the earth as readily and as accurately as the news from Washington, New York, and Chicago. They need to know something of the elements of international law, treaty making, comparative government, international trade, international banking, international exchange, and the exchange of cultures. Persons who have this new training will make better bankers, better importers and exporters, better lawyers, better statesmen, and better plain citizens. The schools must not be allowed to trail the procession. They must sense the future and the needs of the people in an advanced society. Continued investigations — In education for world citizenship we shall become more and more successful as we come to know more and more defi¬ nitely about the psychology involved, the social background against which we must work, the tools that we have to use, and the degree of success achieved. It is indeed true in this field as in other fields that research and facts can never be a substitute for enthusiasm and ideals. Nevertheless we can all work better in the light than in the dark, and there is great need for further research to throw light on the difficult and complex problems involved in helping boys and girls to become men and women fit to survive in a complex and interdependent culture. REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL-ECONOMIC GOALS OF AMERICA FRED J. KELLY, CHIEF, DIVISION OF COLLEGES AND PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS, U. S. OFFICE OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C., Chairman In recent years, many studies and reports have been made of educational objectives. One of the most significant of such was the report about fifteen years ago by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. This report set up seven objectives: health, command of fundamental proc¬ esses, worthy home membership, vocation, civic education, worthy use of leisure, and ethical character. These constituted a conception of education’s responsibility for social welfare far in advance of previously stated objectives. Reports of Committees 211 Teachers have been busily at work since the report was issued trying to make the adjustments in curriculum and method which the attainment of these objectives call for. In endeavoring to make these adjustments teachers have been and still are constantly confronted with questions one step more basic than even these fundamental objectives. Health education, for example, can do little to cor¬ rect inherited weaknesses of body and native incapacity of mind. Worthy home membership can hardly be fostered in homes which are themselves unworthy. Vocational education can train for vocations but the need is for a more socialized attitude on the part of those controlling man’s work. Civic education, yes, but for what kind of society? Who is the good citizen? Simi¬ larly with all the objectives. To fit for social living calls for the answer to a prior question : “What kind of society is it into which the educated person is to fit?” It was for the study of this prior question, “What kind of society does America want ? ’ that the National Education Association created the com¬ mittee on the Social-Economic Goals of America. This committee now sub¬ mits its report in tentative form. In a matter so basic as national goals it seemed to the committee appropriate to invite wide criticism of its first formulation as a basis for further consid¬ eration. Members of the Representative Assembly are urged to read the report and submit their reactions to the Committee. Having submitted the report in printed form, no extended oral report is called for. What I shall say in brief interpretation of the report, is not said in the name of the Committee. I shall speak as an individual who merely hap¬ pens to be chairman of the Committee. A letter was recently received by the President of the United States from a very intelligent citizen. This citizen, while commending the present national program of economic rehabilitation, said that there was one serious omission. e young people high-school and college graduates— were not being enlisted in the program. These young people, stunned by the tragedy of coming up to the door of the adult world to find the placard, “no help wanted, ^ are wandering away with dejected spirits, and with shattered morale. What is needed,” 'went on this citizen, “is a war.” . ^ not mean a war of guns or a war between nations. But a peace¬ time war, a battle for a cause in which the young people could enlist. A cause into winch the young people of America could throw their enthusiasm, their idealism, their courage. When this letter came to my attention I said at once, “That’s right. We ave no cause for which our young people want to fight — nothing that binds our people together in a common struggle.” Yet, probably at no time in , me r ican istory have there been more flagrant and widespread violations of t ose simp e uman rights, the historical ideals of America for which man as a ways been willing to fight than prevail in 1933. And it is my opinion ^5 * ^Se y10 a^ons e*ist in large part because, as the frontier has vanished an tec no ogv as ushered in, the new day, we have not set up the machinery 212 National Education Association which is necessary under these conditions to enlist the intelligent men and women in this country in a crusade to keep those simple human rights as the heritage of all the people. The machinery necessary to rebuild a national esprit de corps to electrify our young people with a purpose, the basis of a high morale, involves at least two things. First, the historic ideals of this country must be restated in terms charged with new meaning by the conditions that prevail today. We need a sort of 1933 version in social-economic terms of the Declaration of Independ¬ ence and of the Preamble to the Constitution. The Committee Report which is in your hands is an attempt at that. The ten goals there stated are put forth as the inalienable rights of each individual. Let us name them: 1. A sound biological endowment. Every individual has a right to be well born. 2. Physical security. He has a right to have his inborn strengths conserved. 3. Effective participation in an evolving culture. He has a right to those skills, those knowledges, those standards, those esthetic and ethical values which will enable him to get the most out of and to give the most back to the culture of which he is a part. 4. An active, flexible personality. He has a right to such development as will enable him to attain to the highest which his native capacities make possible. 5. Induction into and progress in a satisfying occupation. He has a right to what¬ ever joy the most fitting work can bring. 6. Economic security. There are goods enough for all. Brains and heart put into their distribution will prevent the recurrence of disgraceful times like these. 7. Mental security. Anguish of mind is as severe as pain of body. 8. Equality of opportunity. This is the primary virtue of the great American Dream. 9. Freedom. The most basic yearning of the human spirit. 10. Justice or fair play. The rules under which the game of life is played and the guarantee that the officials will call all the fouls in the game. These ten goals seem basic to the life of today if democratic institutions are to persist. Would it not seem possible to enlist our generation in a struggle to bring them to realization? The second thing necessary in the machinery required to build up a national esprit de corps is education — education such as will assure an understanding and support of these national goals by the people. Walter Lippmann well says: “The planning of a better industrial order is the easiest and smallest part of our task. The difficult part is not in the domain of the engineer, but in the domain of the statesman and educator. It consists in finding plans that can be made acceptable to democracy.” Strange that we should continue so long to take an understanding of national goals for granted ! Many European countries have long required a period of military training of their young men to prepare them to carry out their country’s purpose. Now the need for a national esprit de corps is greater than ever before, but it demands not mili¬ tary training, but social and civic training. Our young men and women — old ones too for that matter — need to dedicate themselves as patriotically to the struggle to save our democratic plan of life from the forces that threaten it as ever young men dedicated themselves to national conquest or to national Reports of Committees 213 defense. This is the real job of the schools, the colleges, the adult education agencies. No one will suppose that I mean any superficial “hip, hip, hurrah” for the good old U. S. A. This situation calls for no dosing with 100 percent Ameri¬ canism. Fundamental changes are needed in materials and methods of educa¬ tion from the kindergarten thru college. These changes will not be made, however, unless education accepts its responsibility to prepare our citizenry to understand the issues which are now basic in our national life. REPORT OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION AND THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION ELEANOR M. WITMER, LIBRARIAN, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVER¬ SITY, NEW YORK, N. Y., Chairman The Joint Committee of the National Education Association and the American Library Association has concerned itself during the past year with the following matters: 1. Setting up and maintaining expert advisory services on school library problems at the annual meetings of the National Education Association and of the Department of Superintendence. 2. Preparing for consideration by the National Society for the Study of Education the detailed outline of a proposed yearbook on school libraries. 3. Promoting the discussion of school library problems on the general programs of the National Education Association. 4. Submitting to the Committee on Resolutions of the National Education Association Department of Superintendence recommendations regarding the revision of standards for libraries in secondary schools. REPORT OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON THE ENRICHMENT .OF ADULT LIFE JAMES A. MOYER, STATE DIRECTOR OF UNIVERSITY EXTENSION, STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, MASS., President The ideal of educational opportunity for all is being abandoned in America today, at least temporarily. Reports from many parts of the country reveal the growing force of this reactionary movement. For months there have been unmistakable indications of such a tendency, especially in adult educa¬ tion. Today, in the face of enforced economy in municipal and state expendi¬ tures, there are increasing demands for curtailment of educational opportuni¬ ties, not only for adults, but for children as well. A committee of your National Commission on the Enrichment of Adult Life has studied the financing of adult education for the last three years. Its report, which is now available for distribution, is a valuable and timely con¬ tribution to this controversial question. Part of the report presents the recent 214 National Education Association nities. The findings indicate that in those schools for adults where a fee is charged which is approximately equal to the cost of the instruction, educa¬ tional and recreational standards have been maintained much more ade¬ quately than where adult education has been provided on a free basis. In most cases it has been the free program which has suffered drastic reduction or complete elimination. We may admit that adult education which is free to all is ideal, but in these times, adult education which tends to be more and more self-sustaining, is practical. And if we agree that the preservation of programs of education is our chief concern for the present, then we will do well to take a practical view of the situation. What effects do the charging of fees have upon numbers of enrolments and educational accomplishments? How do these results compare with those in schools which charge no fees ? The committee’s report covers these questions in detail, and in addition to statistics, it includes the answers of leadeis in education who have administered or supervised programs under both policies. It is to be hoped earnestly that school administrators will study this report, particularly those in cities and towns in which further curtailment of educa¬ tional and recreational activities is threatened. The report may show the way for a continuance of many adult opportunities that might otherwise be thrown overboard. Another committee of the Commission has been studying educational and recreational opportunities for the enrichment of adult life, both urban and ru^a/’ ^act t^lat t^le rural population of America today is nearly three millions larger than it was in 1928, and, indeed, larger than at any previous time in the history of the country, has led the committee to concentrate much of its attention upon the rural phase of the problem. Before discussing some of the specific issues of rural life today, I should like to review briefly the history and causes of some of the recent migrations to and from cities. i n3^^larSefLrUral p°Pulatlon in thl*s country previous to this year was in 1910. From 1910 to 1928, there was a gradual but continuous migration from the farms and rural villages to the cities and large towns, especially to those t at had large industries. Since 1929, however, the direction has changed. migration greater than any in recorded history is now taking place, which is suddenly transferring millions of men, women, and children from the cities to the country districts. . re were two important reasons for the transfer of rural families to the cities from 1910 to 1928. The higher compensation that was offered in urban industries in comparison with the pay on the farms, was a vital factor. But many families deserted the farms and the rural villages, not for monetary reasons, but because parents wanted more and better educational and social opportunities for their children and themselves. 1 he question may well be asked today, “Will the families that have recently gone to the country be content to remain there when industrial conditions in the urban centers become more normal ?” It is unlikely, I believe, that they Reports of Committees 215 will remain where they now live, unless there is considerable improvement in educational and recreational opportunities, not only for children, but also for grown-ups. With the assistance of one of the land-grant colleges and the National Recreation Association, a committee of the Commission has been investigat¬ ing the usual recreational activities in rural communities. Their data show that there is a wide diversity of recreation, those of men and women in rough pioneer country being entirely different from the recreations of those living in villages. The principal recreations of villagers living near urban centers and the inhabitants of suburbs of large cities are : ( 1 ) listening to the radio ; (2) seeing motion pictures; (3) riding in automobiles; (4) reading maga- zines, newspapers, and books from libraries; (5) playing cards ; (6) garden¬ ing; (7) listening to phonograph records; (8) engaging in such out-of-door games as football, baseball, and tennis. In a rough pioneer life, there is usually very little formal recreation, but during slack seasons in northern climates there is hunting in winter and fishing in summer. Because of the lack of satisfying recreation, secluded rural life produces, especially for women, many cases of serious mental ill health. Monotony without suitable recreation is often more than even strong minds can bear. For the family isolated from general community life, the availability of ladio broadcasting equipment has been a means of mental salvation. Mental ill health has a high percentage of prevalence among rural workers, due largely to the lack of suitable recreation. On the other hand, mental ill health is almost unknown among the male and female machine tenders in industrial villages and towns where there are fairly good conditions of em¬ ployment, such as adequate housing, factory lunchrooms, accident and em¬ ployment insurance, and old-age pensions. Mental ill health is not confined, as we know, only to rural districts. It is a fact that education equivalent to high-school graduation and beyond in¬ creases the prevalence of serious mental ill health which, in the majority of cases, becomes permanent sometime in life. T his fact may be better under¬ stood if we assume that half of this audience is made up of machine tenders with only an elementary education, working under wholesome conditions of employment, and that the other half is a better educated group with high- school graduation as a minimum attainment. In that case, the machine woik- ers would be practically immune from serious mental ill health, but in the better educated group, certainly one out of six will sometime have a very serious mental disorder. In other words, more than 15 percent of a popula¬ tion having the educational advantages of the delegates to this convention will sometime be inmates in a sanitarium or asylum. Fifty percent of all hospital beds are occupied by adults suffering from nervous diseases. Until recent years, the country church had an important stabilizing influ¬ ence. It was a really effective social as well as religious institution. Unfortu¬ nately, the influence of the country church has dwindled as the well-to-do population has shifted from rural communities to large towns and cities. As 216 National Education Association a result, village and country churches have been seriously weakened, and, in most districts, no adequate substitution has been made. Because of this fact, it seems to me that there are enormous possibilities for the usefulness of rural consolidated schools in the field of adult education and recreation, especially in those communities in which elementary and secondary schools aie combined. If a district is populated mostly by reasonably progres¬ sive families living on farms, with a sprinkling of families living in villages, excellent opportunities for adult education and recreation can be established. The consolidated school building for such a district might be in use nearly every evening in the week for some social activity. On week-ends, it might be used by the entire rural population of a district on Friday or Saturday evenings. The buses or other transportation equipment employed to carry the children to and from school could be used to transport the parents and the older boys and girls to the adult school for the late afternoon and evening sessions. Public foiums for the discussion of problems in economics, government, and current national and local events, have been recently established on a more or less expenmental basis in several cities in this country. In Des Moines an interesting and unique experiment in the educational use of leisure by adults has been in progress during five months of the last school year. The plan provides for discussion forums in the public school buildings of the city. The meetings are open to the public without admission charges and without cost to the taxpayer. The entire cost of the experiment is contributed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The control of the experiment, however, rests entirety with the Des Moines Board of Education. Many persons regard this project as one of the most significant and hopeful of the i ecent educational enterprises that have been undertaken in this country. Such use of school buildings to lift the level of intelligence is a promising approach to an informed citizenship. In the case of most city forums, especially in centers with a population of 100,000 or more, the cost is a considerable part of the city budget. In Des Moines, the annual cost is about $25,000 a year. In a few cities the cost, ex¬ cept for heating, lighting, and janitor service, is contributed by those attend¬ ing the forums. In some other cases, the total cost of the forums is paid by city taxation. In rural districts, the superintendent of schools or a school principal is fre¬ quently the forum leader, and any resident of the community is permitted to take part in the discussions. As a rule, the groups in attendance are small. Most of those who are regular attendants are well acquainted. In a group of this kind the part that the leader takes is not very difficult. In fact, under these circumstances, a lively discussion is very easily stimulated. For the con¬ duct of such projects in rural communities, no special school appropriations are necessary, as the expenses are almost negligible; usually the forum leader assumes responsibility for the necessary janitor service. Reports of Committees 217 Adult Study Opportunities by Correspondence Instruction The increasing adoptions of correspondence instruction as a method of adult learning are significant. Needs and ambitions of individuals are varied. Social and economic trends are changing rapidly. To keep pace with progress, adult education must be alert to provide generally opportunities for a con¬ tinuing desire for learning and for the wholesome utilization of leisure time. For these ends, correspondence instruction is in many ways ideally suited. One of the committees of the Commission has presented during the last year a report on this subject which is now available for distribution. In the adult education schools of large cities usually it is economically possible to offer a large number of courses of study in classes ; but in times of enforced economy, there is usually considerable curtailment or elimination of these opportunities. In the ordinary-sized evening school, even in small towns but especially in rural sections, the offerings for adult learning are greatly limited and in many cases are not found at all. Supervised correspondence instruction permits the efficient organization of one class or several classes in which if need be, as many subjects can be taught as there are students, and this is possible by the correspondence method at a reasonable expense under the direction of one able and versatile teacher. Not only does the correspondence course lend itself favorably to use in adult evening schools, but as well to the isolated individual who dwells far from the centers of learning. To him is offered the opportunity for taking courses in many subjects which lead to an enrichment of life and provide an escape from educational stagnation. The recent high-school graduate may continue his study thru these courses, nurses training in hospitals are employ¬ ing this method for completion of a high-school education, and the correspond¬ ence instruction is lending itself very readily to emergency programs of adult education for the unemployed. Several hundred communities are using correspondence courses selected from a list of seventy-five or more offerings. Among others, automobile me¬ chanics, mechanical drawing, elementary accounting, household management, aviation, radio, and interior home decoration are popular choices. The work so far has been well done and the success is notable. Significant progress in the development of this method of adult education has been made in Massachu¬ setts, Michigan, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania, as well as in some of the Canadian provinces. Planning for Future Leisure Far too many people have the idea that when educators speak of leisure, they mean mere idleness. If the almost certain increased leisure of the future that is to come especially to urban communities will result in nothing better than sheer idleness, our present civilization is very much in danger. Let us remember that leisure was understood by many of the early Greeks to be a time for study for its own sake, a time which might be devoted to desired kinds of wTork. In fact, in the Greek language, the word for leisure and school is the same. Unfortunately, this ancient idea is now only the vision of the idealist and has not gripped the imagination and the desire of the present- 218 National Education Association day man in the street. 1 he latter during his necessary employment has his mind still fixed on the expectation of the time — daily, weekly, or annually — when he does not have to work. Pauperism and the possession of wealth are both social conditions that indi¬ cate opposite types of the leisure class. Social status is the separating barrier between these two leisure classes of society. Civilization advances have always been accomplished, and may be measured by the extent that worthily occupied leisure, or what I like to call “busy leisure,” has become available. In the early civilizations, it was the institution of slavery that provided by means of a compulsory distribution of labor the leisure for a favored few to promote advances in civilization. In more recent times, especially since the industrial revolution, the man-power per individual was enormously in¬ creased, so that some leisure became available for all in addition to the total leisure of a few, as in the period of human slavery. In the human-slavery period, philosophers, writers, and artists made as a rule, profitable, worth¬ while use of the leisure that the work of slaves made possible for them ; and doubtless, this leisure when thus used produced enriched, more cultured, and more desirable lives. It thereby added a great deal to the progress of civilizing influences. But as President Cutten, a member of this Commission, points out, such advancement of civilization was accomplished at the expense of meaner and less desirable living on the part of large numbers of slaves, and later of multitudes of free industrial workers employed for long hours per day. This has been the prevailing social condition for many centuries. An earlier gen¬ eration decreed that the whole time of the majority of people should be devoted to work. That phase is now passing, probably never to return. Now, we have a different problem on our hands. It is the workers themselves and their increasing leisure that we must consider. It is their contribution to the upbuilding or lowering of the benefits of civilization that takes place during the leisure that is coming to them in larger and larger amounts, generation after generation, that must be studied. During the last half century the average work week of those employed in industry has been reduced about 10 hours per week in a generation, and well- informed economists estimate that by 1940 the average work-week of those employed in industry may be five hours per day for five days in a week. Effects of Mechanization of Industry One of the unfortunate effects of the mechanization of industry is the stunting of the creative abilities of those employed for machine operation. The old-fashioned worker in a trade had many satisfactions in his daily work, and the skilled artisan of other years was often an artist as well as mechanic. In other words, industrial mechanization has taken from most workers the joy of accomplishment that historically has been associated with the handi¬ crafts. These are serious deficiencies of modern industrial employment which, however, can be effectively remedied by worthwhile and planned leisure-time activities, in which recreation must play an important part. Without whole- Reports of Committees 219 some, worthwhile recreation, mechanization and commercialization make a mockery of leisure time. Industrial employment should not, however, because of these deficiencies, be scorned as, obviously, a return to a less mechanical existence is entirely out of the question. Further, the machine age has brought to this generation higher standards of living and more generally distributed culture than there has been in any age in world history. The effect of the machine on the opera¬ tor has always been exaggerated, especially by those who had very little me¬ chanical insight or interest. Thus, Carlisle, Thackeray, Tennyson, Brown¬ ing, Goethe, Matthew Arnold, and Phillip Gibbs have railed against the “unspiritual civilization” of a machine age, without taking into account the fact that from the beginning of history, there have been advances in general culture only to the extent that commerce and industry have prospered. It is obviously appropriate at this time to question and investigate how leisure time is used by the large numbers of men and women now out of employment. Relatively few persons know what to do with themselves in such times of emergency. Many stagnate mentally because they have never developed any special interests or hobbies, and because their hands have not been trained for the performance of the socalled skills. In many respects the present is a suitable time to look about for the pur¬ pose of discovering the innumerable ways of enriching the lives of men and women by education and recreation that will provide for their greatest secur¬ ity, comfort, and happiness. REPORT OF THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EDUCATION1 WILLIAM C. BAGLEY, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUM¬ BIA university, NEW YORK, N. Y., President The report is a report of the study made for a year by a special committee of the Council on the present social-economic situation. The report consists of a set of twenty-one pronouncements. Fifteen of those were adopted at the meeting of the Council in Minneapolis, and have been published and con¬ stitute the major part of the report. At the meeting of the Council held imme¬ diately prior to this Assembly, the Council added six additional pronounce¬ ments. 1. In a modern democracy, organized education — meaning primarily schools, colleges, universities, and other adult educational agencies — holds the key to social advance. Therefore, organized education, along with other social institutions must accept its fair share of criticism for the social and economic ills which afflict American society. The deep-seated nature of these ills imposes new and greatly increased responsibilities upon education. 2. To meet these responsibilities, teachers must be acquainted with the basic principles of the social sciences, conversant with the issues involved in current social life, and willing to participate in solving the pressing problems now before the American people. 1 Presented by Joseph H. Saunders, Superintendent of Schools, Newport News, Virginia, in the absence of the president. 220 National Education Association 3. The education of every prospective teacher should include such social science as will assure an understanding of the principles underlying social living. To accomplish this end, teacher-training institutions are urged to make suitable changes in their curriculums, and certificating agencies are urged to include among the requirements for all certificates adequate study of the social sciences. 4. Members of college faculties who are responsible for the education of prospective teachers should themselves be broadly educated and should possess a keen appreciation of the social significance of scholarship. To this end, graduate schools are urged to modify the curriculums designed to prepare for college teaching so as to avoid over-specialization and to assure an effective integration of the entire program for the education of teachers. 5. State departments of education, county and city superintendents, and otheis in like positions of authority and leadership, should encourage and ultimately require teachers in service to have a broad understanding of social and economic issues. 6. As one means of facilitating the in-service training of teachers, in the social sciences, the National Education Association is invited to devise some plan whereby authoritative materials necessary to keep teachers conversant with current social-economic developments may be made most readily avail¬ able to all the members of the profession. REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON RESOLUTIONS DONALD DU SHANE, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, COLUMBUS, IND., Chairman The National Education Association reaffirms as a statement of its general policies the platform adopted at the Atlantic City meeting, July, 1932; and, realizing that the training of children cannot be postponed because of the economic crisis, adopts the following specific resolutions concerning the present emergency in education : School Funds and School Management I axation — The solvenc)^ of the schools is dependent upon the application of scientific principles of taxation. The state governments should immediately designate tax commissions of experts for the purpose of devising taxation sys- terns that are both adequate and equitable. There must be mitigation of excessive real estate taxation and a sharing of the burden by equitable taxes from other sources. The federal government should take whatever measures may be necessary to allow the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to assist the schools directly. School expenditures in the light of economic recovery — [1] No school re¬ trenchment is truly an economy measure unless it: [a] preserves the educa¬ tional rights of childhood and [b] is based on scientific professional principles. [2] In view of rising price levels, schoolboards should : [a] refrain from Reports of Committees 221 further cutting of school costs, including salaries; [b] return to normal levels of expenditure as soon as possible in cases where excessive reductions have already been made; [c] reestablish educationally valuable services and courses which have been eliminated. First principles of school management — [1] The management of school affairs must be non-political and professionally directed. [The growing practise of political interference in the appointment of school officials and teachers is unreservedly condemned.] [2] Public education must be free. [The practise of exacting high-school tuition charges that has crept into some systems is unqualifiedly condemned.] [3] The duty of the state to educate all its children is fundamental, and the greater part of local education costs should be borne by the state. The American Child and the American Teacher The American child’s right to unfettered teaching The ability, prepara¬ tion, and morale of teachers are matters of greatest public concern, inextri¬ cably bound up with the welfare of the children of America. The educational development of our children can be safeguarded only when teachers are adequately trained, both academically and professionally, and are assuied adequate pay, protection from unjust discharge, professionally conditioned employment of new teachers, at least nine months of school each year, reasonable limitation of size of classes, and freedom from unnecessary worry and from hampering restrictions. Removal of special discriminations against teachers — [1] Teachers of equivalent training and experience doing the same kind of work should receive equal pay, regardless of sex. [2] Teachers should not be discrimi¬ nated against because of marital status. Kindergarten training for every child — Kindergarten training for every child of kindergarten age is a part of the proper educational equipment of the population. The Research Division of the National Education Associa¬ tion is strongly urged to make a further study of the kindergarten situation thruout the United States. Instruction in effects of alcohol and narcotics — The National Education Association urges complete and specific instruction in the schools regarding the effects of alcohol and narcotics on the human body and on the social organization ; and expresses its disapproval of any false advertising or propaganda on this subject. Public Relations Publicity needs of education — The quality and extent of education in any community bears a direct relation to the degree of enlightenment of the public opinion of the community. Often skilful secret manipulation of public opinion by minority interests interferes with the natural development of a favorable attitude toward its schools on the part of the public. It thus be¬ comes civic duty for the teachers and all other workers in the schools to serve the children by informing the public of the purposes and work of the 222 National Education Association schools, of the facts in regard to school costs, and of the effects of proposed changes. The following avenues of disseminating information are suggested • addressing meetings of organizations, utilizing the opportunities afforded by exhibitT’ 3nd 'ndUClng parents and other citizens to visit school classes and Examination of motives of organized opponents of school expenditures — bchool expenditures, activities, and objectives are being systematically at- ■ " c . d by certain business and commercial interests and bv organizations bearing such names as taxpayers’ leagues, economy leagues, and citizens’ committees. Such interests and organizations undoubtedly have the right to advocate changes in public expenditures and policies. It is, however, equally light of the public to know the membership of such organizations, the souice of the funds used for their campaigns, and the real motives underly¬ ing such campaigns. The Research Division of the National Education Asso¬ ciation is requested: [1] to ascertain and assemble the facts in regard to these movements against public education, and [2] to disseminate those facts so lat teachers, parents, and all other citizens may know what influences and interests are motivating these organizations. Request for inf or, nation— The officers of the National Education Associa- tion are requested to provide, thru its Journal and otherwise, reliable au¬ thentic information for the use of its members concerning publicly owned publicly controlled, and publicly operated gas, electric light and power plants, especially as to the following items : [1] Name of municipality; [2] Population; [3] Rates of service ; [4] Net earnings to the municipality; [5] A similar showing concerning comparable privately owned and privately operated utility companies. Cooperation with other organizations working for the welfare of the schools— Lay organizations working to protect the schools from injury should have cooperation and appreciation from all teachers and school authorities. Prominent among many such organizations in the various states are: the Parent-Teacher Associations, the American Association of University Women, the National League of Women Voters, the Business and Profes¬ sional Women’s Clubs, numerous service clubs, the American Federation of Labor, the American Legion, and many newspapers and magazines. Protest and Tribute Protest against delay and discrimination in payment of salaries _ The Na¬ tional Education Association vigorously protests against the policy of cities and other communities that have unnecessarily failed to pay their teachers and that, in meeting public financial obligations, have discriminated against teachers. T. he Association looks upon such practises bv public officials as unfair and unbusinesslike. 7 ribute to Chicago teachers — It is especially fitting that the National Edu¬ cation Association pay tribute to the teachers of Chicago, who, in their long experience of unprecedented financial worries, have shown such loyalty, devo- Reports of Committees 223 tion to duty, and zeal in the service of children that they have won the respect of their fellow-workers thruout the nation. The National Education Asso¬ ciation commends them to the city of Chicago and to the nation at large as worthy examples of all teachers who have made special sacrifices for the chil¬ dren of America. ' * National Council of Education The national council of education was organized in 1880, growing out of a paper read by Thomas W. Bicknell before the Department of Superintendence. See Proceedings , 1880:90-94. The active membership of the Council consists of 60 members chosen by the Council ; 60 chosen by the Board of Directors of the Association; and three chosen by each of the Departments of the Asso- cation. For constitution and bylaws, see Proceedings , 1906:608-11. The officers of the Council for the year 1933-34 are : President , William C. Bagley, Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. ; Vicepresident , Lida Lee Tall, Principal, State Normal School, Towson, Md. ; Secretary , Adelaide S. Baylor, Chief, Home Economics Education Service, Federal Board for Vocational Education, Department of the Interior, Washington, D. C. ; Executive Committee: Minnie J. Niel¬ son, Valley City, N. D. (term expires 1934) ; David A. Ward, Superintendent of Schools, Chester, Pa. (term ex¬ pires 1935) ; Anna Laura Force, Principal, Lake Junior High School, Denver, Colo, (term expires 1936). The Council meets twice each year, once in February and once in June. Facts relating to the establishment of this Department and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1880: 90- 94 1893:925 1904:333-377 1915:527-627 1926 :281-327 1882: 77- 87 1894:593-678 1905 :271-340 1916:195-287 1927:247-292 1884 :Pt. 111:1-67 1895:430-509 1906 :607-623 1917:129-219 1928:221-262 1885 :405-551 1896 :393-470 1907 :329-454 1918:135-149 1929 :229-274 1886 :259-331 1897:317-583 1908:313-500 1919:675-739 1930:199-245 1887:255-328 1898:489-588 1909 :331-435 1920:107-190 1931:275-311 1888:251-321 1899 :380-529 1910:307-375 1921 :269-368 1932 :221 -257 1889:345-440 1900:297-364 1911:331-476 1922 :349-574 1890:287-364 1901 :349-499 1912:499-605 1923 :425-551 1891 :275-378 1902:306-408 1913:355-424 1924 :350-428 1892:745-806 1903 :301-376 1914:293-404 1925 :266-336 [ 226 ] DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION, A DISCUSSION OF THE WORK OF THE JOINT COMMISSION ON THE EMERGENCY IN EDUCATION JOY ELMER MORGAN, EDITOR, THE JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. This Commission came into existence at a particularly difficult time — a time beset by uncertainty, confusion, and rapidly changing conditions, and yet a time demanding immediate, vigorous, and farsighted action. That this Commission has met these demands is suggested by the chronology which has been submitted to you here. The Commission is made up of members of the profession of broad experience and acknowledged leadership. They were appointed early in January and immediately began the task of forming an estimate of the situation in the nation and of laying plans for action. An examination of the Commission’s work giv^ important evidence that it went into action at the earliest possible moment and has kept in action steadily ever since ; that it has had what is perhaps the most widespread cooperation ever accorded any such committee in this country, including departments of the Association and related organizations ; that it has found in the head¬ quarters staff of the Association an instrument which it has been able to use effectively to accomplish an important work that could not have been accomplished had the profession been less well-organized and prepared at this point. The purposes of the Joint Commission as set forth in its descriptive leaflet are: (1) To collect information regarding the effects of the present economic situation on the educational program of the nation and of the states. (2) To make this information available to everyone. (3) To increase the appreciation of the public for the work of the schools. (4) To acquaint the public with the loss to childhood which results from unwise cuts in school services. (5) To suggest constructive measures of economy and of educational support. (6) To cooperate with individuals and local groups in the solution of pressing educational problems. (7) To survey the attitudes of lay agencies toward public education. (8) To stimulate every agency which can make a contribution to education in this emergency. (9) To coordinate and unify the efforts of agencies already at work so that maximum results may be obtained. (10) To rally the friends of education to the support of education. In keeping with the varied situation which it has had to meet, the Com¬ mission has chosen a variety of methods, each suited to a particular need. These methods as set forth in the announcements of the Commission include : (1) The enlistment of a nationwide leadership, consisting of the official repre¬ sentatives and officers of the organized educational groups thruout the country. This has given the Commission a body of nearly five hundred consultants who are daily [ 227 ] 228 National Education Association on the firing line in education and who are in a position to act on the information which comes to them and to put into effect wise policies. (2) The Commission has conducted a series of regional conferences, including meetings at Kansas City, Chicago, and Atlanta, thru which it has kept in touch with professional consultants and lay leadership. A review of local school conditions was presented at these conferences by the consultants, including extent of school curtailments, sources of support, effective public relations programs, organization of local discussion groups with the lay public, and plans for further action. More of these conferences are planned for the school year 1933-34. (3) The emergency reports of the Commission describing conditions as they have developed, have been issued at frequent intervals to the educational press and to others in a position to influence public opinion. Six letters have been sent to the consultants containing special information and material prepared by. the Divisions of Research and Publications of the Association. The Research Division has recently completed a state-by-state review of the effects that current conditions are having on the schools. The Division of Publications has prepared material for publication in the lay and professional press and in special bulletins issued by the departments of the Association. (4) Leaflets setting forth essential^facts about the schools have been prepared for general distribution. The staff of the Journal of the National Education Association has been developing a series of home and school leaflets which can be sent into the homes thru the children along with their report cards. One of these leaflets, ‘‘Good Schools in Bad Times,” will be used in especially large numbers during American Education Week. This plan of home-and-school contact has great possibilities. It can be worked out on a local, state, or national basis, or on a combination of these three. (5) Radio addresses on coast-to-coast programs are taking the case for the schools to the American people. During April and May there were twenty-six of these addresses by leading educators and laymen. Most of them were so arranged over the nationwide networks that they would reach well-established listener-groups which had become accustomed at a particular hour to some special feature, such as the Department of Agriculture Farm and Home Hour. These radio presentations, in addition to those which have been carried on under the direction of Florence Hale, have given the radio audience a generous measure of educational information. (6) Speakers have carried information about the emergency in education to con¬ ventions, commencements, and public meetings of many sorts. (7) Exhibits displaying effective methods of meeting the crisis have been prepared for use at conventions and regional conferences. (8) Local discussion groups to consider educational problems and policies are in process of organization. (9) Newspapers and magazines are carrying to their readers the facts assembled by the Commission. (10) American Education IV eek, November 6-12, is to be used as never before to focus the attention of the public on the needs and opportunities of the schools. The three sponsors of the occasion — the National Education Association, the American Legion, and the United States Office of Education — have developed material around the program and plans of the Joint Commission. The theme for the Week will be Meeting the Emergency in Education. The philosophy and point of view of the Commission have been set forth in the reports and statements made by the chairman and various members of the Commission. It is highly significant that there is essential unanimity among the school forces of America on the fundamental philosophy which lies at issue in this educational crisis. .The chairman of the Commission has given expression to it in such phrases as the title of his radio address of April National Council of Education 229 18, “Peasants or Freemen?” and in the challenge which he issued at the Minneapolis convention : The teachers stand ready to join with industrial, financial, and political leaders, and with all other groups, in carrying forward any sound program for economic reconstruction. They will oppose with every resource at their com¬ mand, both as citizens and as teachers, the effort of any selfish group to create a peasant class in the United States. Peasant standards are not necessary in our country either in educating children or in other areas of life. Teachers will stand foursquare with parents and with all intelligent citizens of the nation to fight the imposition of such standards upon the American people. For a generation two opposing forces have been fast gaining headway in America. One of those forces — the ideal of democratic equality of oppor¬ tunity — is best exemplified in the development of the common school which each generation has raised to higher levels of excellence and scope. The other of these two forces — the tendency toward a caste system with high con¬ centration of wealth and control — is represented by the great financial czars, the gigantic mechanized industries, and the privately owned utilities of America. Were one to select from some of these powerful groups which have been deliberately predatory, the picture would indeed be dark. But even if one make the selection from the more ethical and best managed of these great aggregates of finance and industry, he must still be impressed with its essentially undemocratic character. Control is centralized. The worker has little say or security. The selfish advantages of secrecy, inside manipulation, and monopoly are so large that men of great ambition forget that industry should be the servant and not the master of life. It is not surprising under conditions like these that the issue between democracy and the caste system should be drawn, and that there should arise in America widespread propa¬ ganda to the effect that democracy is a failure. In my judgment the teaching profession should be the first to proclaim and prove the success of democracy. It should point to the large and inescapable fact that under the egis of democratic ideals and aspirations, America has made advances unparalleled in all history before. It should go farther in the analysis to show just why this progress arises, because under the American democratic system, the spiritual and mental as well as the physical energies of the people, have been freed. I can think of no task more appropriate to this Council than that each of its members should dedicate himself anew to the work of interpreting vigorously and militantly thru every channel -at his command, the strength of American democratic ideals, the part which the school plays and must play in achieving these ideals, and the relation of these democratic concepts to our national wellbeing and advance. Such a program of interpretation of the democratic philosophy of education will not be easy, particularly in the face of reduced budgets, of economic collapse, and of the propaganda of special interests who would profit by destroying democratic ideals. Such an inter¬ pretation cannot stop with mere generalizations and platitudes. In the end we must come to grips with fundamental applications involving our political 230 National Education Association institutions, our distribution of wealth, and the specific methods by which we are to bring democracy into industry or to bring about some sort of demo¬ cratic control essential to the preservation of our American institutions. I can think of no one among our American educators who has been more eloquent and sustained in his championship of the democratic ideal in edu¬ cation than the present president of this National Council of Education, William C. Bagley. May it not well be that this Council, as a selected group of scholars in American education, will take as its special contribution to the work of the Emergency Commission this problem of interpreting the Ameri¬ can democratic ideal of equality of educational opportunity in such a way that the entire profession and the citizens of the country will have a clear understanding of the issues at stake. Let us never forget that our institutions must be born anew with each generation, that we cannot take them for granted if we desire them to survive. If we desire good homes there must be worthy parents eagerly teaching their children the significance of good homes. If we desire fine schools there must be consecrated teachers leading both children and the public to understand the significance of good schools. If we desire the democratic outlook in government there must be able citizens who will teach and exemplify the deeper meanings of citizenship. Discussion by Thomas E. Benner, College of Education, Univer¬ sity of Illinois, Urbana, Ill. Mr. Morgan has suggested that the National Council of Education might undertake, as its special contribution to the work of the Emergency Commis¬ sion, the interpretation of the importance of the democratic ideal of equality of educational opportunity. It is about that suggestion that I wish to center my discussion. Permit me to say, first, that Mr. Morgan, with whom I have “discussed this discussion,” is in agreement with the general point of view which I wish to present. I emphasize this lest the use, or misuse, I shall make of his suggestion seem out of harmony with his proposal. The vast majority of the people of this country, in my opinion, are no less interested in “the equalization of educational opportunity” than they ever were. The essential difficulty is that they are less certain what consti¬ tutes “educational opportunity.” In the past the phrase has always suggested to them an open road to wealth and power. They have believed that as long as the road to these material ends was open to every individual there wrnuld, as a corollary, be individual and social progress. Only four years ago they thought they were seeing the demonstration of that belief. Now they are bitter in their dis¬ illusionment. They need to be reminded that this great depression resulted from too much rugged individualism and too little social understanding. This means development of the schools for the better socialization of all as the only means of insuring the advancement of each. National Council of Education 231 This introductory statement will perhaps make clear my complete agree¬ ment with the ends which Mr. Morgan has in mind, at the same time that it makes clear my objection to the slogan wTich he proposes. To the public it implies too much of the individual and too little of the social function of education in a democracy. Thinking of the future I cannot escape the belief that the great contribu¬ tion of a body such as this towards helping work our way out of the educa¬ tional emergency vcould consist in revealing the snarls and tangles which, within the pattern of our whole scheme of education, obstruct our efforts to make our schools more effective social agencies. The teachers in elementary and secondary schools have not been given the breadth of social understanding which would make them ready to par¬ ticipate effectively in making the schools more successful social agencies. This is a direct criticism of the nature of our teacher-training programs in teach¬ ers colleges and in colleges of liberal arts. The faculty members of these colleges are in turn inadequately prepared to participate in the formulation and conduct of a program of truly liberal education in terms of the world of today. To make clear what I have in mind when I say “truly liberal education” let me define it as education which seeks to give an understanding of some of the major problems which have confronted man, of the solutions he has attempted, and of the reasons for their failure or success, and which aids the student to discover the points at which he may hope to contribute to better solutions. The inadequate preparation of college faculty members for participation in the formulation and conduct of such a program as this is the result of the exclusive preoccupation of the graduate school with increasingly narrow specialization in the interests of compartmentalized research. There is no longer any room for philosophy in the program of the prospective doctor of philosophy. Specifically, then, my interpretation of Mr. Morgan’s proposal would be that, as a long-time program for meeting the education emergency, this organization should study the possibility of another and new type of graduate training for prospective faculty members who plan to teach on those levels in our colleges where the giving of a liberal education is supposed to be our objective. Such a program would aim at the development of breadth as well as specialization ; emphasize the social significance of scholarship as well as its technics. As a more immediate program there must, of course, be developed better and more liberal programs of adult education both for the general public and for teachers in service. In summary, to restore public confidence in the vital importance of equal educational opportunity, we must solve much more successfully than we have yet been able to do the problem of making the schools effective agencies for social progress, and must emphasize that opportunity for the individual, democratically conceived, is dependent on the social intelligence of the group. The key to this solution will be found in the graduate school. 232 National Education Association THE PROPOSED YEARBOOK ON MATERIALS OF INSTRUCTION JAMES F. HOSIC, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. It is appropriate to present to the National Council of Education certain facts concerning a forthcoming yearbook of the Department of Supervisors and Directors of Instruction for the reason that the project may be said to have originated in a previous Council program. At the Minneapolis meet¬ ing, Mr. Dondineau, Director of Instruction in Detroit, read a paper that resulted in a lively discussion and suggested some definite action. Mr. Dondineau’s contentions were substantially as follows: 1. The use of single, encyclopedic textbooks in our school courses renders the cur- ricul«m static. No substantial progress in changing the curriculum can be made until this condition is changed. 2. Present social needs demand more adequate presentation of social concepts than our present teaching material provides for. 3. Theoretical advance of the curriculum has proceeded as far as is likely to be of value until actual classroom practise has caught up. This depends upon (a) teacher preparation, and (b) materials of instruction. 4. Actual teaching is still carried on mainly by means of books. Hence such ques¬ tions as what books, how many, and how used are pivotal. 5. With the possible exception of mathematics no phase of the curriculum can be adequately administered by means of a single book. 6. At present far better provision is made of equipment than of materials. Expen¬ ditures for furniture and fittings is disproportionate; relatively more should be spent for materials of instruction. 7. Basic texts are essential but library books are just as essential. 8. Supervision has a great responsibility both as to the supply of proper materials and as to their effective use by teachers. 9. If teachers are to make the contribution to American social life of which they are capable, they must be granted the same freedom which they are now expected to grant to their pupils. To these principles the present speaker would add: 10. While aims and objectives of school work, once they have been cooperatively arrived at and agreed to, should be regarded as a mandatory, subjectmatter and its method of utilization should be regarded as optional. H. As much care should be exercised by supervisors in providing for the indi¬ vidual differences of schools and of teachers as they seek to foster in the matter of providing for the differences of pupils. 12. Our present difficulties in regard to materials of instruction are due largely to the form of school organization employed. The general practitioner in the one-teacher school should be replaced by cooperative groups made up of specialists. A committee on the yearbook on materials of instruction is in process of formation. The cooperation of various organizations will be invited. Sug¬ gestions from any responsible source will be welcome. Since the field to be covered is very large and since other groups are attempting to deal with cer¬ tain types of materials, this committee will concern itself mainly with books and other printed materials. The date of publication will he February 1935. National Council of Education 233 THE FAR EAST IN AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION EDWARD C. CARTER, SECRETARY, AMERICAN COUNCIL OF THE INSTITUTE OF PACIFIC RELATIONS, NEW YORK, N. Y. 1. American interests in the Pacific area are rapidly approaching in im¬ portance those in the Atlantic area. This is true not only of political and trade relations but also of social and cultural contacts. Not only the American-born children of Oriental immigrants but also a growing number of Americans living in the Far East are maintaining contacts between the civilizations of East and West. In 1932, 27,000 Americans were living in Asia and Australia, and 43,000 people, not including those on cruises, left American ports for the Orient. We have some 2000 Oriental students in our schools and colleges, many of whom on their return remain in close contact with American institutions. American investments in China and Japan alone amount to over 650 million dollars; and our trade with Asia and Oceania in 1932 reached a total of 700 million dollars. The purchases of American products by the peoples of this area have enormously increased since the War: in 1913, they bought 7.9 percent of our exports, and in 1932 20.4 percent. Similarly, they now contribute nearly one-third of our imports: 28 percent in 1932, as compared with 17.3 percent in 1913. Ships across the Pacific now bring to our ports over one half of our material im¬ ports — that is, goods essential for the economic life of this country — as compared with about one quarter before the War. Japan, altho a relatively small country, is second only to Canada in supplying the United States with needed goods, and at the same time our third best customer. Oriental collections in our museums, libraries of and about the Orient, and other cultural contacts with the far shores of the Pacific are rapidly growing. Many of our own arts and crafts, from gardening to interior decoration, have been profoundly influenced by the Far East. American agriculture and pharmacology have been enriched in recent years by the experience of the East. 2. Social Studies in American public schools — including history, geography, world economics, and civics — do not as yet reflect this enlargement of our national interests, except where individual institutions or teachers are ex¬ pressing their awareness of this need in suggestive experiments. While evidences of anti-Oriental prejudice are rare in the school textbooks most widely used, there are few evidences of positive appreciation for the character of Oriental peoples and their ways of life. Geographical and ethnic descriptions often are of an uninteresting routine character. Information given about customs, habits, and material resources often is erroneous or out of date. In world histories the allotment of space to the civilizations of the East is inade¬ quate for an age in which the fortunes of East and West are becoming more in¬ timately bound together. Information about the history of Far Eastern nations often is given exclusively in relation to their contacts with the West, and often with an exaggerated insistence upon foreign contributions toward their prosperity or progress. There is little effort to view Oriental ideas and ways from any but a western point of view. In the teaching of civics, the countries of the Pacific often are mentioned only as potential sources of immigration; and adverse attitudes toward their inhabitants are created by omitting all references to them except as undesirable immigrants. Oppor¬ tunities for illustrating the possibilities of international cooperation with examples from American relations with the countries of the Far East are neglected. 234 National Education Association In the teaching of world economics, illustrations are as yet almost exclusively taken from the Atlantic world. 3. While it may be open to question whether there is need for the addition of special courses, or parts of courses, devoted to the Pacific area or the Far East, there is unquestionable need for an adequate recognition of this area and its peoples in all courses that aim to acquaint the American child with the world in which he lives, and with the threads that connect his life and its cultural background with the vast populations of the Pacific and their ancient cultures. Many educators will consider it undesirable to enlarge present programs of social studies — except where suggestions for special, voluntary courses are helpful to give teachers a wider range from which to choose, according to the interests of the con> munity or of a class. Existing general courses in history, geography, and other social studies, already provide the frame-work that is needed for giving a more balanced presentation of the world we live in and of its historical becoming. An unbalanced treatment — sympathetically dealing with some races and peoples, and mentioning others only in passing as the recipients of American bounty — makes for misunderstandings and adverse attitudes which prevent the formation of accurate judgments as regards the character of different peoples and their contributions to our welfare. The social studies should give children a sense of their total social heritage; glimpses of its richness should engender the desire to explore it much further than is possible in the limited time that can be given in the classroom. What is wanted, then, is not simply more information, but a more diversified illustration of social facts and processes from the total area of man’s experience and achievements, in¬ cluding the greatest depository of both — the Orient. 4. To meet this need, a group composed of teachers and of persons with authoritative knowledge of the history and civilizations of the Pacific, and specifically of the Far East, should cooperate to provide adequate materials for use in the revision of courses and textbooks. One reason why Occidental history and civilizations have been, and will continue to be, treated much more thoroly in our schools than Oriental history and civiliza¬ tions is that our own past is deeply rooted in the European past. Another is that it has seemed easier to enter into the mentality of ancient and medieval Europe than into that of other civilizations. But this difficulty has been exaggerated. It simply means that our knowledge of the East is more recent, as yet less accurately docu¬ mented (tho some authorities believe that the volume of original records is actually greater) ; and the effort to translate authoritative data into the modern and simple language of our schools, which has made accessible to our children the glorious past of western thought and deed, has yet to be made for the cultures of the Pacific. There is no dearth of sources from which teachers and Oriental specialists may jointly selected both literary and graphic materials of highest pedagogic value. An experimental first survey of materials already available in English would show the prospects of further exploration. The purpose of such a survey would not be merely to disclose material interesting in itself for which room may or may not be found in the social studies, it would also show ways in which present courses in social studies, with their present objectives, may be enriched by drawing more largely upon the oldest and most influential civilizations of the world. Not only this, but the continued existence in the Far East, and in the Pacific, of relatively primitive agri¬ cultural and handcraft civilizations, and of social systems built up on these, provides living examples for a better understanding of our own early backgrounds. National Council of Education 235 Discussion by Edith P. Parker, Assistant Professor of the Teach¬ ing of Geography, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. Geography has a distinctive contribution to make to insight into problems of the Far East, and geography teachers should be held responsible for their part in fulfilling the obligation Mr. Carter lays fairly and squarely on educa¬ tors. One cannot learn of the adjustments which people of the Far East have made to their natural surroundings without gaining, as a result of such understanding, much respect for the peoples involved, and much insight into many of their major problems. Geographic knowledge of the Far East, then, functions vitally in the development of the attitudes for which Mr. Carter justly pleads. The amount of attention given in geography to any part of the world should be proportionate to the importance of that section in American and world affairs. To determine this importance scientifically, one turns to ob¬ jective data of types which Mr. Carter has used. He cites enough data of these types to demonstrate clearly the technic involved, and to show the con¬ siderable and increasing importance of problems of the Far East in Amer¬ ican affairs. The amount of emphasis given in geography to the Far East is not to be measured wholly in terms of the text space and the class time devoted to that part of the world. A given period may be devoted to ideas of little sig¬ nificance; it may be devoted, instead, to those of great value. A half year’s work in the fourth grade on a given theme means much less stress on it than a half year’s work on that theme at higher levels, because the background children can bring to it at the lower level is less than that which they can bring at later stages in their development. Mr. Carter is correct in asserting that uninteresting, routine, inaccurate, out-of-date material is common in socalled geography courses. Such mate¬ rials have no place, however, in real geography. There is no alibi for ad¬ ministrators and teachers who continue to stress the mere memorization of isolated facts grouped in topical outlines and who fail to lead children to become acquainted in a very human way with what people in a given region do, how they live, and how their activities and attitudes are related to the kind of place in which they dwell. Much real damage of the type Mr. Carter notes has resulted, in geography, from the treatment of China and Japan in the third or fourth grade. The outstanding geographic problems of the Far East are not simple enough for children at these levels to comprehend. The study of the Far East has no legitimate place in the curriculum in geography at a level lower than that at which children have enough real geographic background to enable them to comprehend the major aspects in the geographic personalities of these regions. On the other hand, regions in the Far East should have adequate attention at the earliest level at which accurate understanding of the major geographic ideas involved can be gained. The sooner one has a functioning idea, the 236 National Education Association greater is the opportunity he has for it to function, and every application of the idea to new situations tends to strengthen one’s grasp of the idea itself. The relatively greater significance to Americans of the Far East as compared with that of Latin America is one of the important reasons for the fact that a rapidly increasing number of geographers is recommending ( 1 ) the study of the Far East following that of Anglo-America and western Europe and preceding that of Latin America, and (2) the assigning of a minimum of a half year in late intermediate work chiefly to the great powers of Asia. Fur¬ ther insight into the geography of these regions should be given in connection with later courses dealing with the geography of world relations of the United States, the geography of world trade, and political geography. Major geographic understandings of the type that function in gaining in¬ sight into activities and problems of the Far East can be gained only thru a body of concrete experiences so selected and so directed as to center from beginning to end on those understandings. The same fact is true of any major historical understanding relating to the Far East. After major historical and geographic ideas have been developed thru separate treatment, they may both be applied in the solution of a given problem. Unless one distinguishes, how¬ ever, between socalled fusion in acquisition and fusion in application, the contributions of history and geography to insight into problems of the Far East will be merely potential and will not be effected. As Mr. Carter suggests, there is, in geography, no need for additional courses in order to give appropriate emphasis to the Far East. There is crying need for the inclusion in all current courses relating to the Far East units which give concise, accurate understandings of a truly geographical type. Only thru distinctive, clear-cut understandings of various types can one gain any well-rounded insight of the type for which Mr. Carter ably pleads. REPORT OF THE YEAR’S PROGRESS JOHN S. BRUBACHER, YALE UNIVERSITY, NEW HAVEN, CONN. In spite of the work of three national educational surveys — finance, teach¬ ers, and secondary schools — of the research of private foundations, and of the publication of Recent Social Trends, the fact of absorbing national educa¬ tional interest is the present dislocation of economic life and its significance for the schools of the country. Since 1928 the nation’s income has been nearly halved. Between 1913 and 1930 the percent of national income allocated to taxes has more than doubled. These facts have demanded economy along all lines of public expenditure. While complete and detailed figures indicating the results of economy piograms in public schools are not yet available, the following have been compiled for 41 cities of 100,000 population or more: (1) Budgets reduced in the item of current expense, 5 percent; 12 percent, if the New England and North Atlantic states be not reckoned. (2) Capital outlay for 1933 has been reduced 38 percent; 39 percent, if the Northeastern group of states National Council of Education 237 he omitted. (3) Teachers’ salaries have been cut 5 percent; 15 percent, not including the more prosperous area already mentioned. For 1075 cities where size was not a factor, the average reduction wras only 7.5 percent. (4) School enrolments are up about 1.5 percent while the number of teachers has been curtailed by a little above 2 percent. Data gathered from wider sources indicate: (1) an average reduction of the school term in many communities of 10-20 days, the actual closing of over one thousand schools in the South Central states; (2) curriculum offer¬ ings too are greatly curtailed, especially kindergartens, night schools, health service, and music; (3) larger classes are the rule almost everywhere; (4) there is a serious oversupply of teachers. Various pressure groups have been very active in the matter of school ex¬ penditures such as the National Economy League, LTnited States Chamber of Commerce, American Federation of Labor, the National Education Asso¬ ciation, and numerous local committees. Very significant has been the growth of extra-legal groups of laymen, frequently bankers, who thru the control of credit have dictated school fiscal policies. Education has not suffered so severely in Europe as in the United States. While England has trimmed her financial outlay, France and Italy have en¬ larged theirs, France voting to make all years of secondary education free. Spain has tried to laicize its republican system of schools while Russian en¬ rolments have grown to where it is the largest national system of schools in the world. Russia has also made an important move to raise the quality of its instruction. In Germany the issue of Lern-und-lehrfreiheit has been pushed to the fore by the Nazis. Various hypotheses have been suggested to meet the educational crisis in this country. Some have been enacted into law. The chief direction of these proposals has been toward revision of systems of taxation and larger adminis¬ trative units. Social and economic planning has been especially discussed. Some think that the school should take the initiative in building for a new social order. The “Evaluation of American Education” has been set as the theme of the 1933 summer meeting of the National Education Association. What value shall be attached to the preceding facts? Since hindsight plays so large a part in foresight, the historical viewpoint may be mounted to scan three possible outcomes of our times. 1. Perhaps this economic cycle is like preceding ones. If so, this “strange interlude” will soon pass and education will not only be restored to its former riches but will be promoted to greater ones. Comparison with the depression of 1873 bears this out. That recession came about ten years after a major war, as did this one. During its spread of five years reductions occurred in all public expenditures ; but not so great as in the national income ; less for schools than for other public services ; and in the latter before the schools. Teachers’ salaries kept up well in the first two years but were lowest in the fourth and fifth years. In 1878 conditions improved and by 1880 losses had 238 National Education Association not only been regained but advances had been made beyond the level of 1873. 1 he past four years on a point for point comparison reveal highly similar conditions. Will the fifth and succeeding ones repeat the cycle? There are many who answer in the negative who think that this depression is different because, while other depressions have been limited in scope, this is worldwide ; we no longer have a frontier to absorb our economic woes ; the capitalistic industrial system is seriously questioned ; and government is abandoning laissez-faire for greater social cooperation. 2. Some contend that this new social order demands planning. If so, they claim it is the duty of the schools to help create the new social order. This claim seems sound enough. But, should the school select the form of the new social order? Or, however selected, should the school impose this on the chil¬ dren? Perhaps from now on the worldwide spread of the present depression in comparison with the schools will select the social order, but up to date there is no important record of such a case. The school has always been a powerful agency to promote an existing order but never to select it. It fre¬ quently has promoted one by methods of indoctrination. But our best political tradition in the past has been in the evolution of freedom of speech and the press. The educational counterpart is academic freedom with no less hard won or distinguished history. If a new social order is in the making, then, the schools function should be neither to select nor to impose it but to pre¬ serve a fearlessly critical attitude toward it. 3. Both preceding evaluations of the year’s events concede the latter are in a state of flux. The first conceives the change as cyclical, that there will be little or no novelty over preceding change. The second implies rather pro¬ found change. A third hypothesis might also confess underlying change but at the same time doubt and uncertainty as to its implications for education. It was a quarter of a century and more after the Revolutionary War before the consequences of the great political and economic changes engendered by that struggle became clear for American schools. If changes as fundamental are afoot at the present, it may well be some time before we know in which direction to point the schools. If uncertain development of the social fabric does not necessitate this, our economic exhaustion may. The educational re¬ vival which has followed each of our preceding major wars has been delayed at least a quarter of a century till the country has caught its economic breath. But even if at an early date the trend of events should become clear and economic stability become rehabilitated, it must be remembered that the schools will not be the only early birds looking for the first worms of pros¬ perity. Other social enterprises such as unemployment insurance will be competitors with such educational projects as universal secondary education. Possibly education itself is rounding out an epoch. The present educational fabric has been in the weaving since around 1885. The past fifty years repre¬ sent patterns compounded from the warp of the educational philosophy of Dewey on the one hand and the woof of the experimental procedures of Thorndike on the other. While evolving from the Herbartian movement of the nineties they represent a distinct advance beyond the nineteenth century. National Council of Education 239 The past two decades have produced no contributions so original. Rather has the past score of years set itself the task of criticizing and refining in detail the implications of the main hypotheses of these leaders. I his may continue the case during the transition period. REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON A NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION WILLIAM A. EVANS, ROTHENBERG JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, CINCINNATI, OHIO, Chairman The first presentation of the plan for an Institute on Education was made at the meeting of the National Council of Education held in Washington, D. C., February 1932. The president of the Council was instructed to ap¬ point a committee whose duty was to consider two things : 1. A study of the proposed plan and a consideration of its feasibility as a project of the Coun¬ cil. 2. If the committee approved the plan a proposal for the organization of such an Institute, with recommendations as to organization, should be pre¬ sented to the Council. Dr. Bagley called a meeting of the committee at the summer session of the N. E. A. at Atlantic City. The members of the committee present at this meeting w^ere : W. C. Bagley, L. A. Alderman, Lucille Allard, J. M. Gwinn, E. E. Oberholtzer, F. J. Kelly, William A. Evans, Adelaide Baylor (ex- officio). The first decision reached by the committee wTas that the plan was a feasible project for the Council. In answer to the second problem set for its consideration the committee approved the plan, made certain additions pro¬ viding for temporary organization and redrafted the wording of the outline of the plan. In order that no time might be lost the committee determined to present the outline to the Council by mail and seek an expression of opinion from them. The plan as submitted to the members of the Council follows : REVISED PLAN— NATIONAL EDUCATION INSTITUTE PURPOSE AND PLAN The purpose of this Institute shall be to promote understanding of the basic pur¬ pose and procedure of education in advancing the socio-economic wellbeing of a people. It shall be conducted principally by group discussion and publication. CONTROL This Institute will be sponsored by the N. E. A. under the direction of the Na¬ tional Council of Education thru a Board of Control appointed by it. TIME The time of holding the Institute shall be fixed by the Board of Control, and shall be during the summer period. 240 National Education Association PLACE The center for holding the Institute probably will be some college or other place with proper housing, recreation, and equipment facilities. The location for each annual meeting will be determined by the Board of Control. PERSONNEL The personnel shall consist of: A. Leaders of thought and action both national and international. Some of these would be full time, others part time. B. Other members who can profitably participate admitted on application. Opportunity extended to cities or institutions to send delegates. Number enrolled to be limited to such size as to permit the group discussion procedure to dominate. FINANCE A plan of finance will be set up in detail by the Board of Control. Expenses will be borne wholly or in part by the participating group without financial obligation on the part of the N. E. A. PUBLICATIONS There will be published a record of proceedings to be disposed of (1) gratis to members of the Institute, (2) by sale. PROVISION FOR TEMPORARY ORGANIZATION In order to provide for preliminary organization of the Institute, the committee recommends the appointment by the president of the Council, of a temporary Board of Control of which the president of the Council shall be chairman. This Board of Control shall act in the interim before the next meeting of the Council. The Council was invited to express its opinion on two questions: 1. Is the plan feasible? 2. Is the plan satisfactory? The result of the poll in which 109 replies were received follows: Question 1 — Is the plan feasible? Ninety-nine vote unqualifiedly for feasibility. One votes for feasibility provided it does not duplicate existing programs, but leads out. Four vote doubtful as to feasibility. Five vote “No” as to feasibility. Question 2 — Is the plan satisfactory? Sixty-seven of the 109 stated that the plan was satisfactory and made no further comments, except of commendation. Of the remaining 42, all but nine voted that the plan was satisfactory, but raised questions concerning it. These questions relate especially to problems of finance, plans to main¬ tain a democratic organization, selection of leaders, winter vs. summer time for holding it, duplication of work already being done in similar fields, confining the program to social-economic fields, and the like. Dr. Bagley called a meeting of the committee at New York on December 17, 1932 to review the result of the poll and to consider the replies received which raised questions pertinent to the initiation of the plan. Perhaps a review of this meeting will best indicate the consideration discussed and progress made. Dr. Bagley said that altho the function of this committee has been to con¬ sider and plan for the proposed National Institute of Education, there was a more vital and immediate need in the present crisis. He thought that this committee should send a message to the White House Educational Confer¬ ence, in Washington, D. C., on January 4th 1933, pledging the Council National Council of Education 241 to cooperate in any constructive measures that the Conference may propose toward the solution of the very serious educational problems involved in the present economic crisis. Dr. Kelly suggested that the proposed Institute idea seemed to be prac¬ tically impossible now on account of the depression. The chief objection was in regard to financing the Institute. Other objec¬ tions were fear of duplication with other summer schools, fear of unde¬ sirable or cheap publicity, fear of limiting subjects discussed by those furnish¬ ing financial support. Dr. Kelly suggested that there should be no conflict between the Institute and regular summer schools since the aim of each was different. Also in regular summer schools some members of the regular staff are competent to deal with socio-economic questions, but others are not. Mr. Evans said that he had already approached the Chamber of Commerce of Cincinnati and Dr. Pechstein, Dean of the School of Education, Uni¬ versity of Cincinnati, as to the possibility of getting financial support. Mr. Oberholtzer had suggested approaching Rice Institute and also the Chamber of Commerce in Houston, Texas. Mr. Evans felt that if the Institute were to be held in the University of Cincinnati, in June, financial support could be secured. He had delayed any official request, however, until after the committee meeting. After much dis¬ cussion the committee decided to attempt to hold the Institute for one week in June, if financial aid could be secured. This first meeting would be for the purpose of discussing what can be done. Dr. Kelly thought that thru this first Institute, or week’s conference, one might discover what part education should play in the socio-economic affairs of the world. Several suggestions as to how the conference was to be conducted were presented by members of the committee. Dr. Bagley thought that outstand¬ ing speakers might accept the invitation of the group if expenses were paid and that $2500 or $3000 might be sufficient to underwrite the conference. Dr. Kelly thought the plans for the permanent Institute should be postponed and that the conference idea should be carried out instead. The question was raised as to what should be the name of the institute or conference. Dr. Bagley suggested “An Institute of Education to Consider the Relation of Education to Social and Economic Problems.” The name was accepted. Dr. Bagley proposed that the next step in the plans was to consider the personnel of the group. First, those who might be lecturers ; and second, those who might be invited to attend. The names of those who might lecture or lead discussions were to be con¬ sidered first. These men were to be from the fields of politics, sociology, economics, or the press. After some discussion it was proposed that evening meetings, open to the public, be held and that a fee be charged to help pay the expenses of the conference. Such speakers as Alfred E. Smith, Stuart Chase, Nicholas Murray Butler, La Follette, Wickersham, John Finley, 242 National Education Association Lady Astor, Grace Abbott, were to be invited to speak at the large public gatherings, and other names were suggested as possibilities for leaders of the morning and afternoon discussion groups. It was proposed that President-elect Roosevelt be invited to the con¬ ference and that Dr. Moley, his adviser, be invited also. Some felt that there was great value in having the President attend ; others felt that his presence might give the conference a political publicity that would not be wholly desirable. Dr. Kelly thought that the consideration of who was to attend the con¬ ference might influence the speakers in their answers to the invitation. The following experts were suggested: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Raymond Moley, Alfred E. Smith, Stuart Chase, Frank D. Graham, Howard Scott, Sir James Arthur Salter, William F. Ogburn, Charles A. Beard, Wesley Mitchell, Harold Moulton, Robert M. LaFollette, Herbert B. Swope, Edward A. Filene, Mathew Woll, Lewis E. Lawes, G. W. Wickersham, Mr. and Mrs. Lynd, D. C. Fisher, Charles E. Merriam, Herbert H. Lehman, Leon C. Marshall, Murray Seasongood, Irving Fisher, Willford Isbell King, Edwin Francis Gay, Howard Odum. Dr. Bagley suggested that there be morning and afternoon conferences for five days and on Saturday summaries be given and conclusions on proposals be made as a result of the week’s thinking. The plan of the morning and afternoon conferences should be somewhat as follows : For example, Stuart Chase would prepare a short paper which could be handed out to the group. He would present this thesis and then there would be questions from the floor. There was a suggestion made that a fee of $10 be charged to help defray the expenses of the conference. Dr. Bagley said that he preferred to send out invitations to leaders and have invited guests admitted to all meet¬ ings free. The evening lectures would be open to the public and a fee charged. The committee felt that not more than a hundred invitations should be issued — some educators and some in the socio-economic field. Dr. Bagley suggested that three days be filled with discussions of social and economic problems, and the meetings of the other two days be led by educators showing the relation of education to social and economic problems. Names suggested as leaders for educational groups were, Bode, Dewey, Counts, Judd, Overstreet. It was decided to leave the details of the June Conference to Mr. Evans and Dean Pechstein, the whole plan to be submitted to the February meeting of the Council at Minneapolis. With the instructions as given, Mr. Evans, accompanied by Dean Pech¬ stein, conferred with President Walters of the University of Cincinnati. The result of the conference was a statement from President Walters that the University might be willing to act as host for the first institute. The brevity of the time in which to do all the things necessary to launch an undertaking of this magnitude precluded the June date. There seems to be no reason for declining the proposition of the University of Cincinnati National Council of Education 243 for one year hence. The need for some pronounced leadership on the part of the National Council was never more desirable. Because no active meas¬ ures were in progress, emphasizing this leadership, the honor of suggesting, or actively participating in the President’s conference in January was lost to the N. E. A. This same need is presented in the petition, sponsored by educators, seeking that President-elect Roosevelt appoint a permanent com¬ mittee, or congress, to consider the stabilization of those principles in educa¬ tion and social life which determine the permanence of our civilization. It seems like a challenge to the National Council of Education to undertake a task worthy of its name. If this is to shape itself in the “Institute of Educa¬ tion to Consider the Relation of Education to Social and Economic Prob¬ lems” certain definite steps must be taken. 1. The Council must commit itself to the problem. 2. The leadership must be announced. 3. The purpose must be definitely stated. 4. The N. E. A. must assume, in part at least, the underwriting of the expense. Is the N. E. A. too poor to undertake the handling of this problem ? The Ohio Education Association spent $1500 to conduct a survey looking to state support of education. Certainly the N. E. A. cannot be niggardly in expenditure concerning a problem touching the welfare of the children, the standing of the teaching profession, and the socio-economic problems involv¬ ing all of us. The poll really is unanimous on the matter of feasibility and satisfaction. The objections are the timorous ones of expense, and even these are exceed¬ ingly few. If this proposition as submitted in the redrafted form, possesses the merit indicated by the poll; by the statement of Dr. Bagiev that “it is the best thing the Council has ever done”; by the approval of the committee which considered it for five continuous hours at Atlantic City, it surely offers a medium thru which the Council can serve education in these perilous times. THE CURRICULUM REVISION MOVEMENT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION CHARLES H. JUDD, DEAN, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. 1. The fundamental causes which resulted in the movement to revise the curriculum are lack of adaptation of traditional curriculums to the require¬ ments of modern life and the great spread of pupil interests which resulted from the expansion of the school population. 2. The effort to base the curriculum on past or present habits of life or on specific objectives derived from the study of presentdav conditions is doomed to failure. 3. Scientific studies are useful in evaluating experiments with curriculum materials and in suggesting directions in which reforms should be under¬ taken, but no real contribution to curriculum revision is possible without an exhibition of invention which is, strictly speaking, not scientific. 244 National Education Association 4. The curriculum will remain static *so long as American schools are dependent to the extent which they now are on highly condensed textbooks that aim to cover in a single volume all the materials on a given subject. Discussion by H. B. Bruner, Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. While most of us, I think, would agree that lack of adaptation of tradi¬ tional curriculums to requirements of modern life is one of the fundamental causes resulting in the movement to revise the curriculum, we must not forget that American education has been growing for decades as evidenced by the addition of home economics, manual training, extracurriculum activities, and the like, and by the dropping out in recent years of languages. If the thesis means by “the movement to revise the curriculum” the recent movement that is, within the last decade, we must assume at the very beginning that there has been widespread activity. Fewer than 1500 courses were published prior to 1923, while over 3500 have been received in our laboratory since that time. While I am tempted to answer the thesis stated here immediately in the affirmative, I call to mind a few other possible reasons, namely: (1) the readiness of American education to change, (2) the number of pupil fail¬ ures, and (3) the inherent importance of the problem when considered in comparison with administration and supervision. Even tho I should agree with the thesis, I cannot refrain from remarking that there has been a great deal of churning around in our revisions, and while the feeling that traditional curriculums were not adapted to the re¬ quirements of modern life may have caused the revision we have not at¬ tained our goals in spite of tremendous activity. Dr. Judd states that the effort to base the curriculum on past or present habits of life or on specific objectives derived from the study of presentday conditions is doomed to failure. If we insert the word “entirely” one might answer this statement as more true than false. If, on the other hand, we ignore completely the study of presentday conditions and habits of life our efforts would be equally doomed to failure. It seems to me that an analysis of presentday conditions is the starting point for all future efforts. We need this analysis for the purpose of determining where we are and what we have in order to know what shortages need to be eliminated to understand more fully the best beginning procedures in order to obtain improvement. We must, however, also envisage the values proposed by frontier thinkers. This, of course, is implied when we set up criteria for determining which of the elements of our present civilization are deemed to be undesirable. While, in my judgment, we must look to the frontier thinkers for directions in which we should move, it would be extremely unwise if we did not begin to build our plans for improvement upon promising elements and conditions of the present time. 1 he third thesis, it seems to me, attempts to center our thinking on the most appropriate place for the scientist and the philosopher. I hope yye are National Council of Education 245 entering a period where we shall not have to decide on a basis of scientist or philosopher but that our scientists will become more philosophical and our philosophers more scientific. It seems to me that the great need at the present stage of our curriculum thinking is, first, for fundamental consideration of the requirements of American life ; second, the setting up, in accordance with scientific principles, of activities and materials which will seem to contribute to the satisfying of such requirements; and third, checking and evaluating the results of these activities and materials in order that they may be used in an optimum fashion. While science has some contributions to make in the first step in analyzing present conditions, the chief need is for funda¬ mental thinking into the question of what ought to be and what the most promising possibilities for attaining the goals are. Here, of course, the think¬ ing should be based on all the pertinent data science can supply. In the second step science can play a large part especially in pointing out the necessity of making materials and activities conform to the known laws of learning. In the third step, that of evaluating results, science plays a very important role in determining experimental set-ups and securing results but even here much remains to be developed by science in the way of testing results that appear in the form of attitudes and ideals. Dr. Judd’s last statement is in large measure true, since a proper treat¬ ment of the problems of modern life demand a consideration of a spread of materials which cannot be included in the highly condensed textbooks of today. As I understand it, the very nature of proper learning demands that pupils be trained to recognize important problems, to select pertinent mate¬ rials bearing upon a solution of these problems, to organize these materials and to interpret results. This procedure would be strengthened if many sources in addition to textbooks were available. The construction and instal¬ lation of the type of course of study that calls for more than a single text¬ book is usually partially blocked by the following factors: (a) lack of train¬ ing on the part of teachers; (b) the additional financial burdens imposed in the purchase of a much wider range and larger quantity of materials ; (c) the determined and money-backed opposition of commercial vested inter¬ ests. Viewed from one angle the strongly intrenched and politically involved textbook business is the most immediate and most powerful influence militat¬ ing against the proper revision of curriculums today. On the othei hand, we have within the last decade witnessed the tremendous expansion in both the number and the size of the textbooks as well as a decided improvement in quality. All the blame, therefore, cannot be placed at the doors of the text¬ book companies. Some of it will have to be shouldered by the teacher-train¬ ing institutions and the writers of professional and children s materials. I am of the opinion that many textbook companies have already seen the writ¬ ing on the wall and are not only willing but anxious to publish a vanety of materials which will treat more adequately the problems of modern life. 246 National Education Association Discussion by brank L. Ulapp, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis. The failure to make advancement thru educational research in the field of curriculum construction is due to the fact that in the United States we have no definite concrete political or social philosophy which we dare teach in the schools. We believe in democracy in the abstract but when it comes to the ma¬ chinery of government with which we have tried to realize our ideals of democracy, we are not so sure of our beliefs. We believe in political equality in the abstract, but when it comes to advocating the specific forms in which our ideas of political and social equality are expressed we are not so positive. The same general statements may be made concerning our economic sys¬ tem. Whether we should teach pupils simply to be intelligent and permit them to solve the various political and social problems for themselves, or whether we should attempt to reach some solution for these problems and advocate these solutions to our students is a question which we have not an¬ swered. A definite political, social, and economic philosophy expressed in concrete social institutions and procedures would make it possible to put the emphasis in cuinculum construction upon the selection of subjectmatter from the standpoint of function rather than from the standpoint of relation¬ ship to practical life. Discussion by Arthur Dondineau, Supervising Director of Instruction, Detroit, Mich. The traditional use of the single and highly condensed textbook which aims to covei in a single volume all the materials on a given subject and the infallibility of the printed page in the minds of the great mass of teachers piesent leal obstacles in the way of carrying thru a social curriculum aiming to satisfy the requirements of presentday life. Any program of education must take into consideration the present status of our social and economic order. Those who are guided by such a program must be aggiessive in their efforts to provide the children with the oppor¬ tunity of developing, on appropriate levels, the basic social concepts essential to an understanding of our present social institutions and the intricate prob¬ lems arising out of the confusion of the present decade. The carrying out of the curriculum depends on the training, interest, en¬ thusiasm, intelligence, skill, and efforts of all these teachers. It also depends to a much greater degree than we have recognized or admitted on the books, library, museum, and instructional materials used as the medium of instruc¬ tion. Too little consideration is now given to the means of teaching and to the many classroom aids used as the medium of instruction. We may assume m our discussion groups, in our writings, and in our courses of study that the teacher is teaching children and not subjects, children rather than books. But in the classrooms everywhere instruction is carried on thru the me¬ dium of books; in most subjects, by means of a book. We may talk some- National Council of Education 247 thing else, but the fact remains that books are the chief medium of instruction with the superior teachers as well as the mediocre ones. Now the way to get away from a single book is to use two books, better still three books, or ten books, or a library of books. A rich collection of books is just as essential in the classroom as are the maps or the globes or the furniture or ventilation or heat. I am convinced that the aims of the present well-developed curriculum can never be achieved until we provide our children with books rich in experience and written on their level of understanding. The text is basic. I think it will remain so. But it must be paralleled and supplemented by books less concentrated and more illustrated with the appeal that is found in books rich in incident and in experience. There never was time when the American teachers were better prepared or were more alert and anxious to make their efforts count in attaining the purposes for which the schools exist. As I see it, it is imperative that the leaders of the curriculum group now concern themselves with bringing into every classroom materials of instruction appropriate in content, rich in expe¬ rience, and social in outlook. We must also focus our attention on the task of building up the confidence of the teacher in his own ability to use the less standardized materials. To this end we must allow the teacher more freedom in the selection of learning activities and the content of his own teaching than is at present permitted. Confidence in one’s ability is essential to professional growth and success. Anyone who observes a large number of teachers at work soon comes to the conclusion that there is a very high correlation between teaching success and that confidence which the teacher has in his own ability. Our teaching profession must recognize its place in the social, economic, and political life of the nation. Not until the teachers have developed this confidence in their ability to achieve the social ideals which they know to be right, can we hope to prevent the recurrence of such a period of social demoralization that we are passing thru at the present time. The best teachers and the most useful teachers are neither docile nor subservient. They are found expressing themselves frankly and freely on matters pro¬ fessional and public. The public appreciates public servants with initiative, frankness, and independence. This is a thesis in itself, which I must leave undeveloped. Because of its importance to the curriculum, however, I am unwilling to have it disso¬ ciated with this particular discussion. We have a new teaching profession in this country of breaking away from the traditional practises in the use of textbooks as they have broken away from many of the other traditional methods of teaching, if we will but supply the means and grant the same freedom to teachers in matters of instruction that we have done to insist that the teacher grant to the chil¬ dren in their learning activities. 248 National Education Association FUNCTIONS OF PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE FIELD OF EDUCATION JESSE H. NEWLON, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AND DIRECTOR OF LINCOLN SCHOOL, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. ( 1 ) Educational associations should strive to improve the professional competency of their members in order that they may better serve society. (2) Since education is a process essential both to the preservation and im¬ provement of a culture, educational associations should formulate their views with reference to social, economic, political processes and problems, and advise the public as to the kind of education that will most effectively meet the needs of society according to these formulated views. (3) Educational associations should advise the public! (a) with regard to the kind, the quality, and the various forms of organized education that will best serve the needs of society; (b) with regard to the number and types of educational agencies to be created and maintained, the best forms of control, organization, and support of these agencies, and with reference to the number and the professional training of the personnel required; (c) with regard to the educative effects of social institutions and social practises. (4) Educational associations should serve as agencies whereby the teach¬ ers may effectively discharge their responsibility for participation in the formulation of broad social policies. (5) In the United States an effectively coordinated system of education can be accomplished only thru the cooperation of professional societies repre¬ senting all departments of the system. (6) Under our economic and social system educational associations maj^ legitimately strive to advance and protect the interests of their members. (7) I he field of education is so extensive, so varied in character, and so highly specialized as to require many types of professional organizations. (8) Professional associations in education should in the management of their own affairs exemplify the highest professional and social ideals. They should summon their ablest minds to leadership. (9) Since educational associations perform an essential social function, it follows that all workers in education should take an active interest in those general associations upon which falls the heaviest responsibility for advising the public on educational problems. (10) The status of teachers as employees of the state intrusted with a most important social function requires that they advise the public fearlessly with reference to education conceived in the broadest sense. (11) I he National Education Association should create a commission r (a) to reformulate the social objectives of educational associations; (b) to propose a plan for the more effective integration of the National Education Association with state associations and other general associations; and (c) to formulate a program of action in the period of reconstruction that will fellow the depression. National Council of Education 249 Discussion by Florence Curtis Hanson, Secretary, American Federation of Teachers, Chicago, Ill. In his introduction to the theses, Dr. Newlon has written several sentences which I wish to use as the basis for my remarks. Quoting from Dr. Newlon : “Organization of workers in various occupational fields is a common and inevitable social phenomenon in a complex society. These organizations serve certain broad social purposes. Many seek to improve the professional com¬ petence of their members. They seek to advance and protect the interests of their members, however these interests may be conceived.” Specifically, I conceive of the functions of educational associations to be grouped into three main classes, not according to their importance, for I believe each to be fundamental : 1. To advance and protect the interests of their members. 2. To improve the professional competence of their members. 3. To serve certain broad social purposes. These three functions may be exercised in various ways. Educators may form organizations of various comparatively narrow groups for certain pur¬ poses. They may organize into groups that include all workers in the educa¬ tional field to accomplish other purposes. And it will be necessary for them to join with persons wholly outside the educational field, considered in its narrower sense, to accomplish others. Dr. Newlon states in his second thesis that since education is a process essential both to the preservation and to the improvement of a culture, edu¬ cational associations should formulate their views with reference to social, economic, political processes and problems, and advise the public as to the kind of education that will most effectively meet the needs of society accord¬ ing to these formulated views. Dr. Newlon says further that educational competence means understanding, not only of technics, but of the social char¬ acter and implication of education. How is the teacher to become acquainted with great social changes if he does not associate personally, or thru organi¬ zations with those outside of his own narrow group ? Educational associations have no business advising society what to do unless by experiences and con¬ tacts with other groups they know what to do. Quoting, “The teacher is one of the most highly productive of workers and the best interests of the schools and of the people demand an intimate contact and an effective co¬ operation between the teachers and the other workers of the community upon whom the future of democracy must depend.” Dr. Newlon states in his tenth thesis that it is time for the tradition that the teacher must be neutral in political matters to be smashed. That time was a long time ago. He states that teachers and schools have in general only reflected the dominant opinion of the country on crucial issues. He cites the action of the largest educational organization in its attitude toward the World War, beginning at pacifism, following with an ignoring of the issue just before American participation and fervent support after participation. He criticizes the same organization for no denunciation of public betrayal of 250 National Education Association trust, or of the widespread abject poverty which existed in the wealthiest country in the world even before the depression. I wish to call attention to the fact that the American Federation of Teachers maintained a consistent pacifistic attitude toward the war before, during, and after that great world blunder. Also that the same organization has since its inception consistently denounced the betrayal of public trusts in both high and low places and has condemned repeatedly and without rest the maldistribution of the national income which makes the education we are trying to give the children so ineffective. It created quite a storm of criticism both by public and teachers for a strong statement on banking and bankers and calling attention to a “bankers’ conspiracy.” I am especially pleased that Dr. Newlon has brought up the point of the tradition that “since the constituency of the school represents all shades of political, social, economic beliefs, both the school and the teacher must remain neutral with regard to controversial social problems.” We have been work¬ ing for seventeen years to overcome that tradition. It was fifteen years ago, or thereabouts, that Professor Harry A. Overstreet, then and now a member of the American Federation of Teachers, had this to say on that subject: “If one stands for the public one stands inevitably for the ideas and activities of only a portion of the public and of what portion ? Surely of that portion which has most deeply at heart the fundamental public good.” Discussion by S. A. Courtis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. To those interested in educational philosophy the reactions of our whole nation to the depression, citizens as well as teachers, is most interesting and suggestive. We are all being shocked or driven into an awareness of social relationships of which hitherto, for all practical purposes, we may be said to have been totally unconscious. The theses we are discussing today present a clear illustration of this fact. Each of us in his own little corner has gone about his own individual work in his own individual way. Suddenly we find that our work concerns others so vitally they are attempting to meddle with it and to control it in most obnoxious ways. Our first reaction is one of protest. Nor are we willing to protest individually. The forces attempting control are might5^; we feel corresponding need for professional solidarity. A protest backed by a million teachers seems more meaningful. While I have no authority to speak for them, I am sure every member of the National Society of College Teachers also feels the need for action and will rejoice that something is being done to meet the need. My opinion is that, in gen¬ eral, the theses Dr. Newlon has presented will receive the support of college teachers everywhere. We were invited to suggest ways in which the theses might be improved. I have three criticisms to offer. 1. Point of View — It seems to me that the wording of theses might well be changed to express a more cooperative attitude. We talk cooperation, we exalt the importance of cooperation, but few of us ever stop to think what National Council of Education 251 cooperation really means. The conventional connotation is either “for you to help me achieve my purpose,” or “for me to help you achieve your purpose, whereas, the real definition of cooperation is “all of us working together to achieve our purpose.” In the present situation, and in these theses, we are talking of “social con- * trol.” Who is to exert that control ; teachers over education, and bankers over banking? Rugged individualism says yes, but if I interpret correctly both the intent of these theses and the action of the groups to whose efforts to control education we object, the real answer is no. Has not a banker who has had a fortune of $30,000,000 swept away and who sees a teacher raising strenuous objections to a cut of twenty percent in salary, a right to feel the teacher is narrow-minded and unreasonable? President Roosevelt plans on a $500,000,000 reduction in the national budget ; why should any school or university react adversely to a proportionate cut in its budget? It seems to me the whole tenor of our protests is wrong. We do not produce the money available for civic purposes and are in no position to advise how much shall be spent on our schools. I suggest that our memorials ought to say, “We realize our country has come upon troublesome times ; we are glad to take our share of any reductions that are necessary. Tell us how much money is available and let us plan the spending of the money in the most effective ways.” As I read the theses, I do not find an expression of such a cooperative spirit. 2. Social Control — “But,” you will protest, “that is not enough. Educa¬ tion will not be treated fairly. The professional must have a say, not only in how money allotted to education is to be spent but in determining how much shall be allotted. Further, we have been brought into our present diffi¬ culties by unwise actions on the part of bankers and business men. We want to make sure this does not happen again. We believe we should have a say in all future planning.” I wonder if we realize, when we make such state¬ ments that bankers and business men feel just the same way about educa¬ tion. They blame us for present conditions and intend to see that we behave differently in the future. The truth of the matter is we have all been equally foolish and must all revise our ways. Life is not only individualistic but social and interdependent as well. In the past our country has emphasized the individualistic phases of life — freedom, equality, justice. We are now learning that freedom which ignores social consequences is license ; equality that ignores social relation¬ ships is inequality; justice which considers the individual only is injustice. Why would it not be better if our theses were so worded as to give expres¬ sion to the ideal of social unity instead of to the idea of group antagonism ? We should ask, it seems to me, for a national planning committee to con¬ sider the good of the nation as a whole — a committee that shall represent every interest, teachers, bankers, business men, and all the rest. The com¬ mittee should plan in terms of the common interests ; all plan for banking, all plan for education. Can we justly object to control of education in one paragraph and demand control of national affairs in the next? Why should 252 National Education Association not one of our present contributions be emphasis upon the need for the addi¬ tion of the ideal of social unity to the list of distinctive American ideals? 3. Social Direction — This brings me to the last of my criticisms. It is easy to talk of cooperative planning and of social control, but at present there is one fatal defect in all such discussions. What is the common good? In what direction is our nation to move? How shall decision in such matters be made and by whom? American idealism is totally individualistic. Social planning is impossible in such a nation. The bankers desire to reach one goal, the farmers another, the teachers a third. Before there can be anything but acrimonious, antagonistic, sterile debate, and compromise which achieves only the minimum good, there must be agreement as to the common goal to which the goal of each group shall be contributory. Consider the paralysis which has overtaken our national individualistic Congress. In education these days we are giving our students some vision of goals which supply social diiection. My suggestion is that we utilize the present opportunity more to make a distinctive professional contribution to national progress by emphasiz¬ ing the need for national attention to the problem of determining social di¬ iection than to airing our own narrow viewpoints, aims, and irritations. Discussion by J. Herbert Kelley, Executive Secretary, Pennsyl¬ vania State Education Association, Harrisburg, Pa. I am in full accord with the theses submitted by Jesse H. Newlon but would like to suggest a few additional functions of educational associations, such as, teachei placement, group insurance, credit unions, and welfare work both relief in their own homes for former teachers in financial distress, and the operation of teachers homes for retired teachers who find themselves alone in the world and for convalescent teachers in active service. These are major and worthy projects now being carried on by some of our state educa¬ tion associations. In Pennsylvania, we have accepted the challenge to interpret our public- school program to the laymen and have recently thru our committee on public relations set up an organization that is now functioning in each of our sixty-seven counties. This organization consists of two groups : a profes¬ sional group with legislative, speakers, and publicity chairmen ; and a group of laymen, Friends of Education, with three similar chairmen. By issuing a weekly bulletin we keep in close touch with these chairmen and supply them with plenty of ammunition for their work. The circulation of this bulletin has increased from 10,000 to 40,000 copies in twelve weeks. To carry on this work our Executive Council recently appropriated $10,000. As further evidence of the interest of our association in social and political affairs may I cite a resolution adopted by our House of Delegates, a body of 600 representing our membership of over 60,000, favoring the city manager plan of government with the proportional representation method of electing public officials. Dr. Newlon’s suggestion for a closer articulation between state and na¬ tional associations is most timely. With a membership in the N. E. A. of National Council of Education 253 only 200,000 of our 600,000 state association members and with approxi¬ mately 1,000,000 teachers in the United States, we see a clear challenge. Why should we not conduct local, state, and national membership campaigns as a unit on the budget plan and make such membership co-inclusive ? This procedure is followed in some states with such gratifying results that in even this sad year of 1933 substantial gains have resulted to all concerned. May I pause to state that these membership drives are conducted on a purely voluntary basis. Their success depends upon professional leadership and the skilful use of educational methods: argument, persuasion, demonstration. We do not tolerate coercion either in securing memberships in our professional organizations or in achieving our purposes. The use of coercion in any way at any time is of itself a confession of the failure of educational methods. It is foreign to the basic principles of voluntary teachers associations. Altho teaching has made rapid strides toward becoming a profession dur¬ ing the present century, we have not fully arrived, and are still confronted with factors that seem to make attainment of the goal well-nigh impossible. Until we can appeal successfully to the college and university professor and interest him in the learning and teaching process as well as in subjectmatter, until we can enlist the interest in professional organization of every faculty member who instructs prospective teachers, until we can secure the active cooperation in our associations of these men and women at the supposed head of the teaching fraternity, we can scarcely claim that teaching is a profession. At the other extreme there is a group of teachers who look upon their work as a job, a trade, that pays wages and who identify themselves with labor unions. For such, teaching is no profession. These fail to see that there is a clear line of demarcation between mechanics, artisans, labor, and the recog¬ nized professions of law, medicine, engineering, architecture, and account¬ ancy. The hod carrier, altho he does an essential, honorable, and honest piece of work, will never feel at ease in an organization of skilled surgeons. All are workers, but the first works on the level of labor, the second on the level of a profession. Teaching still has its two extremes. Between the two, however, is the great body of professionally-trained, professionally-minded teachers who are earnestly and more or less successfully working out the destiny of teaching as a profession. In this connection, it is interesting to recall that the American Federation of Teachers, whose representative this morning referred to teaching as a profession, published recently a bulletin entitled, Objections Answered in which appears the following : “Teaching is a profession, not a trade. For generations public-school teach¬ ers have salved their pride with this pitiful substitute for adequate remunera¬ tion and a position of influence in the community. They have refused to face the obvious fact that whereas doctors, lawyers, architects, and other profes¬ sional men can control their hours, the conditions under which they work, and the amount of their fees, teachers, as individuals, have almost no control over these matters so vital to their welfare. The results are that the vast majority of teachers receive a smaller annual wage than unskilled laborers, 254 National Education Association and exert far less influence in their calling and in the community than any other skilled workers. “ The war has surely cleansed us of any remnants of such petty snobbery. 1 he time has come for the teachers of the country to rid themselves of their narrow caste spirit and join hands with other workers in their assertion of independence and self-respect/’ The time is at hand when teachers must think clearly and see to it that they and their voluntary professional organizations meet with firmness and good judgment the forces that would destroy the solidarity of our coming profession. Discussion by J. W. Crabtree, Secretary, National Education Association, Washington, D. C. At one of the annual conventions of our Association over thirty years ago I had the honor of escorting our National Commissioner of Education, Wil¬ liam T. Harris, to one of the department meetings where he was to deliver an address. As we passed thru the hotel lobby he stopped to shake hands with a group of men consisting of Dr. Beardshear, Dr. Seerley, Superintend¬ ent Pearse, Superintendent Soldan, and two or three other physical giants. They had been discussing some important problems of the profession. They fired a few questions at Dr. Harris before he could get away. As we went on out of the hotel I referred to that “fine-looking group of men as veritable giants.” ‘A es,” Dr. Harris said, “they are giants in more ways than one.” 1 hen as we went along the street he commented in his usual philosophical manner on what it meant to the individual and to society for big minds to have commodious, comfortable dwelling places. In listening to Mr. Newlon’s remarkably fine address I could not help recalling that early incident and of feeling that here is another giant in more ways than one. I heartily agree with Mr. Newlon in the fundamental principles which he sets forth — in his emphasis on the work of educational associations, his in¬ sistence that teachers need to study the social and economic problems as well as pedagogy, and his urging better leadership for the profession. I am glad that in his theses he places primary emphasis on the work which our education associations do to improve the professional competency of their members. This is the foundation stone, and in proportion as the organiza¬ tions are able to enlist the teachers and to lead them to work on the problems of the profession, they will grow in strength and in service to our civilization. 1 he greatest achievement of professional organizations during the past dec¬ ade, and the greatest hope of achievement in the years to come, lie in the active participation of teachers in the development of our professional and civic policies. Teachers are close to child needs. They are close to the homes. I hey see the wholesome effect of conditions which are favorable to child growth, and the devastating effect of unfavorable environments. They are sincere in their desire to improve conditions. W hat teachers need is not so much freedom to say and to teach what ought to he said and taught, hut as the speaker made clear, they need more in National Council of Education 255 research and more in knowledge. Teachers are not restrained from expressing honest opinions along social and economic lines half so much from fear of losing their positions as from ignorance of the problems involved. "I he public seldom fails to respect the well-informed teacher’s point of view. It will, and perhaps should curb the careless, the extremist, and the intolerant. A li¬ cense to teach ought not necessarily mean a license to put over unreliable information or propaganda. It must be remembered that teachers, like other people, have sometimes come forward with new and half-baked ideas, and they sometimes take sides unwisely on emotional or strictly controversial issues which could have very little value even at best. A little caution in such cases often saves the teacher from himself. I liked the way a teacher handled the question of technocracy. The high- school students asked questions. She said that she didn’t know just how much there was in it. That each of them could understand it as well as she could. “You know,” she said, “some things have come along before we were ready for them. People’s minds were not ready for the binomial theorem when it first came, but you know how simple it is now for all of you. “Even those other professors up there at Columbia who have been starting things don’t see thru technocracy yet. Perhaps our minds,” she said, “will in the course of time develop up to it, or technocracy may yet in some way be brought down to the compass of our minds.” Thereupon one of the students wrote: “Dear Dr. Scott: Our minds get all tangled up in your technocracy. Could you not make it as easy for us as the binominal theorem ? Very truly yours, John.” Changes are taking place so rapidly, that when you start to say a thing should be done, it may come to pass before the sentence is completed. When Mr. Newlon began on his theses, and was pointing out the need of a great coordinating agency in the Association itself, the presidents of the National Education Association and of the Department of Superintendence impressed themselves with that need, and urged ahead by Mr. Newlon’s point of view and that of other leaders were arranging for a joint emergency commission to meet the very situation set forth. The commission will present a prelimi¬ nary report at this convention. While at present the major attention of the commission will be given to problems of the depression to prevent a break¬ down in education, its larger purpose would permit it to undertake much of that outlined in this address, and I would like to see the council recom¬ mend that the commission broaden the scope of its work to include all essen¬ tials mentioned in this report. I hope the Council will recommend to the N. E. A. and to the Department of Superintendence that an effort be made to finance the commission adequately for its work. The endorsement of this address by the Council and its approval of the appointment of the commis¬ sion would add strength to the movement. I have already indicated that I consider this an exceptionally fine address. Mr. Newlon points out weaknesses, but only to show the need for improve¬ ment. We could mention other weaknesses. But we like the plan followed by Mr. Newlon in paying more attention to achievement than to mistakes. 256 National Education Association His recommendations have grown out of an intimate knowledge of the work of the association. They assume that the achievements of state and national associations have been outstanding. They provide not for tearing down but for going ahead. They recognize that there are certain valuable democratic trends and seek to increase their momentum. In short his recommendations are highly constructive. They build on what we already have. They look up and ahead. They are farsighted. Again permit me to say that such theses could only come from one who is “a giant in more ways than one.” SECRETARY’S MINUTES Minneapolis, Minn. First Session, Friday Morning, February 24, 1933 The meeting was called to order by the President at 9:45 a.m. in the Flame Room of the Hotel Radisson. In the absence of William A. Evans, Chairman of the Committee on an Institute of Education, the report of the committee was read by E. E. Oberholtzer, a member of the committee. As the letter from the president of the University of Cincinnati, embodied in the report, indicated the possibility of holding a preliminary conference on an Institute of Education at the University in 1934, but not in 1933, the chairman of the com¬ mittee suggested in the report that there seemed no reason for declining this invita¬ tion for 1934, but he felt that arrangements might still be made for a 1933 conference at some place other than the University of Cincinnati, and that the N. E. A. might assume some responsibility for defraying the small expense of such a preliminary conference. The discussion that followed the reading of this report, centered very largely upon the suggestions of the chairman of the committee as to 1933 conference, especially regarding sources of funds. It was thought by Mr. Oberholtzer that a preliminary conference might be called in Chicago immediately preceding the 1933 N. E. A. meeting there, with each state sending its leaders in education and the expense, which would be light, might be borne by the N. E. A. as suggested in the comments of the chairman. He feared the undertaking would lose zest if delayed. Mr. Saunders, member of the Board ot Trustees of the N. E. A. and thoroly familiar with the finances of that organization, said the budget for 1933 would not allow of such additional expenditures. Mr. Gosling was heartily in favor of the proposal as originally set up if a workable and feasible plan could be developed. In the opinion of Mr. Norton, it would be unfortunate to fall down by undue haste to do something. It was also suggested by a representative from the University of Chicago, that if such an Institution were held in Chicago, August would be preferable to the last of June, which would just precede the N. E. A. meeting. A motion made by Mr. Oberholtzer and seconded by Mr. Smith, that the Committee on an Institute of Education be empowered to act according to its best judgment on the possibility, feasibility, and probability of holding a preliminary conference on the relation of education to social and economic changes, was carried and a meeting of the committee called for noon Saturday. In the absence of F. J. Kelly, Chairman of the Resolutions Committee, the pre¬ liminary report for that Committee was read for the consideration of the Council, by H. L. Smith, a member of the committee. In the discussion of the report, Mr. Shotwell proposed an addition to the resolu¬ tions, of one dealing with the teaching of international relationships as part of the educational program of all countries, especially secondary schools and higher National Council of Education 257 institutions of learning, and that all government officials in positions that may in¬ volve international relationships, be required to take examinations in subjects involving international relationship content. The president of the Council called attention to the formal Declaration offered by the American and British delegations to the Disarmament Conference, on the subject of moral disarmament, which presents a problem and opens an opportunity to the educational authorities of the countries concerned. This proposal, along with all other recommendations of the Disarmament Conference, had been referred back to the various governments for study and report to the conference when it reconvenes. Miss Chari Williams thought some attention might be given by the Committee to a resolution dealing with the reorganization of federal agencies in education. This suggestion was also referred to the Committee on Resolutions for consideration in making the final draft. Miss Williams was asked by the president of the Council to meet with the committee. In connection with these suggestions, which seemed to point directly to certain critical problems to be solved in education, the president of the Council expressed as his opinion, the necessity of making an effort to hold an Institute of Education this year. The possibility of securing financial aid from some foundation or individual was brought out and again the feasibility of holding the institution immediately preceding the 1933 meeting of the N. E. A. in Chicago was considered. The secretary called attention to letters from absent members explaining the situations making it impossible for them to attend the Minneapolis meeting, and said if the Council did not object, she would adjust the records of their attendance on the basis of the letters. There was no objection to this suggestion. The secretary read a letter from Mrs. Susan M. Dorsey, for many years an active and leading member of the Council, in which she tendered her resignation as a mem¬ ber of the Council as she found it impossible to attend and actively participate in future meetings of the Council. The resignation was accepted with regret by the Council. By this action, Mrs. Dorsey becomes a life honorary member of the National Council of Education. Second Session, Friday Afternoon, February 24, 1933 The meeting was called to order by the president at 2 p.m. in the Flame Room of the Hotel Radisson. At this meeting, Dr. Judd presented certain theses previously prepared by him on “An Evaluation of the Curriculum Revision Movement in American Education,” and distributed in advance of the meeting to members of the Council. Dr. Judd briefly set forth his claims for the four theses and his interpretation of certain portions of the same, making further classifications from time to time as questions were raised in connection with program speakers who followed in the discussion, and in the general discussion. Among other things, he stated that he did not agree with those opposing formal discipline, as he interprets it in education. In answer to the inquiry as to whether he could find a better way for determining curriculum content than thru the use of objectives, he stated that he was not interested in objectives but in trends. In his opinion, we must get children to think of civilization as moving in certain directions and this has demanded certain types of education. He gave illustrations of good elementary classroom instruction he had observed in writing and arithmetic, and declared his protest against the name “tool subjects” common among educators. In his opinion, arithmetic is a social study. Dr. Judd further expressed the view that economics can be taught in the lower grades as an accumulation of racial experiences. The following scheduled to participate in the discussion of the theses, were present: H. B. Bruner, Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y., Frank L. Clapp, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., Arthur 258 National Education Association Dondineau, Supervising Director of Instruction, Public Schools, Detroit, Mich. Their contributions in full, or resumes of the same, appear in this volume. A general discussion then followed, in which it was brought out that many causes had operated to retard curriculum revision, among which might be included : 1. Weak¬ ness in programs of teacher-training institutions. 2. Lack of devices for evaluating studies as a basis for evaluating courses of study. 3. The fact that the materials of the social sciences and the like differ from, and are less formal than those of other subjects. 4. The scarcity of desirable textbooks in newer subjects. It was suggested that textbook writers are responsible for the present situation in regard to the school curriculum. The conservatism of publishers and textbook writers was dwelt upon and it was suggested that one way out might be the publica¬ tion of leaflets dealing with controversial questions not found, or easily included in textbooks. Dr. Edmonson stated that he and Dr. Judd were members of a committee to meet with executive officers of publishing houses at their annual meeting to study textbook problems. In his opinion, school administrators and teacher-training institutions may also be indited for carelessness in the selection of textbooks. Those participating in this general discussion, following the presentation and scheduled discussion of the theses, were: Thomas W. Gosling, Superintendent of Schools, Akron, Ohio., Frank M. Underwood, District Superintendent of Schools, St. Louis, Mo., E. E. Oberholtzer, Superintendent of Schools, Houston, Tex., Lotus D. Coffman, President, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn., J. B. Edmonson, School of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., Joseph H. Saunders, Superintendent of City Schools, Newport News, Va., Charles H. Judd, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill., Frank L. Clapp, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., Arthur Dondineau, Supervising Director of Instruction, Public Schools, Detroit, Mich. On motion of E. E. Oberholtzer, the National Council of Education voted to create a special committee to participate in a proposed conference with the editors and executive officers of firms of publishers of instructional materials, and to bring back to the Council a report on the findings of such a conference, the principal aim of the conference to be the cultivation of a better understanding of the opinion of the profession relative to the quality and kinds of instructional materials that are needed in the schools. Third Session, Saturday Morning, February 25, 1933 The meeting was called to order by the President at 9:30 a.m. in the Flame Room of the Hotel Radisson. The president named as follows, the special committee for which provision was made at the preceding session of the Council, to confer with editors and executive officers of publishers of instructional materials: J. B. Edmonson, Chairman , School of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., Charles H. Judd, Uni¬ versity of Chicago, Chicago, Ill., S. D. Shankland, 1201 16th Street N. W., Washing¬ ton, D. C., E. E. Oberholtzer, Superintendent of Schools, Houston, Tex., Frank M. Underwood, Assistant Superintendent of Schools, St. Louis, Mo., William John Cooper, U. S. Commissioner of Education, U. S. Office of Education, Department of the Interior, Washington, D. C., Thomas W. Gosling, Superintendent of Schools, Akron, Ohio, R. O. Stoops, Superintendent of City Schools, Jacksonville, Ill., Joseph H. Saunders, Superintendent of Schools, Newport News, Va., Albert S. Cook, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Baltimore, Md., Ernest Horn, State University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, Paul C. Stetson, Superintendent of Schools, Indianapolis, Ind., J. M. Gwinn, Superintendent of Schools, San Francisco, Calif., H. B. Bruner, Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. Dr. Newlon presented certain theses prepared by him on “The Function of Pro¬ fessional Organizations in the Field of Education,” and distributed explanatory com¬ ments to members of the Council for consideration in advance of the meeting. Dr. Newlon read, with certain brief interpolations, his comments on these theses. National Council of Education 259 The following persons formally scheduled to follow Dr. Newlon in the discussion of the theses, were present and participated: Mrs. Florence Curtis Hanson, Secretary, American Federation of Teachers, Chicago, Ill., S. A. Courtis, Former Secretary, National Society of College Teachers of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., J. Herbert Kelley, Secretary, Pennsylvania State Education Associa¬ tion, Harrisburg, Pa., Charles F. Pye, Secretary, Iowa State Teachers Association, Des Moines, Iowa, S. D. Shankland, Executive Secretary, Department of Superin¬ tendence, N. E. A., Washington, D. C., and J. W. Crabtree, Secretary, National Education Association, Washington, D. C. These contributions in full, or briefs of the same, appear in this volume, with two exceptions (Charles F. Pye and S. D. Shankland). Mr. Pye declaring that something must be done, and that first of all we must set our own house in order. He felt that there was immediate and pressing need for us to determine in some way, how to go about it to solve the problems that had been raised by the theses. In his -opinion, Dr. Newlon is many years ahead of the time in the theses he has set up. Mr. Pye then asked permission to give the remainder of his time to Dr. Kelly. This was granted. Dr. Kelly briefly referred to the great need for social planning calling attention to the LaFollette Plan which the U. S. Congress had been asked to consider. He cited two important points in connection with this plan: 1. It asks for a council to be appointed by the President of the United States and approved by Congress to make reports from time to time to citizens of the United States and reports to councils in the United States for the dissemination of its findings and recommendations. 2. It would deal with educational matters, with no thought of having educational people identified with it. In Dr. Kelly’s opinion, education has a hand in this — it is really educational and not political. There will be created in this country, social and economic councils and educators should have a share in the formulation of these policies and plans. S. D. Shankland stated that teachers are also citizens of the United States. In former years this was not so true or so apparent as at the present time. He said that after reading the theses, he had read thru the programs of the N. E. A. for several years and found a distinct change in trends. The earlier programs dealt more largely with technics, procedures, and the like in education, but not large social matters, as is the tendency today. It is not education alone, as usually interpreted, on which to center attention, but also cooperative leadership. Mr. Shankland pointed out that Dr. F. J. Kelly is chairman of the N. E. A. com¬ mission to study social and economic trends and is also a member of the committee for the preparation of the 1935 Yearbook of the Department of Superintendence on Social and Economic Problems. By this arrangement, Dr. Kelly forms a liaison between the two organizations in the study of social and economic trends, and un¬ necessary duplication is avoided. Mr. Shankland feels that we do not want too many groups interfering and over¬ lapping. A joint steering committee for the N. E. A. and the Department of Super¬ intendence might show what careful organization can accomplish by way of eliminat¬ ing overlapping and interfering. In the general discussion of the theses that followed, Dr. Newlon earnestly ex¬ pressed himself in favor of a type of education that reaches every child and is opposed to a caste system of any kind, which to his thinking is not only not American, but neither Christian nor social. Mr. Saunders called attention to the activities of Chambers of Commerce, that presume to speak authoritatively on all subjects, and declared that we are asleep at the switch, and should organize our educational forces in some way to be a more effective instrument at this time. Mrs. Hanson emphasized the stand taken by the American Federation of Labor for higher salaries for teachers and other liberalizing principles as opposed to that taken by Chambers of Commerce. 260 National Education Association Growing out of this discussion, much of which centered on Thesis XI, the Council voted unanimously to submit Thesis XI to the N. E. A. Delegate Assembly for consideration with a view to its endorsement by that body. Dr. Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Resolutions, presented the final report of that committee. Prior to the discussion of this report, the president of the Council ruled that these resolutions as finally adopted by the Council would be referred to both the Depart¬ ment of Superintendence and the Representative Assembly of the N. E. A. A number of questions were raised as to the import of these resolutions, especially Resolutions 10, 11, and 12, which were answered by the chairman of the committee, and some objection raised to Resolution 14 in its present wording. On motion, Resolution 10 was adopted. Motions were carried to omit Resolutions 11 and 12, but later such action was rescinded thru a motion to leave to the chairman of the committee and the president of the Council the revision of 12 to accord with the suggestions from the floor, and to modify 10 to include the import of Dr. Newlon’s Thesis XI, Resolution 14 and 15 were also adopted, with the understanding that the chairman of the committee and the president of the Council would clear up any wording in both of them necessary for a correct interpretation. On this basis, the 15 resolutions were adopted and a committee consisting of the chairman of the Resolutions Committee and the president of the Council was empowered by the Council to make such modifications in any of the resolutions as seemed necessary for clarification of meaning. The final report as agreed upon by the chairman of the Resolutions Committee and the president of the National Council of Education, follows: 1. In a democracy equal educational opportunity must be available to all not only as the inherent right of every individual, but as the essential safeguard of democracy. 2. The organized school and college is the principal agency established by society to assure every individual this right. 3. This right is being so seriously infringed today that American educators should be aroused to an unaccustomed militancy on behalf of schools. This militancy should express itself in vigorous insistence that this generation of children shall not be deprived of its only chance. 4. As the complexity of modern life has increased, the unequal distribution of wealth has been accentuated, leaving some communities much less able than others to provide an adequate educational program. Therefore we recommend a revision of our taxation system, a widening of the tax unit, a substantial increase in the proportion of educational expenditures borne by the state and by the federal govern¬ ments with such adjustments as will protect and encourage local initiative. 5. We affirm the belief that just and equitable taxes based on ability to pay form the most economical means of financing public works of which education is one of the most important. 6. The present crisis in education calls for emphasis upon the unusual phase of the responsibility of education. The present infringement of the rights of children is due mostly to the breakdown of our adult social order. This situation bears im¬ pressive testimony to the fact that education must at all times concern itself with the social and economic problems underlying social stability and progress if it is not to see its work with children largely nullified. We recommend, therefore, that greater emphasis be placed on the social studies in the curriculums of colleges, teacher¬ training institutions, and of secondary and elementary schools. Above all, however, since the correction of our social maladjustments calls for active participation by all thoughtful persons this present social breakdown makes clear the need of a much enlarged and better organized program of adult education, including especially a program for teachers now in service. National Council of Education 261 7. The social-economic revolution thru which the world, particularly America, is passing is the inevitable accompaniment of the scientific development of recent decades. To build a social order competent to make with minimum social friction and individual hardship the difficult adjustments of such a revolution, is the fundamental task of American education. 8. That these necessary adjustments have been and are still being made at the price of such vast hardships to the people reflects unfavorably upon the achieve¬ ments of education including schools and other agencies in recent decades and calls for a searching examination of the fundamental objectives as well as of the materials and methods used in American education. 9. It is the foremost obligation of education to seek out the underlying causes of the present grievous maladjustments; to forecast, with all the wisdom at its com¬ mand, the social-economic developments of the near future; and heroically to redirect education so as to reduce to a minimum the personal hardships, and the social stresses and strains which tend to accompany rapid social changes, and at the same time to assure to the largest number of people the abundant life which current scientific development should make possible. 10. To carry out this obligation calls for a national council on social-economic planning as forecast by the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, and as urged so cogently by the educators who memorialized the President-elect of the United States urging him to establish such a council. 11. When established, such a national council should be fully representative of our total social life, including agriculture, labor, industrial management, medicine, engineering, law, education, and welfare. It should be constituted in such a way as to give assurance that everything that is done may be directed with an intelligent understanding of the larger social issues involved. Inasmuch as such a national council will serve inevitably as a powerful educative agency in the formation of public opinion, it should have all the safeguards which other educative agencies have. Such a council we respectfully petition the President of the United States, in cooperation with the Congress, to bring into existence at the earliest possible time. 12. The profession should strengthen its facilities to uphold individual educators who may suffer unjust persecution following their active participation in the solution of social and economic problems. 13. Among the probable and desirable steps likely to be taken in the reorganization of the federal government, departments and agencies having to do with education should undoubtedly be coordinated and unified. To this end, we respectfully call to the attention of the President of the United States the report of the National Ad¬ visory Committee on Education with its significant data and recommendations. 14. We commend the interest of the Congress in the tragic fate of the youth of this country now thrown among the multitude of the unemployed. When and if some measure is passed to bring these youth under the protection and care of the govern¬ ment, we urge the absolute necessity that the program of activities arranged for them outside of their housing, feeding, and discipline, should be intrusted to some educational agency, and not to the War Department. 15. We affirm that social-economic problems today are worldwide problems and must be solved on a worldwide basis. We, therefore, commend the efforts and pro¬ gram of the American and British delegations to the Disarmament Conference, em¬ bodied in their formal declaration on the subject of Moral Disarmament. These delegations proposed, among other things, that the several nations agree to recom¬ mend to their competent educational authorities the study of the principles and application of pacific settlement of international disputes and of the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, and to prescribe those subjects to all examinations for government positions which may involve relations with other countries, not only in the consular and diplomatic service, but in all branches of the national government. 262 National Education Association Chicago, Illinois First Session, Friday Afternoon, June 30, 1933 The meeting was called to order in the South Ballroom of the Stevens Hotel at 2 p.m., by the president of the Council. The preliminary report of the Committee on Resolutions was presented by the chairman, Fred J. Kelly. He gave a brief resume of the comments from Council members on the resolutions adopted at the winter (1933) meeting of the Council, to all of whom copies had been sent by the secretary of the Council for their further reaction to the resolutions as a basis for a philosophy of education. These replies were almost unanimously favorable comments on the resolutions, and commenda¬ tions of the same. The chairman emphasized certain points in the earlier resolutions and read a few additional ones the committee had agreed upon as supplementary to them. These supplementary resolutions will appear in the portion of this record that gives an account of the Council meeting Saturday afternoon, July 1. The chairman stated that after all, the teacher was the real key to the solution of our educational problems and commented strongly on the great need of all teachers for increased knowledge of the social sciences. He advised that the resolutions had been submitted to the Representative Assembly of the N. E. A. for action. In the discussion that followed, Superintendent Thomas W. Gosling, Akron, Ohio, questioned the wisdom of the participation of teachers in controversial social prob¬ lems as yet not clearly understood by leaders themselves, but it was explained that a careful selection of content must be made, and in the opinion of the chairman, all teachers in preemployment training, before entering upon the technical courses for special professional training for teaching, should have pursued a two-year course following high school, in which social sciences would be much emphasized. In answer to the inquiry as to how this social science content could best reach teachers in service, the chairman suggested that certain pages of educational journals could well be devoted to the consideration of social changes, social problems, and social schemes. Certain phases of these social situations and problems should reach teachers as well as school administrators, and the profession itself should assume this responsibility. As dealt with in the daily papers and current magazines, all sides of these problems are not presented. The chairman felt that the Research Division of the N. E. A. could well furnish materials for the N. E. A. and other professional journals. In response to the inquiry of the president of the Council as to whether in the opinion of the chairman of the Resolutions Committee a specialist in research in the field of social science should be added to the present N. E. A. staff, the chair¬ man said that there should be first of all, a selected group of wise sociologists and economists, political scientists and historians, to guide the policies of the N. E. A. and unify all services including the N. E. A. Journal in the interest of the social science field. To these suggestions, Joy E. Morgan, editor of the N. E. A. Journal, responded that such had been the policy of the N. E. A. and that specialists had been brought in from time to time, or regularly employed on the staff for this purpose. In the opinion of Florence Hale, former president of the N. E. A. and close to the headquarters organization, no additional staff was needed in the Research Division. The present staff could make the necessary and recommended cooperations and contacts. In the opinion of Superintendent Joseph H. Saunders, Newport News, Virginia, since fields other than social science had not been brought into the picture, there might be some misunderstanding. He raised the question as to why not have the content of the educational journals confined to professional articles, with occasional articles of another type? He felt it best not to push this recommendation at the present time, to the Representative Assembly. The chairman responded that whether or not teachers and educational journals should stay away from these crucial problems, National Council of Education 263 educators as a whole cannot keep away from them. They must get into them some way, and instead of leaving themselves in the hands of those people who do these things, education should have its share in the interpretation of these controversial issues. Educators must assume responsibility for social failures as well as successes. Mr. Gosling stated that we could not secure a concensus. He pointed out the neces¬ sity, and at the same time the difficulty or impossibility, of bringing to the attention of teachers all available materials in these lines. Various opinions could not be forced upon them — regimented, so to speak — they must be left to form their own opinions on the basis of available materials. It cannot be a. process of indoctrination. J. O. Malott of the U. S. Office of Education, Washington, D. C., felt that to popularize such information would not necessarily indoctrinate teachers. Emphasis should be put on facts rather than on interpretations, and such materials made accessible in readable, understandable terms. For further work on the resolutions following this discussion of the preliminary report, and in the absence of some members of the Resolutions Committee, Dr. Bagley, president of the Council, appointed Thomas W. Gosling, A. W. Castle, and Rose Pesta as substitute members to work with the Resolutions Committee in making the final draft for presentation the following day. Joy E. Morgan, editor of the N. E. A. Journal, then addressed the Council on “Democracy and Education, A Discussion of the Work of the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education.” This address appears in full in this volume. Mr. Morgan commented on the types of work undertaken by the commission and the avenues thru which information had been publicized such as leaflets developed in cooperation with the schools. He read excerpts from his paper with clarifying comments. Thomas E. Benner, dean of the College of Education, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, led in the discussion of this address. His paper also appears in this volume. Dr. Benner felt that in supplementing the education of those who have completed undergraduate work, there should be more emphasis on breadth. He believes the training of graduate students today, is very narrow — there are many Ph.D. degrees granted when not a single course in philosophy has been pursued by the candidate. The president of the Council stated that the Council would be glad to consider a resolution on this point. He added that of all civilized countries in this depression, the United States alone is closing schools and cutting salaries of its teachers. Second Session, Saturday Morning, July 1, 1933 The meeting was called to order in the South Ballroom of the Stevens Hotel at 9:30 a.m., by the president of the Council. Dr. James F. Hosic, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y., presented the plan for the proposed yearbook on materials of instruction, to be com¬ piled by the Department of Supervisors and Directors of Instruction. This yearbook will deal with junior and senior high school curriculum materials. Dr. Hosic commented on certain points in connection with this proposed outline, pointing out the need for (1) a variety of texts inasmuch as the same textbook makes the curriculum static; (2) the social science; (3) improved classroom instruction; (4) proper teaching materials vs. equipment; (5) supervisors’ recognition of their responsibility for supplying proper teaching materials; (6) aims and objectives when reached cooperatively being made mandatory; (7) best selection of materials to active aims and objectives optional with teacher; (8) acceptance of the neighbor¬ hood situations as the real test of teaching and the real determinant of teaching materials. Dr. Hosic sought cooperation of the Council in further development of outline and sources for teaching materials. Dr. Kelly called attention to the new materials for instruction developed by the American Council on Education. 264 National Education Association Edward C. Carter, Secretary of the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, New York City, addressed the Council on “The Far East in American Public Education.” Copies of his address had been distributed to members of the Council prior to the meeting so that they would have a better basis for discussion when the topic was presented by Mr. Carter at the meeting. Mr. Carter said that in relation to familiarizing pupils and people in general with that third of the human family not in our textbooks, the museums were far ahead of the schools. A knowledge of these peoples enriches life and broadens the mind. He referred to the Lincoln School, Columbia University, as the one center of instruction where the Western youth meets Eastern culture. Chari O. Williams, Field Secretary of the National Education Association, Wash¬ ington, D. C., called attention to the relation of the culture of India to Great Britain and the problems of its proper functioning, to which Mr. Carter pointed out that the relations there were very different, being those of master and servant, rather than coordinate natures. Edith P. Parker, University of Chicago, led in the discussion of the address of Mr. Carter. Miss Parker feels that real geography points out how people are taking hold of their environment and using it. She emphasized the importance of that function of geography in relation to world affairs. In her opinion, there is no place in the primary grades for a science of geography on which there should be increased emphasis in the junior and senior high school. Ernest Horn of the University of Iowa at Iowa City, Iowa, expressed the belief that educators need to have clearly and concretely in mind just what they expect to have in the minds of pupils after a study of the Far East. Concrete inquiry, journeys, friezes, and the like, often give pupils an idea of “what is not.” Dr. Hosic illustrated the narrow conception of a certain Congressman, who said, “I wish I could build a high fence around the United States so no one could come in and no one go out.” Anna Laura Force, Principal of the Lake Junior High School, Denver, Colorado, gave illustrations of letters interchanged between her pupils and children in India, as a means of assisting in interpretation of life in other lands. It was the concensus that no attempt be made to develop a course of study in rela¬ tion to the Far East without adequate background. Dr. Kelly emphasized the fact that in all this work in social science, any attempt to regiment teachers into certain lines of thought would be utterly at variance to the thought of those working in those fields. William A. Evans, Principal of the Rothenberg Junior High School, Cincinnati, Ohio, and chairman of the Committee on an Institute of Education, gave a brief resume of the development of the work in that direction. The president of the Council explained that an underwriting of the enterprise should be done soon, and authority granted Mr. Evans and himself to make the necessary approach to interest organizations with funds, in support of such a venture. On motion of Dr. Hosic, seconded by Dr. Kelly, blanket authority was accorded the Committee on an Institute of Education, to proceed with the undertaking as seemed best to the chairman and committee members. Third Session, Saturday Afternoon, July 1, 1933 The meeting was called to order in the West Ballroom of the Stevens Hotel, at 2:10 p.m., by the President of the Council. Joseph H. Saunders, Superintendent of Schools, Newport News, Virginia, acted as secretary pro tem. John S. Brubacher, Graduate School of Education, Yale University, ‘New Haven, Connecticut, presented a paper entitled “The Annual Review of Educational Happen¬ ings.” This paper was discussed by John Guy Fowlkes, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. Mr. Fowlkes defended the general property tax, urged that all taxes should be turned into the general treasury and apportioned according to service, advocated the employment of married teachers, and also the selective process National Council of Education 265 in teacher-training institutions. Others who participated in this discussion were E. E. Oberholtzer, Superintendent of Schools, Houston, Texas; J. A. Lynch, Rice Institute, Texas; Chari O. Williams, Field Secretary, N. E. A., Washington, D. C. ; and Frank G. Pickell, Superintendent of Schools, Montclair, New Jersey. The report of the Committee on Membership to supply vacancies in office and membership of the Council, was read by the Secretary pro tem, and unanimously approved by the Council. The following were declared duly elected: I. Officers: 1. Elected with term expiring in 1936: Vicepresident — Lida Lee Tall, Principal, State Normal School, Towson, Maryland. To succeed Mrs. Susan M. Dorsey. Members, Committee on Membership — Rose Pesta, Windermere Hotel, Chicago, Illinois. To succeed Carroll G. Pearse. H. L. Smith, Dean, School of Education, Indiana University, Blooming¬ ton, Indiana. To succeed Robert H. Wright. 2. Reelected with term expiring in 1936 : Member, Executive Committee — Anna Laura Force, Principal, Lake Junior High School, Denver, Colorado. II. Membership: 1. Reelected with term expiring in 1938 : (No action was taken by the Council in 1932 on these memberships — expiring in that year — because the new Constitution was being formu¬ lated.) Katherine D. Blake, 101 West 85th Street, New York, N. Y. Frank P. Graves, Commissioner of Education, Albany, N. Y. F. J. Kelly, Office of Education, Department of the Interior, Washington, D. C. W. Carson Ryan, Educational Director, Indian Service, Department of the Interior, Washington, D. C. Henry Suzzallo, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 522 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. Caroline S. Woodruff, Principal, State Normal School, Castleton, Vermont. J. C. Wright, 5624 Western Avenue, Chevy Chase, Md. 2. Reelected with term expiring in 1939 : W. C. Bagley, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. Milton Bennion, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. Isabel L. Eckles, Superintendent of City Schools, Santa Fe, New Mexico. J. B. Edmonson, School of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Anna Laura Force, Principal, Lake Junior High School, Denver, Colorado. Frank G. Pickell, Superintendent of Schools, Montclair, New Jersey. E. Ruth Pyrtle, Principal, Bancroft School, Lincoln, Nebr. Mrs. Margaret Smith, 1522 Lafayette Street, Denver, Colo. A. L. Threlkeld, Superintendent of Schools, Denver, Colo. 3. Elected with term expiring in 1939: Dean T. E. Bener, University of Illinois, Urbana, Ill. Bess Goodykoontz, Assistant Commissioner of Education, U. S. Depart¬ ment of the Interior, Washington, D. C. Boyd H. Bode, Professor of Education, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Guy M. Whipple, Secretary, National Society for the Study of Education, Danvers, Mass. Margaret Kiely, Principal, City Normal, Bridgeport, Conn. Dean William S. Gray, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. E. D. Roberts, Superintendent of Schools, Cincinnati, Ohio. 266 National Education Association L. A. Peckstein, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio. L. A. Alderman, U. S. Office of Education, Washington, D. C. William Burdick, State Department of Education, Baltimore, Md. Marion S. Clark, 205 Mt. Auburn Street, Cambridge, Mass. J. Stevens Kadesch, Head Master, Medford High School, Medford, Mass. David A. Ward, Superintendent of Schools, Chester, Pa. R. C. Deming, State Board of Education, Hartford, Conn. J. Cayce Morrison, Assistant Commissioner for Elementary Education, Albany, N. Y. Winifred J. Robinson, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware. Will Crawford, Territorial Superintendent of Schools, Honolulu, Hawaii. F. J. Kelly, chairman of the Committee on Resolutions, submitted the report for that committee which was unanimously adopted. The resolutions adopted at the Minneapolis meeting, February 25, 1933, were readopted by the Committee at the Chicago meeting on July 1, 1933, with the following additional resolutions: “1. In a modern democracy, organized education — meaning primarily schools, col¬ leges, universities and other adult education agencies — holds the key to social advance. Therefore, organized education, along with other social institutions must accept its fair share of criticism for the social and economic ills which afflict American society. The deep-seated nature of these ills imposes new and greatly increased responsibilities upon education. 2. To meet these responsibilities, teachers must be acquainted with the basic principles of the social sciences, conversant with the issues involved in current social life, and willing to participate in solving the pressing problems now before the American people. 3. The education of every prospective teacher should include such social science as will assure an understanding of the principles underlying social living. To accomplish this end, teacher-training institutions are urged to make suit¬ able changes in their curriculums, and certificating agencies are urged to include among the requirements for all certificates adequate study of the social sciences. 4. Members of college and university faculties in which prospective teachers are educated, should themselves be broadly educated and should possess a keen appreciation of the social significance of scholarship. To this end, graduate schools are urged to modify the curriculums designed to prepare for college teaching so as to emphasize broad social education and to assure an effective integration of the entire program for the education of teachers. 5. State departments of education, county and city superintendents, and others in like positions of authority and leadership, should encourage and ultimately require teachers in service to have a broad understanding of social and economic issues. 6. As one means of facilitating the in-service training of teachers, in the social sciences, the National Education Association is invited to devise some plan whereby authoritative materials necessary to keep teachers conversant with current social-economic developments may be made most readily available to all the members of the profession. Signed Committee on Resolutions A. W. Castle Thomas W. Gosling Fred J. Kelly, Chairman. Rose Pesta Henry Lester Smith Lida Lee Tall” Note: These resolutions were submitted to the Representative Assembly on Friday, July 7, by the Secretary pro tern, and were unanimously adopted by the Representa¬ tive Assembly. Departments of the Association The growth of departments in the Association began in 1870 when the American Normal School Association became the Department of Normal Schools (now Department of Teachers Col¬ leges), and the National Association of School Su¬ perintendents became the Department of Superin¬ tendence. Another great forward step was taken in 1921 • when departments were given larger independence and responsibility. This led to the establishment of fees by the stronger departments and to the selection of an executive secretary by the Department of Su¬ perintendence. There are now twenty-three departments. Infor¬ mation regarding their organization may be found in the historical note at the beginning of the section devoted to the department in question. The list of de¬ partments with years of organization is as follows : 1. Administrative Women in Education . 1932 2. Adult Education . 1921 3. Art Education . 1933 4. Business Education . 1892 5. Classroom Teachers . 1914 6. Deans of Women . 1918 7. Educational Research . 1930 8. Elementary School Principals . 1921 9. Kindergarten-Primary Education . 1884 10. Lip Reading . 1926 11. Rural Education . 1907 12. School Health and Physical Education . 1894 13. Science Instruction . 1894 14. Secondary Education . 1886 15. Secondary School Principals . 1928 16. Social Studies . 1925 17. Special Education . 1930 18. Superintendence . 1870 19. Supervisors and Directors of Instruction . 1928 20. Supervisors and Teachers of Home Economics . 1930 21. Teachers Colleges . 1925 22. Visual Instruction . 1923 23. Vocational Education . 1875 [ 268 ] Department of Administrative Women in Education The national council op administrative women in education was organized in Oakland, Calif., in 1915 by a group of women in attendance at the annual meeting of the National Education Association. One of its purposes set forth in its constitution at that time was to strengthen the friendly and professional relations of administrative women in educational work and to main¬ tain high, professional standards among them. It has branches in eighteen states. Since its organization the Council has held two meet¬ ings a year, one during the convention of the Department of Superintendence in February, and another during the annual, meeting of the Association in the summer. At the Atlantic City meeting application was made to the Board of Directors for the admission of the Council as a Depart¬ ment and favorable action on the application was taken by the Representative Assembly on Friday morning, July 1,1932. The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are : President , Annie C. Woodward, 100 Highland Avenue, Somerville, Mass. ; Vicepresident , Anna Laura Force, Principal, Lake Junior High School, Denver, Colo.; Sec¬ retary r, Mrs. Margaret Mendenhall Smith, 1522 Lafayette Street, Denver, Colo. ; Treasurer , Elizabeth Wells Robert¬ son, Supervisor of Art, Public Schools, Chicago, Ill. ; Audi¬ tor, Evelyn Butler, Butler University, Indianapolis, Ind. ; Directors: Agnes Samuelson, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Des Moines, Iowa; Sue Powers, Super¬ intendent, Shelby County Schools, Memphis, Tenn. ; Mary E. O’Connor, Supervisor, Elementary Schools, Natick, Mass.; Eva G. Pinkston, Executive Secretary, Depart¬ ment of Elementary School Principals, 1201 Sixteenth Street. N. W., Washington, D. C. ; Rose Pesta, 460 South State Street, Chicago, Ill. [ 270 ] ARE OUR SCHOOLS TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP? ROSE A. PESTA, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CHICAGO, ILL. I wonder how many of us really know how well our schools are training for citizenship, for the methods of teaching have improved in this field as much as if not more than in many others. For most of us, I presume citizen¬ ship training consisted mainly in learning the divisions and functions of government, and the names of the then officials with something of their powers and duties. Nowadays, the training in citizenship, while including that, takes a much more active and practical form. Naturally, in giving examples, I shall cite mainly from the Chicago schools, not because they do this any better than other schools, but because I am more familiar with them. The pupils help to solve the problems that arise because large groups of young people are gathered together by serving as monitors and marshals of various sorts. In this way they get some experience, not only in the duties, responsibilities, and honors of office, but some experience too in its tempta¬ tions. It is so easy to make just a little variation in the application of a rule for a friend. The results of such variations in inefficiency of service, in increased infractions, are so soon apparent. The school tries to help the pupils to foresee these temptations, to meet and overcome them, to realize what they are doing to school service if they do not live up to the responsi¬ bilities of their trust. In the management of the affairs of their clubs, which are so definite a part of the school program today, they get experience in working together, in carrying a project to a successful conclusion. And in this work they get all the effect of the failure of each to do his share upon the total enterprise. Then in the self-government organizations in the school, the pupils have an opportunity to make rules under which they shall live, and in large measure the opportunity of experience in enforcing them. Thus, in all these ways that I have indicated, the school is trying to train a generation of young people into a new understanding of government with a new attitude toward public service, and with some practical experience in the management and the control of government. In regard to all this experience, there have always been, as I have seen it, two attitudes. The one that these pupil affairs should be more or less un¬ hampered by direction. Of course, the difference of opinion is in the more or less. But as I see it, the one school of thought is willing to let trickery occur, is willing to have school elections carried by some irregularity because that is the way things occur in regular life. While they regret it, the idea seems to be that since that is the way things happen in the real world, if these children are to be given experience that will help them in the real world, graft and crooked politics must be permitted to exist in the management of school affairs by pupils when they occur. Otherwise there is no real self- government. The other point of view is that school should not be an actual [ 271 ] 272 National Education Association picture of life, it should be simplified living, and that orderly and as near as possible ideal living which would mean a large element of direction, assist¬ ance, indeed interference when things are going wrong. Let me give an illustration. An election for mayor is occurring. The can¬ didate, Candidate A, on one side, or his campaign manager makes a claim for him that is not true. The opposing candidate, whom we shall call Can¬ didate B, knows the claim to be untrue. It is a matter of school record, and, therefore, one which the school officials could easily verify. The school office takes the attitude that they do not wish to interfere in an election, that if anything is to be done about it Candidate B is publicly to challenge Can¬ didate A. Candidate B and his family consider that that would be entering into dirty politics, and if the school will do nothing about it, they will not. Now, here you see is a “nice” problem in ethics, and one which I feel illus¬ trates very clearly the point I am trying to make. In actual life Candidate B or his followers would have had to challenge the statement made by Candi¬ date A’s followers. Should it have been so in school politics? I do not think it should. This seems to me a clear case in which the school should step in and announce the falsity of the claim. Otherwise the young people are getting the impression that any claims are all right, provided one can get away with them. Furthermore, while one does wish to give young people freedom to choose, to decide, to judge in order to train their ability to choose wisely and judge accurately, one must recognize that there is a difference in making individual judgments that affect only themselves, and in making judgments that affect some activity of the school. One can allow for mistakes in judg¬ ment that affect merely themselves. Only by having the opportunity to make these mistakes, and learning by them can the children grow in real and abid¬ ing character. But when it comes to mistakes that affect the whole school, that is the place for the school to take charge and simplify the situation. In the management of school affairs it seems to me to be the job of school people to see that no irregularity, no trickery enters into the matter. Whichever of the two theories one holds or operates under, it is undoubt¬ edly safe to say that the typical school situation is decidedly above the average life situation in standards of ethics and personal conduct. I believe that the longer we can get the young people to manage affairs under ideal conditions, the more established will be the habit and the con¬ sciousness that projects can be undertaken, brought to a satisfactory conclu¬ sion with efficiency and without graft, that elections can be won by honest methods. It is our hope that they will adhere to that habit and belief after they leave us. And that is the only final solution of our civic problems — that we shall train up one generation after another who know that honest, straight-forward methods do work in the efficient management of community affairs. It is said that one factor causing man to become so highly developed an animal is the long period of infancy. In civic affairs, it seems to me simi¬ larly that if we can give our young people a long period of the management of affairs under ideal conditions that we work toward the improvement of Department of Administrative Women in Education 273 the management of conditions in the real world, for we get more and more people having a belief built upon experience of the efficacy of honest methods. Whether or not there is any parallelism this much is true, that our civic affairs will never be rightly run until enough of us believe they can be so run. Quite too many of us take graft and corruption as the natural and inevitable concomitant of civic affairs to be hopeful of any great and imme¬ diate improvement. To return to our forms of citizenship training in our schools, we try to teach the proper attitude toward public property thru the public property with which the pupils first come in contact ; namely, street lamps, the school building. In our desire to give our young people practical experience in civic matters, we have cooperated with certain activities outside the school, such as safety patrol work and clean-up campaigns. In both these campaigns there are cer¬ tain questionable elements which I have not time to discuss. Both have with¬ out doubt given the children a greater insight into the problems of the city. Chicago has now for some years observed a Youth Week. In the various programs, the civic responsibility of youth is emphasized. Speakers are chosen from among the prominent men who have civic consciousness. On these occasions pupils who have been high in scholarship, who have shown especial qualities of leadership and civic responsibility, are recognized as honor stu¬ dents. A certain few are given scholarships to the universities in and about Chicago. Among the girls there has now been held for two years an all-city high- school girls conference to which delegates are sent from all the high schools. In these conferences they discuss such matters as: “How does high school enable us to vote wisely ?” The whole tendency of the conference is to awaken the civic consciousness of the girls, and help them to understand their respon¬ sibilities as citizens. Classes taken to visit the various governing bodies function to an in¬ creasing degree. Even up in a small town in Michigan I found the civics class attending a meeting of the County Court, which occurred in an adjoin¬ ing town. The children of our schools are regularly discussing presentdav problems and their solution. Their interest in these problems was strikingly illustrated this year in the activity of the Chicago high-school pupils for pay for their teachers. The pupils even sent a delegation to Washington, seeing officials of the National Education Association, and such others as they could reach. But at least in one respect I am not at all certain that we are doing as much as we can for these children. Are we giving them the consciousness that in the field of social planning we lag way behind our progress in the material field — the field of science, invention, and, dare we say, business? For example, it is a matter of history that there have always been inflation and depression after a war. Why didn’t the government face this and do some planning? Seemingly, it is our practise to handle problems in our social and political life only when there is a crisis. Social planning means meeting the 274 National Education Association problems ahead of time, forestalling the crisis. It would seem to me that this is an idea we could easily put over at least in Chicago, for our pupils all know of the Chicago plan for making the city beautiful. If there needs to be a plan formulated and adhered to for years in the matter of streets and buildings, how much more necessary a plan for living together ? But some one may say, “How can we make a plan with regard to living together, since we change our ideals so frequently?” At one time, we believe in prohibition, at another time we do not. But the same is true with regard to our buildings. The architecture of today is not that of 1893, as is so vividly brought out by our fairs. Similarly in living together, society feels a responsibility today for the unemployed that did not exist at all at the time of our last world’s fair. While this sense of responsibility exists all over the United States, and indeed all over the world, it is met quite differently in different places. In our smaller places, at least as I know them, for the money expended in relief, definite service in return is exacted, whereas this is not true in the cities, certainly not in Chicago. This is one of our problems in social planning in our cities that we must work out. It is a fine illustration of the fact that a great many of these social questions go back to questions of finance. In this field certainly we do not do as much as we should. In any of our big cities the problems of finance are very complicated. Yet these problems are really in the background of all of our social problems. Most public questions are finally ones of finance, just as finance looms large in any decisions in the home. The difficulty of the problem is no excuse for avoiding it altogether. There are, I think, certain fundamental ideas one might start with. One I have already discussed fully. There should be honesty in the running of government. It is possible, examples can be given. Only as we expect honesty, and are ourselves honest, can we bring about this condition. W e should not expect future generations to pay for what we are now using. As a general rule, bonds issued should be paid up before the thing for which they are issued wears out. If necessary to issue them in other circum¬ stances there should be complete understanding with respect to these circumstances. I believe that our high-school children might understand not a little of inflated values and the precautions to be taken in lending upon them. This whole field of finance, as I am thinking of it, would constitute new ground lor our high schools. I believe that we would find we can do much more than we think if we made a start in this field. Despite the fact that I feel there are some things more for us to do, I am very hopeful of the future. I feel the young people of today are getting prac¬ tical training in citizenship such as never was had in our schools before. That fact combined with the fact that in our high schools today we have so large a part of the population makes me confident that the young people of today will do a better job at governing than has our generation. They may even be able to solve the problems of living togethef in large cities, problems which have thus far baffled us. Department of Adult Education The department of adult education was established by vote of the Representative Assembly, July 8, 1921, as the Department of Immigrant Education. The first meeting was held in 1922 in Boston. See Proceedings , 1922:905. In 1924 the name of the Department was changed to the Department of Adult Education. See Pro¬ ceedings , 1924:566. The officers of the Department for the year 1938-34 are : President , Mary L. Guyton, Supervisor of Adult Alien Education, State Department of Education, Boston, Mass.; Secretary , Caroline A. Whipple, Supervisor of Adult Education, State Education Department, Albany, N. Y. ; Treasurer , Agnes Winn, Director, Division of Classroom Service, National Education Association, 1201 Sixteenth Street N. W., Washington, D. C. ; Executive Director , Charles J. Lunak, Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Chicago, Ill. ; Editor , Alonzo D. Grace, Professor of Education, University of Rochester, Rochester, N. Y. ; Executive Committee: L. R. Alderman, Chief, Service Division, U. S. Office of Education, Washington, D. C. ; Robert C. Deming, Supervisor, Division of Field Service, State Board of Education, Hartford, Conn. This Department meets once a year in July. Facts relat¬ ing to the establishment of this Department and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1921 :460 1922:905-968 1923 :669-703 1924:565-582 1925 :337-353 1926 :329-37i 1927:293-334 1928:263-304 1929:277-316 1930:249-274 1931:315-341 1932 :263-281 [ 276 ] EDUCATING THE PRISONER A. H. MAC CORMICK, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE BUREAU OF PRISONS, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, WASHINGTON, D. C. Among the most fruitful fields of effort for those interested in the educa¬ tion of adults is the American prison. In the institutions for long-term prisoners alone, there are 150,000 men and women, and the population of short-term institutions totals nearly half a million. To those who wish to join in the war on crime by use of one of our most constructive agencies, educational work for prisoners presents a striking opportunity. That there is a need and a desire for education in our prisons and reforma¬ tories for adults is well known to penologists. Psychological tests adminis¬ tered to thousands of prisoners in various sections of the country indicate that their mental status is approximately that of the Army draft group. Standard achievement tests show that the great majority cannot pass a sixth- grade test, that at least 10 percent are totally illiterate, and that an addi¬ tional 15 percent are practically illiterate. Studies of their occupational histories show that only a minority have had adequate vocational training. In those institutions where educational opportunities possessing reality and significance for the prisoner are offered, a substantial percentage of the pris¬ oners voluntarily enrol for educational work. In the federal penitentiaries, for example, 75 percent of all the prisoners received at two of the institutions request educational work, and 90 percent at a third. Seventy percent of the prisoners in one federal penitentiary are voluntarily taking courses ranging from Beginners English to Diesel Engineering. In a number of state prisons the possibilities of educational work have been demonstrated. These institutions range in size from the California state prisons at San Quentin and the Michigan state prison at Jackson, each of which has over five thousand prisoners, to the two-hundred-man prison in Utah. The most effective educational programs in state institutions are those developed with the aid of state educational authorities. San Quentin, where over half the prisoners are studying, offers a striking illustration of what cooperation can accomplish. Here the state department of education, the University of California, and the state library work closely with the prison authorities. In the greater number of our prisons there is no educational program worthy of the name. In mv opinion, there will be no substantial extension of educational effort in this field on the initiative of prison officials. Leadership must be assumed by educational authorities from outside the walls. Those interested in adult education have alreadv given their backing to the move¬ ment to educate prisoners. Continued effort will gradually overcome that official apathy which is the chief obstacle to prison education. [ 277 ] 278 National Education Association BASIC ENGLISH MARY L. GUYTON, SUPERVISOR OF ADULT ALIEN EDUCATION, STATE DEPART' MENT OF EDUCATION, BOSTON, MASS. The chief sponsor of this new international language is C. K. Ogden, Magdalen College, Cambridge, England, and Director of the Orthological Institute, Cambridge, England, and author and editor of many books on the psychology of languages. In cooperation with him are many of the leading scholars the world over. Basic English has been before the public eye for the last ten years in its process of development and trial in many of the great nations of the world. Last summer on Mr. Ogden’s visit to America many college authorities and scientific organizations in the United States became extremely interested and believe it is the most promising of mediums of world communication. The following two paragraphs appeared in the New York Times : A statement was recently issued by fifty scholars of worldwide fame who are cori- vinced of the urgent need for an international auxiliary language. They feel that some form of simplified English such as Basic English offers will best meet the demand. The statement is signed by Dr. John Dewey, Professor Julian S'. Huxley, Professor E. D. Starbuck, Professor Y. Okakura, George Bernard Shaw, A. Lloyd James, Wickham Steed, and H. G. Wells. Within ten years, Mr. Ogden believes, there will be world radio for knitting the nations together. A nucleus for it is already forming. Radio experts plan to put a girdle of common interest around the globe. The language they propose to use, whether Washington, Tokio, Buenos Aires, Stockholm, or Prague does the broad¬ casting, is this same Basic English now beginning to win its way. There is no other promising language in sight. Great literature is being put into Basic for all nations, including the greatest book of all, the Bible. Basic English is by no means a final language, but is thought by many to be a sure foundation on which to build. Mr. Ogden has chosen 850 words which he states can be made to do the work of twenty thousand words. The English thus learned and put into practise sounds like normal English to any¬ one who hears or reads it. It is clear, clean English, a simpler form of English than is commonly used in books, but you can say anything however impor¬ tant with the help of these 850 words, together with four or five simple rules. Basic English is now studied and used by groups of pioneers in Japan, Iceland, and Czechoslovakia. It would seem that there is little need of argu¬ ment in regard to the need of Basic English as the language for all countries, a.S ithas W1*dest distribution of any language and there still are great pos¬ sibilities of expansion. I believe it has been quoted that two hundred million people now have English as their everyday language, another three hundred million are under English rule. When taken into consideration that about four hundred million or more people on the earth desire to speak English, it would not seem necessary for much argument in regard to accepting English as the basic language of the world. Mr. Ogden has issued a series of books on different phases of Basic Eng¬ lish, a list of which can be obtained by writing the Orthological Institute, Department of Adult Education 279 10 King’s Parade, Cambridge, England. I found the A B C of Basic English extremely helpful to me in understanding the great work which is being done by these educators. I have here a letter from an evening-school teacher in Copenhagen, Den¬ mark, Mrs. Kamma Taylor, which reads as follows: Dear Mr. Ogden: For quite some time I have been wanting to write to you and introduce myself as a teacher of Basic English, as I thought it might interest you to hear how the studies are progressing. I am a Dane by birth and a Britisher by marriage, 38 years old and employed at the Council Schools of Copenhagen; I have spent four years in U. S. America, work¬ ing as a bookkeeper and stenographer, have made several long visits to England and spoken and written the English language for a period of twelve years. Well, last September I suddenly discovered your books and decided to see what they were about, as during the six winter months, I teach English to young girls and boys, who attend the free evening classes at the Council Schools of Copenhagen, two or three evenings a week. The inspector of the English classes happens to be a teacher at the very school, where I am working in the day time — and one day I found him reading “The ABC of Basic English.” He seemed very interested and asked me, how I would like to take over a class and try your system. He gave me two hours in which to think it over. I had already a very fine class of old pupils to start with on October 1 but this was too thrilling— and I could not let this offer go, so my answer was yes, and I let the other class go to somebody else. Of course it was clear to me, that this was to be an attempt, which, if it turned out to be a success might mean a rearranging of the teaching of English in these evening classes, and that if it was a failure, it would simply be terrible for me! ! ! I know now that we shall have a very fine result, and that is why I am writing to you. I hope the length of the letter will not bore you, it is not easy to make it short — but you may skip the uninteresting bits. In the beginning of October I made the start with a class of twenty-two boys and girls between 17 and 25 years of age; they have all voluntarily agreed to try this new way of learning English. Well, wTe started, without textbooks of any kind, and have by now learned 450 words and all of the elementary grammar quite well. It has meant a tremendous lot of homework and planning for me — but with a typewriter and an English husband and a great enthusiasm for the job — the work is going strong. I have followed your instructions of putting the words into groups in an order in which they come naturally to the mind, and I have managed to get all the words into groups! In regard to the number of new words which we are able to learn and digest, I think you are little too optimistic but only a little, our average is only be¬ tween twenty and twenty-five. We are not able to take new words every single time, but have to rest our brains once in a while and repeat what we have learned so far. To each word group my husband (who is greatly interested in the work) makes up some little story, containing all of these particular words, and thus we get reading material, which all has to be typed in as many copies as needed. Every lesson lasts one hour and 40 minutes ; and the last half hour is used for these Danish-English exercises. The next thing to get started with is conversation, and I intend practising it a lot in the time from January to the end of March, when the course finishes. About two weeks ago the inspector of the English classes visited our class and was indeed very satisfied with the result and declared that none of the other classes of beginners were by any means so far advanced ; both the pronunciation, the grammar, 280 National Education Association and the supply of words were very good, he said. He had to get a special permission from the Board of Education to make this attempt in Basic English, and he has w ritten a few articles in a school paper and also in one of our daily papers about Basic English, so naturally he will be very pleased if the class is a success. As far as I know this is the only and first attempt in Denmark, with the exception of a private course in languages, whose advertisement I saw in the paper a little while back. I am afraid we shall have to meet a storm of criticism, but that will not alter the fact, that the result will be a good one. In conclusion I would like to express my appreciation of and regard for your system; it certainly is fine and just the thing for grown-up people, who quickly want to be able to make themselves understood and to understand the English language. Sincerely yours, Kamma Taylor. Lyngbyvej 70, Copenhagen Str. At a seminar course in Supervision of Instruction in Adult Alien Educa¬ tion, to be given by me under the auspices of the Division of University Extension of the Massachusetts Department of Education at Boston Teachers College this summer, I am planning to experiment with a group of experienced supervisors in preparing them to know the process of teaching Basic English for trial experiments in Massachusetts during the second year 1933-34. CATCHING UP WITH LITERACY WILLIAM S. GRAY, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. When the 1930 census returns were reported, general satisfaction was expressed with the progress which had been made during the last decade toward the elimination of illiteracy. The reduction in the percentage of illiteracy from 6 to 4.3 indicated that the efforts of adult education workers had been very successful. Gratifying as this pi ogress was, an analysis of the situation reveals various causes for dissatisfaction. Among them are the liberal definition of literacy by the census department, the inaccurate reports often made to census takers by those scarcely able to read ; the surprisingly low rank of the United States among other civilized nations with respect to literacy; the actual inability of about 20 percent of our population to read a newspaper or to write a letter ; and the failure of millions who have attained literacy to utilize reading to any significant extent in increasing their personal and social efficiency. The foregoing comments suggest three definite levels at which the problem of literacy must be attacked ; the first includes those who have not attained technical literacy; the second includes those who have learned to engage in the very simplest reading and writing activities but have not attained func¬ tioning literacy , and the third includes those who have attained functioning literacy but require further guidance in applying reading in enriching life and in increasing their personal and civic efficiency. Two methods have been employed in the past in efforts to reduce illiteracy. One has been characterized as the pioneer method, accompanied by spectacu- Department of Adult Education 281 lar campaigns. The other has been defined as the professional educational procedure. Both of these methods must still be employed if illiteracy is to be greatly reduced during the next few years. Professional educators should supplement their efforts in the classroom with vigorous campaigns to educate the public and to enlist the cooperation of those of little or no previous education. In teaching those who are illiterate, major emphasis should be given to types of instruction that will provide a broader understanding of practical everyday problems, that will increase their personal and social efficiency, and that will stimulate new interests and aspirations. In addition, a sufficient amount of instruction should be given in the language arts to determine which adults have the capacity and inclination to learn to read and write effectively. Scientific studies show clearly that a considerable proportion of those who have remained illiterate thus far cannot learn with sufficient ease and rapidity to justify the expenditure of the necessary time and effort to teach them to read and write. One of the major purposes of early instruction is to deter¬ mine the kind of training for which individuals are best adapted. 1 hose who show that they can learn to read and write readily should be given appropriate training until they have attained functioning literacy. Those who learn to read only with great difficulty should devote most of their time to types of training that increase understanding and provide enrichment. The second major obligation in eliminating illiteracy consists in promoting functioning literacy on the part of those who have demonstrated that they can learn to read and write with reasonable ease. Experience teaches that the necessary training should be carefully organized and skilfully presented. Other things being equal, it is advisable to concentrate effort during this period on a single goal, namely, functioning literacy. The final problem is to provide the necessary guidance in applying read¬ ing to the chief fields of practical interest today, namely, current events, health, social problems and civic obligations, the simple scientific facts that underlie an understanding of modern life, vocational information, and recreation. Before such help can be provided most effectively, it will be necessary for appropriate materials to be prepared at a sufficient level of simplicity that they can be read easily by adults of limited education. If the next decade witnesses satisfactory progress toward the elimination of illiteracy, adult educators must supplement the scientific study of their problems with successful salesmanship among the public and effective per¬ suasion among illiterates. ART TRAINING IN PREPARATION FOR ADULT LEISURE ELIZABETH WELLS ROBERTSON, DISTRICT SUPERVISOR OF ART, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, CHICAGO, ILL. During the war I fought the battle of Occupational Therapy in the Medi¬ cal Department of the United States Army. I also served with the Invalided Soldiers Commission of Montreal. Occupations as a cure intrigued me not 282 National Education Association only for what they could do for the doctors but because thru occupations, injured, shocked, discouraged, and disheartened men not only became inter¬ ested in new avenues of work both as vocations and avocations, but they became once more interested in life. In the improvised hospital workroom in the chapel of Magill University in Montreal, men in all stages of nervous disorders due to shell shock from real concussion of exploded bombs and from being buried alive, and other shocking experiences, worked at wood carving and painting. One huge Welsh¬ man watched me mix colors for some article he had made. The simple pri¬ mary colors flowed into gorgeous hues and tints much to his amazement and delight. “Will you please set down on paper what you did there so that I can tell the missus and the children just how you did it when I go back to the farm? We get our colors one at a time in cans. You have made the sunset.” Thousands of men and women will go back to work just as soon as the wheels of the machine begin to turn again and the smoke belches forth once more from the factory chimneys. They will not go back just as they did before, however, because their work days will be shorter and there will be fewer days in their work week. People have been liberated by the machine so that they may now have time to think of more than just staying alive. Leisure has come that could hardly be dreamed of a few years ago. This leisure has brought to educators the enormity of the problem of finding satisfactory and worthwhile occupations for adults as well as children. Indeed at no time has the responsibility for providing for the enrichment for adult life been as great as now. How are we going to enrich the lives of those who are already educated but who cannot find avenues of expres¬ sion in their vocations? The teaching profession must provide plans for wise use of leisure or avocational efficiency just as it has been providing for vocational efficiency. Adults must be given opportunities to express their feelings and their talents not for money but for the sheer happiness that comes from creating something from nothing and the great satisfaction that comes from work well done. When men and women make things with their hands for their homes, there will be better communities and happier people. Right here I want to say a word to the unmarried woman who wants a home. Every little girl wants a doll house and so it is natural for every woman to want a home whether she is married or single. Build your own home and even if it is one of the new standard houses we hear about in the report on housing you can make the things that go into it and your personality will make your house different from every other house. I have had the satisfaction of building a house and found that almost anything a man can do a woman can do if she makes up her mind to do it. I found that the curtains can be woven, the furniture painted and covered, the rugs hooked, all in that margin of time that is usually wasted. It is the way that leisure is used that is important. Keep creative art in the schools and the adults will go along with them. Creative art must be emphasized not only for the pleasure which the child Department of Adult Education 283 has in it, but for the preparation it gives for avocational efficiency when he is grown up. The regular school life of the child will stimulate the enrich¬ ment of adult life because the avocations started in youth are usually those that carry over into adult life. We enjoy doing the things that we know how to do well. The regular school program in creative art offers abundant opportunities and stimulates desires to create. Our universities and colleges for the most part offer only art classes which bear upon socalled art appreciation. By art appreciation is meant the study of History of Art from the beginning of civilization to the present day. This affords fine cultural reading of course, but people today want more than that from art courses. Club women want to know how to create and there are art classes in our museums for women who have never studied art. The Business Men’s Art Clubs show how necessary it is for the tired busi¬ ness man to express himself in painting. They want something more prac¬ tical than art history. They want the joy of making beautiful things that is the birthright of us all. We are all artists. Some of us have more talents than others but we all have the inherent love for the beautiful and with some of us the desire for it is so strong that we must have an outlet for that expression of ourselves. The importance of education for leisure is one of the most vital facts which educators must face squarely now. This is the machine age and unless the machine is abolished the people of today must learn to live with it. It is the machine age into which we have all been placed and whether we like technology or loathe it we must balance it and progress with it. There was a time when people found satisfaction for their talents in their work. Now they must find a place to use skills, tastes and talents in leisure. Thus education must provide for avocational training. A new day demands a new education. The machine has brought the new day. Has the new education kept pace ? We have been forced to realize recently just how the machine has replaced man power. The machine was intended for the betterment of man. It was intended to put man on a pedestal. Now the machine is on a pedestal and man is underneath. It was not until the substitution of the machine for man became so overwhelming in its force that the government began to study the matter seriously. The Report of the Hoover Research Committee on Social Trends sets forth that man’s problem today is to catch up with the machine. Many of the ills of the country are attributed by the report to a “cultural lag’’ or the failures of changes in economic life, education, government, and re¬ ligion to move forward at the same rate as mechanical progress. America must bridge the gap between material advance and social progress. It warns against the prolongation of a policy of drift. I have been asked to make a contribution to this program because I have found a way out, and for the past few years I have been trying to show other women how to use the margin of time advantageously by means of an old folk art that is purely American, the art of quilt making. I have given 284 National Education Association lectures to women’s clubs, I have talked over the radio, and I have helped organize quilt clubs among women on farms; in the suburbs of the city, and on the south side of Chicago fifteen quilt clubs resulted. Our first American women made quilts because they needed extra warmth. They had no materials with which to make new bed coverings and so they saved all the bits of old materials and combined them with other bits into our first American pieced quilt — the crazy quilt. There was no design, no color harmony — merely a quick way to get a warm bed covering. But the inherent love of the beautiful in the colonial women was so real that pattern soon evolved and many delightful quilts resulted. Some were pieced and some were applique. Today there is just as great a need for these quilts as there was in the early days. We need them for warmth. We need them as a means of using up bits of materials and even more than before we need them as a means of expressing ourselves. W e need them for our own Occupational Therapy to keep our minds from our difficulties and to make an intelligent use of leisure. My contention is that the quilts of today should have the spirit of the old ones, but they must fit the needs and color schemes of today. The tradi¬ tional designs are fine for historical examples but our modern decorative schemes call for larger spaces, freer designs, and finer color. All the train¬ ing that goes into the making of a painting goes into the making of a well- designed bed covering. The recognition of fine art principles in the making of articles for use occurred in Europe long before it did in America. But now with more leisure and a finer culture the general public is demanding a fine design. However, even now, too many women are making hooked rugs from poor designs. They are putting too many hours of work on insignificant quilt patterns. One reason for this is that they lack education. They fear to expiess themselves. They have been inhibited too long. Let every child study seme sort of art and when he grows up he will be able to discriminate. Begin now with the adult wherever he or she can be reached. Buying judg¬ ment and discrimination will result as well as fine applied art. From a young woman in a small town in central Illinois eight miles from a railroad, came this note. Eight of us young women here decided to spend our time at something more worthwhile than playing cards, so we decided to start a little quilt club. We exchange pieces of material and have an awfully good time, always feeling when we go home that our time has been well spent.” From Ohio: “I hurried my wash so that I could hear your talk on the radio. Quilts and quilting are my hobbies. I am not in the best of health as • have low blood pressure and asthma, but let me have a box of scraps and I am as happy as a child. From a lonesome soul in Illinois came this note: “I am asking for information, for collecting quilt patterns and blocks are my hobby. I have seven blocks and thirty pieced block samples. I heard in your talk about a lady who has some patterns to spare. I wrote her and now u e have been writing and exchanging blocks, books, and patterns ever since. Department of Adult Education 285 I have four friends I made that way thru your quilt talks on the radio/’ From northern Indiana: “I am a young quilt lover. I enjoy your help so much I want to hear all of your talks because they are so different and what you say about color and design is so different.” This then is one specific adventure into the realms of art in the new edu¬ cation for leisure. It is only one expression of the many social inventions. Think of the many phases of art in the new education. ENRICHMENT OF ADULT LIFE THRU ART LORADO TAFT, INSTRUCTOR AND LECTURER, CHICAGO ART INSTITUTE, CHICAGO, ILL. Someone has well said that “success lies in doing the best that one can the thing that one can do best.” It is a modern version of the parable of the talents. The implication of the parable is that we are responsible for what we possess and for nothing more. No one is going to hold us to account for the astonishing, enviable gifts of other men. But I glean that we are very seriously accountable for our own. With most of us these are ample to keep us busy thru a long and active life. Most of us have interests or can cultivate interests, which will make this pilgrimage a fascinating adventure. It has been said that the greatest accomplishment possible in life is the making of a personality. Whose personality ? Why, our own, of course. I once heard a speaker observe that the trouble with all of these beneficial movements, adult education included, was that every one of us was trying to improve other people. Why not turn in and try to improve ourselves? Here is our first responsibility. In any case let’s give up the idea of trying to reform character, our own or anybody else’s. During an enforced leisure last summer my wife read to me, among other things, Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. The unfolding of the various characters of that average family was a splendid work of art and the effects of this pleasurable prescription were soon evident in my restored health. I was just thinking that if every one of us is equally good material for a novel it is because of the infinite variety of our individualities which in spite of the standardizing processes of modern education have remained individual ; and, further, because each one of us is engaged in “working out the pattern which Nature has woven into us.” The adventure comes from the fact that we ourselves do not know the sequel. The unfolding of the design we can only guess at. Like the weavers of the Gobelin’s tapestries we work on the other side, out of sight of the finished product. So our fabric is full of sur¬ prises, yet is it bound to be consistent because it is a personal expression with its roots deep within one’s self. I have recently read the statement that “a man cannot grow to his height without self-knowledge.” Cultivating the tastes is a progressive revelation of one’s own powers. I loved the quotation from Emerson in the current number of the Journal of Adult Education: 286 National Education Association “Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion.” It s like learning to ride a bicycle — if you know what I mean — or driving an auto, or speaking in public. The achievement is such fun that it goes to one’s head. I remember that I could not believe my ears when I , began to make myself understood in a foreign language. How could they understand when I did not myself? It was a triumphal progress, with enough droll mishaps interpolated to make it plausible. I was interested in Dean Martin’s advice to the young regarding educa¬ tion, where he tells them to be serious, but not too blame serious. Many pursue knowledge with such grim determination that they press all the juice and flavor out of it. I have been contrasting in my mind two com¬ mencements which I have recently attended. In the one many of the gradu¬ ates were so wan and pale that they seemed utterly worn out. The cost had apparently been too great. The certificates were mechanically handed them and stolidly received. Not a courtesy, not a smile. At another college, commencement was a gala day. There were merry and even now and then mischievous glances at the young president as the candidates advanced on willing feet. The amenities were gracefully recognized. The “joyous ad¬ venture of learning” was a reality. President Butler in a recent commencement address quotes Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture as “knowledge of the best that has been thought and said in the world. Ehe wise doctor continues: “He set a standard which only those who climb to the mountain tops of the mind can possibly reach. The vast majority of men pass thru life equipped with modest intel¬ lectual furniture and with eyes fixed on the ground immediately in front of the spot where their feet happen to be. The best that has been thought and said in the world does not concern them, nor have they even suspicion, much less knowledge, of its existence. So it is that the life of man involves stupendous, literally incalculable waste in respect to all those imponderables that are the only things which, in the long run, really matter.” Thruout the ages there have been men who delighted in whittling, in drawing and painting. They decorated their bodies, their homes, and their shrines. Now and then one of these craftsmen had a vision of something more wonderful or more beautiful than anything he had known before — an ideal which he felt must be preserved and shared with others. He may have glimpsed the mystery of the “burning bush” or dreamed of “angels ascending and descending.” Perhaps an inexplicable joy has thrilled him; perhaps an overpowering awe. In any case it is something vastly important to him ; something which compels him to make in enduring material a record of his experience. Studying these emotional expressions of other days, one is constantly impressed by their earnestness, their naively passionate appeal. Along with the prophets of Israel and the world’s real poets, these nameless toilers of the centuries came closest, it seems to me, to a fulfillment of Department of Adult Education 287 Nietzsche’s high ideal, “Life means for us constantly to transform into light and flame all that we are or meet with.” We recognize that we come out of mystery and that we depart into mystery; we have no notion what it is all about. The whole game would be a ghastly farce were it not for the assurance felt by most of us that we are making progress. Progress — in what direction? To me the most obvious token is in these records of the ages; the appreciable gain in the world’s spiritual wealth. Thru poetry and painting and sculpture, life begins to explain itself. The thing most precious, the highest ideal, man has always embodied in the form of art and transmitted with his love to those coming after. Hence it is that little lands which all together would not fill one of our states, countries like Greece or Palestine, loom large in the past. They have bequeathed to us their treasures, while other enormous territories are forgotten because they did nothing for us. Yes, these little countries created, and we have “entered into their labors.” Aside from their intrinsic worth these precious things have another value for us, a message particularly needed in America ; they help us to realize the infinite sequence of life. As a nation we have little accumulated wisdom and slight appreciation of the gifts of the ages. Our life is casual, without back¬ ground. Our homes seem to be on casters, like our furniture — ever moving, ever changing. Our recreations are hectic — at forty or fifty miles an hour. Our music is jazz; our drama the movie; our literature the strident daily. To the other arts we are practically immune. If only we could pause long enough to read the message of the centuries! If our people would but listen to the invitation : “The eternal court is open unto you with its society, wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen and the mighty of every time and place.” What a companionship is offered us! Here is my oft- repeated confession of faith. I hold that as intelligent people we have a right to ( 1 ) all of the beauty around us, the beauty of nature which most of us never perceive; (2) all of the inheritance of the past, of which Ameri¬ cans are particularly unconscious; and (3) to the talent which springs up perennially, but which America’s rushing life is wont to extinguish before it takes root. There are ten thousand ways to study art, and to appreciate art there are at least ten million, suited to every eye and every perception. Let us consider just two out of this multitude. The first is actually making art, or trying to. I agree with your educators who urge that the schools are not the places to make artists any more than to make dentists, but I feel that it is a sacred duty of the schools to help every pupil to appreciate art and music and incidentally to discover and to encourage unusual talent. It so happens, however, that in most cases there is no means of learning quite so fruitful as participation. Says Dr. McAndrew, “The English teacher should not be trying to graduate Shakespeares but enjoyers of Shakespeare,” and he quotes aptly Dr. S. Weir Mitchell who used to observe that “one of the quickest ways to reach appreciation of a master is to try production in his line long enough to realize that he is a genius and you are not.” Dr. Me- 288 National Education Association Andrew continues, telling of the protest of an eminent art director of 1891 who reproved him for letting his youngsters illustrate their compositions. “It’s very bad,” he said, “it familiarizes them with incorrect forms.” ‘ Why not be logical,” asked the great teacher, “and forbid the baby to creep until he has a correct form of walking, or to speak until he has mastered the dictionary?” In my little booklet, The Appreciation of Sculpture , I find these lines: “The best way to learn to appreciate sculpture is not to read about it, but to try to do it.” It is worth the effort. You may find that you have a knack foi modeling, and you have opened up a whole world of joyous adventure. More likely you will promptly report that you “can’t do a thing with it,” but even then you will have learned something — how difficult it fs, and much more ! I wish to describe in a few words my idea of a museum of art which is adaptable to every school and university. So completely “sold” am I to my dieam museum, and so doubtful that ever I shall see it realized in this life, that I have begun in my studio a miniature model of it. On a table about eight by fifteen feet in size, we have laid out a tiny world of architecture and sculpture. Thru the rugged Eion Gate of Mycenae and a grove of archaic Apollos you view the Parthenon front. The “Hera” of Delos, a turned newel post, stands in dramatic contrast to the east pediment of that glorious building. The floor indicates that only one hundred and fifty years separate them. In parallel aisles are ranged the achievements of various lands. Here is Egypt with its incredibly long history. It must be syncopated but notice this: the Lion Gate of Greece was carved about 1350 B. C. Once inside it you turn your head to the left and yonder in the Egyptian aisle you see the delicate, exquisite face of Nofratete, the lovely wife of Iknahton, the poet king of Egypt, the first monotheistic ruler of whom we have record. Her son-in-law, King Tutankahmin, died in 1350 B. C. Parallel with the Egyptian procession is the equally long array of Meso¬ potamia. Like an army with banners do we meet the successive civilizations of Chaldea, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia. Transepts cutting across the aisles mark the centuries and the milleniums, permitting one to note at any significant date what was going on in neighboring lands. Return with me for a moment to Greece. We find the majesty of the fifth century B. C. gradually giving way to the grace and the pathos of a new era. The golden art of Praxiteles and the tragic power of Scopas ard recognized ; then we stand where Alexander’s triumphant hosts have swept across a stage now fitly crowned by the Nike of Samothrace. For a con¬ siderable distance the sculpture of Greece will fill almost the entire width of the building, even as Hellenistic art filled the earth. In its current, how¬ ever, we find a series of Etruscan carvings. This strange craftsmanship is destined presently to expand and, united with the Greek tradition, to flood the world of Roman conquest. Writing Laocoon and the dramas of Per- gamon lead in their turn to the even more magnificent art of a new world empire. Department of Adult Education 289 It was only last week I heard Jane Addams say that, to her mind, the difference between an educated and an uneducated person is that the former has a “background.” Doesn’t that sum it up? Maurice Barres speaks of “a literature having the feeling of a greater world and of countries spread over the face of the globe.” This is what my museum aims to give — “a feeling of a greater world” and the spiritual expression of the “countries spread over the face of the globe.” The exhibits may be plaster casts or paper silhouettes, Medici prints and photographs, or only mental images, but let them be arranged in orderly sequence and so placed that the relationships of the different nations and periods are evident. I do not need to tell you that the children’s minds never reach saturation as long as they are interested. They absorb like a sponge and cry for more. I believe that history can be made fascinating to youth if it is illustrated by the significant products of the centuries and if its notable actors are made real by vivid portraiture. Dr. Suzzallo has beautifully expressed the relation of art to history: In all of human history, art has occupied a large place. In every civilization, in every human culture, everywhere upon the earth, from primitive times until now, the artistic technic has been man’s finest and most influential method of crystallizing and expressing his appraisals of the worth of what he finds in his life. What he has esteemed highly he has enshrined in a temple or a palace; what he has revered deeply he has organized in ritual, ceremony, or good manners; what he has wished to glorify he has painted or put in song; what he has treasured for use in war or industry he has decorated with the best designs of his imagination. The arts, all of them, fine and less fine, reveal the working values of their creators and appreciators in every time and place where they are found. They are the ap¬ praising emotional reactions of mankind on the things and events, ideas and ideals, saints and heroes, that touch man’s life with vital significance. They reveal human aspirations for a better, a more enriched life, one less fearful, less monotonous, less ugly, more stable, more just, more gracious. To create an art object or expression is to make a personal revelation of one’s soul when aspiring to its best. A national or group art is a folk confession of what it thinks and feels about life, when separating the higher from the lower, the best from the worst. Here is a great and enviable role for the enthusiastic teacher, but he can only point the way. It is the gold which the student digs for himself which is precious to him. Hence my faith in methods and collections which invite. You remember the words of the sage John Cotton Dana, “Education is primarily a subjective process; no teachers are so competent to teach us as we are to teach ourselves.” (“Hear, hear,” cry the children.) If “education is the process by which one enters into the race mind,” what a privilege to meet the “race mind” at its highest. Then indeed do we know “the best that has been thought and said.” In a sermon by a friend of mine, a southern pastor, whose name, oddly enough, is John Knox, I find these vibrant words: Let those who know not Beauty argue whether living has significance or not; they who sometimes see her may be silent. They cannot tell what they know; others would not understand if they did. They have been admitted to “the secret place of the tabernacle of the Most High.” 290 National Education Association Here only pure and abounding joy can be found, whether one be the creator of a beautiful thing or the person, equally gifted, who loves it. Only “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” He who has had even one beautiful experience can never be com¬ pletely desolate again. The really poor, whether they are peasants or princes, are those who have in their souls no secret room where Beauty comes sometimes to visit them. They are most rich whose lives approximate a succession of beautiful moments. ENRICHMENT OF ADULT LIFE THRU MUSIC WILLEM VAN DE WALL, STATE DEPARTMENT OF WELFARE, HARRISBURG, PA. Some of the particular problems of the moment with which the adult has to wrestle are concerned with how he can keep physically, mentally, and culturally virile and capable, despite the increased burdens of life. One of the results of this overburdening is the physical, mental or social breakdown now so common. Many of these cases could have been prevented had the victims learned how to achieve a more efficient use and control of mental powers in the development of their own lives. We find many people who have matured physically, but not emotionally, and altho some of them may have even attained prominence in the intellectual world, they nevertheless cannot settle some of their emotional problems on a higher than infantile level, for the simple reason that they never learned how to face, understand, use, and control their emotional life as a source of creative power and con¬ structive beauty. Somehow in their education there was a failure to recog¬ nize and develop their possibilities along those lines. Thus it happens that among the emotionally frustrated we find many individuals with undevel¬ oped artistic abilities. The practise of the fine arts affords one way of learning how to deal with life as a problem of emotional adjustment. We find also among adult people, the inarticulate, the wondering, and the dissatisfied, who simply drift along without a goal of any kind. Some of these made a good start, but somehow gave up ; others blame untoward cir¬ cumstances for their not getting anywhere. It is a time when countless men and women are called on to start all over again in one or another particular way. To have to start all over again — what courage is needed to throw one’s self with faith, initiative, and force into the herculean task! To succeed there must be a continuous control of the self. This may be accomplished thru sheer will-power, but frequently en¬ vironmental support, inspiration, and stimulation are necessary. And here it is that for the artistically sensitive the arts come to their spiritual support, and for the musically inclined this help comes in the form of sound. The variety of the responses to music and interests in music calls for a more diversified utilization of the art as a pedagogical tool in both juvenile and adult education. We have, in the past, too exclusively catered to only one aspect of the various possible responses to music, namely, the aesthetic. There is more to the function of music than the giving of aesthetic satisfac¬ tion, however important and edifying in itself that may be. But not all people whose lives could be enriched by music are equipped to appreciate and benefit from its aesthetic qualities. To many a person music is purely a physio-motor experience of pleasing sensory qualities, and it should Department of Adult Education 291 be given to them for all it is worth as such, in other words, as a “kick.” And the older these persons may be, the greater is its value when causing a re¬ activation of the physical processes. The dynamic influence of music on the physique is not limited to that of an excitant only. Slow musical rhythms may function as brakes on physio- motor action and further muscular relaxation. This is frequently a much needed reaction of therapeutic value. Closely connected with the physical influence of music is its effect on the emotional life. The sensation of well-being following the listening to or playing of music has definite physical causes and components. Adults more frequently than youths stand in need of such sensations. In the mental influence of music we find perhaps its richest contribution to the emotional need of the adult. It is only a very small part of humanity that, like the critic, listens to music objectively, and performs it like the artist for objective aesthetic reasons. For the majority of music lovers and amateur singers and players, music is primarily a means of subjective emo¬ tional experience and expression. Its hearing causes in some people’s minds a veritable explosion of phantastic thoughts, and, as they put it, “wonderful feelings” are experienced; something indescribably vague, but nevertheless overwhelming and intensely satisfying. That is frequently just what many need and should have amidst the worries of life — a mental vacation and relief from intellectual concentration on an endless chain of vexing and in¬ soluble problems. If certain adults could only be gotten away in time from having the nose continually to the grindstone, how much more bearable would life become to them, how much more agreeable they would be in their relations with others, how much more efficient would they be in their work, and how much longer would their powers last. Very frequently mental breakdowns are caused by a too one-sided way of thinking and living. Adding music to one’s interests in adult life may be a factor in preserving the balance and integration of the personality. Music may act as an isolator from disagreeable and preoccupying thoughts and make possible a freer and broader thinking. To be able to react thus to a symphony may, in some cases, be a richer and more fruitful experience than the mere mechanical tracking of its pattern of construction and instrumen¬ tation. Some people, depending on the individual nature and needs, derive a great deal of direct emotional help from romanticizing, letting their fancy rove where it will. The number of adults emotionally starving is great. The de¬ pression has added many more to those who, thru changes in their social status, have been cut off and have themselves cut loose from the company of those they cherished, from the cultural joys which inspired them, from the artistic creative and interpretative work which they used to do. Of the pro¬ fessional and amateur musicians, for whom music-making meant emotional living, expression, communication, meant giving the best they had to give, we find now by the dozens pianists without instruments, violinists having 292 National Education Association pawned and lost their violins, singers without music to sing from and too poor to secure a piano or accompanist. Again, anyone engaged in community work knows of another type of emo¬ tionally isolated souls, some of whom never had a family and others who at some time cared for as many as ten. There are people who since their parents died have never had a home. There are also people whose daily work keeps them in a basement and who are virtually without social connection or even talking acquaintances, who retire in the evening with a sandwich to a hall bedroom. Some of these folks have grown into peculiar persons. How could it be otherwise? They tend to become inarticulate, emotionally uncommuni¬ cative, to become old and ugly, incapable of inspiring or attracting any form of friendship or love attachment. Still, we know that in these emotionally isolated ones burns a yearning for sympathy, sociability, friendship, and love. But they have lost the way, and frequently get confused and unintelligible. It is amazing to note how a little personal attention, a semblance of ro¬ mance in the form of a party or a picnic, may reinspire these souls, energize them, and give them a new attitude and start in life and work. Music is for many of them, as they hear it in the parks or thru the radio, frequently the only stimulus of inner elation, an experience so tender and caressing that it means to them, in symbolic, still concrete form, an experience of emotional satisfaction which life has denied to them thru the means of personal rela¬ tionship ; and the result is similar to that of any experience of satisfying emo¬ tion — a liberation of energy and a sense of peace and happiness. When the wear and tear of adult life cause the individual to lag in interests and to age in his attitudes, a new emotional stimulus and interest will often recharge, as it were, the vital battery, cause a rejuvenation in attitudes and function, and increase the person’s usefulness and happiness to a considerable degree. Many adults carry sometimes carefully hidden illusions from the days of youth which were never materialized. Among these is a desire to make music in some form. If that idea has persisted thru the years, it will be well worth¬ while to investigate its dynamic origin and value. Again and again it has been found that assisting such persons of riper age in securing the right type of musical instruction, development, and expression resulted in an emotional liberation on a wholesome cultural plane and has given them a new objective of great inspirational and constructive influence. The aesthetic and spiritual enrichment of life thru music does not need elucidation in this address — it is too well known. Naturally, if we can develop within a person an aesthetic interest in music as a subject of reflective study and of artistic practise, we open new channels thru which both inspiring and comforting experiences may come to him. In fact, we may help him thereby to change his focus of attention and satisfaction to something more apart from himself, independent of himself, and so we increase his possibilities for finding relief and strength in something greater, more perfect, than the self, which is often what man is seeking when he yields to art. From this can be explained the natural thirst of so many emotionally insecure, sometimes un- Department of Adult Education 293 stable people for aesthetic and artistic experiences. The listening to or mak¬ ing of music is, consciously or unconsciously, their means of stabilization and of reaching out for the control of their emotional urges by aesthetically conditioned modes of conduct. Man has been called a “social animal.” Sometimes he seeks isolation, but more frequently he needs emotional companionship of a congenial nature, to reach his own highest level of dealing with himself, with his work and with his fellowmen and to feel inwardly satisfied. Thousands of people go to con¬ certs and operas seeking this emotional satisfaction, relaxation and inspira¬ tion thru music. One of the forms of enrichment of adult life thru music is found in the bringing together thru choruses and orchestras, groups of peo¬ ple on an emotionally and aesthetically inspiring basis, people some of whom would otherwise have no congenial fellowship. What do we find in our work today in connection with the serious want suffered by untold numbers of adult men and women of musical inclination ? We find a need of musical experiences, which will give them the sorely wanted zest to continue to believe in their own reason for existence and to “fight the good fight” to the end. Many are the causes which contribute to this need. Of a few we have spoken ; others we have not touched upon. Life is hard on the present adult generation and also on many a youth, now cut off not only from a bare liveli¬ hood and from the completion of his education, but also from the sources of cultural inspiration and strength. The paradox of it is, that now, when life demands new, quick, and effective adjustments, when there is a greater need for more education, relaxation, and inspiration than ever, everywhere budgets are being cut, causing teachers to be dismissed, classes stopped, courses abolished, concerts revoked, lopping off just so many sources of growth, inspiration, comfort, and relief ; and in each case the fine arts and culture are condemned to atrophy. In adjustment work with musical adults out of a job, with half a job, and with a job, but without emotional balance and peace, there is a dire need for assistance in the pursuit of music as a cultural and spiritual objective. For many, today, occupation with music is the straw to which they are clinging, emotionally speaking, to preserve their morale, their personality, their integrity, their fighting spirit against demoralization. For others it means a direly wanted self-assertion in a constructive and socialized form. For still other adults, it means the liberation of energy for non-musical, economically constructive thinking, planning, and laboring. For all, this use of music implies, instead of a loss of morale and backsliding, the going for¬ ward again, with head up, in faith and hope. AN ADVENTURE IN ADULT EDUCATION IN DAYTON DON D. LONGNECKER, PRINCIPAL, FAIRVIEW HIGH SCHOOL, DAYTON, OHIO A small group of teachers in the Fairview High School, Dayton, Ohio, after studying the Dewey and Kilpatrick philosophy of education, attempted, four years ago, to apply this philosophy in the enrichment of the lives of its adult patrons. 294 National Education Association There was a definite feeling at that time (which has increased since) that the average adult : ( 1 ) did not properly evaluate the purposes of public edu¬ cation, (2) had certain prejudices and stereotypes making local self-govern¬ ment dangerous, (3) did not have an adequate medium thru which to ex¬ press his own convictions about local affairs, (4) needed an opportunity to grow in his knowledge of parent problems, social problems, and economics, (5) lacked a foundation on which to build a creative interest to take care of an increasing amount of leisure time. With these ideas as a background, we set out on an “adventure in com¬ munity adult education.” Using six Monday evenings during the winter months, we offered the first year eight courses with an enrolment of two hundred adults. This enrolment has gradually grown to more than one thou¬ sand adults, last year when the Brown Elementary, the Col. White Junior High, and the Fairview Senior High (in the same section of the city) combined in a program. The general committee chose as their definition of adult education, “that organized type of education designed primarily for individuals beyond reg¬ ular school age, for securing continual adjustment to changing social and economic conditions of contemporary life.” It was the assumption of the committee that the schools form a natural community center and as such should participate in the life interests of all ages and class groups. The general theme “Security” was adopted for last year’s project. Educa¬ tional, social, and economic security were special topics, each of which re¬ ceived treatment on different nights by competent speakers. The idea of security was also developed in the regular class periods in many of the courses. The general plan of the school was to have two one-hour periods each evening. On alternate Monday evenings, an assembly for the entire enrol¬ ment was held in the school auditorium. Twenty-seven classes were offered, from which number any one person might choose two. Classes were organ¬ ized with the informal adult education idea in mind : namely, that anyone might have the privilege at any time of injecting a question or making a comment ; that the class period was so organized that the entire group might exchange ideas and grow together. No class had a teacher, but each class had a discussion leader. There was a conscious attempt to leave indoctrination out of the procedure. No course was offered which had direct vocational value. Such courses as the following were all popular : The Baby Gets a Good Start, The Elementary-School Child, The Junior High-School Boy and Girl, The Senior High-School Boy and Girl, After High School — What?, Current Events, Conversation, English Usage, What to Read, Applied Art, Crafts, Salads and Desserts, Songology, Art Appreciation, Social Hygiene, Presentday Economic Problems, Social Planning, Dayton Citizenship, Travel, Religion in Everyday Life, Home Nursing, Dress Design, Con¬ tract Bridge, Homemaking, Interior Decorating, Amateur Photography, Dramatics. Department of Adult Education 295 Two months previous to the first session, discussion leaders were called together, the plan of the school was outlined and all those taking part were given a common background. In addition to the regular discussion leaders, practically every course used special leaders for special topics, with the result that more than seventy took some definite leadership in the school. There was very little dropping in attendance during the course of the school. In fact, the school has become so popular that it has been definitely decided to conduct similar types of adult education groups in five different centers next winter. Many have volunteered their services to help carry out the project on a citywide basis. The P. T. A.’s, League of Women Voters, Federated Clubs, and the Council of Social Agencies are just a few of the organizations lend¬ ing the movement their support for 1934. It is as yet too early to prophesy results. We note this, however — our community is less critical and more cooperative with the schools. The school is more of a community center. Altho a mill-levy for school operation failed of passage last year at the election, this particular community gave it strong support. One enthusiastic parent puts the value of the informal adult school this way: “Why can’t my boy be taught these same things in the high school?” We believe that we have more or less stumbled upon a means by which we can gradually change public opinion away from traditional “college prepara¬ tory” courses and in favor of courses at every level, that will educate toward adjustment of the individual to “changing problems of contemporary life,” that will stimulate the latent creative abilities, and teach people to “do better the desirable things they are likely to do anyway.” Practically no expense was involved in our little project since the time of our seventy leaders was donated and the board of education graciously permitted us the use of the buildings. We claim no originality in our adventure. We only claim success far beyond our hopes — a success which is carrying us rapidly into a citywide informal adult program. GLIMPSES FROM THE FIELD MAUDE E. AITON, DIRECTOR OF ADULT EDUCATION, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, WASHINGTON, D. C. The full-time adult school of the District of Columbia, known as the Americanization School, is directly under the board of education. An entire school building is used for adult educational work. Classes are open, day and night, for practically the entire year. There is a short vacation in June and September. This is a school for the whole family. A nursery and kindergarten afford an opportunity to bring the youngest members and make possible demom stration to the parents the value of child care including health and education. 296 National Education Association Field teachers carry on many classes in the homes and the Rotary Club furnishes bus transportation for entire home classes, including children, to the central school. The organization of the school provides : ( 1 ) Graded classes of men and women seeking naturalization. Close contact is maintained with the Court and the Naturalization Bureau. (2) Graded classes for adults desiring to study the English language. (3) Graded classes for the underprivileged, both native and foreign-born who need primary work. (4) Many special classes are organized, such as budget luncheon class, mothers’ sewing groups, current topics class, legislative study group, handcraft groups, garden club, practical law class, and general science class. The age range (including the nursery) is from babyhood to men and wo¬ men of advanced years. The average age varies from the late twenties to the early thirties. The educational range of students is from illiteracy to univer¬ sity men and women. The nationality range includes over fifty nationalities. The Americanization School Association, an organization initiated by the students of the school, has functioned for more than eleven years. Its work is correlated with the school work and it affords many extracurriculum activities, such as library, orchestra, chorus, bulletin, recreational activities. It also carries on extensive aid and employment work. GLIMPSES FROM THE FIELD A. W. CASTLE, DIRECTOR, EXTENSION EDUCATION DIVISION, STATE DEPART¬ MENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, HARRISBURG, PA. Adult education in Pennsylvania, as in other states, has suffered from and profited by the exigencies and hysteria of the times. One city decides to save money regardless of ultimate costs, and overnight uproots and destroys its entire program of evening schools. Its neighbor girds itself to meet the social and industrial demands of technological unemployment and enforced leisure and courageously expands its evening school program. Most communities of our commonwealth have soberly prorated among all school activities the retrenchment found to be necessary, preserving all of them to the best of their ability. Erie and Altoona short-sightedly have ab¬ ruptly and completely wiped out their evening schools, serving thousands of deserving adults, in order that other activities might remain unhampered as largely as possible. Ellwood City, not far from Erie, recognizing the urgent social and eco¬ nomic need for adult education, organizes a new and comprehensive evening school program topped by a standard evening high school, and throws wide open its school doors as its contribution to the solution of present problems. Other cities and boroughs follow. Williamsport, already famous for its vocational retraining program, cal¬ culates costs and possible economies but plans a bigger and better program of adult education including a new standard evening high school. Downingtown teachers point the way to other small communities by giving volunteer teaching service in evening schools as an emergency measure. Department of Adult Education 297 In Pennsylvania there is now being prosecuted under the leadership of Dr. James N. Rule, our State Superintendent of Public Instruction, a state study of educational problems. In this study, among one hundred committees now at work, extension education for adults, embracing school extension, university extension, and library extension, has won a place of equal standing with elementary education, secondary education, and higher education. Thru the slow but effective leavening of our extension education for adults, illiteracy with all its social implications, the genuine assimilation of our foreign-born, vocational retraining, leisure-time occupation, crime and juvenile delinquency, prison education, parent education, the enrichment of rural life, home study, library service, social trends and social control — all are now, for the first time, getting the serious consideration long due them. Extension education for adults will continue in Pennsylvania with rela¬ tively little specific loss and generally great gains. Our greatest present need is for definite and well-understood social objectives upon which there is general agreement. Obviously, we cannot arrive until we know exactly where we want to go and just as definitely why we want to go there. The National Council of Education will soon recommend to the Presi¬ dent of the United States the creation of a national commission on social- economic planning. This recommendation should have the support of every¬ one interested in adult education. No other single field of education has so much to gain from such a proposed intelligent weighing of our social and economic values and objectives, and of our educational outcomes and needs. The educational implications of increasing leisure, greater vocational ob¬ solescence, and the growing need for continuing readjustment of individuals to constantly changing conditions, point unmistakably to adult education as the most significant development of coming decades. Continuing education for continuing readjustment has taken permanent root in Pennsylvania. No new movement nor infant institution has ever before, in our democracy, been called upon so suddenly to assume such tre¬ mendous responsibility. In our commonwealth and elsewhere, the challenge is ours to meet. GLIMPSES FROM THE FIELD KATHERINE M. KOHLER, DIRECTOR, EXTENSION DIVISION, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. The paramount question in the Adult Education Department of the Minneapolis Public Schools at the present time is “How can we stretch the dollar still more to meet the ever-increasing demands for constructive leisure time activities?” During the school year just completed, on a reduced budget, we have car¬ ried on a program in elementary, secondary, commercial, and homemaking education and in addition some special projects were initiated. To gain an idea of how the evening schools were serving the unemployed, surveys were made in the evening commercial and in the evening high school in May 1933. 298 National Education Association The most common reasons given by the unemployed for attending the com¬ mercial evening school were: “To better myself,” 24 percent; “to acquire a business education” or “to learn typewriting or shorthand” or “keep up shorthand practise,” 47 percent; “to help secure a position” or “gain a better position,” 21 percent. Approximately 92 percent and perhaps more are coming for some reason pertaining to a job. The evening high school presented a very different but an equally interest¬ ing picture. Approximately 34 percent answered that “cultural value” was the determining factor in attending; 35 percent were garnering credit toward graduation and 10 percent toward university entrance. A large percentage of the students expressed an urgent desire for educa¬ tional and vocational guidance. It was most encouraging to find that in both schools nearly 70 percent were planning to return to evening school next fall; 20 percent were undecided and 10 percent either had finished the course in which they were interested or had other reasons for not coming back. Classes for women — During the past year the department discovered that there was great need to help housewives on reduced incomes and those on public relief to use their food allotments to the best advantage. Thru the cooperation of schools, neighborhood houses, and social workers, classes were opened. Some of the women needed help in making their budget allowance cover the total time allotment; all needed training in food marketing, in preparing inexpensive but nourishing dishes, in baking bread, and in planning balanced meals to suit the family needs which varied according to the num¬ ber and age group in each family. To bring the cost within the weekly allow¬ ance for families on the relief rolls, grocery lists were procured from the relief agencies. The work done in these classes resulted in better and more satisfying meals, fewer periods of enforced fasting, and less friction in the homes. Groups of women, anxious to find day work, were enrolled in laboratory classes in housework. This course included cleaning rooms and furnishings, removing stains, laundering, pressing and ironing, care of household metals and plumbing, and the care and use of household appliances. Supplementary to the general lessons, demonstrations were given in the care and use of elec¬ trical machines and appliances. A number of young women, who had been trying vainly to find work, were encouraged to enter study groups for self-improvement. Since getting a job was the girls’ paramount interest, a class in general housekeeping drew those who hoped to qualify for work, either by day or week, as maids or waitresses, or in catering. Practical laboratory lessons in cooking, serving, and general housework were given. This course also included lessons in the selection and care of clothing and in personal grooming. Incidentally, the teacher sought to instil the fact that careful grooming, cleanliness, and neat¬ ness are even more essential than smart wearing apparel. Had the teachers been able to finish the program by placing each pupil, the project would have been a complete success. Unfortunately not many employers were found waiting at the end of the course. A few of the girls secured jobs, but more Department of Adult Education 299 were disappointed. However, even the latter realize that their time was profitably spent, that when they do get work they will be better qualified to give satisfaction, and that the knowledge they have gained is useful in their own homes. Thru the Minneapolis Urban League a group of Negroes, the majority unemployed, petitioned to have a class in janitorial housekeeping. The Adult Education Department provided a course covering the care of different kinds of floors and woodwork, and in correct methods of sweeping and dusting and cleaning. At the end of the course, the men expressed themselves as being well satisfied and as wanting further training along the same line. The foregoing projects, carried out as they were mainly among American- born young people, do not reveal all the problems of extension work con¬ fronting the Minneapolis Adult Education Department. A selected picture of a complete adult education situation was obtained thru a survey of all adults (numbering 1861) within a specified district. The social and eco¬ nomic levels of this district were low in comparison with other school popu¬ lations in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Over 55 percent were born in foreign countries and more than 15 percent were not as yet citizens of the United States. Previous education had been limited, few of them having gone be¬ yond the elementary school. One out of every seven adults could neither read nor write English, and one out of every twenty could not read or write in any language. The parental responsibility of the mothers was not great in a majority of the cases, and these adults for the most part fell in the age groups where education is possible and desirable. In our enthusiasm for new projects in adult education, the old problems of illiteracy and of providing an ele¬ mentary education for all the adult population must not be forgotten. All about us in Minneapolis as elsewhere there is convincing proof of the importance of “carrying on” activities for the education of adults. Support for this program should be adequate, particularly in the present situation as is so well expressed by Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, when she says: “Outside the provision of actual funds for food and shelter, I would say that the opening up of new and diversified educational opportunities for adults is the most important movement for unemployment relief.” GLIMPSES FROM THE FIELD CHARLES J. LUNAK, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CHICAGO, ILL. Adult education in Chicago is comprised of: (1) evening schools; (2) a regular day elementary adult school; (3) day English-to-foreign classes; (4) Americanization classes; (5) classes for the unemployed in shelters; (6) parent-education classes. Owing to a decreased revenue, the appropriation for evening schools was cut in half. This necessitated the closing of sixteen opportunity high and elementary evening schools. This seems an enormous denial of opportunity, but by consolidating small schools, closing hopelessly small schools, and com- 300 National Education Association bining classes, we feel that we have a better and a closer knit system which allows of better supervision and draws a much better student body without depriving anyone of the opportunity of securing an education in the evening. The six evening high schools are accredited by the North Central Associ¬ ation of Secondary Schools and Colleges. They contain high-school shop classes, elementary classes, classes in Americanization, and English-to- foreign. The accredited schools have a term of thirty-six weeks, meeting the first four evenings of each week from 6:45 to 9:45, three hours each evening. A charge of $5.00 returnable registration fee is made. This fee is returnable if the student has attended three-fourths of the time, and a refund of one-half the registration fee is made if the student uses tools, machinery, or equip¬ ment. An investigation was made on the relation between nominal tuition charges, returnable registration fees, and free instruction and attendance. It was found that where no charge was made, the attendance averages 68 percent. When a nominal tuition fee was charged, the average attendance was 74 percent, and when a returnable registration fee was demanded, the average attendance was 78 percent. It is a question if students regularly employed should not be requested to pay the greater portion of the cost of instruction in the accredited classes. We attempted this year to combine community center activities with the evening schools by giving to the community lectures, debates, dramatics, orchestra, band, vocal music, and forums. I am not yet ready to endorse this experiment, but we shall try it another year. The accredited high schools had a membership of 24,963, with 978 in the classes below the high-school level. In addition, there are 5480 in Ameri¬ canization classes, 467 in the shelters for the unemployed. There seems to be little doubt about offering instruction in English-to- foreign and Americanization classes free of charge. After all, this directly benefits the community and state. It is a question too how long the tax- paying public is willing to assume the burden of educating self-supporting adults. Here in Chicago the tax-paying public has assumed the entire respon¬ sibility, only a small portion of the returnable registration fee going into the treasury of the board of education. Undoubtedly during the financial depres¬ sion, with its long periods of unemployment, a number of worthy students who cannot pay the registration fee are deprived of the opportunity of at¬ tending. Even carfare is an element which enters into regularity of attend¬ ance. Our attendance on Monday and Tuesday is almost perfect ; it drops off on Wednesday, and on Thursday it becomes low because by that time there is no money for carfare. Chicago is divided by the river into three sections, a North Side, a South Side, and a W est Side. Two accredited evening high schools are located in each section, so that they are conveniently located. Department of Adult Education 301 The following is a paragraph taken from the Strayer report: The study of the evening high schools of Chicago leads to the conclusion that these schools are performing invaluable educational service. Chicago has set for all large cities in America an example of night high schools sufficient in number, con¬ veniently located, and comparable with the day high schools in the type of work done. It is recommended that, in spite of the present emergency, the evening high-school program be continued. I am in hopes, when financial conditions are improved, to open three tech¬ nical high schools, one for each section of the city, and an additional high school on the South Side for the colored, which shall have accredited classes, elementary work, and vocational classes. Four years ago this school for the colored was open and in one room for elementary instruction there were eight grandmothers, four grandfathers, and four great-grandmothers. One wonders why people as old as these come, day after day, to trace laboriously with labor-stiffened fingers one letter after another, and just as laboriously pick out one word after another. The answer is the answer for the organiza¬ tion of the first schools. They come so that in the sunset of their lives they might learn to read the scriptures and secure comfort therefrom. GLIMPSES FROM THE FIELD MRS. KENNETH F. RICH, DIRECTOR, IMMIGRANTS’ PROTECTIVE LEAGUE, CHICAGO, ILL. Citizenship has never been more needed by the foreign-born than now. The disabilities that face the alien have never been so great. First of all, in most states he cannot really become a part of the political life of the com¬ munity by holding office, by serving on the jury, or by voting. A democratic government, however, is dependent upon the participation in it of those resident within its boundaries. Most states limit the opportunities in many of the professions to those who are citizens. In certain parts of the country, for instance, an alien cannot become a physician, or a lawyer, or a nurse, or a public accountant. In many other certain states aliens are not permitted to hold land, or cer¬ tain other types of property. Land ownership, perhaps, may not descend to the child of an alien. Perhaps he is barred from mining claims. Perhaps he cannot procure a hunter’s license, or even own a hunter’s dog. In many other states, social legislation has not extended to the alien. The non-citizen may be barred from the benefits of the Workmen’s Compensation Act, or an old-age pension, or a blind person, or a mother’s pension. If he is so unfortunate as to have become caught, with his neighbors born in the United States, in the present economic stringency, he is probably barred from work relief projects, employment on public works, or possibly even a relief budget. From an immigration standpoint, he cannot bring his wife and children outside the quota unless they happen to have been born in the Western Hemisphere. He, of course, cannot travel on an American passport. The position of the alien in the United States at present is critical in many of the relationships of his life. He cannot make an adjustment to it unless he becomes a citizen of this country. 302 National Education Association At the very moment, however, when citizenship is demanded of the alien in all this range of his relationships, the path to naturalization has become more and more difficult. Mounting obstacles bar his way. Perhaps he simply cannot afford the expense of becoming naturalized — this bill of twenty dol¬ lars, or perhaps thirty-five dollars, to the government. The high cost of natu¬ ralization has defeated its own end and seems particularly unjust in view of the fact that there is so large a surplus in the naturalization fund, collected from the fees paid by the applicant. Perhaps he has forgotten the name of his boat and cannot verify the record of his arrival in the United States, which is now one of the first requirements to naturalization. Perhaps he has made a trip abroad and has stayed a little longer than a year, in adjusting matters in the old country relating to property, the care of his parents, or other family obligations. Those prolonged visits may even indicate greater, rather than less desirability, among his qualifications for citizenship. More than a year of absence breaks his residence, however, and the five-year period required must begin all over again. Perhaps in renounc¬ ing allegiance to the foreign ruler he has named the wrong king, which has happened so often, since the sweeping changes in territory in Europe after the World War. The little amendment to the Naturalization Act relating to renunciation of allegiance was probably too limited in its provisions to embrace his dilemma. Perhaps the applicant to naturalization has compunctions about taking the oath to bear arms, and so perhaps has been disqualified because of his re¬ ligious beliefs, as was a certain Professor of Divinity at Yale University. Perhaps it is the color of his skin which makes him ineligible. If he is not “free white or of African nativity or descent,’’ in other words, if his skin is yellow, not black, nor white, nor red, regardless of the great contribution he may be making in this country, he is barred from naturalization. Another naturalization difficulty is the educational test. In order to be¬ come a citizen, one must “speak the English language,” sign the petition “in his own handwriting,” and be “attached to the principles of the Constitu¬ tion.” The socalled educational test for naturalization has not been enacted by Congress. In some naturalization districts, however, it is being enforced without legislation. The list of petitioners described by naturalization exam¬ iners as “found poor in their knowledge of English and form of government” has grown longer and longer and longer! Perhaps that is not true in Massa¬ chusetts, where so wonderful a system of enrolment of the foreign-born in adult classes is in operation under the able direction of Miss Mary Guyton. Other states also have adult education programs of which they may well be proud. Illinois has a permissive act and aspirations! Chicago has Miss Frances Wetmore’s excellent department of adult day classes, but she needs ten times the appropriation made by the board of education ! The filing of any naturalization paper, whether declaration or petition, should be the signal for cooperative action between the local public-school system, and the United States naturalization service. Thru the visiting teacher function, there should be enrolment in some kind of class, of every Department of Adult Education 303 such applicant. In order that this object may be attained, there must be great elasticity of curriculums, and of management of classes, with special respect to the hours at which they are held, their location, the number required for attendance, and other regulations. The argument for establishing an educational test for naturalization is always a plausible one. It is, however, an entirely unjust one, until public- school facilities for adults catch pace with such naturalization requirements. The educational opportunity for them, the country over, is far from equal and far from adequate. It seems, moreover, entirely unfair and unfortunate to raise bars to naturalization when so many legal disabilities face the alien. If the argument for an educational test is based on its relation to the voter, it should in all justice, apply to the citizen born in the United States, as well as the citizen by adoption. Some states are already experimenting with a general educational test for all voters. Such obstacles to naturalization can partly be mitigated by administrative procedure. In many directions, however, they will require amendments to the naturalization law itself. Such a group as this might well adopt an active legislative program for naturalization which would include such items as: (1) the immediate reduction of naturalization fees, (2) permission for legalization of entry regardless of date of entry, (3) broader provisions re¬ garding renunciation of allegiance, (4) elimination of the discriminations now existing in the naturalization law, as to sex, religion, and race, (5) pre¬ vention of an educational test until all parts of the United States have achieved equality and adequacy of educational opportunity for adults. Woodrow Wilson, in speaking to an assembly of newly naturalized citi¬ zens, once said: “You have come to America not only to earn a living . . . but ... to let me know that everywhere in the world there are men who will cross strange oceans, and go where a speech is spoken which is alien to them, if they can but satisfy their quest for what their spirits crave ; know¬ ing that whatever the speech, there is but one longing and utterance of the human heart, and that is for liberty and justice.” A group such as this, by opening the half shut doors to citizenship by naturalization, can make a direct and immediate contribution to the liberty and justice they believe is here. GLIMPSES FROM THE FIELD FRANCES WETMORE, SUPERVISOR OF ADULT EDUCATION, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, CHICAGO, ILL. There is so much of interest and variety in the field of adult education that it wTould take many times three minutes to give even a brief survey of what is taking place in this field. In Chicago we have the problem of illiteracy and the teaching of funda¬ mentals of the language to the native-born white and colored, as well as the foreign-born. It is found that many of our native-born are unable to make a written application for relief to the Illinois Commission for Relief, 304 National Education Association because of illiteracy. Thru this agency we hope to come in touch with a new group needing education and giving them a new opportunity. This department has functioned a sufficient number of years to have the satisfac¬ tion of watching the illiterate emerge from illiteracy thru the elementary level of education into high school. We hold many classes for adults in the public-school buildings. In several instances, three generations from the same family attend the same public school. We have classes meeting in settlements, office buildings, and shelters for the unemployed. We have a number of groups meeting for the study of parental care. A carefully planned course of study on child care from infancy thru ado¬ lescence is conducted thruout the school year. Many of our more advanced classes, including the parental care groups, are conducted largely as discussion groups. The work which has developed most rapidly during the past year or two is the work in the shelters for the unemployed men and women. We have found, as have many others working with the unemployed groups, a cross section of society presenting various educational needs and interests. After careful consultant with these groups, we have responded to their lequests for English, mathematics, Spanish, radio making, salesmanship, economics. We have found the effect of presenting a constructive piece of educational work in this time of enforced idleness, a great factor in keeping up the morale of these discouraged men. I believe the result has warranted all our efforts, even in the face of our crippled financial condition. What next! Only a seer and a prophet can tell, but this I know — we must respond to the increasing and changing demands for education on the part of the adult. W e must accept this challenge, or we fail in one of our most vital and hopeful fields of educational work. SECRETARY’S MINUTES First Session, July 3, 1933 Mary L. Guyton, president, called the meeting to order at 2 p. m. In the absence of the secretary, Caroline Whipple, of New York, chair appointed Mrs. M. D. Neu- field, of Chicago, as secretary pro tem. After a brief expression of appreciation to the committee for its work for the preceding year, and an announcement of the other meetings to follow in this department, she stated that in accordance with the provi¬ sion of the bylaws the appointment of a committee on resolutions would be first order of business. Committee appointed as follows: A. W. Castle, Pennsylvania, Chairman; Charles Lunak, Illinois; Wil Lou Gray, South Carolina; J. O. Hornstein, New York. T. he next order of business was the appointment of the nominating committee: Frances K. Wetmore, Chicago, Chairman; James A. Moyer, Director, University Extension, Massachusetts. In the absence of Sydney B. Hall, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Rich¬ mond, \ irginia, “J he Report of the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Educa¬ tion” was presented by William G. Carr. 305 Department of Adult Education In the discussion which followed Mr. Castle of Pennsylvania asked to what extent the commission had considered the need of adult education in the school sys¬ tem, to which Dr. Carr answered that the commission had given this matter con¬ siderable thought and that it is anxious to get suggestions as to how it may proceed in this connection. Mr. Castle moved that Dr. Carr convey to the commission the request of this conference that the commission give its further consideration to the need of adult education activities in public education and the need of meeting pres- entday emergencies and exigencies and to make its recommendations accordingly. Motion seconded by Charles Lunak of Chicago. Motion carried. Report made by Dr. Carr received and filed. A. H. MacCormick, Assistant Director of the Bureau of Prisons, Department of Justice, Washington, D. C., presented a paper on “Educating the Prisoner.” In the discussion that followed Miss Guyton asked how the prison teacher compares with the teacher outside. To this question Mr. MacCormick answered that if the teacher’s work is well supervised it is usually good, but that since wardens usually do not know what it takes to make a good teacher and that since prisoners who were salesmen or bankers, etc., must be given white-collar jobs, frequently the teaching is not adequate. Mr. MacCormick’s paper was received and filed. C. K. Ogden, Cambridge, England, who was to have presented a paper on “Basic English” was unable to be present. Miss Guyton told the Conference of some of the values of the new 850-word vocabulary proposed by Dr. Ogden, read a letter from a teacher in Denmark which was accompanied by a lecture she had given in which only words from this vocabulary were used, and announced that further information and literature on this subject may be secured by writing to S. Ploward Evans, Room 371, 1 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. Much discussion followed the presentation of this subject in which the difficulties as well as the advantages of the adoption of this new vocabulary were emphasized. Dinner Meeting, 6:00 p. m. The meeting was held at the Stevens Hotel, in the North Ballroom, Mary L. Guyton, presiding. Miss Jane Addams, Hull House, Chicago, brought greetings and expressed her appreciation of the values and the accomplishments of the Adult Education move¬ ment. Professor William S. Gray, University of Chicago, presented a paper on “Catch¬ ing Up With Literacy.” Paper filed. Greetings from South Carolina were brought by Miss Wil Lou Gray. Delightful music by the Lane Technical High School Orchestra completed the evening. Joint Conference of the Department of Adult Education and the National Com¬ mission on the Enrichment of Adult Life>, July 5, 1933 James A. Moyer, president of the National Commission on the Enrichment of Adult Life, called the meeting to order at 2:00 p. m., in Room 430-A, Stevens Hotel. Because of the large number attending the meeting was transferred to the Grand Ballroom Annex. Elizabeth Wells Robertson, Supervisor of Art, Public Schools, Chicago, presented a paper on “Art Training in Preparation for Adult Leisure.” Having finished her paper, Miss Robertson reported that in response to a request made by her, the Board of Directors of the NEA are permitting the establishment of a Department of Art. Miss Robertson’s paper was received and filed. “Enrichment of Adult Life Thru Art” was presented by Lorado Taft of Chicago. Paper received and filed. 306 National Education Association In the absence of Willem van de Wall, State Department of Welfare, Harrisburg Fa his paper on “Enrichment of Adult Life Thru Music” was presented and read by Miss Guyton. Same was received and filed. An Adventure in Adult Education in Dayton” was presented by Don D. Longnecker, Principal, Fairview High School, Dayton, Ohio. Paper filed. Under “Glimpses from the Field” the following speakers presented their papers, which were filed: K p ’ Kenneth F. Rich, Director, Immigrants’ Protective League, Chicago, 1. Mrs. Illinois. 2. Wil Lou Gray, Supervisor of Adult Schools, Columbia, South Carolina. 3. Charles Lunak, Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Chicago, Illinois. 4. Frances K. Wetmore, Supervisor, Adult Education, Public Schools, Chicago A>. W*Cas?®» Director’ Extension Education Division, State Department of Education, Harrisburg, Pa. P ur'Tu °f a,b,fnu-’ *he PaperS °f Maude Aiton’ Director of Adult Education, Pubhc Schools, Washington, D. C„ and of Katherine M. Kohler, Director, Extension Division Public Schools, Minneapolis, Minn., were not read. Business Meeting The business meeting was conducted by Mary L. Guyton. Treasurer being absent fiom the meeting, secretary was requested to read excerpts from the treasurer’s report which was voted accepted and filed. Mr Moyer reported for the committee on bulletin. Report accepted. Mr. Moyer moved that the special committee on bulletin be continued for the next year and that it be authorized to issue four editions if possible and to adopt whatever plans in its discretion it deems necessary. The Committee on Bulletin is composed of the following members: J. A. Mover Massachusetts; Robert C. Deming, Conn.; C. S. Marsh, New York; Marguerite Burnett, Delaware; Alonzo G. Grace, New York. A letter from W. C. Smith, Business Manager of the Bulletin, was read bv the secretary; it contained the following excerpts: 1. “I ask you to appoint a Business Manager for the following year.” 2. “lam at the same time asking that all right, title, and interest, in the publication of the Regents Word List heretofore published by Adult Education be reserved to me, or to be disposed of by me in the liquidation of the affairs not directly concerned by the Department.” Mr. Moyer moved that a communication be addressed to Mr. Smith expressing deep appreaatmn of his services in the capacity of business manager during his term ot office. Motion seconded by Miss Wetmore. Motion carried. With reference to Excerpt 2, above referred to, Mr. Moyer moved that the request therein contained be granted. Motion seconded by Miss Wetmore. Motion carried. Mr. Castle moved that the chairman be empowered to appoint a committee to study the bylaws and to make any recommendations for revision at the next annual meeting of the NEA. Motion seconded by Miss Gray. Motion carried M Miss Wet^ore moved that Article V, Sec. 2, be amended to include the words except the Editor.” Motion seconded by Mr. Moyer. Motion carried. Frances K. Wetmore, Chairman of the Nominating Committee, presented the o owing slate: president, Mary L. Guyton; executive director, Charles Lunak - sec¬ retary, Caroline Whipple; treasurer, Agnes Winn; editor, Alonzo G. Grace.’ Mr. Moyer moved that the report of the nominating committee be accepted and that the secretary be instructed to cast one ballot for the election of these nominees to their respective officers for the ensuing term. Motion seconded by Miss Gray. Motion car¬ ried. Upon announcement by the secretary that the ballot had been cast the above names were elected to their respective offices for the ensuing term. Department of Adult Education 307 Mr. Castle, chairman of committee on resolutions, presented and read four resolu¬ tions. After reading resolution No. 1 he moved its acceptance. Motion seconded and carried. After presenting resolution No. 2 Mr. Castle moved its adoption. Motion seconded. Motion carried. Mr. Moyer moved that resolution No. 2 be mimeographed and copies sent to any organization or Board of Education which may be helpful in bringing about its objective. Motion seconded. Motion carried. After reading resolution No. 3, Mr. Castle moved that it be adopted and that authority to the president of this department to distribute it in the manner referred to in relation to resolution No. 2. Motion seconded by Dr. Lunak. Motion carried. After presenting resolution No. 4, Mr. Castle moved that it be adopted, with the provision that the president and secretary of the department be authorized to change the wording if necessary. Motion seconded. Motion carried. The above resolutions are appended to the minutes of this meeting. Chair announced that letters were received ; one from H. A. Allan, under date of January 12, 1933, addressed to her, and one from Mr. Allan, under date of January 12, 1933, addressed to Mr. Smith. Miss Wetmore moved that the reading of these letters be dispensed with and that the letters be filed with the minutes of this meeting. Miss Wetmore announced that a tea would be given at the Chicago Women’s Club, Thursday, July 6, at 4 o’clock to which all interested in Adult Education are invited. Wil Lou Gray voiced the appreciation of the Department for the splendid services of Mary L. Guyton, its president. RESOLUTIONS BE IT RESOLVED— That the Department of Adult Education of the National Education Association, grateful for the many considerations extended its members as guest of Chicago Public School officials and teachers, formally express its deep appreciation of the manifold courtesies received from and the complete conference dinner facilities provided by Dr. C. J. Lunak, Miss Frances Wetmore, their assistants, and teachers, and BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED — That our Secretary be instructed to forward a draft of this resolution to Dr. William J. Bogan, Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, to Dr. C. J. Lunak, Assistant Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools, and to his assistant, Miss Frances Wetmore. WHEREAS, In public education, the education of adults is directly and indirectly the most important factor in effecting social control and in determining social progress, and WHEREAS, The present crisis in education necessitates retrenchment in expendi¬ tures in all departments and levels of education. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED— 1. That the Department of Adult Education of the National Education Association respectfully requests and petitions its parent body to set forth unmistakably, by reso¬ lution, the relative importance of adult education in national and state programs of public education intended to effect social integration. 2. That such resolution direct attention to the wisdom of prorating required budgetary reductions among all school activities preserving for each at least a nucleus about which to construct its certain future developments. 3. That such resolution reiterate the social and civic necessity of continued reduc¬ tion of illiteracy and a more effective assimilation of our foreign-born population as the more urgent adjustment needs of these classes of our adult population, restriction of immigration notwithstanding. 308 National Education Association 4. That such resolution emphasize the present urgent need for local provision of educational opportunities for our great body of high-school graduates and college students unable to attend college and unable to find employment, from which is springing our growing army of itinerant American youth. 5- That by such resolution attention be forcefully directed to the adult education implications of our rapidly growing leisure, with special reference to the social and recreational needs of the vast number of underprivileged adults especially in rural areas whose earlier education opportunities have been restricted. 6. That, by whatever means available, these adult education emergency needs and recommendations be brought to the attention of officials of public schools, colleges and universities, thruout the nation. WHEREAS, Because of decreased educational revenues, adult education in cities of several states has been entirely eliminated, and WHEREAS, In some cities adult education has suffered a disproportionate de¬ crease in budgetary appropriation, and . {WHEREAS, No democracy can long endure unless its citizenry is literate, well- informed, and educated, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED — That no further decrease be made in appro¬ priations for adult education, or if decrease must be made that only the same pro- proportionate decrease be made in the appropriation for adult education as is made for all other educational activities. Miss Wil Lou Gray J. O. Hornstein C. J. Lunak A. W. Castle, Chairman Department of Art Education The department of art education became a part of the National Education Assoeia- tion by vote of the Representative Assembly on July 6, 1933. The creation of such a department was suggested “because art is an important subject, neces¬ sary to the development and culture of the childhood of America, and because this is a particularly impor- tant period in its life.” The Department developed from the Conference on Art Education. At the business meeting of the Department at the Chicago convention the following officers were elected to serve for the year 1933-34 : President, Elizabeth Wells Robertson, District Supervisor of Art, Public Schools, Chicago, Ill. Secre¬ tary, Edna E. Hood, Supervisor of Art, Administra¬ tion Building, Kenosha, Wis. Treasurer, Marcella Jackson, Director of Art, State Teachers College Castleton, Vt. The Department of Business Education ^department of business EDUCA- 1 VVu was created in response to a petition read TnIvaiVhiesSleefmg Saratoga Springs, New York, duly 12, 1892, from the Business Educators’ Associa- ion, requesting admission as a department of the 1809°^ ^idUoltl0n Association. See Proceedings, 1892. dl - The Business Educators’ Association was organized in New York City in 1878. Its constitution was. revised for acceptance by the Department of Business Education and may be found on page 958 of the Proceedings of 1894. ^ s The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are: President, Benjamin R. Haynes, Professor of Business Education, University of Southern Cali- q? a1£k VJS Angeles, Calif. ; First vicepresident, M. E. Studebaker, Director of Commercial Teacher Train¬ ing Ball State Teachers College, Muncie, Ind. : Sec¬ ond vicepresident, Clay D. Slinker, Director of Com¬ mercial Education, Public Schools, Des Moines, Iowa • Secretary-Treasurer, Raymond C. Goodfellow, Direc¬ tor of Commercial Education, Board of Education, Newark, N J . ; Executive Committee : Paul S. Lomax Annie C Woodward Seth B. Carkin, Dorothy L. Travis, B. Frank Kyker, Ernest A. Zelliot, E. G. Blackstone, G. F. Cadisch. T71 j 1 _ once each year in Julv. I acts relating to the establishment of this Depart¬ ment and the record of the meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1893:787-807 1894:957-994 1895:862-890 1896:791-835 1897:792-824 1898:856-892 1899 :998-1030 1900:542-581 1901:721-757 1902:644-701 1903:719-752 1904:709-736 1905:669-705 1906:637-639 1907:877-903 1908:871-906 1909:701-718 1917:315-344 1910:833-872 1918:235-247 1911 :827-868 1919 :259-269 1912:1031-1093 1920:263-270 1913:619-635 1921:369-376 1914:649-662 1922:575-590 1915:883-940 1923:553-567 1916:361-395 1924:429-438 1925 :354-364 1926:373-391 1927:335-35 2 1928:305-324 1929 :317-334 1930:275-292 1931:343-358 1932:283-302 [ 312 ] A PRELIMINARY STATEMENT OF THE GENERAL OBJEC¬ TIVES AND FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF COM¬ MERCIAL EDUCATION IN THE PUBLIC SECONDARY SCHOOLS earl w. Barnhart, editor, National Business Education Quarterly ; and CHIEF, COMMERCIAL EDUCATION SERVICE OF THE FEDERAL BOARD FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. In accordance with the plan announced in the March number of the Na¬ tional Business Education Quarterly, there is presented herewith a prelimi¬ nary draft of a proposed authoritative statement of the General Objectives and Fundamental Principles of Commercial Education in Public Secondary Schools. It is hoped that this statement will become the basis for a nationally accepted comprehensive platform of the realizable objectives and funda¬ mental principles which will be used by all public-school administrators, curriculum-makers, and teachers of commercial subjects. The need for such a generally accepted statement is too obvious to be elaborated here. This preliminary draft has been compiled from the papers contributed to the March number of the Quarterly by a select group of distinguished edu¬ cationists and commercial educators. The thanks of all interested in commer¬ cial education in this country are due to David Snedden of Columbia Uni¬ versity, W. W. Charters of Ohio State University, P. W. L. Cox of New York University, John M. Brewer of Harvard University, L. S. Lyon of Brookings Institute, F. G. Nichols of Harvard University, James M. Glass of Rollins College, Ira W. Kibby of California, L. A. Rice of New Jersey, Regina E. Groves of Madison, Wisconsin, and Alexander Massell of New York, N. Y., for their generous help in contributing papers for use in pre¬ paring this statement. This preliminary draft has been organized as logically as possible from the papers used as the basic contributions. Necessarily some ideas as taken from these papers have had to be rephrased to fit into the topical arrange¬ ment used in the statement. When necessary some ideas have been included within a more comprehensive generalization and a few items have been added by the compiler for completeness. Unfortunately, due to many dupli¬ cations in the contributed papers, individual credit cannot be given for the various items used. In order to present as comprehensively as possible each of the major topics in this statement, certain items have been repeated in the different topics with the deliberate intention of showing the necessity for considering the application of these items to the topic in which they appear. This duplication was necessary for logical completeness in many of the major topics. Each item in this statement both in its phraseology and in its possible sig¬ nificance to public-school commercial education is to be regarded as a thesis for discussion. The interested cooperation of all educationists and teachers of commercial subjects in all parts of this country is solicited for a critical [313 ] 314 National Education Association examination and careful revision of this statement. This preliminary formu¬ lation must be subjected to a minute evaluation by every group interested in, or connected with, public high-school commercial education before it can be legai ded as an authoritative statement embodying generally accepted prin¬ ciples. The expressed and implied significance of each item must be fully appieciated and generally accepted by the rank and file of teachers of com- meicial subjects 5 the application of each item to every high school offering commercial courses must be understood ] the value of each item in con- tributing to better educational service to all pupils enrolled in commercial couises must be fully realized. Unless there is such an understanding, ac¬ ceptance, and realization of these principles so that they are generally followed, this statement, or any printed statement will remain only a well- intentioned wish, not a potent instrument for improving the social and economic effectiveness of commercial education in the public high schools. It is hoped by the officers of the Department of Business Education that during the coming school year national and local organizations of commer¬ cial teachers, even those in individual high schools, will provide in their meetings programs for discussions of these objectives and principles, and that reports on the outcomes of these discussions will be forwarded to the editor of the Quarterly. Any modifications or additions which groups of commer¬ cial teachers submit for consideration will be carefully evaluated. Sugges¬ tions for changes are welcomed from individual teachers and educationists. In brief, the compiler of this statement invites the comments and contribu¬ tions from all interested in the formulation of an authoritative statement which can be confidently followed by all public-school administrators, cur¬ riculum makers, and teachers of commercial subjects. Plans have been formulated for publishing in the Quarterly during the coming year papers from business men, educationists, and commercial edu¬ cators on these aspects of commercial education which should contribute most to developing an understanding of our economic life, and to more in¬ telligent consumer use of business services. The items presented in these papers will be used in a more detailed formulation of the objectives and principles for these two major topics. This preliminary formulation is now presented to the members of the Department to be used as the basis of the various conferences constituting the program of the Department at this meeting. I. General Objectives of Commercial Education in Secondary Schools The general objectives of commercial education in secondary schools are to develop in each pupil to the maximum possible under controlling school con¬ ditions the abilities needed by the youth of a democracy. 1. To understand and sympathetically appreciate the workings of our economic system ; 2. To use intelligently all the business services and facilities needed in conducting the business activities of a citizen ; 3. To enter and succeed in a commercial occupation as a beginner who expects to follow business as a career; Department of Business Education 315 4. To keep adjusted to the constantly changing economic conditions affecting workers a. Seeking to win or retain a promotional position in a commercial occupation ; b. Engaged in managing a small business, whether commercial, industrial, agricultural, or homemaking in nature; 5. To enter some higher kind of commercial school. II. Principles of Methods in Determining Objectives 1. Procedures for determining general educational objectives a. Philosophic formulations of individuals and groups based on established trends in the community as determined by scientific data so far as available ; b. Scientific formulations (1) Deductive by application of certain accepted general objectives of education to commercial education; (2) Inductive by generalization from working objectives of superior teachers of commercial subjects. 2. Procedures for deriving objectives of commercial education by deductive process a. Select general objectives of education which are relevant to commercial education ; b. Reformulate selected general objectives to apply to commercial education with such modifications, eliminations, and supplemental additions as are needed ; c. Modify learning activities directed by teachers of commercial subjects until these activities are the most effective available for developing the socially desirable outcomes of commercial education. 3. Procedures for deriving objectives of commercial education by the inductive process a. Collect and compile the working objectives of superior commercial teachers; b. Generalize the working objectives which express the trends of many indi- dividual teachers; c. Modify the learning activities directed by teachers of commercial sub¬ jects until these activities are the most effective available for developing the socially desirable outcome objectives of commercial education. 4. Procedures for deriving working objectives by committee processes a. Collect and compile answers of teachers of commercial subjects to the question: What contributions can commercial education make to the students and the community? b. Formulate by a reviewing committee a consolidated statement of objectives; c. Refer formulated objectives to classroom teachers for checking teaching objectives and procedures against the accepted and approved objectives. 5. Procedures for determining vocational objectives for commercial classes a. For determining for what vocations a given school should train; (1) Study community or school service area to discover what commercial vocations would be of the greatest value to the students and to the community ; (2) Follow up former students to note what commercial vocations were most frequently entered and eventually held by former pupils of the school ; (3) Interview employers in the school service area to see what training was desired of beginners and candidates for promotion; (4) Review literature of occupations most frequently mentioned in the studies already indicated; (5) Get from competent experts national trends in occupations under consideration ; (6) Select specific commercial vocations apparently of greatest value to students — both graduates and drop-outs; 316 National Education Association b. (7) Determine the beginning positions held in these vocations by gradu¬ ates and drop-outs immediately after leaving school ; Determine training needed to supplement working experience in beginning and intermediate positions in the vocation; Resurvey continually to keep objectives adjusted to changes in business employments; For determining what learning exercises should be used; (1) Make job analyses of each vocation to discover the specific duties required ; (8) (9) ( ) Analyze each duty into abilities — skills, knowledges, attitudes, ideals, emotional controls — needed for efficient performance of each duty; (3) Determine ability units to be taught in each class; (4) Select the specific learning exercises to be used for developing the abilities needed ; (5) Measure outcomes of learning against success in discharging specific duties. III. Principles of Curriculum Construction 2. A 1. Objectives of commercial curriculum of any school depend upon a. The character and functions of the school for which the curriculum is con¬ structed ; b. The population and community to be served by the school; C ^nJTnatio^ ^ gr°Wing and develoPinS social order in the community commercial curriculum in any school should include all those subjects which a. Represent a properly balanced selection of the common and specialized commercial activities; b' naVC, theLgreates.t demonstrable use-values in social and business activities- c. Develop the maximum of adaptability in the pupils. The commercial program in any school must make provision for a. Pupils who study some commercial subjects for general social outcomes • . upils who cannot qualify for the commercial vocations for which the school prepares; c. Pupils who can qualify for the commercial vocations for which the school prepares ; d. Pupils who are preparing for commercial courses in higher schools 4. All commercial subjects should develop abilities useful in a. Home life ; 3 b. Neighborhood and community memberships; c. Vocational activities; d. Leisure time activities; e. Further educational activities — while at work and at school. 5. Vocational curriculums should provide for levels within each vocation; such as a. Juniors or beginners or low-level workers; b. Operative workers or craftsmen — average-level workers; c. Masters — high-level workers. 6. Each vocational commercial curriculum in a specialized vocational school a. Should be confined to vocational subjects, leaving content and place of subjects included for general educational values to be determined by general educators; b. Should present all subjects with special reference to their bearing upon the problems of the vocation ; c. Should include no subjects as essential— even health and civics— unless of demonstrated vocational value; Department of Business Education 317 d. Should develop those social traits necessary and desirable for successful adjustments in commercial occupations; e. Should provide organized training in emotional control and desirable personality development; f. Should use school business enterprises to provide for cooperative ex¬ periencing. IV. Principles of Organization and Administration 1. Commercial courses and curriculums should be organized and administered to make socially effective provision within the resources of the school for a. Pupils who study some commercial subjects for general social outcomes; b. Pupils who cannot qualify for the commercial vocations for which the school prepares ; c. Pupils who can qualify for the commercial vocations for which the school prepares ; d. Pupils who prepare for commercial courses in higher schools. 2. Vocational commercial curriculums should be organized in terms of a. Preparation for specific office and store occupations; b. Specific occupational objectives, not of subjects; c. All the commercial occupations in which a reasonable number of drop-outs and graduates from the school are known to find initial employment in the school service area; d. Known occupational requirements in the vocations for which each curricu¬ lum prepares; e. Preparation for every kind of adjustment required of beginners in each occupation ; f. Ability-levels within each occupational group open to beginners; g. Time and amount of learning required for adequate preparation for occu¬ pations ; h. Participation in productive work in school, community, and commercial business activities on part-time basis; i. Responsibility for placement and follow-up of all students enrolled. 3. Admission to vocational commercial curriculums should be determined as to a. Age that is required by employers in the occupations for which the school prepares; in general minimum age of employment in the community; e.g., may be 16 or 17 ; b. General or liberal education, minimum requirement generally completion of ninth grade; preferably completion of tenth or eleventh grade; c. Determinable aptitudes; minimum required for success in the commercial occupations for which the school prepares; d. Numbers reasonably likely to find initial employment in the school service area. 4. School authorities should know about each pupil enrolled in a vocational com¬ mercial curriculum a. His reasons for selecting the particular vocation; b. His possession of the mental and physical resources required for success; c. His likelihood of entrance upon and success in that occupation. 5. Guidance in connection with vocational commercial curriculums should be based upon a. Accurate information about different kinds of commercial vocations open to beginners in each ability-level in each commercial occupation; b. Enroling in a vocational curriculum only those students reasonably certain to be potentially trainable for and placeable in clerical or store positions of the kind for which the school prepares; c. Not admitting pupils not interested in or qualified for commercial occu¬ pations, especially those for which the school seeks to prepare; 318 National Education Association d. Recognizing that some pupils are suited for only the lower ability-levels of certain commercial occupations; e. Transferring to some other course any pupil in a vocational commercial curriculum as soon as the presence is revealed of any factor preventing success in the selected commercial occupation for which the pupil is preparing ; f. Retaining in a class no student who cannot reach the minimum employable level in the community in the occupation for which he is preparing. 6. Standards for graduation from a vocational commercial curriculum a. Demonstrated competency to meet minimum standards of employment on the specific ability-level in the occupational field sought. 7. Time required for completion of the course a. Depends upon the individual’s rate of learning and the amount of learning he must acquire to meet minimum employment requirements. 8. Teachers of vocational commercial subjects should possess a. Adequate general education ; b. Business experience of kind evidencing competency in the occupation for which their instruction prepares; c. Social traits desired in commercial workers. 9. The institutional location of vocational commercial curriculums will depend upon a. The numbers required for economical class administration — for some com¬ mercial vocations centralized state schools will be needed; b. Entrance requirements in the occupation or the ability-level on which pupils prepare to enter (1) Junior colleges may offer courses preparing for higher levels of occupations than high-school graduates can ordinarily enter upon graduation ; (2) Senior high schools may offer courses preparing for lower levels of common beginning office and store occupations. V. Principles of Education for Economic Understanding 1. Justification for commercial education in public schools based on a. Better informed citizens, “electorate”; b. Advancement of individual contributing to social welfare. 2. Commercial education should include non-vocational commercial knowledges and skills as a contribution to better citizenship; 3. Non-vocational commercial education should include a study of business; 4. All who actively participate in our economic life need appreciational knowledges about economic activities; 5. Relatively free and independent personalities require economic adjustments to world in which finances and business play a large part; 6. All producers should become familiar with factors affecting business; hence all should include courses of a social-economic nature. VE Principles of Education for Consumer Utilization 1. All who actively participate in the economic life of this country need a. Adequate working knowledge of the various commercial facilities and services which all use; b. Training in efficient management for their personal, home, and social organization economic activities. 2. Many persons can advantageously use certain skills, such as typewriting and shorthand in the more effective conduct of their personal affairs; 3. A course in elementary business information and practises should be offered to all junior high-school pupils; Department of Business Education 319 4. All commercial programs and curriculums should include provision for develop¬ ing an adequate a. Understanding of the operation of our economic working organization ; b. Working knowledge of the various commercial facilities and services of the community which most people use; c. Training in the efficient management of their personal, home, and social organization economic activities; d. Skills in more effective commercial and recording activities; e. Self-discovery of interest and aptitude for commercial vocations or a specific commercial vocation. 5. Achievement in the elementary business practise and elementary-personal use level — commercial skill courses should be regarded as of highly significant diagnostic and guidance value. VII. Principles of Guidance in Commercial Education 1. Guidance implies recognition of different abilities and capabilities in youth ; 2. Ability to make effective social and emotional adjustments; 3. Accurate information about different kinds of commercial vocations open to beginners should be accumulated in every school as an aid to individual counselling ; 4. Guidance and counselling is a continuous process extending thruout the entire period of schooling, for additional information about the duties and require¬ ments in an occupation must be supplied as the learner reaches points where he can understand the significance of the additional information; 5. Guidance includes developing an understanding in each student as to how he will proceed in directing his own learning and progress after leaving school; 6. For exploratory and guidance value a. Elementary business information courses should be offered as an integral part of every commercial program; b. Elementary skill courses should be conducted so as to serve as tryouts for discovery of aptitudes ; c. Failure in elementary business information and skill courses should be regarded as indicating lack of aptitude for success in certain commercial vocations ; 7. All commercial programs should include exploration and tryout experiences before a selection of a specific occupational goal by a pupil is approved; 8. School authorities should know about each pupil in a commercial curriculum a. His reasons for selecting the particular occupation as a goal ; b. His possession of mental and physical resources requisite for success; c. Likelihood for entrance upon and success in that occupation. 9. Success in vestibule or elementary commercial subjects for purpose of explora¬ tory experiences should be regarded as a prerequisite to the selection of a par¬ ticular commercial vocation; 10. Much research is needed to discover learning curves in exploratory and prepara¬ tory courses as basis for determining probability of success in commercial vocations ; 11. Initial store and clerical jobs are not satisfactory end points for business careers; 12. Only those students clearly potentially promotable should be encouraged to prepare for commercial occupations. VIII. Principles of Vocational Commercial Education 1. Schools should provide as many as possible — economically practicable — voca¬ tional curriculums, each preparing for a specific commercial vocational field; 2. Each vocational commercial curriculum should be organized and conducted so as to prepare for 320 National Education Association a. A number of specific commercial occupations within the vocational field included in the objectives of the curriculum — shorthand, bookkeeping, salesmanship are vocational fields, not specific commercial occupations; b. Specific ability levels with each occupation or in the vocational field; c. Entrance and success in a known kind of beginning occupation; d. Rapid promotion to more responsible positions within the occupational field. 3. Each vocational commercial curriculum should be organized and conducted so as to develop a. The minimum degree of operative skills required for satisfactory service by a beginner on a particular level in an occupation; b. The specific related knowledges and understandings required; c. A satisfactory degree of occupational judgment — intelligence or job-wisdom; d. As wide as possible an amount of related knowledges of business practises and relationships of known vocational value; e. The degree of social adaptability and emotional control necessary for making social adjustments of the kind required in the occupation; f. The ability to maintain an acceptable or attractive personal appearance while engaged in the activity of the occupation; g. The ability to select the particular kind of position in which the individual can render satisfactory service ; h. The ability to locate and obtain a position within the occupational field in which the individual can render satisfactory services; i. The ability to deal effectively with people in the business relationships of the occupation ; j. The ability to preserve physical and mental health including emotional control while engaged in the activities of the occupation ; k. The ability to direct efficiently individual’s own growth after leaving school in reaching higher levels in the occupation; l. The ability to judge own working abilities in relation to entrance and promotional requirements in the different occupations open locally to beginners of the individual’s own degree of occupational ability; m. Continuous personal supervision and guidance for each student from the time he enrols until he is satisfactorily placed in employment, including follow-up after placement so as to get a fair measure of the effectiveness of the training and guidance given. 4. Each vocational commercial curriculum should include a. Working experiences on a part-time employment schedule in school, or commercial business activities; b. The use of the tools, materials, processes, and other characteristics of the occupation ; c. All the different kinds of learning experiences required to develop the. degree of ability required for entrance and promotion within the occu¬ pation ; d. The presentation of all the different subjects in such a way as to show the special bearing of each subject upon the problems of the occupation. OBJECTIVES OF BUSINESS EDUCATION AS VIEWED BY BUSINESS JOHN y. beaty, editor, Bankers Monthly, rand mcnally and company, CHICAGO, ILL. Business needs young people with a genuine love for business. The routine subjects now taught are merely tools with which business men work. These tools — stenography, typing, accounting — are rapidly being replaced by ma¬ chines. Business needs men who will succeed against every increasing com- Department of Business Education 321 petition. When the objectives of education are routine rather than creative development, the scholars are not being prepared to meet the requirements of modern daily business. Modern business deals with human relations pri¬ marily, and only secondarily with things. How many times have you said at the end of a weary day in school, “Oh, if only all of my scholars were like Fred. He gets his lessons every day. He remembers all that he learns. He always gets the best grades.” As a matter of fact, it would be a tragedy if all of your scholars were like Fred. They would be nothing but automatons. They would be little more than dictaphone cylinders. What you dictate to their minds, they re¬ tain, but they get nothing else. That is not what we need in business. We need thinkers and doers. We need young people in love with business. Make your teaching real. If you wish to use a problem that concerns the sale of a case of tomato juice, borrow a case of tomato juice from the local store and have that before the class as you talk about it. Borrow the invoice the grocer received when the tomato juice was shipped to him and let the scholars handle the actual invoice. If they are studying the making of checks, let them write a check in payment of the invoice. Make their study real. Let them get the feel of business and your responsibility of making successful business men out of them will be much easier to fulfil. GENERAL OBJECTIVES OF COMMERCIAL EDUCATION LOUIS A. RICE, ASSISTANT IN SECONDARY EDUCATION, STATE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, TRENTON, N. J. In his article in the March number of the National Business Education Quarterly , Professor P. W. L. Cox of New York University stated: “The general aims of secondary education are to be sought ( 1 ) in the preparation for participation by youths and adults in the duties of citizenship and in the most directly economic relations of cooperative group life; (2) for their participation in the production and distribution of economic utilities; (3) and for the life of the individual as a relatively free and independent per¬ sonality.” The first one of these aims deals with appreciational knowledges of many business procedures, such as credit, insurance, banking, taxation, amortization, real estate practise. It is closely akin to what was designated as “consumer education.” The second objective listed by Professor Cox is largely vocational, tho with a background of social-economic material, as his article well brings out. The third objective may be divided into two phases: (1) self-discovery by the pupil of his abilities and his ambitions; (2) personality adjustment and development. The first of these is the function of the junior high-school business education, or of the exploratory or orienting course of the senior school — probably junior business training. Professor James M. Glass in his article in the March Quarterly states: “An introductory business course to the extent of assuring intelligent appreciation of the common customs 322 National Education Association of business is a general need of all pupils. . . . This general survey course reveals to the early adolescent, during the period of his first conscious en¬ deavor to adjust himself to his everyday environment of business, an intel¬ ligent interpretation of how he is related to it, how he should adapt him¬ self to it, and how he should use it.” We know from many studies that a large number of pupils fail in business because of reasons that have nothing to do with the ability to do clerical or stenographic work. These are fail¬ ings in human contact or in behavior or in personality. They are just as numerous among pupils who have passed thru other high-school curriculums as among those who have passed thru the commercial curriculum. The school must give attention to what the pupil is, and how his appearance, character traits, and general demeanor may be improved, as it does to what his knowledges and skills are. To quote Glass again: “The required ‘intro¬ duction to business’ course has as strong a claim to a place in the core curriculum of constants as any other branch of general education designed to meet the needs of everyday living.” In formulating this part of the philosophy of business education, we are reminded of Kilpatrick’s statement that philosophy emerges from conflicts of ideas. It seems to fit well here. The objectives of commercial education are a series of battles between forces commanded by General Necessity and General Desirability on the one hand and General Misunderstanding and General Disagreement on the other. While it might be difficult to formulate a statement of objectives that everyone will subscribe to in detail, it does seem that after half a century of intensive business education we should be able to state in fairly simple language just what we are after. GUIDANCE IN COMMERCIAL EDUCATION TOWARD VOCATIONAL AND NON-VOCATIONAL OBJECTIVES ERNEST A. ZELLIOT, UNIVERSITY OF DENVER, DENVER, COLO. Guidance in secondary schools is generally accepted as an all-school func¬ tion to assist each pupil in developing an understanding about occupations, about education, and about himself that will enable him to choose and pre¬ pare for, more intelligently, a vocation in which he may serve with reasonable assurance of success. In this program, every teacher has something to con¬ tribute. Opinions regarding the meaning of the term “commercial education” differ. Some would limit its use to education which definitely prepares for entry to, and advancement in, a business position. Business subjects pursued for non-vocational reasons would be “general education,” not “commercial education.” In the minds of many, any subject pertaining to business or a business skill is “commercial education,” regardless of purpose. To avoid the issue, the term “commercial department” will be used in this discussion. Department of Business Education 323 In the commercial department, a range of business subjects (dependent upon the size and location of the school) are offered from which pupils may select according to needs and purposes. These subjects, separately, or in combination, may emphasize one or more of several objectives. Among the objectives are: (1) the exploratory; (2) personal use; (3) general educa¬ tion; (4) orientation for the college school of commerce; (5) use in indus¬ trial or agricultural courses; (6) preparatory for advanced business study; (7) vocational background; (8) vocational skill training. Wise choices of business subjects for any purpose depend upon effective guidance. In this, the commercial teacher has a major responsibility to assist thru many of his contacts. Among them are: (1) in the school guidance program as a whole; (2) as a reliable source for information about busi¬ ness education; (3) a sensible use of commercial tests; (4) in teaching exploratory business courses; (5) social business courses; (6) business skill courses; (7) extracurriculum commercial activities; (8) placement and follow-up. In guidance within the commercial field, curriculum offerings are im¬ portant but the attitude, the training, and the ability of the business teacher are most vital. SECRETARY’S MINUTES Chicago, III. First Session, Hotel Stevens, Saturday, July 1, 1933, 9:30 a. m. The president, Paul S. Lomax, addressed the Association briefly, reviewing the progress of the past year. He then turned the meeting over to J. O. Malott, United States Office of Education, Washington, D. C., the chairman of the morning program devoted to “Objectives of Business Education as Viewed by Classroom Teachers of Commercial Subjects.” Mr. Malott stated that as Earl W. Barnhart, Federal Board for Vocational Educa¬ tion, Washington, D. C., chairman of the Monday afternoon discussion of “Methods of Determining Objectives of Business Education,” had been recalled to Washington by a telegram just received, he felt it best to exchange time assignments with Mr. Barnhart. After some discussion, Mr. Barnhart proceeded with the presentation of his topic, with subsequent discussion from the floor. Second Session, Hotel Stevens, Saturday, July 1, 1933, 12:15 p. m. Joint luncheon of the Department of Business Education and the National Associa¬ tion of Commercial Teacher Training Institutions. Miss Ann Brewington, Universitv of Chicago, presided. The address was made by A. L. Threlkeld, Superintendent of Schools, Denver, Colorado, who told in a very interesting manner of the activities of the N. E. A. Commission on the Emergency in Education. Third Session, Hotel Stevens, Monday, July 3, 1933, 12:30 p. m. This session opened with a luncheon presided over by B. J. Knauss, Director of Commercial Education in the Chicago schools, who introduced the Chairman, Ellis D. McFarland of the Chicago Association of Commerce. McFarland spoke briefly and then introduced John Y. Beaty, editor of the Bankers’ Monthly, who addressed the Department on “Objectives of Business Education as Viewed by Business.” 324 National Education Association Mr. Malott then reopened his discussion of the "Objectives of Business Educa¬ tion as Viewed by Classroom Teachers of Commercial Education'’ and spoke on this topic as did M. E. Studebaker of Ball State Teachers’ College, Muncie, Indiana, and Lloyd L. Jones, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. L. A. Rice, State Department of Education, Trenton, N. J., then spoke briefly on “General Objectives of Commercial Education in Secondary Schools. This was followed by discussion led by C. C. Crawford, State Teachers College, Valley City, North Dakota, participated in by a number of teachers in the audience. E. A. Zelliot, University of Denver, Colorado, then presented the problems of “Guidance in Commercial Education Toward Vocational and Non-\ ocational Ob¬ jectives.” This session was followed immediately by the annual business meeting. Business Meeting The business meeting was called to order by President Paul S. Lomax, of New York University, in the Hotel Stevens, Chicago, at 4:45 p. m., July 3, 19j3. The first matter considered was the Report of the Resolutions Committee, Helen Reynolds, Ohio University, chairman. This report was read by the secretary in the absence of the chairman, and was as follows: Report of Resolutions Committee The following resolutions are presented. 1. We express our appreciation to Mr. Knauss and to Miss Brevwngton for preparing for us the delightful luncheons of Saturday and Monday. 2. We express our gratification at the improvement in health of Clinton A. Reed, Department of Education, State of New Work, a member of our executive committee. 3. We express our sorrow because of the illness of Ira W. Kibby, California State Department of Education, a member of our Executive Committee, and our hope for his speedy recovery. # . 4. We express to D. D. Lessenberry, Director of Business Education, Uni¬ versity of Pittsburgh, our sincere sympathy in his recent bereavement. (Signed) Helen Reynolds W. R. Odell Committee on Resolutions. It was moved and seconded that these resolutions be adopted and spread on the minutes of the Department of Business Education, and that copies be sent to the individuals named therein. Motion carried. _ The Secretary then read the minutes of the last business meeting which were approved. The report of the Treasurer, L. Gilbert Dake, St. Louis, dated June 24, 1933, was then read by the secretary. It was moved and seconded that the report be accepted. Motion carried. The report of the Budget Committee was presented by the Chairman, Clay D. Slinker, Des Moines. This estimate of expenses for the year 1933-34 totaled $1390, based on anticipated income. It was moved and seconded that the proposed budget be adopted. Motion carried. # The President then called for consideration of the constitution which was laid on the table at the last business meeting. He explained that the experience of the year had shown that a few changes were desirable, and asked the secretary to enumerate them. The secretary explained that these changes had chiefly to. do with combining the offices of secretary and treasurer, the custom of the Association prior to the current year, and establishing the office of second vicepresident, together with a few minor changes of wording. It was moved and seconded that the con¬ stitution be adopted with these changes. Motion carried. Department of Business Education 325 The President read a letter from Edward J. McNamara of New York, organiza¬ tion chairman of the proposed American Council of Business Education, asking for the participation and indorsement of the N. E. A. Department of Business Education. After some discussion, it was moved and seconded that the President appoint a delegate to represent this Department at the organization meeting to be held in December, and that this Department proceed to cooperate in the formation of such a Council, provided, however, that any plans for full participation of this Depart¬ ment be subject to approval at the annual business meeting in June, 1934. Motion carried. The report of the Nominating Committee, consisting of Mrs. Esta Ross Stuart, Berkeley, California, Helen Frankland, Nashville, Tennessee, Paul A. Carlson, Whitewater, Wisconsin, H. G. Shields, University of Chicago, and L. A. Rice,' Chairman, was read by the chairman. (This report was not signed by Messrs. Carl¬ son and Shields who were compelled to leave before the committee concluded its sessions.) The Committee presented the following nominations: For President — Benjamin R. Haynes, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California For First \ icepresident — M. E. Studebaker, Ball State Teachers College, Muncie, Indiana For Second \ icepresident — Clay D. Slinker, Director of Commercial Educa¬ tion, Des Moines, Iowa For Secretary-Treasurer — Raymond C. Goodfellow, Director of Commercial Education, Newark, N. J. For Members of the Executive Committee: Terms Expiring 1934: Paul S. Lomax, New \ ork L niversitv (retiring president); Annie C. Woodward, High School, Somerville, Mass.; Seth B. Carkin, Packard School, New York; Dorothy L. Travis, High School, Pierre, South Dakota Terms Expiring 1935 : B. Frank Kyker, North Carolina College for Women, Greensboro. N. C. ; E. A. Zelliot, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado Terms Expiring 1936: G. F. Cadisch, State College, Pullman, Washington ; E. G. Blackstone, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa It was moved and seconded that the report of the nominating committee be accepted. Motion carried. The president then called for nominations from the floor; there were none. It was moved and seconded that the secretary be instructed to cast a ballot for the nominees presented by the nominating committee. Motion carried. The president declared the above-named officers elected. It was moved by Miss Wakefield, Fredericksburg, Va., seconded by Dr. Cadisch, that the secretary be instructed to voice the protest of the Department of Business Education against the elimination of federal representatives of commercial educa¬ tion, to Secretary Ickes. Motion carried. The president explained that this had already been done, and would be repeated if necessary. There being no further business, it was moved and seconded that the Department adjourn. Motion carried. ' The Department of Classroom Teachers The department of classroom TEACHERS held its first session at the St. Paul meeting, July 8, 1914. It was organized in response to petitions representing classroom teachers in all parts of the country. See Proceedings , 1914 :909. The Department was reorganized under a constitu¬ tion at the Boston meeting in July, 1922. For the constitution of this Department see pages 352-55 of this volume. For amendments see Proceedings , 1923 : 578; 1929:365; and 1931:390-91. The Department of Classroom Teachers cooperates with the National League of Teachers' Associations. The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are : President , Faye Read, 131 Vernon Place, Pueblo, Colo. ; Vicepresident , Mrs. Myrtle Hooper Dahl, 3527 Pillsbury Avenue, Minneapolis, Minn.; Secretary , Mrs. Mary D. Barnes, 223 Summit Road, Elizabeth, N. J. ; Director exofficio , Mrs. F. Blanche Preble, 10855 Vernon Avenue, Chicago, Ill. ; Regional Direc¬ tors: Eastern Section, Daisy Lord, 1027 West Main Street, Waterbury, Conn. (Term expires 1934) ; Middle Section, Mary C. Ralls, 6529 Jefferson Street, Kansas City, Mo. (Term expires 1935) ; Western Section, Albert M. Shaw, 2833 Estara Avenue, Los Angeles, Calif. (Term expires 1936). This Department meets at the time of the annual meeting of the Association. Facts relating to the establishment of this Department and record of meet¬ ings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1914:909-916 1915:1161-1177 1916:637-652 1917:615-622 1918:381-389 1919:375-392 1920:343-355 1921 :399-406 1922 :683-691 1923 :569-620 1924 :460-499 1925:365-402 1926 :393-423 1927:353-390 1928 :325-352 1929 :335-368 1930 :293-307 1931:359-392 1932:303-335 [ 328 ] PUBLIC OWNERSHIP THE WAY OUT CARL D. THOMPSON, SECRETARY, PUBLIC OWNERSHIP LEAGUE OF AMERICA, CHICAGO, ILL. Our country is in the midst of the most serious crisis in the history of modern civilization. Fifteen million men and women are out of work — their purchasing power destroyed, their morale degenerating, and techno¬ logical development making matters steadily worse. Four million farmers driven from their farms. Ten thousand bank fail¬ ures — and a banking crisis so serious that at one time every bank in the country closed. Utilities and industry paralyzed. Schools and universities cutting down their terms of service and facilities just at the time they are most needed; teachers being dismissed to join the ranks of the unemployed ; and many thousands of them unpaid for months upon months — 14,000 of them here in Chicago alone. And to this crisis and its needs our overlords and rulers of industry, civics and finance have no adequate answer. They can find $90,000,000 to help a stranded private banking system here in Chicago ; but when the unpaid teachers stormed these temples of the money changers asking for their pay the answer they got was, “To hell with the trouble makers.’’ But there is an answer to this tragic crisis — there is a way out. And it is the same answer and the same way out that our American people have always found and used when everything else has failed. When America faced the problem and the necessity of universal education our public-school system was the answer and the way out. And in it we have the greatest institution of modern civilization. When business and industry and the social requirements faced the neces¬ sity of universal dissemination of information and intercourse the postal system was the answer. And the only bank and banking system that with¬ stood the storms of general bankruptcy in this present crisis was the U. S. Postal Savings Bank. When the cities of America faced the grim necessity of supplying their inhabitants with water in sufficient quantities and in such qualities as would protect the public health and the safety of life and property, municipally owned water works was the answer and the way out. Today there are 7,853 cities, towns, and villages that own and operate their own water works systems. And that means practically all of them. So today in this present and most serious of all crises public ownership of basic utilities is the answer and the way out. We see the United States government driven to the necessity of develop¬ ing the great hydro-electric power project at Muscle Shoals. It is no longer a question of personal opinion or of social or political belief — it is a matter of incorrigible public necessity. Men must have work. Private enterprise can not supply it. The public — the government must. [ 329 ] 330 National Education Association But the government cannot give men work unless it has work to give. Hence we are driven by public necessity into public ownership. Cities, towns, and villages are being driven by the same necessity. Here in Chicago we are spending $5,000,000 a month in unemployment and poor relief. Obviously, this cannot go on very long before it will bankrupt the city and impoverish everybody. On the other hand, here is another city, typical of thousands of others — the little city of Washington, Indiana — that is actually making money by keeping its people at work and so keeping them out of the poorhouse. And how ? The city owns and operates a revenue-producing, money-mak¬ ing electric light and power plant. Out of its surplus earnings it employs its unemployed, it reduces its public debt, reduces its taxes 60 percent, while other cities are increasing theirs. And when the depression came and its chief factory was about to close, the city, out of the surplus earnings of its municipally owned light and power plant, bought stock in the factory and kept it going, and so kept its people at work. And the city makes 6 percent on its investment and sells the factory $8,000 worth of electric current from its municipal light plant besides. Other cities are doing even better. Los Angeles, out of the $3,900,000 profit it makes every year on its municipally owned water, light, and power system, appropriates hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for the relief of the unemployed. And these are but typical examples that could be multiplied almost in¬ definitely, illustrating the manner in which our cities, states, and federal government are being driven, whether they will or no, and in spite of all our stubborn conservatism and stupidity, to public ownership as the only way out of our present dilemma. CRITICAL PRESENTDAY ISSUES IN EDUCATION JESSIE GRAY, PHILADELPHIA NORMAL SCHOOL, PHILADELPHIA, PA. Before speaking of critical presentday issues in education in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, I shall explain that in my city, we have a board of edu¬ cation appointed by the Board of Judges and responsible to them alone for the rectitude of their administration. In the time since schools were divorced from politics, buildings have im¬ proved beyond our fondest hope. Our board has had a fine attitude toward their teachers, and our morale has been built up and strengthened by their paternal attitude. The board realized that fine teaching can only emanate from happy teachers. Their wise procedure has secured to us such fine con¬ ditions that I hesitate to tell of them, because of distressing contrast. It is with the fond hope that other boards will see what can be done with fine management that I shall relate what we have been able to hold. In this period of distress and depression, it is not my purpose to boast of our good fortune but humbly to testify to a condition that has withstood Department of Classroom Teachers 331 the assault of bad times, because of the superior management of our funds. For over forty years, it was said of the secretary of our board, “William Dick has had millions of dollars pass thru his hands, but not one cent has ever stuck to them.” After his resignation, the present business manager, Edward Merchant, has managed the school funds, collected thru our nine and one-half mills school tax, in such a way that, notwithstanding an in¬ crease in the percentage of unpaid taxes, the board of education has paid all bills currently with the exception of the year 1931. In our schools there has been no reduction in the number of books nor in stationery and supplies. There has been no harmful curtailment in repair work and today the buildings are in better condition than they ever were, and are being kept at that standard. There have been no reductions at all in teachers’ salaries and no dis¬ missals of teachers. As vacancies occurred thru death or resignation, the places have not been filled. Thereby, in many cases classes have become larger. Our pupil-load, however, is about normal. There has been no shortening of the school term which is fixed by the state. The building program has been stopped, but no more than it should be, because, with changing conditions, it would not have been possible to tell the right location for new buildings. In our state we have held all reductions in our program down to a two- year period 1933-35. We have been able to hold the retirement law intact. To guarantee the contributions, an act was passed making it optional for teachers to pay on their peak salary (altho receiving a temporary reduction). If teachers de¬ cided to do this, it became necessary for the state and local district to do likewise. This safeguards amounts to older teachers within the last ten years of service, the average salary for which is the basis for computing the retire¬ ment allowance. This brings great happiness to teachers. Legislation was enacted to prohibit salary refunds which boards of school directors were requesting, in some sections, in lieu of actual salary reductions. Legislation permitting salary reductions of ten percent was passed and state subsidies for school districts were reduced approximately ten percent. School districts were legally permitted to issue and sell bonds to the extent of eighty percent of uncollected taxes, with the proviso that such bonds must be liquidated within ten years thru definite sinking funds or other provisions. A bill was enacted to permit groups of teachers to organize and partici¬ pate in credit unions. To meet the present crisis our organizations have aroused individual mem¬ bers to a realization of the need of definite action which was suggested a visit, a letter, a telegram to their legislators. Key individuals were carefully selected to contact leaders in groups favor¬ able to education and opposed to education. Dignified publicity material was disseminated to teachers, taxpayers associations, editors of newspapers and current magazines ; the American and State Federation of Labor, the P. O. S. 332 National Education Association of A., the American Legion, Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, League of Women Voters, Federation of Women’s Clubs, Parent-Teacher Associa¬ tions, and the Grange. Every time we teachers could arouse lay groups to defend educational pro¬ grams, we had not only a first but a second and stronger line of defense. CRITICAL PRESENTDAY ISSUES IN EDUCATION ROBERT C. KEENAN, HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER, CHICAGO, ILL. The question is asked, what more can organizations do in this crisis? I think they can and should do a lot more. It seems to me that organizations are apt to lose sight of the reason for their existence, until the organization becomes an object in itself. Officers are too likely to determine the value of their services in terms of bigger and better memberships, rather than in actual accomplishmnts redounding to the benefit of their members. The criterion of success does not appear to me to be the erection of a fine headquarters build- ing, the publication of a handsome and self-laudatory house organ, or the holding of monthly, semi-annual, or annual talk fests. Americans seem to have a mania for conventions. Chicago is having so many this year that we hope to see at least a local return of prosperity, perhaps sufficient for this hotel to pay its long overdue taxes. But aside from providing an opportunity for tired business men to get a little vacation away from the home fireside, and for the fortunate delegates to get a trip at the expense of the Brother Elks, I don t know just how much good is accomplished at most conven¬ tions, unless you call an accomplishment, the passing of a lot of resolutions which are straightway buried in the files. I do not say this of N. E. A. con¬ ventions for I never attended any, but I have attended others, business and educational. Usually they are just a lot of talk, dealing in generalities and platitudes and flag waving and beautiful theories, with little concrete result. I don t know how much of all this abuse of organizations applies to the N. E. A. for, as I said, I am a novice. I suspect, however, some of it does apply. I certainly feel that if a national organization with the power that this gioup could wield had functioned with proper efficiency during the past twelve months the schools would long since have shared with the banks, in¬ surance companies, railroads, farms, public improvements, and all the rest, in the right to federal aid in bridging this emergency. It has been stated that R. F. C. funds will be supplied to Russia for the purchase of cotton. China is to be given the use of R. F. C. funds to buy wheat. In this city we have the famous or notorious bank that borrowed $90,000,000 from the R. F. C. ; and I observed the statement a few days ago that the Northwestern Railroad would probably refund its maturing bonds by borrowing 50 percent of the amount from the R. F. C. Yet the schools of this nation are denied the right to employ federal credit at a time when the natural sources of credit, the banks, have practically dried up. This Department of Classroom Teachers 333 is not Chicago’s problem alone. I attended a conference in Washington last February at which mayors from cities all over the country pleaded for the government to rescue them from the banker Shylocks who take advantage of this critical time to demand the last pound of flesh in exorbitant interest rates and mutilated budgets before they will buy municipal securities. Had the teachers thruout the land acted vigorously and in conceit, there is no doubt that Congress would have considered education at least on a level with bankrupt railways and sewage disposal plants. You all realize, I am sure, that it is only by such vigorous united action in the past that you have ob¬ tained from your state legislatures whatever benefits education enjoys in your state. A few days ago I read a story about the teachers and P. T. A. of a town in Alabama who got together in public prayer to avert a cut in the educational budget. Far be it from me to deny the efficacy of prayer, but I am reminded that .when some of the Continental Congress objected because the Chaplain prayed, as usual, that the Lord would shower his Divine Wis¬ dom upon the king, Benjamin Franklin pointed out that it could do no harm for they had been offering that prayer for many years and the king showed no wisdom yet. To influence our statesmen you must say it, not with flowers but with votes. We in Chicago believe there is a nationwide plot to cripple public edu¬ cation, to take it out of the reach of the common man’s children and restrict it to those who can pay for it. We think the focal point of the plot is Chi¬ cago, but we know that the attack led by socalled citizens’ committees is going on in the same way all over the country. These committees are made up of men of power and wealth and position. They are answerable for their actions to none unless their boards of directors, because they are not elected by the people. They have behind them the support of the press for they lep- resent the large advertisers. . . . One of our Chicago newspaper publishers goes about the country giving talks against high taxes. His paper has always been adverse to paying taxes. For many years it occupied tax free land which it rented from the school- board at an absurdly low figure. In crying out against fads and frills he fails to point out that tho his paper raised both its price and its advertising rates during boom times it has never reduced them. And while inveighing against school buildings, his paper erects a highly ornamental elaborate building and continues to publish so many pictures of it that I’m sick of looking at them. Another Chicago gentleman, one of the leaders in our self-appointed group of city saviors, wrote an article which you may have read last January in the esteemed Saturday Evening Post. In it he explained that the large tax¬ payers had taken control here and would never again release control. He himself termed the committee an “extra legal body, but in publishing this article the magazine gave us a hint as to our power. Teachers all over the country wrote letters of protest to the publisher. Moreover, a good many of them wrote similar letters to those who advertise in the P ost. This was hit¬ ting tho magazine where it hurt most— in the pocketbook. Last April Mr. 334 National Education Association Crabtree showed me a letter he had received from the publisher. It stated that the teachers were not only influencing subscriptions but were actually interfering with advertisers! That’s horrible, isn’t it? The most interesting thing, however, happened just last week. The same magazine published an article entitled, Blank Pay Days,” purported to be written by a Chicago teacher . This was plainly an effort to retrieve the previous error, and so anxious was the editor to have us all read it that he sent every Chicago teachei a postcard telling about it. Of course it is a weak article which does not attempt to answer the one to which we objected, but it shows that the Saturday Evening Post has a somewhat penitent spirit and wants to placate our wrath. If our organizations would temporarily at least spend less time consider¬ ing methods of teaching, curriculums, character training, health education, and the other proper subjects of peace times, and instead devote themselves wholeheartedly to the war with greed and special interests they would better seive theii members and would find memberships growing as a consequence of the appreciation of the common teacher. We teachers need make no apology for our stand. We do not object to true economies; we advocate elimination of waste and non-essentials. We can show that our enemies are not sincere. For example, in Chicago our janitor system is the highest paid in the country while our teachers rank low among cities comparable in size. The fact is notorious; yet our citizens committee has not changed it. While the board of education shortens the school term and searches for more means to save another six million, you may have noticed in the papers last week that the city is planning to build another island out in the lake at an initial cost of $8,000,000 in order to bring the airport fifty minutes closer to the center of the city. The old slogan is reversed. It is now “Millions for airplanes, concrete roads, stop and go lights, or world’s fairs, but very few cents for education.” But the public still wants its children educated. The parents will not tolerate the destruction of the schools, if they are informed. We have the best machinery in the country for molding public opinion for we come in contact with all the people. Let us inform them of the true facts. Let us take up the gauntlet hurled at us by big business; let us, too, fight for a new deal. SOME PRESENTDAY ISSUES IN EDUCATION MRS. JOHANNA LINDLOF, NEW YORK, N. Y. The City of New York has been no exception in the campaign to reduce educational costs. Last winter they held a special session of the legislature and reduced the salaries of the teachers $20,000,000. However, because the teachers were awake and were organized, we were able to refuse to take a voluntary cut as our then worthy mayor has suggested to us during the summer vacation and we were successful in having the bill that was passed provide a graded cut, which made it easier for those who had the lowest salaries. Department of Classroom Teachers 335 There is one other thing I would like to say about the New York teachers organizations. We feel that we have been able to hold the foit for our teachers and for educational standards in the state, because w e have been united as one great body, altho we have so many varied teachers organiza¬ tions in the city. Whenever we appear before the legislature we come as one united group and they listen to us. Even at that special session, when our salaries were reduced, we made an attempt and even the governor of the state attempted, altho futilely to get the bankers of the state to agree to a stated time for the duration of the cut, but that “worthy” gentleman, Mr. Mitchell, representing the bankers at the other end of the wire absolutely refused. So we were com¬ pelled to take the cut for an indefinite period. Now, I want to tell you a little bit about the bankers and teachers of New York. Last September we held a very large meeting in the auditorium of one of the schools of the city and our speakers on that occasion told the teachers what the bankers were about to do and there were teachers among us at that time who felt that our speakers were over-stating the situation, that these worthy men who have control of the finances of the country would never think of doing these things. My friends, what Dr. Lefkowitz and Mr. Lewis told us that day did not half express the situation. What has been revealed by the Senate investigation has told us ten times more. We have issued a little pamphlet called, Teachers and the Economic Situa¬ tion, which gives you facts which every teacher in this nation should know. This has been published by three groups in New York: the 1 eachers’ Union, Local No. 5 of the American Federation of Teachers, the Teachers’ Wel¬ fare League, and the Kindergarten 6-B Teachers’ Association. Dr. Abraham Lefkowitz, one of the ablest teachers in our city, is the author. We have 500 copies of this pamphlet here which are to be distributed fiee of chaige to all who wish to have them. I hope that nobody who can possibly obtain a copy will go away without getting one, reading it, studying it, and imparting the information it gives to all whom you can get to listen, not only to teachers but to parents and citizens everywhere. You want to know what teachers organizations can do. I will tell you what the teachers can and should do. You are the teachers of the nation. You are training the citizens of this nation. If we have a poor government, whose is the responsibility but the teachers who have confined their efforts to teaching the academic subjects, who have been so afraid to delve into social sciences, who have been afraid to get the pupils to thinking about things outside of the classroom that concern us? I have been pleased at this convention to find that we are being told that we have rights to consider outside of the classroom as well as within ; that our jobs concern the lives and the things that happen all around us. Far more important than teaching our pupils how to add, multiply, and divide is it to teach them to think and understand that we are living not to our¬ selves alone and that this civilization which we have built up to be nothing but an acquisitive civilization is all wrong ; that the new deal, if it shall mean 336 National Education Association anything shall mean what this man told us here today — that this shall be one of the important things that you are going to go out and teach your children. I have belonged for many years and I hope to belong as long as I live, to another organization of teachers, as well as this — the American Federation of Teachers, which is a body for all the teachers of this nation, just as the National Education Association is. I hope and believe that the time will come when these two bodies, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association will join together in one vast body to mold public opinion, to work for the same ends. Our goal should be to bring about the kind of civilization that will not let any child starve, that will let no child go unclothed, and let no men or women go hungry, that will let no one be without food or shelter when there is plenty all about us, and the means should be right here for everyone to live in comfort and make this world something like the place so many of you talk about when you think of heaven, a place where everybody will be happy. Why need we acquire millions thru the exploitation of other human beings? Why do we permit a situation of that sort? Why? Because we have grown up in a civilization where that was the common thing. Must we continue to think that way ? This man today has shown you what is done by these public utilities, that they take the money from you and then ask you to reduce your salaries when what they are stealing — that is the word that describes it from all of us could be well used to give educational oppor¬ tunities to all the people. Now what can be done by a publication like this one which I have here for distribution, can be done in many other ways and let us hope that the teachers of this nation, thru the medium of speakers, such as the guest speaker here today, and thru the study of economics and of ethical standards shall go out with a message to the nation that will prove that depressions are unnecessary, that there is enough and to spare for all, and that we can and should do our part to make that situation possible. REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT MRS. F. BLANCHE PREBLE, VAN VLISSINGEN SCHOOL, CHICAGO, ILL. The Department of Classroom Teachers of the National Education As¬ sociation has been called upon constantly during the year by both local and state groups of teachers for advice and assistance. Your president has en¬ deavored to meet the calls, but many times she was not able to respond due to conflicting dates and other causes. I have spoken to 35 groups of teachers in 27 cities and 1 1 states. In all my contacts with the teachers I have tried to emphasize the importance of local, state, and national organizations and especially the necessity for classroom teachers being organized locally in groups where administrators are not present. I have told them of course that all-inclusive groups have a place but that the great mass of the teachers on whom we must depend for defense Department of Classroom Teachers 337 against such attacks as are being made on education today cannot be aroused to their full strength and interest unless the natural leaders among them can have the opportunity of working with the teachers in groups by themselves. In making plans for addressing teachers in various cities I have tried always to appear before a meeting called by the teachers. This makes the meeting their own project and makes them interested and enthusiastic about it in advance, and thus it is much easier to reach them with my message than if they were called together by some one in authority. I have found the super¬ intendents and other administrators very friendly toward the National Edu¬ cation Association and the Classroom Department and very anxious to have us do anything we can to arouse interest and enthusiasm in the teachers. When I have gone into the principles underlying the necessities for having teachers organized by themselves I have been met with understanding and sympathy from the administrators even tho in many instances they seem not to have thought of these underlying principles before. On July 20 I spoke before summer school students of the Michigan State Normal College at Ypsilanti at a special assembly called for the occasion. Many of them were experienced teachers and I found them keenly interested in the problems of the profession as we find them today. On October Hand 15 I attended the annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the Illinois State Teachers Association at Flora, Ill., and spoke twice on the general program, each time to an audience of 1200 teachers. This section of the state is definitely rural and feels especially the discrimina¬ tion against agriculture thru revenue laws based on a state constitution adopted in 1870 before the rise of great industrial cities of wealth. Such a constitution provides no effective method of equitably distributing the tax burden. Now at the end of a year of intensive campaigning by the teachers oDIllinois the leaders of the teachers feel that the lines have been held fairly well so far as school legislation goes but practically no progress has been made toward a permanent solution of financial problems of the state. In New York, N. Y., on October 171 met the officers of the High School Teachers Association at a dinner conference, and on October 24 I conferred with the president of the Kindergarten-6B Association and the teacher members of the pension board. Both these conferences were arranged by Sara Fahey, director exofficio of the Department. These two large associa¬ tions of classroom teachers have made remarkable contributions to the schools in their own city and state. Let us hope that they will in the future make their influence felt more strongly in the councils of the National Education Association and of the Classroom Department. The combined membership of the two New York groups is so great that if all of them were repre¬ sented in the delegate assembly of the National Education Association the classroom teacher movement would take on a new significance. On the afternoon of October 18 1 spoke to the Teachers Association in Rahway, N. J. A number of teacher leaders from the neighboring city of Elizabeth attended the meeting also. The elementary teachers of that state succeeded last year in forming a department in the state association. 338 National Education Association I spent October 19 and 20 in the headquarters at Washington getting acquainted with the work there. Mr. Crabtree called a special meeting of the staff at which we discussed the work of the Department. Miss Winn and I also went over in detail the plans for the year. Even this short stay at headquarters added very much to my appreciation of the power and im¬ portance of the National Education Association. On October 22 I spoke at Greensboro, N. C., on the general program of the annual meeting of the Northwestern District Teachers of the North Carolina Education Association, and also at a meeting of the classroom teachers of the district. Three hundred teachers gathered in the cafeteria of the senior high school for a six o’clock dinner which was followed by a business meeting. At that time the teachers voted to organize a classroom department for the district, adopted a constitution, and elected officers. It was the hope of the North Carolina teacher leaders that a classroom depart¬ ment might be formed in each district of the state during the year. On October 27 and 28 I attended the meeting of the Minnesota Educa¬ tion Association at St. Paul. There I addressed the Classroom Department of the State Association at a luncheon which was attended by about 650 teachers. As in all sections of the country that I have visited, the Minnesota teachers were very much disturbed by actual and threatened cuts in educa¬ tional budgets. They are fortunate, however, in having a number of strong local associations of classroom teachers in the state to back up the school administrators in Minnesota in their efforts to save educational budgets from ruinous reductions. On November 16 I spoke at the annual dinner of the Elementary Teach¬ ers Association at Springfield, Ill. This group has been organized less than two years but already shows progress. They have been working with the High School Teachers Association of Springfield, together with some other groups in the state in making plans for a State League of Teachers Associa¬ tions. The next evening, November 17, I spoke at the annual dinner of the Milwaukee Teachers Association. This occasion showed that the teachers were able to laugh at their own troubles in the little drama they put on and also that they were guarding the interests of Milwaukee schools in their usual effective way. December 2 and 3 found me working among the teachers of Rockford, Ill. Conferences began upon my arrival at six o’clock in the evening, and ran almost continuously thru the next day. The climax was a luncheon given by the Rockford Teachers Association. This group is very earnest about teacher welfare and has committees working on plans for group insurance, a credit union, and other definite activities. The period from December 8 to 17 was spent in southern Michigan. I spoke before the Albion Teachers Club, a group of teachers from Hillsdale County, and the Association of Teachers Clubs from Southeastern Michi¬ gan. The latter association includes clubs from seven counties of that part of the state, banded together with the hope that they may be able to protect Department of Classroom Teachers 339 the children from the consequences of the depressed economic conditions of this industrial section. According to the information received recently, at least two classroom groups have been organized in that part of the state — one in Highland Park and one in Detroit. On this trip I visited the campuses of Albion College, Hillsdale College, Michigan State Normal College, and the University of Michigan. In all four schools I spoke to classes in the departments of education. The Michigan teachers then were thinking very seriously about the financial problems of the schools of their state in view of the fact that their state constitution was amended last November so that the tax rate on real and personal property must not be greater than 15 mills on a dollar. They have been working very hard with their legislature to try to save the schools and at present I am not able to say what success they have had. On April 8 I attended the annual meeting of the Southwestern Division of the Illinois State Teachers Association at East St. Louis. Here I made a short address on the main program, but the chief event of my day there was a luncheon for classroom teachers sponsored by the East St. Louis Grade Teachers’ Fellowship Society. Nearly 300 teachers were in attend¬ ance and listened with gratifying attention to my address on the aims of the Classroom Department, and on the contribution that classroom teachers should make toward helping to solve the problems now facing public educa¬ tion in America. The Classroom Teachers Association of Tulsa, Okla., invited me to speak at its annual business meeting on April 20. I found this group very progres¬ sive and most eager to stand by the local schools in the present crisis. After the meeting I attended a dinner with the executive board of the association. The committee in charge of securing speakers for the St. Joseph, Mo., Teachers Institute asked me to be the speaker at their final institute held on April 22. The attendance was practically 100 percent and I found the teachers of this city most willing to work together in the difficult task of saving education. On the evening before the meeting the St. Joseph Teachers Club gave a very fine reception for me which was attended by a large num¬ ber of the teachers and principals, and the superintendent and his wife. The Association of High School Women of Kansas City, Mo., sponsored a dinner at which I spoke on the evening of April 22. All teachers in the city were invited and a large number responded. The dinner was a delight¬ ful affair and I found the teachers there very much interested in under¬ standing and warding off the nationwide attack on the schools. During the month of May I traveled in New York state where I made a series of ten addresses in nine different cities. The trip was planned by Emily Tarbell, president of the Teachers Welfare League of New York state. My first stop was at Jamestown where I spoke on May 1 at a dinner given by the Women Teachers Club. This Club has some very fine leaders and the true classroom teachers’ spirit. On May 3 I spoke at a dinner in Elmira which was arranged by the Women Teachers’ Club of that city. I found them a very enterprising 340 National Education Association group determined to see that education takes no more than a fair share of the economies resulting from the depression. In the afternoon I spoke for fifteen minutes over the local radio station on “The National Emergency in Educa¬ tion.” The next address was given on May 4 before the teachers of the Cortland schools. This was an afternoon meeting and was well attended by teachers eager to find a way out of present difficulties. The Syracuse Teachers Association arranged for an afternoon meeting for May 5. This group showed unusual appreciation of the difficulties fac¬ ing education and are taking a leading part in the struggle in New York state. The meeting was followed by a dinner conference with the officers of the association. On Saturday, May 6, I spoke in Syracuse at a regional conference called by Miss Tarbell, at which nine cities and towns were represented — Auburn, Binghamton, Elmira, Geddes, Oneida, Rome, Sol- vay, Syracuse, and Weedsport. Luncheon was served at the Hotel Syracuse and the discussion lasted thruout the afternoon. In the midst of the confer¬ ence I left for a fifteen minute broadcast, and then returned to find the dis¬ cussion still going on. The Elementary Teachers Association of Troy held an evening meeting at which I spoke on May 8. This, too, is an earnest group of women devoted to the interests of the schools. In the City of New York the Kindergarten-6B Association held a special meeting which I addressed on May 9. This group is ever on guard in the interests of children and teachers and should be given much credit for the way in which the lines have been held in their city this year. The meeting was followed by a dinner conference with the officers. On the evening of May 1 1 I attended a dinner given by the executive board of the High School Teachers Association of the City of New York. I found this a stimulating and well-informed group. Daisy Lord, our eastern regional director, met me in New York City on Saturday, May 13, and we went together to her summer home near Mil¬ ford, Conn. There I conferred with teachers from New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Norwich, and New London. This little state is very well organized as far as teachers are concerned and is making a real contribution in these troublous times. On the way back to Chicago I stopped at Rome, N. Y., and spent a day there, May 16, where I spoke at an afternoon meeting attended by all the teachers. This was followed by a dinner conference arranged especially for teachers interested in forming a classroom organization for Rome. Definite plans were made which will undoubtedly result in such an organization. On May 23 I was called to South Bend to speak before the Teachers Federation there. Like so many groups of teachers they have had drastic cuts and are facing great uncertainty next year; but they are determined to carry on as best they can and to save everything possible for education. The meeting of our Department at the winter conference in Minneapolis was most successful. The cooperation of Superintendent Reed of that city, and the enthusiastic work of the local committee of teachers under the chair- Department of Classroom Teachers 341 manship of Myrtle Hooper Dahl resulted in the largest midwinter luncheon and conference ever held by the Department. Nearly 600 people were in attendance and most of them remained thruout the afternoon for the dis¬ cussion conference on “Recent Significant Changes Affecting the Pupils and Teachers in the Public Schools.” All the speakers for the conference were classroom teacher leaders from various sections of the country and the members of the executive board of the Department. Intelligent interest was shown in all the facts brought out and the originality and freedom of the discussion was pronounced. This meeting was an outstanding example of the way classroom teachers can work together in presenting and evaluating significant information re¬ garding public education. A quotation from our Department president’s report of last year is quite pertinent in describing the Minneapolis confer¬ ence: “The keen analysis of the situation made by these teachers and others who were drawn into the discussion, and the interest manifested by the audience demonstrated clearly that teachers are ready to discuss their own problems, and are willing to profit by such discussion. The old myth, that it is necessary to secure a widely-known speaker for our winter meeting in order to draw an audience, was laid low by this conference of teachers.” All the members of the executive board of the Department were kept very busy thruout the week with meetings of the board, with attending the meet¬ ings to hear the inspirational addresses given by speakers of national note, and in visits to the schools of Minneapolis. There has been little committee activity in the Department this year be¬ cause of the fact that teacher leaders thruout the country have been so absorbed in local problems. At the annual business meeting a year ago a committee on academic freedom of the teacher was recommended. Professor Karl Guenther of Ypsilanti, Mich., was appointed chairman of such a com¬ mittee and he and the other members have been at work for some months on a report to be presented at the business meeting in Chicago. The com¬ mittee on resolutions was appointed with Anna Thompson of Kansas City, a former president of the Department, as chairman. This committee will also report in Chicago. The Eighth Yearbook committee has done remark¬ ably fine work this year. This volume probably will be published early in 1934. At the meeting in Minneapolis the National Education Association and the Department of Superintendence set up the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education. The commission consists of seven members : three city superintendents, one state superintendent, one dean of education, a college professor of school administration, and a classroom teacher. Your president is the classroom teacher member. The other members are John K. Norton, chairman, professor of education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. ; J. B. Edmonson, dean, School of Educa¬ tion, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Sydney B. Hall, state superintendent of public instruction, Richmond, Va. ; A. L. Threlkeld, superintendent of schools, Denver, Colo.; Herbert S. Weet, superintendent 342 National Education Association of schools, Rochester, N. Y. ; and David E. Weglein, superintendent of schools, Baltimore, Md. The commission has had meetings in seven cities — Cleveland, Minneapo¬ lis, Kansas City, Chicago, Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Washington — and I have attended all of the meetings except the one in Atlanta. In Kansas City, Chicago, Atlanta, and Cincinnati we held what we term regional confer¬ ences. At these gatherings we call into the centers chosen a list of consul¬ tants from five or six near-by states and go into conference with them for the purpose of getting first-hand facts about conditions in each state, and advice as to how the commission can help with the problems in the different states. The consultants are selected because of their key positions in education and there are about 450 in all. All the members of the executive board of our Department have been appointed. The results of each conference have been written up in the form of minutes and sent to each member of the commis¬ sion and to each consultant who has been appointed for the region in which the conference was held. The work on the commission has been most inter¬ esting to me and I feel sure that we have been helpful to many educational leaders who have been hard pressed this year in their efforts to defend education. Former presidents of the Department have reported many times on the appointment of our officers to important places on N. E. A. committees and on those of other departments. This year, besides acting on the Joint Com¬ mission on the Emergency in Education, your president has been the mem¬ ber from Illinois on the N. E. A. Resolutions Committee. I have been in¬ vited by President Rosier to speak before the Representative Assembly at the convention in Chicago and am also to speak at the meeting of the Depart¬ ment of School Health at its annual meeting. At this point I wish to acknowledge the splendid support the Department has had during this trying year from Secretary Crabtree and all other mem¬ bers of the headquarters staff. Miss Winn, director of Classroom Service, has been especially helpful. The Board of Directors has been most loyal and cooperative. And now I cannot close this report without paying some words of tribute to the leaders I have met on my conference trips about the country for the many kindnesses they have shown to me which have added much to my comfort and happiness. The leaders that classroom teachers choose when they are directing their own affairs with no suggestion from those in author¬ ity stand out as people far above the average. Not only have they impressed me by their gracious hospitality and their delightful social qualities but by the other qualities of real leadership which they possess. The contacts that I have had this year have given me much more faith in democracy than I have ever had before. That is why I am so insistent in saying that classroom teachers must be organized by themselves. A classroom teacher group organ¬ ized with the right machinery can be a pure democracy. If we sometimes feel that democracy has not been highly successful in this country careful thought will lead us to realize that insofar as our government has failed to Department of Classroom Teachers 343 give the greatest good to the greatest number it has been because of too little democracy rather than too much. In working out all the numerous details in connection with the summer meeting to be held in my own city of Chicago there has been with me an undercurrent of gladness because I was thinking always of the joy there would be in seeing again the fine leaders I have met in the many cities I have visited ; the joy that would come in renewing friendships founded on devo¬ tion to a common cause. I hope that officers of the Department will always feel that one of the important parts of our conference work is the cementing of friendship between us and the nation’s teacher leaders. (Reports of the other officers may be found in the Department’s Official Report , June, 1933.) A HISTORY OF THE DEPARTMENT— A RECORD WITH A FUTURE SARA H. FAHEY, GIRLS COMMERCIAL HIGH SCHOOL, BROOKLYN, N. Y. The rapid development in recent years of associations of teachers, which influence the policies of the National Education Association and participate in its work, forms an interesting chapter in the history of the Association. In order to realize better how far forward they have traveled it is well occasionally for teachers to glance backward. By so doing they realize, too, how much they owe to pioneer members of their vocation who daringly blazed the trail in so many directions when the world around them, and the frequently reactionary members of their own group, blocked their progress with all the impact of a stone wall. Moreover, it makes them realize that it is possible to reach the goal toward which they are now striving despite the grave obstacles that at times threaten to make the way impassable. Sixty-three years ago, the Department of Superintendence was organized in the National Education Association in response to a felt need of adminis¬ trators and supervisors. The department thus formed established the practise of holding a winter convention and soon became the policy forming body in the N. E. A. Problems were discussed at these midwinter meetings, and recommendations based on the findings were submitted the following sum¬ mer at the annual meeting. At last a few leaders of local organizations, realizing the power and influence exerted by the Department of Superintendence, decided that a department for classroom teachers was the next necessary step. In 1912, a petition was presented by Margaret Haley of Chicago asking that such a department be established. At first, teachers were told that their interests were being cared for by the Department of Elementary Education which had been organized some years before. But as this department was directed wholly by people in supervisory positions, and dealt quite exclusively with questions of methods and administration, the classroom teachers did not relax their efforts. They continued to appeal for a department of their own. 344 National Education Association This was gi anted the next year. The Department of Classroom Teachers held its first session at the annual convention in St. Paul, July 8, 1914. Thus it was given official recognition by the N. E. A., as a body trying to solve its own special problems. From the very outset, the Department declared its aims to be, “To encourage higher qualifications for entrance into the teaching profession; to promote teacher participation in school management ; to aid in securing adequate salaries, sound retirement systems, tenure, and such other improve¬ ment in conditions as will enable teachers properly to function as a vital factor in educational progress.” Some years later it added: “To promote, encourage, and assist organizations of classroom teachers and to promote cooperation among such organizations and the members thereof.” From 1914 to 1922, the formative years of the organization, it had no appropriation from the National Education Association with the exception of twenty-five dollars allowed for stationery and postage. The income of the Association during those years was very uncertain. However, with the reorganization of the N. E. A. on a delegate basis in 1920, a new policy was adopted. Under President Ethel Gardner of Milwaukee, a constitution was adopted in 1922 at Boston which greatly widened the scope of the Depart¬ ment’s activities. A request for a budget of five thousand dollars was made. This sum was appropriated by the N. E. A. and the work as outlined was begun. The constitution provided for conferences held in all parts of the country and this has become one of the major activities of the officers. Thru this means teachers who are unable to attend the N. E. A. convention have the opportunity of discussing their problems with the officers and are often successful in finding a solution. The Department began also to send its officers to the midwinter meeting in order that they might keep in touch with the objectives of the Department of Superintendence so that their attitude would be an enlightened and co¬ operative one. At this time a conference is held for classroom teachers in attendance for the discussion of vital problems. From 1914 to 1922, the work of the Department was confined largely to preparing the programs for the annual convention. As there were no finan¬ cial resources for use in carrying on independent studies, the writer, who was president during five of those early years, aimed to excel in program making. The purpose was to interest educators in the possibilities of this Department, and to bring home to each group the truth that the success of all was de¬ pendent on the success of each. One who is interested in the history of the Department may discover from the pages of the N. E. A. Annual Proceed¬ ings that the names of some of the ablest educators in the nation are to be found in these early programs. It will be seen also that the Department has held steadily to the field laid out for itself at the beginning. The work of the Department is carried on by its officers, its standing com¬ mittees, and the generous volunteer work of many of its members. The headquarters staff of the National Education Association is ready to assist at all times. The joint editing of the News Bulletin of the Department by Department of Classroom Teachers 345 Agnes Winn, director of Classroom Service, and Daisy Lord, Eastern regional director, has been a most valued contribution. The numbers sent out this school year have been especially noted for their excellence. In 1926, the Department issued its first Yearbook. It contained a state¬ ment of the aims and policies of the Department and a discussion of large teacher problems which furnished a basis for work which followed. In 1927, The Child and His Teacher was given over to the study of the attitudes, and the appreciation of child life. In 1928, Problems and Opportunities in Teaching attempted to point the way thru teacher welfare to pupil welfare. In 1929, Creative Teaching and Professional Problems described actual classroom procedure. In 1930, Teaching as a Creative Art was intended to be a continuation of the theme of 1929 in response to the requests of many teachers. The 1931 volume dealt with The Economic Welfare of Teach¬ ers, a study which is of the utmost value at the present time. In 1932, The Classroom Teacher and Character Education attracted wide attention. The present Yearbook Committee is at work on a very timely subject deal¬ ing with effective publicity for education. The foregoing important research activities involve large expenditures which have brought an enlargement of the appropriations of the N. E. A. for the work, the present budget being $10,100. Because of consciousness on the part of teachers that the Department is vital to their interests, the organization has grown most rapidly. With every passing year it has increased its usefulness, and has amply justified the faith of its leaders in the growth of its power to contribute to progressive thought. It is helping to win for teachers the standing and place to which they are entitled thru their important work in the field of education. SUMMARY OF THE FIRST PRELIMINARY REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM KARL GUENTHER, MICHIGAN STATE NORMAL COLLEGE, YPSILANTI, MICH. Academic freedom has two chief aspects: the freedom of the student to learn ; and second, the freedom of the teacher. It is a right which it is particularly important to preserve and extend in a time which, like the present, is one of rapid social change. Freedom facili¬ tates peaceful and orderly social adaptation to changing conditions of life. The American Association of University Professors has championed this cause since 1915. As a consequence it has revealed and measurably rectified shameful abuses in the profession of college teaching. A similar and greater task confronts the teachers in the other branches of the profession. The committee authorized by the Department at the 1932 convention approaches the subject with an awareness of the responsibilities as well as the advantages of academic freedom. It seeks greater freedom than at pres¬ ent exists with a view to enhancing the usefulness of the teaching profession. Freedom is sought, not for the benefit of the injudicious and the ill-prepared, 346 National Education Association but for the competent, professionally trained and professionally minded teacher, and with a view to enlisting the interest of all teachers in higher standards for the profession. The freedom to learn seems, at present, to be a matter of great importance to teachers who are themselves students. Especially important is it that teachers should be able to study the problems confronting them as members of organized groups of teachers. To this end the committee recommends the establishment by local or regional teachers associations of “study-your-own- problems” classes which may study, for college credit and under an instructor selected by the group, the problems which are confronting the group. The committee will aid those who are interested in the organization of such classes and has available an outline for such courses which may be had by interested teachers.1 Turning to a consideration of the freedom of the teachers two additional elements in the problem present themselves. The first involves the right of the teacher to expound the truth and knowledge as at present known with¬ out constraint except that which is imposed by the professional obligation to be judicious, to present fairly all sides of controversial questions, to avoid making unverified statements and using intemperate modes of expression. Violations of these professional rights and obligations of teachers should be judged in the first instance, not by lay groups, but by bodies composed of members of the teaching profession. To this end it is important that steps be taken to create such judicial bodies. A second element in the teachers’ freedom is the right of extra-mural utterance and action. Subject to the obligations mentioned above teachers should have the same rights of free speech which other citizens enjoy. Their conduct, outside of school, should be subject to few, if any, external controls to which other citizens are not subjected. They should be free, furthermore, to support actively, if they choose, organized movements which they consider to be in the public interest. An important special aspect of the general problem of academic freedom is involved in connection with the activities of teachers in teachers associa¬ tions. The policy of these associations, it is believed, is often unduly influ¬ enced by the administrative staff. By virtue of their often arbitrary control over rating salary, transfer, tenure and recommendations, administrators hold a powerful whip over teachers which can be used to penalize those who dissent from their policies. In consequence it is often difficult to know whether the policies of an association represent the considered opinions and wishes of the rank and file or whether the policies merely reflect the wishes of administrators. A partial escape from this situation has often and successfully been sought thru the creation of organizations whose membership is limited to classroom teachers. 1 For further information in regard to these classes communicate with Miss Rena Rockwell, 364 W. Clinton St., Elmira, N. Y. Department of Classroom Teachers 347 Altho not necessarily due to abuses of authority it is probable that the influence of classroom teachers has been very small in the affairs of state teachers associations. A study of the California Teachers’ Association in a recent year showed that only about one-third of the governing body were classroom teachers and further that this group, which constitutes about 95 percent of the profession, had only 22.5 percent representation on committees and only 14.25 percent representation among the chairmen of committees. A similar study of the Michigan Education Association in 1932 showed only 13.2 percent classroom teacher representation on the most important standing committees and 6.25 percent representation on the board of directors. Where the exceptional influence of administrators in teacher association affairs is due to subtle pressure or open coercion or other abuses of authority it should be checked. To note cases of this kind and to take steps to correct them should be a special responsibility of the Department’s committee. In attempting to maintain and extend academic freedom the Department of Classroom Teachers may meet its professional responsibilities by con¬ tributing as effectively as it may to the building up of a public opinion both within and without the teaching profession which will appreciate and defend academic freedom as one of the important liberties to be cherished by a free people. In connection with this work the committee has prepared a bibli¬ ography which should be of value. A second course is to develop judicial bodies within the profession which will be competent to hear and to pass judgment upon cases involving aca¬ demic freedom. A third procedure is to take steps to insure that those teachers who have unjustly been dismissed in connection with cases of this kind shall have special help extended to them in securing new positions. As a first step towards these ends the committee requests the Department of Classroom Teachers to authorize the committee, in its discretion, to in¬ vestigate, in such ways as it deems proper, cases which seem to involve academic freedom and also to authorize it to take steps to secure, when it seems expedient, the creation of a joint council on academic freedom com¬ posed of representatives of organizations which have manifested an interest in the problem. SECRETARY’S MINUTES Chicago, Illinois Second Session, Thursday Afternoon, July 6, 1933 The annual business meeting was convened at 2:25 p. m. in the North Ballroom of the Stevens Hotel. Mrs. F. Blanche Preble, the president, presided and opened the meeting with a brief report of her activities for the year, expressing her appreciation of the opportunity that had been given her to serve the Department. She said in part: “I have kept as busy as time and money and strength would permit and have visited 35 groups of teachers, held conferences with 35 groups of teachers in 37 cities 348 National Education Association and 11 states. I know now why the people who were charter members of our Depart¬ ment have always said and have continued to say that the conference work is by far the most important part of the work of the Department. I also know why they have alwa}'s insisted it shall be adequately financed because I see more than ever before what these personal contacts mean, not only that the officers get to know the teachers and the teachers get to know the officers so that when they come to the convention we can join hands and work together, but because the officers in visiting the different sections and communities of the country can understand the problems so much better than in any other way. So I am very sure the Department is going to continue that part of the work, the holding of conferences.” Mrs. Preble then called attention to her complete report in the printed Official Report of the Department, copies of which were distributed at the meeting, and announced that no yearbook would be published in 1933. She then recommended the following order of business which was unanimously adopted: (1) president’s report; (2) election of officers; (3) report of Committee on Academic Freedom; (4) report of Committee on Resolutions; (5) report of Yearbook Committee; (6) reports of officers. Before proceeding with the election, announcement was made of the annual dinner to be held that evening in the Grand Ballroom of the Stevens and Mr. Guenther announced that he would like to have the presidents or other officers of state depart¬ ments of classroom teachers meet with him immediately at the close of the session. Frances G. Harden of Chicago, was then asked to take the chair and explain a plan of election procedure which she had worked out and which was adopted by the executive board. The plan was to be given a trial and then whatever changes seemed necessary were to be made before final adoption for another year. Viola Kelley of San Francisco and Emily Tarbell of Syracuse, N. Y., were appointed judges of the election and Josephine Wilson of Dallas, Texas, and M. E. Hurst of Tulsa, Okla. were appointed clerks. The following nominations were made: president, Faye Read of Pueblo, Colo, nominated by Dorothy Hall of Pueblo and seconded by C. W. Jackson of California and others; vicepresident, Mrs. Myrtle Hooper Dahl of Minneapolis nominated by Harriet Scofield of Minneapolis and seconded by Daisy Brown of Stillwater, Minn., and others; secretary, Mrs. Mary D. Barnes of Elizabeth, N. J., nominated by Agnes Mathews of Roselle, N. J., seconded by Mildred Hardester of Salem, N. J., and others; western regional director, Albert Shaw of Los Angeles nominated by Helen Holt of Alameda, Calif., seconded by Rena Rockwell of Elmira, N. Y., and others. The nominations were then declared closed and the balloting took place according to Miss Harden’s plan. The results of the election follow: president, Faye Read; vice- president, Mrs. Myrtle Hooper Dahl; secretary, Mary D. Barnes; western regional director, Albert M. Shaw. Other regional directors are, Daisy Lord of Waterbury, Conn, and Mary Ralls of Kansas City, Mo. Mrs. Preble then recognized Karl W. Guenther of the Michigan State Normal College at Ypsilanti, chairman of the Committee on Academic Freedom, authorized last year, who presented a summary of a preliminary report. Before presenting it, Mr. Guenther said: “The interest in the subject of academic freedom has grown a good deal during the last six years. In consulting with your president with regard to the matter of creating the committee, it was felt it would be wise to try to get one which was representative, as nearly as possible, of the classroom teachers thruout the country. For that reason the officers of the various state departments of class¬ room teachers were asked to name a representative to serve on this committee, the point of that method of selection being that we wanted to get people who would be representative of the classroom teachers of the states so far as possible, and, secondly, to get a wide distribution of opinion from people who had the confidence of their own constituent groups.” 349 Department of Classroom Teachers After reading the summary the chairman moved the adoption of the full report and it was duly seconded. A lengthy discussion of the report then took place center¬ ing mainly around the following declaration: “Their conduct (teachers), outside of school, should be subject to few, if any, external controls to which other citizens are not subjected.” Mrs. Johanna Lindlof of New York City moved to amend it by sub¬ stituting the word “no” for “few, if any,” and it was seconded by D. K. Stewart of Raleigh, N. C. Among those who took part in the discussion were: Mrs. Lindlof, Mr. Immel of California, Christine Jacobsen and Gertrude Mallory of Los Angeles, Miss Kent, Mr. Wright, Hester Smith of Denver, Mr. Stager of California, Sara Fahey of New York City, Robert Keenan of Chicago. A motion to refer the amendment back to the committee was lost and the amend¬ ment presented by Mrs. Lindlof was voted on and carried. After a discussion as to whether the entire report should be adopted or just the summary which had been placed in the hands of all present it was the general opinion that the vote should be taken on the summary. Mr. Guenther stated that he was willing to accept this change. It was then voted to adopt the summary as amended which authorizes the committee to continue its work and to investigate cases which seem to involve academic freedom in consultation with the officers of the Department. The next order of business was the report of the resolutions committee by the chairman, Anna Thompson of Kansas City. After the adoption of two amendments the report was accepted as given on page 350. Reports of the officers followed Each one spoke briefly and those interested in reading their complete reports were referred to the printed Official Report. . Miss Harden then presented a matter which she felt should be of interest to eveiy classroom teacher, the proposed amendments to the N. E. A. bylaws which were introduced at the Atlantic City meeting. These provide for a reduction in the num er of ex-officio delegates to the Assembly from 156 to 16 for the purpose of bringing about greater democracy in the business of the Association. She stated that as it had been suggested that the question be postponed for another year she would like to know the feeling of the Department relative to it. It was moved by Mrs. Myrt e Hooper Dahl and seconded that Miss Harden go ahead and present the amendments on Friday morning. All classroom teacher delegates were urged to remain thru the Assembly session in order to vote on this important matter and Miss Jacobsen of Los Angeles recommended that an announcement concerning the amendments also be made at the dinner that evening. Mrs. Gilligan of Chicago then spoke of the splendid leadership of Mrs. Preble as president of the Department and asked that a vote of thanks be given to her for her untiring work. A hearty vote was given. Eula Hunter of Fort Worth, Texas, a former president, expressed her appreciation to the officers who have carried on in such a fine way this year, and especially to Mrs. Preble for the work which she has done. . A brief discussion took place relative to the N. E. A. and the Chicago teachers as to what had been done to help the situation. Miss Kemp of Los Angeles expressed the view that definite steps had been taken by the N. E. A. in support of the teachers basing her statements on extensive correspondence she had in her possession. Some questioned her about her information but as the hour was late the discussion was brought to a close by the following statement by Mrs. Lindlof: “I believe if you want to have the N. E. A. do something for the Chicago teachers we should wholeheartedly support the resolution which I believe will be submitted to the Representative Assembly on Friday morning calling upon the President and the Reconsti uction Finance Corporation to extend aid to localities which are in need of aid to maintain the birthright of the children in the educational line. I believe it^should have our wholehearted support, and that is the greatest help we could give.” The meeting adjourned at 5:30 o’clock. 350 National Education Association Annual Banquet The annual banquet was held in the Grand Ballroom of the Stevens, Thursday July 6 at 6 p. m. with Mrs. F. Blanche Preble of Chicago, presiding. Nearly eight undred guests were in attendance. Among the speakers were Joseph Rosier presi¬ dent of the National Education Association, William J. Bogan, superintendent of the Chicago schools, Francis G. Blair, state superintendent of public instruction for Illinois, and Margaret Haley, business representative of the Chicago Teachers’ ^deration. A musical comedy, “A Century of Progress in Teacher Training” was given by the Chicago teachers. Resolutions The Department reaffirms its stand on many questions coming up in former years and expresses its opinion on the vital problems confronting the teachers of the nation at the present time. Entrance requirements — We affirm our previous endorsement of higher qualifi¬ cations for certification of teachers in order to raise the professional status of class¬ room teachers and to improve the teaching service. Professional spirit — We urge that all classroom teachers participate actively in local, state, and national teacher organizations. We believe that in teacher-training courses, instruction should be given in the proper relationships of teachers to their professional organizations and in the ethics of the profession. We also believe that teachers should take an active part in civic and community affairs. Training in civic and economic responsibility — We urge that all training schools for teachers include courses acquainting their students with presentday civic and economic conditions, thus developing leadership in solving the financial problems of the schools. Rating— We approve constructive rating of teachers but we believe every teacher should be given an exact copy of her rating card in order that she may correct any apparent weaknesses and we disapprove the basing of salaries upon rating. We also endorse reciprocal rating, believing that supervisors and principals should be rated by classroom teachers and the combined findings be turned over to the board of education. Teacher load— We stand firmly against increasing the teacher load as a means of retrenchment in this emergency in education. We believe it would redound much more to the welfare of the children to curtail, as a temporary measure, such activi¬ ties as a curriculum department, research department, student counseling depart¬ ment, thus releasing those workers for classroom instruction rather than to over¬ burden teachers to the point where effective teaching is impossible. Tenure— We continue to favor a sound law which provides for an indefinite tenure following a sufficiently long probationary period. We believe that a committee of classroom teachers should participate in decisions which involve the dismissal of classroom teachers. Retirement laws — We continue to endorse legislation providing for reasonable and financially sound retirement laws in which the state participates with the teachers. Cumulative sick leave— We approve of a sick leave of sufficient length that the health and the welfare of the pupils are conserved. We believe that the days not used each year of the number granted should be allowed to accumulate to be used in case of a prolonged illness on the part of a teacher. Single salary schedule— We reaffirm our belief in the principle of equal salary for equal service, training experience, and responsibility. We believe that all teachers whose services are satisfactory should be given a salary increase each year until they have reached the maximum salary. Department of Classroom Teachers 351 Teacher participation in shaping school policies — We urge that teachers be given opportunities to assist in shaping school policies, and that whatever policy concerns the school as a whole should be the result of concerted thought and effort on the part of the entire faculty. Equal opportunities — We believe that women whether married or single should have the same opportunities in the teaching profession as men, and that no discrimi¬ nation in salary should be made when the preparation, the load carried and the responsibilities are the same. Professional improvement — We reiterate our belief in freedom for teachers in their choice of subjects in the summer sessions of colleges and universities, but desire no curtailment of the broadening influence of wide educational training. Sabbatical leave— We reaffirm our belief that a leave of absence for study and travel should be granted teachers periodically in order that they may return with enlarged vision and renewed energy. Simplification of reports and records— Realizing that “the child in the schoolroom is the object of the school,” we ask that classroom teachers be permitted to give more of their time and efforts to the child and less to the keeping of complicated reports and records. We believe that the latter should be reduced to the minimum for efficiency and that all duplications of records should be avoided. Sources of larger revenue — We recommend that every classroom organization form a committee to study the tax situation and disseminate information regarding other sources of revenue to take the place of the antiquated property tax on which our schools are now dependent. Welfare of teachers— Mutual benefit associations— We approve of the organiza¬ tion of mutual benefit associations in each large school system. Hospitalization plan— We endorse a plan for the hospitalization of the teachers in a system when the need arises. Credit unions — We favor the establishment of credit unions in all school systems large enough to support them in order that teachers may be protected from exorbi¬ tant rates of interest and to be mutually helpful. Publicity — We endorse the use of the radio and the press in interpreting educa¬ tional policies and problems to the public. Illiteracy — We endorse the campaign to stamp out illiteracy in America, and pledge our assistance in the effort to have every adult in our nation possess the equivalent of a grammar-school education. Child labor — We favor an amendment to the federal Constitution which will permit the enactment of a national child labor law in order that every American* child may have an equal opportunity for an education. World Federation of Education Associations — We approve the activities of this Association and endorse its program for world peace, friendship, and understand¬ ing, and urge that teachers actively cooperate to bring about the realization of these aims. Service of teachers — We believe the “laborer is worthy of his hire” and that when funds are exhausted teachers should not be asked or expected to teach without pay. People must be made aware that the problem of educating their children is theirs, and that resources for carrying on this essential function of the state must be found, just as funds are raised for road building or any other desired services. Service of Chicago teachers — The teachers of the nation express to the Chicago teachers and other teachers similarly situated their admiration and respect for the loyalty, devotion, and fortitude which they have shown in the trying ordeal thru which they have passed, and we deplore and condemn the political tactics which have resulted in such a condition of affairs. Local hospitality — We express our sincere appreciation to the classroom teachers and administrative staff of the Chicago schools and to all those in the community and state whose courtesies and hospitality have contributed so greatly to our comfort and happiness during this convention. 352 National Education Association CONSTITUTION (Adopted at Boston, Mass., July, 1922. Amended at Oakland, Calif., July, 1923, Atlanta, Ga., July, 1929, Los Angeles, Calif., July, 1931, and Atlantic City, N. J., June, 1932.) ARTICLE I— NAME The name of this department shall be the Department of Classroom Teachers of the National Education Association. ARTICLE II— OBJECTS AND PURPOSES Section 1. To encourage higher qualifications for entrance into the teaching profession ; to promote teacher participation in school management ; to aid in securing adequate salaries, sound retirement systems, tenure, and such other improvement in conditions as will enable teachers properly to function as a vital factor in educational progress. Section 2. To promote, encourage, and assist organizations of classroom teachers and to promote cooperation among such organizations and the members thereof. Section 3. To cooperate with parent-teacher associations and other civic bodies having educational objectives, in order to secure better community understanding and appreciation of the problems and the value of the public schools. ARTICLE III— MEMBERSHIP Members of the National Education Association who are employed as classroom teachers and all members of classroom teacher organizations act¬ ing as officers or agents of such organizations, whether employed as teachers t or ncT and retired classroom teachers, shall be eligible to membership in this Department, provided that no person shall be eligible to membership herein unless such person shall be a member of the National Education Association. ARTICLE IV— OFFICERS AND DUTIES The officers of this Department shall be a president, a vicepresident, and a secretary, and all such officers shall be elected by a majority vote of the members present at the annual meeting of the Department. The officers shall serve for a term of one year from the date of their election and until their successors are elected, and shall perform the usual duties pertaining to the respective offices which they hold and such other duties as may be im¬ posed upon them by this constitution and the bylaws of the Department. It shall be the special duty of the president of the Department to prepare a program for the annual meeting of the Department by and with the advice and consent of the executive committee and advisory council. On the ex¬ piration of his term of office as president he shall automatically become a member of the Executive Committee for the ensuing year. Department of Classroom Teachers 353 ARTICLE V— EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Section 1. Election — The president, the vicepresident, the secretary, the retiring president, and three members of the Department, to be called re¬ gional directors, who shall represent three different sections of the country, to be elected in the manner hereinafter provided, shall constitute the execu¬ tive committee. Elections to the executive committee shall be made by the Department at the meeting at which this constitution is adopted. The candi¬ date receiving the highest number of votes shall serve on the executive com¬ mittee for a term of three years; the candidate receiving the next highest number of votes shall serve on the executive committee for a term of two years ; and the candidate receiving the next highest number of votes shall serve on the executive committee for a term of one year. Annually there¬ after, the Department shall elect one member of the executive committee in place of the member whose term expires and the members of the executive committee so chosen shall thereafter serve for a term of three years. Section 2. Persons Eligible — No person shall be eligible to office in this Department who is not, at the time of election, regularly engaged in some phase of classroom teaching. Should any officer of this Department leave the profession to engage in other business, his office shall be declared vacant and shall be filled in the same manner provided for other vacancies. Should any officer of this Department accept an administrative position, or retire from active teaching, such officer shall serve only until the next succeeding annual election, and any vacancies so occasioned shall be filled by election at the annual meeting. Provided, however, that this section shall not be construed to apply to any person holding office in this Department at the time this section is adopted ; but any such person shall serve until the expiration of the period for which he was elected. Section 3. Duties — The executive committee shall assist the president in preparing the annual programs and shall perform such other duties as may be imposed upon it by the Department. The executive committee shall have power to employ an assistant secretary and such other employees as it may deem necessary to carry on the work of the Department, and, subject to the ratification of the Department, to fix the terms for which such em¬ ployees shall be employed and the salaries to be paid to such employees and to prescribe the duties of such employees, in addition to the duties imposed upon such employees by this constitution and any bylaws adopted by the Department. The executive committee shall have power to designate cen¬ ters at which regional conferences of the Department shall be held. The executive committee shall conduct the business of the Department in the interim between the annual meetings of the Department. The executive committee shall be authorized to fill all vacancies in its own membership. All such interim appointments shall be filled by election at the next annual election. 354 National Education Association Section 4. Budget — On or before the first day of June in each year, the executive committee (of this Department) shall prepare and submit to the executive committee, the board of directors, and the representative assembly of the National Education Association, thru the secretary of the Association, a budget setting forth the proposed expenditures to be made by this Depart¬ ment during the ensuing year and the purposes for which such proposed ex¬ penditures are to be made, except that the executive committee shall have the power to reapportion such funds when necessary. Such budget shall set forth a statement of the estimated receipts of this Department during the ensuing year from membership dues levied under the provisions of Section 9 of Article V of the bylaws of the National Education Association, and a statement of the amount of money estimated to be necessary to be appropri¬ ated from the funds of the Association for this Department for the ensuing year. It shall be the further duty of the executive committee to see that the funds so set aside and so appropriated shall be disbursed for the purposes of this Department in the manner provided for in the budget. ARTICLE VI— CONFERENCES Section 1. Purposes — Conferences shall be held by the members of the executive committee of the Department with local organizations of class¬ room teachers or with other groups of teachers for the purpose of (a) dis¬ cussing, formulating, and carrying into effect the policies and programs of the Department, (b) assisting local groups with their problems, and (c) stimulating interest in professional organization work. Former members of the executive committee, who are members of the Department, may be authorized by the executive committee to conduct conferences and perform other services for the Department. Section 2. Officers — The officers of such conferences shall be a chairman and a secretary. Members of the executive committee and others authorized to conduct conferences shall send to the headquarters office of the National Education Association in Washington written reports of all such confer¬ ences, and a list of those held during the year shall be published in the Year¬ book of the Department. ARTICLE VII— MEETINGS The annual meeting of this Department shall be held at the same time and place as the annual meeting of the National Education Association, and shall consist of business sessions and such programs as may be authorized by the executive committee. Business sessions shall be open to classroom teachers only. A conference of the officers, executive committee, advisory council, and other members of the Department shall be held at the same time and place as the meeting of the Department of Superintendence of the National Edu¬ cation Association. The president of the Department shall be charged with the duty of preparing a program for such conference. Department of Classroom Teachers 355 ARTICLE VIII— AMENDMENTS This constitution may be amended by a two-thirds vote of the members present at the annual business meeting of the Department, provided notice in writing of such proposed amendment shall have been filed with the secre¬ tary of the Department at least sixty (60) days prior to such annual meeting and published in the issue of the Journal of the National Education Asso¬ ciation next preceding the annual meeting of the Association, and in the issue of the News Bulletin of this Department next preceding the annual meeting of the Department. * ' ‘ . Department of Deans of Women The department of deans of women (National Association of Deans of Women) associated itself with the National Education Association in 1918. Its meeting is first reported in Proceedings , 1918: 391-417. The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are : President , Agnes Ellen Harris, Dean of Women, University of Alabama, University, Ala.; First Vicepresident , Harriett M. Allyn, Academic Dean, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass. ; Second Vicepresident , Jessie Coope, Assistant Prin¬ cipal, and Dean of Girls, McKinley Technical High School, Washington, D. C. ; Secretary , Sara Norris, Dean of Women, State Teachers College, Mankato, Minn. ; Treasurer , Elsie M. Smithies, Assistant Principal, University of Chicago High School, Chi¬ cago, Ill.; Headquarters Secretary , Gwladys W. Jones, 1201 Sixteenth Street, N. W., Washington, D. C. Facts relating to the establishment of this Depart¬ ment and records of its meetings will be found in earlier volumes of Proceedings , as follows : 1919:393-426 1920:357-364 1921 : 407-420 1922:693-793 1923 :621-636 1924:500-536 1925 :403-449 1926:425-457 1927:391-418 1928:353-374 1929:369-390 1930:309-330 1931 :393-413 1932:337-356 [ 358 ] HELPING THEM TO STAND ON OUR SHOULDERS ADA L. COMSTOCK, PRESIDENT, RADCLIFFE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. My subject, I fear, like the introduction which has been given me, promises more than the speaker will perform. I am reminded of a story which I heard Harry Emerson Fosdick tell the other day about a church which had the custom of holding yearly a straw¬ berry festival. It appears that last June, in the church notice, the announce¬ ment was made: “The annual strawberry festival will be held on June 15 at the parsonage, admission twenty-five cents. Note: In view of the depres¬ sion, prunes will be served.” In view of a consistent and steady and permanent mental depression, I fear prunes may be served tonight, but I had an idea in my mind when I chose my subject. It was based on a picture — a recollection which I had of a day in Paris some thirty years ago. It was in the fall of 1903, and the King and Queen of Italy were being entertained in Paris with high festival and pageantry. I shall never forget how beautiful Paris was or what a revelation I had of the taste of the French nation in the decoration of a city and in the reception of royal guests. One day, one Sunday afternoon, the King and Queen were to be taken to the left bank of the river for some purpose, perhaps to visit the tomb of Napoleon. I went to see the procession, taking with me a little boy seven years of age. When we got to the bridge over the Seine, where we thought we might see the procession, the crowd was so great that he could see nothing at all. He perched on my shoulder and saw something of it, and I recorded in my diary that my shoulder was very lame from holding Edmund up to see the procession. I thought of that experience as I was considering the subject on which I shall talk tonight, because I suppose, in a sense, it expresses our object in education, the function which education performs in society, and our own personal ambition as to what we should like to do for the young people who come under our care. I suppose that just now with the world in the state in which it is, we desire more than ever to give those in our charge the benefit of our experience. We have ceased congratulating ourselves just now on the control which the world has been able to take of the physical forces of nature, the control of famine, the control of disease, the control of so many of those disasters which used to sweep over humanity, and we realize that now a new control must be established over the forces of society. These are the economic forces — war, crime — the conditions which come about in a great and complicated society like ours ; and we desire, as we have never desired before, to be able to pass on what little wisdom we have, what bitter experience has taught us, to those who are following us ; and we wonder by what means we can help them to see farther than we have seen and to do better than we have done. We, every one, are asking it, and we who are known by the obnoxious term “educators” are wondering most of all what we can do. f 359 ] 360 National Education Association It seems to me that there are certain very clear essentials which we must have in mind in helping the younger generation to stand or perch on our shoulders, and one of those essentials is that our own feet should be firmly planted and should be planted on the earth, not on a chair, not on a platform, not on dogma which has been unthinkingly accepted, but on the earth which we have come to know ourselves thru our own living and our own expe¬ rience, the mud and the rocks and the snow of which we know by having tried to walk over them and thru them ; the paths and the highways of which we have discovered for ourselves ; the mountains that we have learned by ascending them, and the valleys that we have learned by going down into them, and in this state, I may say, the blizzards in which we have sometimes lost our way, but thru which we have finally come. I know that I date myself irretrievably by quoting Kipling and yet I remember what I used to read about Tomlinson. You will recall that when he wTas asked to prove either his virtues or his sins, I forget which — “Now this I have read, quoth Tomlinson, and this has been noised abroad, and this I took from a Belgian Book on the word of a dead French lord.” We can’t be Tomlinsons if we are going to be of assistance to the oncoming generation. Some people think that school and college life ought to be made more nearly a part of the adult life of the time, that a good share of our effort in school and college ought to be devoted to making the students realize current conditions and understand the problems of the day. I think there is something in that, but not everything because, after all, school life and college life are very precious periods in that they are set aside from the labor, the turmoil of daily life, and to try too much to bring the market place and the forum and the responsibilities of adult life into the school and the college is to make a mistake. It must be thru adults and especially thru their teachers that stu¬ dents make their contacts with life ; and for that reason it is particularly essential that their teachers themselves should know life and should know this earth on which we live. We are the transmitters, and our contacts ought to be with the thing itself. And another thing which seems to me one of the essentials, if we are to help them stand on our shoulders, is that our mental bodies should be in condition, exercised and developed and fit. I am confident that no static person can be really a teacher. We hear in colleges a good deal of criticism of the appointment of teachers who are devoted to research on the ground that often they lack the teaching gift. It is quite true that they often lack it, but a really good research person, somebody who is enthusiastically engaged in a piece of study on his own account, has something certainly to give students who are advanced, who are eager, and who are willing to dig a little bit for the gold which he has to offer them ; whereas, the good teacher who has not refreshed his mind and whose mind has ceased to grow has sometimes almost nothing to give. I say, beware of yourself if you have the teaching gift, because you may be led to substitute it sometimes for the learning which should be transmitted thru Department of Deans of Women 361 that gift, but which may sink lower and lower until the fountain is dry and you have nothing but the technic of teaching to offer your students. It is pleasant to speak in this state and in this place of the necessity of con¬ stant growth on the part of the teacher, because it was in this state that I came to know a woman who seemed to me to exemplify most strikingly that particular characteristic. Some of you knew her. Her name was Maria San¬ ford and her name is still great in Minnesota. She began to teach when she wTas sixteen years old and she taught, so far as I know, without a year of absence until she was retired from her teaching at the University at the age of seventy. She fought poverty and discouragement and every kind of diffi¬ culty which could confront a human being. She never lost her intellectual appetite ; she never ceased to study ; she had an enthusiasm — an intellectual enthusiasm which I have rarely seen equalled. I remember asking her when she was seventy-five years old whether she had had a good year. “I never had a better year,” she said, “I have discovered the Flemish painters this year; I never knew before how great they were.” She died when she was, I think, eighty years old at the close of a day she described to someone as the happiest day in her life. Now, in certain respects, as a teacher of a specific subject, she was not so good as other people whom I have known, but she gave her students, all of them, the impression of a mind which never ceased to develop and for which there were always surprises, for which the world was always full of wonder and of a mind and a character developed steadily thruout her life. The athletic quality of mind is something which we must have if those who follow us are to stand on our shoulders. Tho we are supposed to stand somewhat apart from active living, it seems to me that we are responsible for what is seen from our shoulders, that we cannot divorce ourselves from responsibility for what happens in the city in which we live, in the state in which we live, in the country in which we live, and in the world in which we live, and that we owe it to ourselves and to our students to take some part in the life of our times. How can we teach them, for instance, any high conception of citizenshp if they see around them corruption and inefficiency, the disregard of law, and the kind of frivolity toward public service which make that opera which many of you have seen and heard, “Of Thee I Sing,” much less of a travesty than we wish it were. The state of the world itself is a part of our responsibility. You may remember that Sir Walter Raleigh, that famous teacher of English at Oxford, said once in regard to teaching: “It’s no good making other people do things; you must do them yourself and trust to infection to spread it.” And the first duty of a teacher, as it seems to me, concerns what he makes of himself and what he does in the world in which he lives. Well, in a way, what I have just said applies to everybody who hopes to be a good citizen and who hopes to make the world better for those who are to follow after, but it isn’t enough, of course, for us who are gathered here tonight to try to be strong and to be helpful and to let young people, if they will, scramble up to our shoulders. To help them do the scrambling is our particular profession — a profession which has its principles, its meth- 362 National Education Association ods, its technic; and it is of those principles and methods and technic that I suppose we ought to speak. It has seemed to me, in spite of certain disquieting action which has been taken by state legislatures, in the last week or so, that our profession was never more esteemed than it is at the present time. We all know what efforts are being made by parents to keep their children in school and college, how the education of their children is the last thing on which they are willing to economize, in which they are willing to retrench. We know how many people believe in these troublous times that education must be the way out, and we know how many people outside of our own ranks are resolved that whatever else suffers, the quality and the quantity of education in this coun¬ try shall not suffer. And yet, of course, on the other hand, education was never more challenged. Certain groups of people in our colleges are particu¬ larly challenged; the economists are suffering under the same blight which has fallen upon business men, the leaders of business, and we know that a good many people think it strange that after America has done so much for the education of its people, we should, in crises, show so little knowledge of how to behave wisely and advisedly. Another story of a church notice comes to my mind. It read in this way: “Sermon by the pastor; subject — ‘Spiritual Gains Resulting from the De¬ pression.’ Soprano solo by Mrs. Brown — ‘Search Me.’ ” A good many people have felt that the gains which were supposed to result from education in this country are well described by the title of Mrs. Brown’s solo. People are dissatisfied, of course, with what education has done and is doing, but no one is so dissatisfied as we ourselves, and some of us are discouraged. I was talking not long ago with a man known to many of you who has been head for many years of a well-known college settlement and who has also been one of the heads of a well-known school. He told me that he was old enough now to have seen the pupils whom he had known in the school and in the settlement grow up and take their places in life, and he said it discouraged him very much to find that as far as he was able to judge they were little better, if any, than those who had had fewer privileges, who had not had their experience. It seemed to him that they didn’t justify, finally, in their lives the effort which had gone into molding them. My own impression is very different from that: I am old enough, too, now, to have seen the students whom I have known at the University of Minnesota, and at Smith and at Radcliffe, go out and take their places in life. Perhaps I wear too rosy spectacles, but it has seemed to me that they and others like them were thinking a little more clearly, were acting a little more helpfully than those who had not had the same kind of opportunity. And yet, no one of us is content. We all realize that we could do better than we do, and we all hope to do better in the future than we have done. It is right for us, I think, to consider our situation and to ask ourselves whether our ways, our methods, our principles, are valid. My own view of our present situation is something like this : I think that just at this time some of the limitations under which we have suffered are Department of Deans of Women 363 being stripped away. Certain artificial restrictions on women, for instance, have disappeared in the last twenty or twenty-five years. The outward re¬ strictions are nearly gone. Women have full rights of citizenship; almost all occupations are open to them ; the inward limitations are yielding. I think that qualities of mind, rugged qualities of character, physical strength and skill, are much more respected among women, much more desired by them than they used to be. I think there is still a considerable distance to go in that regard. Fathers still say to me, “My little girl is spoiled, but that is what little girls are for” ; and I feel that girls still need less cushioning than they get. I think that they need to be laughed at more than they are. I think the qualities of sportsmanship still need to be asked of them more than they are, more than they have been in the past; and nobody believes more firmly than I that they will meet every such challenge which is given them. The artificial social distinctions, I think, are disappearing in these times and are giving those of us who are now in schools and colleges a great op¬ portunity. There is less extravagance ; there is less emphasis on distinctions which show themselves in segregation in clubs and sororities and cliques. There is a much freer field, as it seems to me, in which to work than we have had for many years. Miss Raymond said to me a while ago that almost all discussion of school methods, college methods, was strikingly lacking in the “how.” We all know what we desire to do, what our aspirations are, what our ideals are, but how to achieve them, how to bring them about — that is so difficult. In discussing improvement that might be made in schools and colleges, we sometimes talk about the subjectmatter and say that we must have a com¬ plete change of subjectmatter in the curriculum of the school, the curriculum of the college. I, myself, have never been one to shed blood over curriculum. I have never been able to get up much excitement over whether there should or should not be Latin or whether there should or should not be so much mathematics, or so much of this or so much of that. I am a conservative per¬ son, however, and I am distrustful of choices made by students which are based merely on the preference of the moment, and there are certain things which I believe that the content of the curriculum in school or in college ought to yield. One of those things is a sense of the reality and the stubborn¬ ness of fact; and certain rather humdrum subjects appear to me to yield a sense of that kind of reality. I heard the other day of a little boy who belongs to one of those clubs in which topics are discussed on the merits of which a vote is taken when the discussion is concluded. A friend of his met him on the street and said, “Johnny, what did you discuss at your club last night?” “Well,” he said, “this was the subject we talked about: ‘Is there a God?’ but we didn’t vote • >> on it. One thing which the curriculum ought to yield is the sense that there are some subjects on which you cannot vote, that are not matters of opinion — that there are some things which appear to be indubitably so and which have to be reckoned with. And another thing which the curriculum ought to yield 364 National Education Association is the opportunity for the weighing and the balancing of evidence, this side and that side, pro and con. And, of course, there should be opportunity in the curriculum for the play of the imagination, and there are certain tools for future use which must be provided. Now those ends, if they are sought, are likely to bring about a course of study which, so far as subjectmatter is concerned, does not differ so amaz¬ ingly from the course of study which we offer in most of our schools and colleges; but this I do think: that the mode of presentation of our subject- matter requires a good dead of revision. Certain subjects are playing a new part in the lives of our students — the languages, for example. When I was a young woman, languages were very largely a polite accomplishment or a means of obtaining a knowledge of the literature of foreign countries. They are still that, but they have become a much more important medium of communication with the people of other countries. Any of our youngsters who wish to make themselves citizens of the world, who wish to become members of international organizations, who hope to play a part in the settlement of the difficulties of the world, ought to have command of languages. All of us who go to international meetings are ashamed of our own inexpertness in the use of other tongues as compared with the women of Scandinavia, as compared with the women from Hol¬ land and the smaller European countries, as compared with women of almost any country except our own. Languages as a tool, languages as a real means of expression, should be taught in our schools and in our colleges. When I was a young girl, we all had a great desire to learn to write. We regarded English as an art medium in which we hoped to acquire some proficiency. The literary magazine in school, in college, was an extremely important publication, and to be an editor of it was to stand on a pinnacle of fame. It isn’t so now. At least, it isn’t so in a great many institutions I know. The literary magazine is non¬ existent or a struggling affair. The girl who writes best in the school isn’t necessarily the one to whom all the others look up with the greatest admira¬ tion. There is a differentiation there, and as it seems to me, we need to teach English with that differentiation in mind. Our students, for the most part, are not so eager to write novels and poems and plays as they used to be, but they need English as they never needed it before for the defining of issues, as a tool of thought. One who reads the general examinations in one of our fields of concentra¬ tion at Radcliffe was telling me the other day that both at Harvard and at Radcliffe the contents of the examinations written now by our students was easily 100 percent better than it was ten years ago. He said they knew more; they had read more widely ; they had a much greater command of fact ; but he said that their mode of expression was easily 50 percent worse. They haven t been taught to use English as a tool of thought, as a means of making delicate discriminations. The teaching of English needs to be revised as to its aims and methods. Department of Deans of Women 365 The social sciences are obviously more important as a part of the curricu¬ lum of school and college than they have ever been before. They are of the greatest importance, but there is one great danger in regard to them and that is that we shall try to use them as a means of indoctrination. A book has been put on the market recently, which is the result in part of the work of a commission of the American Historical Association, on the teaching of the social sciences in the schools. It is called A Charter of the Social Sciences , and Charles Beard is the author. It is an excellent book, and yet, one gets the impression from it that the social sciences offer a great opportunity for teaching attitudes toward social questions, for communicating a sense of values, and I think I agree with the critic of that book who wrote in this way after discussion with a group of his colleagues : “We do not believe that the social sciences on any level should be used consciously for the purposes of indoctrination or for the inculcation of standards, values, attitudes, no matter how generally acceptable or ap¬ parently desirable, and for this reason: in all probability, tomorrow will be just as different from today as today is from yesterday, and any attitudes and any standards which you may try to inculcate consciously, may easily be out¬ worn before the time comes for their use. To make human relationships understandable, intelligible — that is the great function of the social sciences and for that purpose we cannot make too great use of them. As for the method of teaching, I don’t need to say today that it ought not to be cut and dried — that is not our danger ; but perhaps it is necessary to remind ourselves that it is a laissez faire method which is perhaps too fashionable today. I don’t know whether you have had the experience which has been mine, of having a perfectly delightful class to come to which was a daily pleasure and in which the students seemed to be having an extremely good time, and then of realizing at the end of the year that no one of them had really gained anything in power and ability. It is the easiest thing in the world to deceive yourself and if you are enjoying the teaching of a class, to be over¬ sanguine as to the results which your teaching is achieving ; I am sure that all of us need constantly to be on our guard, to see that we are insisting on certain acquisition of fact, that it shall be precise, that it shall be accurate, that we shall not slide over details too easily at the same time that we are trying to stimulate thought and imagination. An article which I read the other day defines in this way the aim of educa¬ tion : “The sense of the past, the sense of wonder, perspective and imagina¬ tion, awareness, and power — these are the ends of education.” There is one thing which I think is absolutely certain in regard to teach¬ ing, and that is that it is a highly expensive process for the teacher. To arrive at such ends as those which I have just mentioned means inevitably that one must give the best treasure that one has of thought and of effort and of energy. There is no formula in the world, there is no method in the world, that takes the place of that. To give the student such treasures as those I have mentioned means that the teacher himself must spend himself to the 366 National Education Association point of exhaustion. It is easy to say all this, to think of the students as if we could make them what we will, as if they were plastic in our hands, but, of course, they are not. I spoke a while ago of a little boy in Paris who saw a procession. Fd like, in closing, to tell you about another little boy whom I saw last year in China. I was visiting the tomb of Sun Yat Sen in Nanking, and half way up the thousand steps that led to that tomb I saw a family group, a Chinese father and mother with a little fat Chinese boy about so high, in the brightly colored wadded robes that a Chinese child wears in the winter months. He was on his father’s shoulder, and he was screaming at the top of his lungs, beating his father s head. At last his father, with a look of patience and resig¬ nation on his face put him down, and he proceeded quietly and amiably along without any further display of temper. What he wanted was to be on his own feet. And there are some of our students who never will perch on our shoulders, who prefer to make their own way. All of them who are worth anything sooner or later climb down and go up the steps on their own account. There is something baffling, disturbing about that, but there is something comforting about it, and I think if we reflect on it, it may do something to cure in us what I regard as the besetting sin in our profession — taking ourselves too seriously. STUDENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AND THE COUNSELOR — WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WOMEN STUDENTS GRACE S. M. ZORBAUGH, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF WOMEN, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, COLUMBUS, OHIO When Esther Allen Gaw undertook her work as dean of women on our campus, she began by visualizing the job. Social adjustment, she concluded, is essentially and urgently the objective of all students whether men or women. And relative to this objective the major function of a dean is teaching. Counseling of students, if intelligently done, is teaching. Her idea of teaching, however, while including direct counseling, was farther reach- ing than that , it extended to the teaching of teachers , in other words, of counselors,, who would thereupon apply what they had learned to teaching or . counseling their own groups. Around this central conception of social adjustment as the main objective of students and of teaching as the function of the dean or counselor, Dean Gaw gradually evolved the activities and services which today constitute a going concern on our campus. Two of us, herself and myself, are the teaching members of the staff with a faculty rank : hers, professor of psychology, mine, associate professor of economics. The work of a dean of women’s office cannot, as you know, be divided off into water-tight compartments. Generally speaking, however, my function as an economist is to supervise existing economic developments in our work and largely to provide the initiative for further economic developments as they are seen to be needed ; to conduct all economic research in the interest of students, which includes research designed to improve our efficiency in serving students, and to give a course paralleling the dean’s three-credit Department of Deans of Women 367 survey course, Student Psychological Problems and the Counselor. My three- credit survey course is called Student Economic Problems and the Counselor. These two courses are open to upper classmen and graduate students. In the spring we offer a very brief non-credit training period open to lower class- men who desire to become eligible in the fall to be what we call student assistants. In this brief period we try to get across to would-be student assist¬ ants some ideas as to sound, homely advice which they should get across — if they are to be really helpful — to new students, -especially to freshmen. First, let us glance at the three-credit survey course in Student Economic Problems. We start with the question, “What do women students, when they go to college, think they are there for, think is up to them?” Members of the class suggest this and that with the result that presently we have com¬ piled quite a list of interests: good time, making a sorority, preparing to earn a living, acquiring culture (someone suggests acquiring a husband), and so on. But what, in the opinion of the counselors-to-be, are the fundamental interests of women students ? Each one must arrive at some sort of answer if she is to evaluate sanely the problems of students. This implies her having a philosophy of educated young women. Each participant will be asked to attempt to formulate her philosophy. Meanwhile, in order to provoke dis¬ cussion, disagreement, and thought, some tentative philosophy is put to them relative to educated young people in general. For example, this: Educated young people are only a few years in college. All the remainder of their lives will be lived in the world. Is not the first question, then, not what is up to them in college but what is up to them in the world ? What¬ ever that is, is that not what young people are in college to prepare them¬ selves for? Tentatively, let us take it to be a proposition consisting of four life problems: First, the problem — primal for all human beings — of existing is an eco¬ nomic problem: the inexorable urge for food, shelter, and clothing. Some means of livelihood must be sought by every one. If it is not a gainful occu¬ pation, it will be one of several other things: marriage, inheritance, borrow¬ ing, charity, prostitution, or robbing. Second, the problem of human beings possessing reasonable intelligence is the problem of living. It, too, is essentially an economic problem, in the main a consumer’s problem. It is the more or less fumbling effort of every person to achieve maximum satisfactions from goods and services consumed. He has a certain ideal, not necessarily a high one, for his personal develop¬ ment; that is, he has a standard of living. How achievable is it? That de¬ pends on his ability to discriminate between values, in other words, his judg¬ ment in making choices. But his power to make choices is limited by the amount and dependability of his annual income. So how far he can succeed in solving this second problem very much depends on how well he has solved the first — that of existing. Third, is the problem of human beings who are more than reasonably in¬ telligent ; it is because they are highly intelligent that they are likewise socially minded. This is the problem of enabling others as well as oneself to 368 National Education Association live. 7 o solve it requires not merely individual effort but group effort — for the purpose of elevating for the whole group of people, first the average standard of living, second and consequently the average plane of living. Both of these social objectives are only to be achieved, in the main, by economic ways and means such, for example, as provision of revenue for public education. Fourth, the problem, which like the problem of existing comes home to all human beings, of sex relations. This, too, is essentially an economic prob¬ lem, which we see in the case of prostitution. Economically, prostitution is one of the gainful occupations. Someone asks, “How about marriage ? Wasn’t that mentioned in connection with the first problem as a means for insuring a livelihood?” Well, answering a question with a question, are there any who marry in order to escape self-support? Possibly we agree that the solution of this problem turns very much on a person’s attitude towards what is the nub of the first problem, namely, responsibility for self-support. What is the likely outcome of such a discussion as I have briefly sketched ? Substantial agreement, perhaps, as to the philosophy of educated youth. But would there be agreement that precisely this philosophy applies to the half of educated youth in whom we are interested — educated young women? That is a question. However, the discussion will have served a good purpose if it does nothing else but stir all the participants to think out afresh and objectively what, in each one’s belief, are the fundamental interests of women students. In so doing they will perceive, I believe, the importance of a good training in economic principles both for themselves preparing to be counselors, and for students endeavoring to achieve adequate social adjust¬ ment. To epitomize: some sort of philosophy of educated young women the counselor must have to enable her to evaluate sanely the various economic problems of students — the temporary ones cropping up only during the col¬ lege years, the permanent ones which will persist thruout life. Nine interests and problems have been selected for discussion in this course, as follows : 1. Financial status of entering students 2. Whether students should try to earn while attending the university 3. How we can cooperate with those who do undertake to earn 4 and 5. Economic causes of students’ emotional maladjustments and also of their ill health 6. Students’ account keeping 7. Students’ food and lodging 8. Students’ cultural development 9. Students’ future gainful occupation. Every one of these interests, or problems, entails on our part either activi¬ ties or research or both. An account of it all would require too much time. So I shall stress certain topics, touching the others lightly. 1. Financial status. I cite one example. We found thru research, in 1931, that students from farms, while constituting only 13 percent of the whole body of women students, form a third of the group which, in order to live Department of Deans of Women 369 cheaply, resides outside the university dormitory, and half of the group which earns room and board by doing housework in private homes. Having dis¬ covered these facts, what did we do? We developed more facilities for cheap living — what we call kitchen privilege houses. And we intensified our efforts to promote social life for these two groups. 2. Should students try to earn while attending the university? As a rule, students are not encouraged to come unless they are reasonably certain of funds to meet necessary expenses for a year. I said “as a rule.” There are always exceptions. But the longer the depression continues, the more wary we are about exceptions. They are always in peril of arriving in the bread line. 3. What about cooperation with students who do undertake to earn while attending the university? Some of my students1 in consumption economics have helped us recently with research which has yielded, among other facts, these: Out of something over 2200 women students from whom we received information, 8 percent are entirely self-financing ; 1 1 percent are to a considerable extent self¬ financing, while another 23 percent are earning a little towards their ex¬ penses. This leaves about 58 percent who are financed entirely by their families. Our task of cooperation, which is a challenging and difficult one these days, relates chiefly, then, to about 20 percent of the students and especially to the 8 percent who are entirely self-financing. What do we . do for those who apply to us for cooperation? First, and foremost, you may well believe we try to connect them with possible jobs. This means we put much effort on intensive cultivation of employers — but not merely that. The preliminary interview with students almost invariably involves at least the beginning of vocational counseling. For two groups of the self-financing students we do another thing. Before connecting them with possible em¬ ployers, we give them a test. One group consists of students with commercial training, the other of students who wish to work in private homes for their room and board. Any of you who are interested in learning more about our cooperation with self-financing students are referred to a recent article of mine which is entitled “Part-time Placing and Vocational Counseling of Women.”2 4 and 5. Happily, the vast majority of students are normal, wholesome persons. And they, rather than the minority of pathological cases, consti¬ tute the main responsibility of a dean of women’s office. Therefore, I shall merely call your attention in passing to topics 4 and 5 — economic causes of students’ emotional maladjustments and of their ill health. They are apt to be root causes — we must explore to the root and apply our healing there, if restoration is to take place. 6. Next, and briefly, is keeping account of expenditures. There is no virtue in account-keeping as such. What makes it worth doing for a time is if, as a result, the students become choice-conscious and full of desire to study the principles of choice making, in other words, of consumption economics. 1 Ruth Davis, M.A., assisted by Emma Edwards and Margery Keith. 9 The Ohio State Unir — sity Educational Research Bulletin, Vol. XI, No. 16, Dec. 7, 1932. 370 National Education Association All campuses of the size of ours have numerous women’s organizations — fraternal, special interest, such as dramatic, musical, athletic, and religious, social clubs, governing boards such as Women’s Student Government Asso¬ ciation and Panhellenic, and so on. At no time is the group spending of each organization a negligible matter ; at present, when funds are harder to get, it is uncommonly important. The largest single category of such organiza¬ tions is the fraternal. We have approximately 25 active sororities. Most of them own or rent and operate houses. They are required to file not only with their national officers but with the dean of women, at regular intervals, a full report of assets and liabilities, of income and outgo. These data will be utilized for an early economic research project. The results may materially influence subsequent sorority policy and action. 7. The next topic — food and lodging. It is at all times, especially now, a major interest of students. This, if for no other reason than the high pro¬ portion which it absorbs of the student’s income, approximately half in the case of the entirely self-financing students. In our university the living arrangements of students are of seven general types in the following approximate proportions : Students living in own homes . 50% University dormitories . 17% Private houses . 10% University approved houses . 7% Sorority houses . 7% Denominational dormitories . 7% Private homes working for board and room . 2% A pronounced effect of the depression has been to bring down, all along the line, the price charged or value imputed for room and board, a reduc¬ tion, so far, of approximately 15 percent. With a view to next year, it may have to go down still lower. Mere cheapness, however, does not mainly in¬ terest us. What does deeply concern us is, first, an adequate standard of room and food, and second, the lowest possible price at which that standard can be secured. To these two objectives, first, standard, and second maintaining that standard at the most economical price, we are now devoting considerable research. I might say that the house operators have cordially cooperated in the study. One of them seems already convinced that for years, without having known it, she has operated at a loss. About that I am not yet sure. Another matter which we are not only investigating but are experiment¬ ing with is in connection with that group of students who are forced to keep living expenses down to the very minimum possible. A good many of our university houses meet this demand by offering kitchen privileges. When the time is propitious — when we are again in a period of compara¬ tive prosperity — we hope an educational experiment may be made, i.e., a genuine cooperative house. 8. The next topic, students’ cultural development, we all agree is of su¬ preme importance. Dean Gaw is one of a number who have carefully in- Department of Deans of Women 371 vestigated students’ expenditure of time. I refer you to her article, “Advising Students in Their Distribution of Time,” the Ohio College Association Bulletin No. 86. These comparative figures indicate that four to five out of every twenty-four hours of the student’s time, on an average, constitute free time — that is, the residuum after allowing for all the time spent in sleep, meals, study, classes and conferences, travel, activities pertaining to the care of the person, and, if a working student, work for pay. What happens in this free time? Here is the clue to the interests of the students. The range and quality of these interests, plus the student’s major and minor choices on the curricular side, may be said to constitute his culture. And his culture finds overt expression in his standard of living. Our department of sociology, in a recent study of 204 freshmen’s use of time, found a fourth of them spending no time in organized extra-curricular activities, over a third were engaged in only one — that as a general rule for less than an hour a day. This group was composed of both men and women. In a small study of women students recently made by a colleague and my¬ self, we distinguished between organized extra-curricular activities and voluntary activities, organized or otherwise, off the campus. We did this because half of our women students live in town and have town interests. We found with rare exceptions that more of their free time was spent in off- the-campus activities than in campus activities. If this is generally true of our students, it seems to me to call for careful consideration. The free time of students, likewise the free time of all people, is a great unoccupied frontier — an unorganized opportunity for education. 9. Our final topic is students’ future gainful occupation. At the present time this, one would think, is the absorbing interest of students. But I am not so sure. It is a singular thing, but true in our experience, that where seven or eight students take the initiative in asking us to help them get part-time work, one will take the initiative in seeking vocational counsel. Perhaps, on the whole, vocational counseling is the most difficult of our problems because of the inertia we have to overcome. I should like to speak of at least two guiding principles in vocational counseling. These are guiding principles only. There are many cases where they cannot very well be applied. First, we try to focus the student’s at¬ tention at the start on her free time, then on her future working time. The whole trend in our generation is toward shorter working hours per day, a shorter working week ; I dare say a shorter working year. When it comes to the working life, possibly it is tending or will tend to be somewhat pro¬ longed. At most, however, the working period for every student will ter¬ minate relatively early in her life, whereas, thruout her life she will always have free time. Furthermore, in her free time she is more mistress of herself than in her working time. The next principle follows — namely, to focus her attention first on the choice of an avocation, and then on the choice of a future gainful occupation. By avocation I do not mean a mere hobby, al- tho I very much believe in hobbies. What I mean is an absorbing interest which the student can transmute into a socially significant voluntary activity. 372 National Education Association CASE STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL ATTITUDES ERNEST HORN, STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, IOWA CITY, IOWA For the last eight years I have been working with a series of committees which have been formed to study the problems of social education. From the discussions in the meetings of these committees I have been led to form two convictions : first, that everyone has a right to be happy, and second, that the social sciences should contribute to happiness by teaching people how to live together well. Since these are fundamental and specific objectives for all social education, it may be worthwhile to report very briefly the way in which we are attempting to study them in our own institution. It is always necessary to form some sort of hypothesis before one starts any investigation. Of the many hypotheses which I have used, the most profitable pertains to the relationship between law and ethics. It assumes that in the court decisions which have been given by judges as case after case, in country after country, has come before them, there has gradually been accumulated a kind of racial wisdom as to the ways of living together that have been found, by and large, to work the best. With the advice of the faculty of our law school and with the assistance of graduate students, I have been attempting to study what is involved in the social maladjust¬ ments which bring people before the court. I shall refer very briefly to three types of such situations: first, those involving lost and found articles, second, those involving trespass, and third, those involving slander. Articles that are lost and found, represent a special case in the general field of private property. If you will examine a few issues of any local news¬ paper, you will see that it is only rarely that something is advertised as found, if the finder can use it or hide it so that nobody can discover it. Over¬ coats that will not fit may be reported, along with spectacles or keys, but purses, tools, and fountain pens are rarely advertised. The number of valua¬ ble things which are advertised in the lost column and which must of necessity have been found but were never so advertised is astonishing. The investigation of the attitudes which people have toward found articles helps to explain the discrepancy between the number of articles which are reported as lost and the number reported as found. The slogan “Finders, keepers” is still an agreeable salve to the conscience of many people. On the other hand, if one finds something to the value of ten dollars and does not ad¬ vertise it, the punishment in most states, upon conviction, is almost as severe •as though the object had been stolen. Both law and ethics dictate that every reasonable effort be made to discover the rightful owner to the property and that a failure to do so should be a punishable offense. Dr. Ray Latham investigated the attitudes of people at different age levels toward various problems arising in connection with trespass. His con¬ clusions are : a. In general, there seemed to be no significant difference between the concepts concerning trespass on real estate, possessed by boys and by girls. In certain particu- Department of Deans of Women 373 lar instances differences were noticeable, but such differences nearly always had to do with the minor and less consequential phases of the concrete situations being con¬ sidered. b. In general, a larger percentage of the children on each succeeding level of the grade scale thought that the welfare of society could be better served by protecting the interests of the real estate owner than by assuming a tolerant attitude towards the trespasser. Or, stated in another way, the higher on the grade scale pupils were enrolled, the greater was the percentage of pupils who gave what seemed to be the most intelligent answers to the questions involving certain issues relative to the matter of trespassing. There were, however, exceptions to this generalization. In¬ stances were found where a larger percentage of Grade IV, than of Grade XII, pupils made a better response to the ethical phases of trespass situations. The pupils on lower grade levels seemed to agree with court decisions on certain points to a much greater extent than did the pupils on higher grade levels. c. The pupils of widely separated environments of different types showed notice¬ able differences of opinion concerning (1) the amount of protection which real estate owners should have against various types of trespass; (2) the amount of tolerance and generosity which real estate owners should exercise towards various kinds of trespass; (3) the means for preventing trespass which real estate owners should employ; (4) the right of redress which real estate owners should have against property loss and unusual annoyance caused by trespassers, and (5) the right of redress which those individuals should have who receive injuries while crossing over or using the property of others with or without permission. d. The presence of numerous defects, shortcomings, and imperfections in the con¬ cepts, ideals, and attitudes of the pupils on all grade levels of all environments constitutes a call for concrete, systematic, and directed training. The third type of situations has to do with slander. I shall dwell upon this in greater detail, partly because the most important research upon it has been completed by Dr. Yates, who has had experience as an adviser of women, and partly because slander is apparently a universal type of social maladjustment. You will recall that one of the Ten Commandments, that great and restricted list of rules for living together well, deals with this problem. There can be no question about its importance. I suspect that, in any community represented in this room, as much sorrow is caused by slander and by careless and malicious gossip as by any other single factor. We have had since the time of Moses, and probably long before that if records were available, constant advice of a sound nature to the effect that we should not bear false witness against our neighbors. Slander seems to be attached to almost all forms of social relationships, and some of the problems involved are of an exceedingly complicated charac¬ ter. We have striven, on the one hand, to preserve the right of free speech and, on the other, the right to protect our good names. It is easy to see that these two principles may at times come into conflict. There are occasions when the good of the community demands that one shall say things which may injure the individual about whom they are said. In other situations the obligation to make a statement may seem to be nicely balanced against the obligation to keep silent. Most reputations are damaged, however, without any justification whatever. In the investigation by Dr. Yates the attempt was made to take only such cases as had persisted in coming before the court for a considerable 374 National Education Association period of time and which were, in addition, common in all English-speaking countries. An examination of these cases shows that the motives which cause slander in these universal instances are many: personal dislike, jealousy, of¬ fense, malicious or idle gossip, and the like. The same things that prompt gossip now, apparently have always prompted it. No age seems to be im¬ mune. Almost the first thing that a young child learns to say is slanderous. The three-year-old has already learned to say, “Brother is a bad boy; sister is a bad girl.” Few children talk six months without slandering, and the fundamental motives lying back of that childish slander are much the same as are found in the slander of adults. One of the cases which Dr. \ ates included in her study of slander has to do with talebearing, where the individual does not actually start the rumor but helps to spread it. It does just as much harm to spread gossip as to start it. Both from the standpoint of our best ethical thought and from the standpoint of the court it is perfectly evident that the race has agreed that we must not be talebearers. What are the convictions of students in this matter? In grade nine, the last year of the junior high-school level, only 22 percent of the students agreed with the principle established by law and ethics. Judgments on this case were secured also from prospective teach¬ ers in college. Only 31 percent of these college students agreed with the judgment of the court. This means that two-thirds of these prospective teachers have, in this instance, ethical judgments which may bring them and their pupils before the court. The average results from tests on cases of unprivileged communication give an arresting picture. One state code defines privileged communication as “a communication without malice to a person interested therein by one who is also interested, or by one who stands in such a relation to the person interested as to afford a reasonable ground for supposing the motive for the communication innocent, or who is requested by the person interested to give the information.” For example, if the daughter of a friend of yours were to become interested in a man that you know to be a thoro reprobate, you would feel privileged to warn your friend in confidence. You can readily see that most gossip or slander is not privileged. Fifty-two percent of the children in grade six agreed in their judgments with the court in the matter of unprivileged communication, but only 35 percent of the students in the last year of the high school and only 34 per¬ cent of prospective teachers agreed with the court. The situation involved by this last percentage is most disturbing, for these persons will soon have the responsibility of guiding the growth of the moral concepts of pupils; yet two-thirds of them are wrong in the judgments which they would make on these common unprivileged communications. Tradition has it that gossip is a feminine attribute and that it is peculiar to the small towns. Neither of these beliefs is borne out by the evidence in Dr. Yates investigation. Boys did show a somewhat greater tendency to inquire into the truth of slanderous statements, but, by and large, the differ¬ ences between the sexes were not important. There were few significant Department of Deans of Women 375 differences between the concepts and attitudes of the children of small towns and those of large cities. I should like now to point out a few deductions and implications from these investigations. Perhaps most important of all is the problem created by the lack of agreement in all these instances as to what type of behavior is most desirable. It is not easy to develop right conduct in children even when we know precisely what it is that we want to develop and even when the adults of the community are in agreement as to the mode of behavior. We should doubtless all agree that it is a good thing for every person to have a good speaking voice and to be able to speak well in public, but it is not easy to develop that ability. We all agree that it is a fine thing to have good posture, but it is difficult to develop good posture. We agree that everyone should be able to spell, but even with the best methods that are available, it is hard to teach people to spell. But in the field of morals there is an additional difficulty; namely, the adults of the community are not al¬ ways in agreement as to how one should behave. Still more serious is the situation created by those who give lip service to a form of conduct in which they really do not believe, as shown by their private conduct. Such investiga¬ tions as have been completed show that adults are not in agreement as to how to behave even in those situations about which there can be little doubt. The lack of agreement, on the part of many persons, with the almost uni¬ versal opinions of the courts in all civilized countries constitutes a very serious problem. It means that the moral climate in which our boys and girls are supposed to thrive — the climate which impinges upon them at the break¬ fast table, on the street, and in school, is of a sort to make it difficult for them to live with other people as they should. Let me repeat that it is not easy to teach something even when we all agree as to the desirability of what is to be taught, and even when we, as adults, will practise what we preach. And when the college or the high school or the elementary school is confronted with the problem of teaching something about which there is no agreement among adults, or agreement in lip service only, then the school is confronted with a very serious problem indeed. The large amount of disagreement, on many items, between the judg¬ ments of the court and the judgments of children is very significant. It con¬ stitutes a challenge to every teacher in the school. One of the purposes of education is to develop law-abiding citizens, but evidently there is much to be done before students are able to make right judgments concerning their conduct, and still more to be done to insure that these judgments will be carried into action. The investigations by Latham and Yates show that there is a gradual improvement in social concepts as pupils progress thru the school. On the other hand, both investigators report that in several instances the concepts of college students were inferior to those of elementary-school stu¬ dents. The serious misconceptions and wrong attitudes thruout the grades indicate that the schools should make specific plans for the development of more intelligent attitudes toward the law. 376 National Education Association Writers on character education are not in agreement as to whether instruc¬ tion should be direct or incidental. It is my conviction that there must be some direct teaching, but whether instruction is direct or indirect, teachers must be provided with better analyses of social behavior than are now avail¬ able. We have found these analyses very difficult to make. The social rela¬ tionships which are involved in problems of conduct are almost always com¬ plicated. In almost every case there is a conflict of interests. The resolution of these conflicts requires a large amount of insight. It is well to stress the contribution of insight and sheer knowledge to living together well, for these factors have been underestimated of late. Yet even those who profess to believe that knowledge does not lead to virtue would hardly defend the position that ignorance moves in that direction. On the contrary, both modern theory and the results of research indicate that belief, which is knowledge assimilated and sincerely accepted, does tend to lead to virtue. It is conceivable that this organ¬ ization could do no more useful work than to make a list of the typical cases with which you deal, define the issues involved in each type of problem, and record the most successful ways in which these problems have been solved. Department of Educational Research THE AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH ASSOCIA¬ TION applied in 1929 to become the Department of Educational Research in the National Educa¬ tion Association. The proper notice was given at the Atlanta meeting in 1929, and final action in creating the Department was taken at the Columbus, Ohio, meeting on July 3, 1930. The research organization brings with it. a history rich in achievements and places the National Education Association in closer touch with colleges, universities, and research agencies. Officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are . President y Paul T. Rankin, Supervising Director of Research and Adjustment, Board of Education, Detroit, Mich.* Vicepresident , T. C. Holy, Professor of .Education, Ohio State University, Columbus Ohio; Secretary-Treasurer , William G. Carr, Direc¬ tor, Research. Division, National Education Associa¬ tion, 1201 Sixteenth Street, N. W., Washington,’ D. C. , Executive Committee: Paul T. Rankin, Super¬ vising Director of Research and Adjustment, Board of Education, Detroit, Mich. ; William G. Carr, Direc¬ tor, Research Division, National Education Associa¬ tion, 1201 Sixteenth Street, N. W., Washington, D. C. ; W. W. Charters, Director, Bureau of Educa¬ tional Research, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; John L. Stenquist, Director, Bureau of Educa¬ tional Research,. Public Schools, Baltimore, Md. ; Wil¬ liam S. Gray, Director of Teacher Training, Univer¬ sity of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. Facts i elating to the establishment of this Depart¬ ment and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1931:415-431 1932:357-375 [ 378 ] THE STATUS OF THE SCIENCE OF EDUCATION1 GEORGE DRAYTON STRAYER, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. Any adequate account of the present status of the science of education would call for a review of some thousands of scientific studies of greater or less importance dealing with the fields of teaching and of learning, of physical and mental growth and health, of the curriculums of elementary, secondary, and higher educational institutions, and of the financing, man¬ agement, and control of education in modern society. Scientific work in education found its initial impulse in and was developed out of the work done in other social sciences. The establishment of a psy¬ chological laboratory in Johns Hopkins University under the direction of G. Stanley Hall marked an important transition in the development of this science and laid a foundation for scientific inquiry in the field of learning and teaching. The application of statistical and experimental methods to psychology by J. McKeen Cattell furnished the foundation upon which Thorndike and others developed and perfected these methods and their application in the whole range of educational problems. In like manner, the development of the sciences of biology, sociology, economics, and gov¬ ernment have made their contribution to the development of methods ap¬ plicable to the field of education. It may be said for the science of education that it is no longer necessary among a group of professional workers to argue the case for scientific pro¬ cedures in the solution of the problems of education. This may seem a very limited claim to the younger members of our group, but it may astonish them to know that such a statement could not have been made truthfully as little as twenty-five years ago. There have been scientific inquiries concerned with ( 1 ) governmental control and the arrangements for interpretation of the desires of the com¬ munity for education; (2) the financing of the educational program; (3) the registration of those subject to compulsory education and the securing of their regular attendance at school; (4) the organization of schools and of classes with reference to the differences which exist among pupils in in¬ telligence, in physical condition, and in vocational outlook; (5) the training, assignment, supervision, remuneration and tenure of the staff employed in the schools; (6) the provision of building and equipment suitable for the most effective development of the program of education conducted in them ; and (7) the technics essential for the efficient administration of the business affairs of schools and school systems. In each case scientific inquiry has resulted in a modification of our prac¬ tises. We have arrived at the place where we can predict the results that 1 This and the following eight papers were presented before the first three general sessions of the Department at the Minneapolis meeting and constitute all of the material available from these sessions with the exception of the address by Leo J. Brueckner, “The Validity and Reliability of Educational Diagnosis,” which appears in the Journal of Educational Research for November, 1932. Space limita¬ tions do not permit publication of the material presented before the five sectional meetings. [ 379 ] 380 National Education Association will follow from changes in procedure. We have learned how to conduct experiments scientifically, and the administrator has shown willingness to be guided by the results. In summary it may be proposed that the scientific method has been ap¬ plied to all sorts of educational problems. Results have been achieved which have increased the efficiency of our practise. There is recognition among scientific workers of the necessity for attacking the problems of education directly while at the same time utilizing the results made available by the sciences fundamental to education. One may safely propose upon the basis of work already accomplished that we are developing a science of education. NEEDED DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPANSIONS FRANK N. FREEMAN, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. Educational research is of three types: discovery, invention, and testing. They should be carried on in this order : discovery leads to fundamental facts and principals, invention puts the knowledge that we secure from discovery to practical use, and testing evaluates our inventions. Testing is, therefore, useful chiefly after discovery and invention have been carried on. In our educational lesearch we have reversed the order and the emphasis. We have perfected measurement to a high degree but we have not had very much to measure. The need of the hour seems to be for social invention to match our technological invention. This need is as urgent in education as in other social enterprises. Our research departments, therefore, should be chaiged with the responsibility of systematic invention of new educational procedures as well as of testing or measurement. RECENT SOCIAL CHANGES AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH MALCOLM M. WILLEY, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. The rapidity of modern social change is introducing new problems foi educational research. There is need for examination and investigation of the assumptions of modern education to find if they conform to the needs of the new world which science and the machine are creating, and more espe¬ cially to insure that the school readjusts itself to the new social environment which is in process of formation. Population changes, for example, may result in a shift in emphasis from elementary and secondary education, to the adult field. In 1930 there were fewer children in the United States under the age of five than in 1920; in 1940 there will be a million less children of the school ages nine to sixteen than there were in 1930. The birth rate is falling, while more people are attaining the upper reaches of life. The problem of the future will be to provide means for continuing the education of these older groups. In a Department of Educational Research 381 rapidly changing world formal education of early years becomes quickly obsolete, and educational researchers of the present must begin to plan for vocational and cultural education for increasing numbers of adults in the future. The increase of the median age of the population from 16.7 years in 1820 to 26.4 in 1930 suggests that as a nation we are growing older; older age normally means conservatism unless deliberately counteracted. One problem of educational research in the face of increasing numbers of oldei people, is how to prevent the conservatism that would normally inhibit the changes in attitude and belief that are imperative in a mechanical and scien¬ tific world. Especially important for investigation are problems relating to the ability of the school to train men and women to resist the bombardment of sugges¬ tion and misinformation that reaches them thru the mass communication network that has developed during the past decade. It is important to know if ideas inculcated by formal education can and do withstand the onslaught of vigorous appeal that comes from non-school sources. If not, the school has been defeated in its avowed purpose of providing citizens with the knowl¬ edge and attitudes upon which to base their lives. Finally, there is need for educational research to ascertain if the school is now inculcating the social values which will enable the individual to make a successful personal adjustment to modern social changes. The school must seek the way to counteract the impression of chaos that a survey of modern life presents, and the seeking must be in terms of social values that gear in with modern life as it actually is. The discussion as a whole is based upon the recently issued Report of the President’s Committee on Social Trends, and points out implications of this report for educational research. COMMON FAULTS IN GRADUATE RESEARCH IN EDUCATION PERCIVAL M. SYMONDS, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. I propose to discuss current graduate research in education under six heads: 1. Several years ago the phrase “the scientific study of education” was widely used and there was considerable hope that by the application of scien¬ tific methods, educational practises, procedures, and policies could be put on an indisputable basis. Emphasis in the scientific method was on the gather¬ ing of facts. At that time the school survey was having its vogue and every school survey placed considerable emphasis on the gathering of facts con¬ cerning the achievement and intelligence of the pupils, the adequacy of the school buildings, the preparation of teachers. This practise of gathering facts has persisted as a shibboleth even tho the value or significance of these facts has often been obscured. 2. Many students undertake a problem with inadequate background of information and understanding. In our American universities it seems as 382 National Education Association tho we lack the thoro scholarship that is often claimed for and found in Euro¬ pean universities. Our students apparently first wish to propose and attack a problem and then gain their understanding of the problem and its ramifica¬ tions as they proceed. Students, for instance, will undertake problems of legal requirements of education with only a meager acquaintance with the law, or problems on the planning and construction of school buildings or dormitories with little or no understanding of the principles of architecture, or problems with regard to pupil attitudes and interests with but limited background in psychology. We should require that students undertake prob¬ lems that are related to their previous preparation. No one can do adequate thinking in a field in which he has not had thoro and fundamental training. Thinking on a problem is not something that can be undertaken in a dilettante fashion. The work for the doctor’s degree should be the climax of years of study and should be the result of mature thinking in a field with which the student has had long acquaintance. Were this principle more closely adhered to, many mediocre dissertations would never have been undertaken. 3. Much of our research in education has failed to be consciously aware of certain fundamental assumptions that have been made. Much of the re¬ search in education has been done under the guidance of those whose expe¬ rience has been in the fields of intelligence and achievement testing and the research has been colored by the assumptions which underlay work in this field. I can best illustrate my point by giving an example. A number of investigators have studied the significance of class size. The traditional experimental attack is to give achievement tests of school subjects to classes which have been large and other classes which have been small and note the differences in achievement. The assumption that has been tacitly made in these studies is that all of the worthwhile values of education are contained in the results of tests of achievement. Now it is well known that there are many values for which no adequate tests have yet been devised. For instance, ability to participate in group discussion is a value the impor¬ tance of which is becoming increasingly felt. Has anyone made studies of the extent to which pupils tend to participate in group discussion in large classes as compared with smaller classes? 4. Another fault which is occasionally found in graduate research is the bias that comes from catering to or working for a professional group. This is most clearly seen in studies that are sponsored and financed by organizations. When the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment sponsored a series of research bulletins a few years ago it was quite evident that, how¬ ever honest the investigator himself was, the conclusions reached by re¬ search sponsored by such an organization would emphasize only one side of the story. In like manner studies sponsored by correspondence schools, by electric power companies, by food corporations, by the Red Cross, by the D. A. R., and the like, must always be suspected of bias. If the investigator is being financed by some such organization no matter how honest he can be, his results must inevitably be colored by the fact that he feels a certain responsibility to the organization that is backing his study. That the same Department of Educational Research 383 tendency holds true with students sponsored by professional groups within education is not so generally recognized. Any professional group in educa¬ tion, however, has certain interests to further. It may be the sponsors of adult education, it may be the science teachers, it may be the guidance coun¬ selors, whatever the group and however honest their motives they still have an interest in maintaining their service. This is^ true partly because they really believe in the value of what they are doing. It may also be true because we all tend to try to favor our own group in our own decisions. We have been fortunate in having so much research in education sponsored by the large impersonal foundations established by Rockefeller, Carnegie, Russell Sage and others. The investigator who works under a grant from one of these foundations feels no obligation to support any platform oi organized group and consequently these investigations have been remarkably free from bias. 5. Graduate research in education sometimes makes a poor choice of re¬ search methods and instruments of investigation. For instance, so many students wishing to include in the study some measure of intelligence, interest, attitude or socio-economic status will propose using some readily accessible scale or test which can be commercially purchased. Because a test is called an intelligence test or an interest questionnaire many students will accept these titles without challenge and will proceed to use these instruments and inter¬ pret the results in terms of the printed title. Often in recent work in which attitudes toward ability grouping or interests in certain types of activity are to be studied there are no instruments at present available which exactly satisfy these purposes. It is then up to the student to construct his own test or questionnaire. 6. My last point has to do with certain technical faults to be found in dissertations in education. I have time only to mention two or three that have been recently brought to my attention. One concerns the reporting of differences that are not reliable. I think it only human nature that a student should want to make some outstanding discovery or to prove something that is not already known and recognized. To spend a year or so in tedious drudgery on a problem only to end up with negative conclusions is at least discouraging if not indicative of poor guesswork at the beginning. As a matter of fact, to prove that relationships do not exist where they may have been suspected is as important a contribution as to discover or prove rela¬ tionships, and no one should have his research rejected because he has not been able to get significant differences between groups or to get coefficients or correlations which depart in a reliable way from zero. One wonders how frequently numerical errors appear in statistical com¬ putations. I am quite sure that the immense volume of statistics that annually appear in graduate research in education is not checked over as it should be by those who are responsible for it. I am of the opinion that a clever student could manufacture out of nothing test scores, averages, standard deviations, and coefficients or correlations without having anyone check up on the accuracy of his work. We sometimes expect a good deal of our students 384 National Education Association when we require them to score hundreds of tests, tabulate hundreds of ques¬ tionnaires, and carry thru statistical computations with accuracy when ap¬ parently no check is made on the carefulness with which the work is done. Finally the form of the manuscript as it is submitted is often unsatisfactory. There are many manuals giving standards for style for such matters as preparation of graphs and tables and bibliographies, and students should con¬ sult these manuals and bring their manuscripts into conformity with these standards. In conclusion, research is not something that can be ground out as by a machine. Genuine research must be an exploration, a gamble, and every stu¬ dent who undertakes to do research must, of necessity, be taking a chance. The sure-fire problem the end of which is visible from the beginning does not constitute genuine research. Any student who wishes to undertake re¬ search in education must be willing to take a venture into the unknown and only by so doing will he bring back the fruits of genuine discovery. THE ADVANTAGES AND LIMITATIONS OF THE TIME SAMPLING METHOD JOHN E. ANDERSON, DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE OF CHILD WELFARE, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. The technic of time sampling grows logically out of the technic of behav¬ ior unit. Some kinds of behavior occur with a sufficiently high degree of frequency and are sufficiently common so that by observing the child for a predetermined period of time and recording his behavior during that period in accordance with criteria laid down in advance, a sample can be secured which may be indicative of the frequency of the behavior over a longer period of time. Keeping this time constant introduces an element of control which facilitates the handling of the data. In all scientific work sampling is used. A limited number of experiments are performed in the laboratory on selected subjects. From the results obtained generalizations are made as to the inter¬ relations of certain phenomena. It is not necessary to observe a subject twenty-four hours a day in order to draw conclusions about his behavior. The assumption that underlies the use of the time sampling technic is that a sample of behavior is indicative of behavior over a longer period of time and that the appearance of a particular response on one occasion is related to the appearance of that response on another occasion. The extent to which a time sample has predictive value also can be determined. A number of methodological problems however still wait solution. No one so far as I know has attacked the problem of the optimum length of time to be used in sampling. In some studies five-minute samples have been used, in others two minutes, and in others one minute, and in others half minutes. Further investigations may reveal that with some traits a five- minute period is preferable to a one-minute period, while for others a one- minute period is preferable to a five-minute one. Department of Educational Research 385 A second problem of much interest centers about the predictive value of the time sampling technic over a period of time. The studies so far under¬ taken have been completed within a single school year. What is the relation¬ ship between scores based on samples taken at the age of two years, and scores based on samples taken at the age of four or five years? A third problem is that of checking the length and number of various traits of samples against detailed observations obtained by the behavior log method over a long period of time. For instance if an activity could be measured for six hours or eight hours a day for a number of days there would be the problem of how adequately one-minute or two-minute or five- minute time samples picture the longer measure of behavior. I wish to point out that there are three methods of studying behavior as it occurs under natural as distinct from artificial conditions which have ap¬ peared recently. Of these the first is the method of situational analysis in which emphasis is placed upon the observation of the reactions of children to frequently occurring situations by placing trained observers at critical points. The second, the method of behavior unit, involves a categorization or de¬ scription of behavior, either simple or complex, and a study of the conditions under which this behavior occurs, without particular reference to the length of the period of observation, but with an attempt to obtain information on all the accessory conditions which might lead to its interpretation. The third technic, that of time sampling, involves the making of observations in accord¬ ance with categories laid down in advance, during intervals which are kept constant. From the results generalizations can be made as to the likelihood or possibility of the particular behavior occurring in larger units of time and scores obtained that can be correlated with measures obtained by the use of more traditional technics. Of the three methods, the time sampling technic lends itself most readily to statistical treatment since it is possible to secure as many samples as necessary to obtain stable series of measures. But all three methods yield quantitative results and are a distinct advance over running accounts or qualitative descriptions of behavior. Up to the present time, the possibilities of these methods hardly have been explored. Altho many questions of technic still remain to be solved, their future is bright whether or not fulfillment comes up to anticipation. Thru them our concept tion of child development should be broadened and many phases of human behavior that now lie outside the realm of quantification and systematic ob¬ servation brought within the realm of science. THE COORDINATION OF RESEARCH AMONG NATIONAL PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS WILLIAM JOHN COOPER, U. S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. When this decade opened there was much educational research under way. Nothing was any longer assumed. Everything had to have an objective back¬ ground. Not only were the colleges and universities interested in research 386 National Education Association but their departments of education were vigorously hunting for facts. In 1932 over half the state departments of education had a division of re¬ search. More than one hundred twenty-five cities also reported research de¬ partments and these were turning out reports which while primarily of interest to the city concerned were of course of some value to general re¬ search in education. In addition to all this, the United States Government was supporting an Office of Education which was passing its administrative functions in Alaska over to other offices and giving itself almost entirely to the fields of educa¬ tional research and investigation and service. The question arises, what can this office do that other officials cannot do ? The law creating it provides “that there shall be established ... an Office of Education for the purpose of collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several states and territories and of diffusing such information respecting the organization of management of schools and school systems . . . thruout the country. This law assumes the gathering of certain statistics. These statistics have been collected ever since the time of the second commissioner, John Eaton, and have been gathered in increasing amounts beginning with the administra¬ tion of Commissioner Tigert. Not wanting to depend upon questionnaires and correspondence alone, Commissioner Tigert secured an appropriation for four assistant statisticians of education. These men every other year spend about five months of their time in the field and gather the figures first hand. Our figures are now estimated to be about 95 percent complete. They give the best picture of education in the United States that we have. Granting that these statistics should be collected, the question arises, can they be gathered by anyone else? I myself think that there is no educational association that could put forth the effort necessary to collect them. I am sure that no state department of education could do it for if it were left to the states them¬ selves to do there would be forty-eight such organizations each making its own appeal in its own way. There would be no uniformity. We work, how¬ ever, with a state and thru these traveling statisticians gradually bring the varying states into uniformity in length of year, length of day, etc. Unques¬ tionably the best place for these figures to be gathered and kept is at a central federal office in Washington. Moreover, after statistics have been gathered the federal office can speak for the country to each of the forty- eight states and to the other civilized countries of the world, for in most foreign countries there is a ministry of education which gathers similar fig¬ ures. Thru the State Department our Office of Education is in touch with all of these other nations. At present we gather and publish at regular intervals statistics with regard to state school systems, city school systems, higher institutions of education, public and private secondary schools, and private elementary schools. At four- or five-year intervals our statistical division gathers data on private commercial schools, on nurse-training schools, and on special schools for the blind, deaf, crippled, and defective. It also Department of Educational Research 387 gathers every four or five years the figures on libraries whether maintained by the public, by societies, or by schools. These give an idea of the studies we make at regular intervals, either biennially, or at four- or five-year intervals. In addition there are several special studies which may be made only once. For example, during the past year we have given attention to the following topics: economic outlook in higher education, economic outlook in city schools, effects of the depression on rural schools, trade and technical schools, cost of textbooks, expenditures in liberal arts colleges, and Negro education. In addition to this work we keep track of what is going on in the sepa¬ rate states. One of our men is especially equipped in the matter of school legislation. It is his duty to report on what the legislatures in each state do. For example, at the present time there are some states which have state tenure laws for teachers. The gist of these laws he knows. There are more than this number of states which have teacher-retirement laws. How these funds are made up and how they are administered are questions on which he issues bulletins from time to time. He gives information about what each state does with its exceptional children, that is, how they care for the blind, the deaf, the crippled, the delinquent, the subnormal. Frequently informa¬ tion of this kind is put into the form of bulletins and issued to any who are interested in it. But we are able to do some direct experimental work in spite of the fact that we have no laboratory facilities. This is usually done in coopera¬ tion with other agencies. Among the studies which have required consid¬ erable coordination of our office is a study of the peoples of the southern mountain areas. Here it was necessary to coordinate the work of several county superintendents in different states. This is a general sociological and economic study of the whole Southern Appalachian Region. It has been undertaken by some private agencies and the government working together, under the chairmanship of the Department of Agriculture. Each cooperating agency is assigned its part and is solely responsible. Our man has assumed the work in elementary and secondary education. This represents only a part, however, of his regular assignment of the study of educational provi¬ sions in sparsely settled areas. The Office of Education serves as a coordinating influence for the city school systems in many ways. At the present time a study is being made to discover administration measures and teaching procedures which will re¬ duce retardation in the early grades. In cooperation with the city school supervisors our kindergarten-primary specialists are now studying the exist¬ ing organization in primary grades in Philadelphia, Battle Creek, Mich., Baltimore, Montclair, N. J., Bronxville, N. Y., Seattle, Greenwich, Conn., Minneapolis, and Terre Haute, Ind. The organization of each city presents different problems in providing for the regular progress of primary children. It is hoped that the results of such experiments as that of “three or four semesters for two” in Baltimore, of no promotion till the end of the third year in Montclair, of two years to a teacher plan in Bronxville, and others 388 National Education Association will contribute valuable suggestions to schools thruout the country when their findings can be pooled. In addition to these pieces of research work which the office does and to the ways in which it attempts to coordinate research thru the country, we have organized at the request of the state superintendents and commis' sioners of education a National Advisory Council on School Building Prob¬ lems. This cooperates with the Office of Education in doing research on school buildings. As an indispensable aid to research the office maintains a library of ap~ proximately 140,000 volumes. About 20,000 of these books are textbooks which have been used in American schools at different times. Here will be found the McGuffy Readers, Webster Blue Back Speller, and other books which have been famous. Only about half of these textbooks have been cataloged so far due first to shortage of help, and second, to lack of space. It is hoped that as appropriations make it possible, these defects may be overcome. When these textbooks are finally in service, it is proposed to issue a short bibliography each on reading, on writing, on spelling, on arithmetic, etc. Books which we know we have not we shall endeavor to get, for when the history of American education is finally written it must be written with these books as documental evidence. Here also are the records from the various states on their school systems. Here will be found the catalogs of colleges and universities thruout these states. This in a general way gives a view of the Office of Education as it usually functions in research. During the present administration we have accom¬ plished some large pieces of direct research. In these fields we projected a National Survey of Secondary Education, a National Survey of the Educa¬ tion of Teachers, and a National Survey of School Finance. The first two will be completed by June of this year. One will be published and the second ready for the publisher. The study on the education of teachers, however, was reduced 10 percent in the present (third) year and the study of school finance was entirely eliminated in the interest of economy after it had run one year. In these studies a group of educators who are well posted in the field are selected to serve as consultants. A recognized authority in the field is always selected as associate director of the survey. The three men who have done this work have been Dr. L. V. Koos of the University of Chi¬ cago, Dr. E. S. Evenden, and Dr. Paul R. Mort, both of Teachers College, Columbia University. The Survey of Secondary Education which was completed last June and which is now being printed, will consist of some 28 monographs embracing about 3,500 pages. The Teacher Education Survey which will be completed this June, will give a picture of what teachers are required in the schools, what education and professional preparation they have, and where they come from. Charts giving much information have already been published in School Life. A 100- page bibliography on the education of teachers has been published as Vol. I of Bulletin No. 10, 1933 Series. Our specialists found it necessary to prepare Department of Educational Research 389 this bibliography before they could proceed very far with their studies. There are in course of preparation the following : a history of the professional edu¬ cation of teachers in the United States, an investigation and evaluation of the curriculum for the education of teachers in both the teachers colleges and in the liberal arts colleges, a special study on the preparation of Negro teachers, a measurement of teaching ability, an analysis of laboratory school facilities and practises in different types of institutions, a comparison of the present situation with Coffman’s study of 1911, and reading interests of teachers compared with other groups. The study of school finance will be brought to a conclusion before this paper is ready. It consists of but three volumes: first, an annotated bibliog¬ raphy, bringing the bibliography of the educational finance inquiry down to date ; second, a report on the state support of education, showing how edu¬ cational opportunity differs in different states of the Union and in different parts of the same state ; and third, a volume of the study which will bring together the problems that had been outlined for study under the heading, “Needed Research in School Finance.” Both of these latter volumes are pro¬ duced by the generous aid of the General Education Board, which appro¬ priated $25,000 when Congress saw fit to discontinue its money. THE COORDINATION OF RESEARCH BY STATE DEPARTMENTS OF EDUCATION WARREN W. COXE, DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, ALBANY, N. Y. The activities of state education departments in regard to research are best understood against a background of the theories which have controlled the duties of state educational officers. According to one theory a state depart¬ ment of education is a passive statistical agent, a distributor of state monies and an “arbitrary, technical and legal enforcing authority.” Such duties do not require much professional training or leadership. According to another theory a state department of education is “an active, energetic agent working consistently and intelligently for the moral, intellectual, and social improve¬ ment and advancement of the people and the betterment of educational con¬ ditions thruout the state.” In many of our states today there is an inconsistent intermingling of these two theories in the actual operation of departments of education. I believe it is correct to say, however, that the conception of a state education depart¬ ment as a high-grade clerical office, merely, is rapidly passing and is being replaced by the conception of a department as exercising educational leader¬ ship within the state. This latter view is in accordance with the provisions of our federal Constitution, for it was obviously intended that leadership in educational matters should not be a federal function but that it should be delegated to the several states. To my mind, this obligation of educational leadership imposed upon state education departments is the primary justification for the organization of 390 National Education Association research in such departments. My paper deals not with the research studies which are conducted by state departments of education but with the efforts which these departments exercise to coordinate the research efforts not only within their own organizations but within the states for which they are responsible. The subject, therefore, naturally divides itself into two parts: policies and organizations which tend to bring about an integration of research activities within a state department of education, and the activities which tend to integrate the research efforts of the whole state. First, research which is primarily statistical and routine, while usually a necessary first step, is a passing phase. More and more, research in state departments is concerning itself with the study of problems, particularly those which are basal to the formulation of state education policies. This is in accord with the increasing amount of leadership which is being exercised by state departments. As progress along these lines is made there must be provision for greater coordination of research activities between the members of the staff. A second trend I would call to your attention is the growing recognition that the state department is in a strategic position to coordinate the research activities of a state, with no evidence of a desire to interpret this as control or domination of research. The reason for this increased coordination is probably to be found in the growing importance of educational problems of a statewide nature. The purposes of the coordination are better understand¬ ing of the problems to be studied and encouragement of those capable of and interested in research. DESIRABLE STEPS IN COORDINATING RESEARCH AT THE COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY LEVEL FRED J. KELLY, CHIEF, DIVISION OF HIGHER EDUCATION, U. S. OFFICE OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. I am beginning to be impressed with the need of a research worker’s code of ethics. I think, therefore, that I shall propose such a code as an introduc¬ tion to my paper. If by a stroke of luck this code coincides with the codes held by any considerable number of those present, and if then those who believe in this code would practise it (an even more unlikely hypothesis) a great advance in coordinating research would be made thereby. My code of ethics contains two clauses : 1. Research workers, both for themselves and their students, should not under¬ take problems for which they lack the essential desiderata. What I mean is, that if some graduate student turns up, let us say, at the University of Nebraska with a burning interest in the educational implications of salt water bathing beach prac¬ tises, he should be told that the University of Nebraska has only meager facilities for observing salt water bathing beach practises, and therefore the student should seek a more appropriate place for his research. 2. Inexperienced research workers ought not to engage in studies involving the cooperative effort of others without the backing of an experienced research worker, which backing is made clear in the request for cooperation. Department of Educational Research 391 If this brief code of ethics is followed, it will help all coordination efforts. Do only what you are prepared to do well, and expect cooperation only on properly sponsored projects. Desirable steps in coordinating research at the college and university level, may be grouped around two separate types of problems: (1) cooperative projects and (2) individual projects. In either group of problems, the object of coordination is twofold — first to facilitate progress in the project itself, and second, to avoid waste and duplication of effort. Cooperative projects — The first type of cooperative projects is that where the research worker is alone in devising the procedures and instruments of research, and he seeks cooperation of others who merely comply with his requests or follow his instructions. This type includes questionnaire studies, most state testing programs, and surveys. For this type of project, there is need for an agency to assure both the soundness of the procedure and the proper construction of the instruments like questionnaires. This type of research is in great danger of slow but sure death for want of such protection as the above suggestion affords. Even well-conceived studies, making use of carefully constructed questionnaires are endangered by the rising tide of resentment occasioned by the flood of studies not well conceived and by the almost daily receipt by busy educators of questionnaires which are obviously bad. If there were some agency, say a committee of this research association, whose approval of a questionnaire was necessary before members of this association would fill it out, it would do wonders to improve the quality both of the project, and of the questionnaire. If such a committee were created, you would undoubtedly desire to know what principles the committee would use in reaching its decisions to approve or disapprove before the association would vote to support the committee and refuse to cooperate with unapproved projects. A committee would no doubt require time for the formulation of such a set of principles, but would not wish to go forward with their task of approving projects without submitting their plans and policies to the Association. What would such principles or policies probably cover? At least three things, as it seems to me: first, that the worker shows evidence of acquain¬ tance with the literature on the subject, and does not cover ground already covered unless he is definitely checking on previous research ; second, that the project does not duplicate some other project already under way; and third, that the plan, including the proposed questionnaire, meets the require¬ ments and specifications set up for satisfactory research technic. For carrying out the last safeguard, it might be found desirable to prepare a brief set of specifications with which a questionnaire would need to conform in order to be approved. Let no one be deceived. The task I am proposing for this committee or other approving agency, is no light one. I am convinced, however, that no equal amount of labor spent otherwise would yield so high a return in raising the standard of research and in working possible studies which are coming 392 National Education Association now to be nearly impossible because of rebellion among those who are asked to fill out questionnaires. The cost of the committee service might be carried by a fee, scaled to the amount of labor required by each application for ap¬ proval, and charged against the individual or institution asking for approval. The second type of cooperative project is that where several research workers join in devising the project, and divide among themselves the several segments of the study. This is the type employed in seminar classes, particu¬ larly where the students carry on field work as a part of the project. This is now common and affords one of the most fruitful fields for research. Individual projects — What is necessary to bring about helpful coordina¬ tion among the projects being carried on by faculty members or advanced students in the colleges and universities thruout the land seems clear. There is need first for a clearing-house by means of which each research worker may know what others are doing. Second, there is need for opportunity of research workers to get together by states or other suitable regions to hear and criticize one another’s reports. Third, there is need for a national meeting annually of those most interested to look critically at the technics of research being employed, and to guide the general development of the program of research ; and fourth, there is need for a more adequate channel of publi¬ cation. By the clearing-house step, each worker could coordinate his efforts with those of other workers in the same or related fields. By the regional conferences neighboring research workers could become acquainted and the work of each strengthened by the criticism of the others. By publication of reports, each could have the advantage of what the others had done. How best to carry out the above program is by no means clear. I felt so keenly its high value to college and university education that it was my prin¬ cipal reason in going to the U. S. Office of Education eighteen months ago to assist in carrying it out. It seemed to me that in the early stages of the development of the program of research on the college level, the U. S. Office might undertake to collect a list of projects in progress, mimeograph them, and circulate them among the workers. This was done last year. Instead of communicating with the thousand colleges separately, effort was made to work thru either a state college association or a higher education section of a state teachers association in each state in order to encourage the foundation of research groups in each state. Because of following this plan, not all the colleges were reached, but a list of 486 projects was compiled and distributed to the workers. To summarize, cooperative research calls for the services of a committee authorized to approve questionnaire projects as a prerequisite to cooperation by members of the Research Association. Individual research calls for some central office to serve as a clearing house to bring persons of like interest to one another’s attention, and to foster conferences at which reports may be made and criticized. Only in this way can the technics of research be vali¬ dated and these isolated workers inspired to persist in what is too often a rather thankless task. Department of Educational Research 393 THE COOPERATION OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATORS AND EDUCATORS IN RESEARCH CHARLES ASCHER, SECRETARY, PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION CLEARING HOUSE, CHICAGO, ILL. With the current general onslaught on governmental expenditures which threatens the mutilation of the services which forward-looking citizens have come to recognize as vital, it particularly behooves those working in the field of educational administration to form close ranks with students of public administration in general. Each can profitably learn from the other. Par¬ ticularly unfortunate situations arise at the present time in communities where various branches of governmental service seem to compete with one another for shares in the reduced fund available for taxes. Those responsible for general local government feel that the important thing to bring home to the public is the vital role of government. If all governmental groups do not present this picture in a united way, the attack on one service is likely to carry down others. Specifically in the field of research in administration, this means that every device for reducing the unit cost of services must be used in every branch, and it is suggested that educators who have not done so familiarize them¬ selves with the progress that has been made in other branches of the public service toward this end thru centralized purchasing, stores and equipment control, unit cost accounting, budgetary control and allotments, and public reporting. Beyond this educators must work with other students of government for the simplification of the structure of government, the present antiquated complexity of which accounts for so large a part of the waste which threatens the extinction of the services. The fiscal relations of school authorities to local communities and to states must be worked out, not in a spirit of con¬ test, but in a spirit which will make the citizen feel that his legitimate prob¬ lems are being dealt with sympathetically and fairly. The bureaus of municipal research which exist in more than seventy cities, the workers of which are organized in the Governmental Research Associa¬ tion, and the associations of forward-looking public administrators who are attempting to build up in their several disciplines the same spirit of profes¬ sionalism which the educators have long had, welcome cooperation from those in educational research and plead for it. Notable among such associa¬ tions are the International City Managers’ Association, the Municipal Finance Officers Association, the American Municipal Association, and many others which can be reached thru the Public Administration Clearing House. SECRETARY’S MINUTES Minneapolis, Minnesota The annual business meeting of the American Educational Research Association was held February 25, 1933. The secretary-treasurer reported an increase of 26 394 National Education Association active members, 20 subscribers to the Review of Educational Research, and 52 single copies of the Review sold during the year 1932. The full report was distributed to all members. The Auditing Committee, M. M. Proffitt, chairman, reported that the accounts of the Association were in correct and accurate condition. The Editorial Board, Frank N. Freeman, chairman, submitted a report outlining plans for the second cycle of the Review of Educational Research. The Necrology Committee, W. W. Theisen, chairman, reported that the following active members of the Association had died during the past year: Robert D. Cole, professor of secondary education, University of North Dakota; and Arthur W. Kallom, director, Department of Educational Investigation, Boston, Massachusetts. A report was received from George D. Stoddard, repesentative of the Association to the National Research Council. E. J. Ashbaugh, the representative to the National Committee on Research in Secondary Education, submitted a request for an appropriation of $50 for the work of the committee. Later in the week the Executive Committee appropriated this sum. Edward S. Evenden was appointed to represent the Association for a six-year term on the National Council of Education. Frank N. Freeman was appointed to succeed himself for a three-year term as a member of the Editorial Board. The Committee on Membership, B. R. Buckingham, chairman, submitted a pre¬ liminary report. The committee was continued with the request that a report be filed with the Executive Committee, on needed changes in the constitution and procedure concerning the selection of members of the Association. The Nominating Committee, M. R. Trabue, chairman, submitted the following nominations: For president, Paul T. Rankin, supervising director of research and adjustment, Board of Education, Detroit, Michigan; for vicepresident, T. C. Holy, professor of education, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. There were no other nominations, and the secretary was instructed to cast a ballot for these two officers and they were declared elected. Department of Elementary School Principals The department of elementary school prin¬ cipals, temporarily organized as the National Association of Elementary School Principals at the Atlantic City meeting of the Department of Superintendence in February, 1921, became a depart¬ ment of the National Education Association at Des Moines, in July 1921. The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are: President , Aaron Kline, Principal, Pullman School, Chicago, Ill. ; First Vicepresident , Elizabeth McCormick, Principal, Timothy 0. Howe School, Superior, Wis. ; Second Vicepresident , Mason A. Stratton, Principal, Brighton Avenue School, Atlan¬ tic City, N. J. ; Third Vicepresident , M. Emma Brookes, Principal, Miles School, Cleveland, Ohio; Fourth Vicepresident , Ernest L. Markley, Principal, Ritchie Platoon School, Wheeling, W. Va. ; Fifth Vicepresident , Margaret C. Mackintosh, Principal, Public School 140, Brooklyn, N. Y. ; Executive Secre¬ tary , Eva G. Pinkston, National Education Associa¬ tion, 1201 Sixteenth Street, N. W., Washington, D. C. ; Executive Committee: A. B. Heacock, Prin¬ cipal, Los Feliz School, Los Angeles, Calif. (Term ex¬ pires 1934) ; Herbert C. Hansen, Principal, Talcott School, Chicago, Ill. (Term expires 1935) ; Cassie F. Roys, Principal, Walnut Hill School, Omaha, Nebr. (Term expires 1936) ; Earl R. Laing, Principal, Burt School, Detroit, Mich. (Term expires 1937). This Department meets twice each year, in Feb¬ ruary and in July. Facts relating to the establish¬ ment of this Department and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as fol¬ lows: 1921:453 1924:545-564 1927:419-455 1930:333-365 1922:851-886 1925:450-477 1928:375-409 1931:433-465 1923:653-666 1926:459-495 1929:391-424 1932:377-406 I 396 ] EDUCATION FOR WORTHY HOME MEMBERSHIP BESS GOODYKOONTZ, ASSISTANT U. S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. Homes are different now from what they were in the days of our grand¬ parents, or our parents, or, in fact, from the homes we knew when we were the age of the children with whom elementary-school principals work. Most homes now are town or city homes, not farm homes. This means living relatively closer together, but not having neighbors, having less privacy, be¬ coming accustomed to noise, taking children out of the yards and rearing them in four-room apartments. The connection between these rapid shifts in patterns of home life and the need for emphasis upon worthy home membership is evident. Parents are facing living conditions — economic and social — for which they have had no preparation. Old standards and attitudes and practises seem not to work. Developing new patterns which give back to children the things which city life has taken away, must be included in education for worthy home membership. I should like to suggest as one step forward a perfectly definite practical step which can be taken as soon as we all reach home again, that a survey be made of the course of study in each grade of the elementary school to see just where, in what activities or chapters or subjects, provision is made for working with homes in developing worthwhile skills and habits and inter¬ ests for those eighteen hours out of every twenty-four that children are in their own homes or under home supervision. It cannot be too strongly em¬ phasized that setting up standards and goals for these home hours must be done by homes and schools together, otherwise children are ground be¬ tween two programs. There is, for example, the child who has always drunk milk for breakfast but now that he goes to a kindergarten where milk-drinking is socially neces¬ sary, he refuses to drink his milk for breakfast. One program conflicts with the other. There is the other child whose father has always insisted that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well — that a drawing, a toy cart, a valentine once begun should be done as well as the boy is capable of doing. But at school spontaneity, interest, dash, breadth of interests, quick¬ ness, swinging push-pulls instead of meticulous capital A’s are emphasized. H is home program and his school program conflict. Possibly, then, the step forward I am suggesting may include really three steps : first, an inventory of the homes represented in the elementary-school group, to discover the possibilities for work at home, for home play, and for getting help at home, with especial notice of the gaps that are evident ; second, an inventory of the places in each grade’s study program in which attention may be given to the interests and activities and attitudes which strengthen home life ; and third, a definite plan whereby each grade will con¬ tribute something toward that elusive but valuable goal of worthy home membership. [ 397 ] 398 National Education Association THE ADVANCE OF SCHOOL FINANCE ROSS N. YOUNG, PRINCIPAL, MARSHALL HIGH SCHOOL, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. School financing cannot be accomplished by piecemeal methods. It is necessary to take a broad view of general principles. Social and economic conditions are changing so rapidly that a new concept of taxation must be had. The rights of the various interested groups run in this order: child and society, teachers, taxpayers, other interested groups. The rights and wel¬ fare of the child and of society are of so much greater importance that teacher and taxpayer must keep their interests in the background. The wel¬ fare of the whole community is superior to the welfare of a single group of taxpayers. The problem must be recognized. The rise in prices from 1896 to 1929, the tremendous increase in high-school enrolment, the humane care of the unfortunate have increased greatly the gross amount of educational ex¬ penditures. The new leisure will send millions of children and adults into the day and night schools. These things mean that we cannot escape paying a greater proportion of the social income to the public schools. We need, therefore, an entirely new system of taxation. The heavy taxes on real and personal property must go. We must have new sources of taxa¬ tion. We must think of taxation as a division of the total social income and not as so many dollars and cents. A country that suffers from over¬ production cannot say that it cannot spend more on schools. Increased ap¬ propriations for public schools are a necessary corollary to an economic so¬ ciety based upon the machine. Only when we suffer from under-production do we need to devote less of the social income to education. To provide the funds necessary for these things, there must be taxes on incomes, inheritances, gifts, amusements, and sales. Tax-exempt securities should be made illegal. The state must help the poor communities. The progress of the Minnesota Junior Taxpayers’ Association offers valuable suggestions. The schools must accept depression conditions, eliminate the incompetent and selfish employee, eliminate such expensive practises as mid-year promo¬ tion, equalize the loads between the elementary and senior high schools, ar¬ range better floor plans and better movable equipment, avoid false economies, give extra pay for extra service, and insure a full return on every dollar. The school children and the general public of this country are between two groups of racketeers. On one side is the highly organized “taxpayers” association, the leading spirits of which are tax-dodgers who send their chil¬ dren to private schools. On the other side are time-serving teachers and prin¬ cipals who are selfish and who draw the maximum amount of pay for the minimum amount of work. It is time for the cheated small taxpayers, the parents of American children, and the rank and file of principals and teachers to organize for militant action to insure the best interests of chil¬ dren and of the whole public rather than the favored few. Department of Elementary School Principals 399 A FORWARD STEP IN SCHOOL FINANCING ORVILLE C. PRATT, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, SPOKANE, WASH. A forward step in school financing demands that the tax base be broad¬ ened ; that the general property tax be supplemented by other forms of taxation so that real estate will no longer carry its present impossible bur¬ den ; and that all may again pay taxes in proportion to ability. A second much needed forward step in educational financing is the equal¬ ization of educational opportunity and of taxation. In former times when agriculture was the chief occupation, wealth and population were distributed at least in rough proportion to each other ; the supporting wealth back of a school child in one part of a state was not greatly different in amount from that back of a child in any other part of the state. With modern industrial development this has long since ceased to be true. A third much needed step in school financing is the enlargement of the financial unit. Whatever may be thought of the county as an administrative school unit, it certainly is true that many present inequalities of school op¬ portunity and taxation would disappear if the county had a uniform tax levy for school purposes. In some school districts in the state of Washington the tax rate is eighty times as high as in others, and the high-rate districts usually still have the poorer schools. A fourth step needed in school financing is budgetary control. In the past, budget making has received altogether too little attention in the ad¬ ministration of schools. Administrators have been too much like the minister who took his text, straightway departed from it, and never came back to it. In rich districts, especially, relative values were not carefully weighed and balanced. Now, in these depression days, we are all in danger of hav¬ ing legitimate school activities ruthlessly cut off by ignorant but influential laymen placed on budgetary control boards. Perhaps the chief weakness of a democracy is its inability to learn and to follow expert opinion. What we need to do far more than we have is to take a leaf from our leading industrial concerns. Without exception they maintain research laboratories for ascertaining present truth and for dis¬ covering new truth. Then they go to great pains to inform their stock¬ holders about the progress made. The public generally constitutes our stock¬ holders. What we do to inform patrons is incidental or, worse still, acci¬ dental. Many city systems have research departments, but these are too exclusively directed to teaching problems. Financial problems ought also to receive expert and prolonged study. Then the necessary machinery should be set up for acquainting the public with the facts. The truth about school financing is fairly well agreed on by experts, but it is not well known among school people. A program such as this augurs well for the future. First we must know ; then we must make known what we know. The latter is much the more difficult as a forward step in school financing. 400 National Education Association EDUCATING THE PUBLIC TO UNDERSTAND SCHOOLS CHARLES H. JUDD, DEAN, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. There is a form of adult education which school systems should provide in order to insure their own preservation. It is the education of the people with regard to the changes which are taking place in American schools and with regard to the reasons for these changes. The failure of schools in the past to make clear what they are attempting to do has led to some of the disastrous retrenchments which are now being forced upon school systems during the present economic stringency. School officers are likely to assume that everybody understands the rea¬ sons for the expansion of the curriculum and for the adoption of new methods of teaching. The fact is that the newer educational procedures are not always understood even by teachers. The ordinary parent is far less in¬ formed than are the teachers. The reason for the general lack of knowledge about education is that many of the changes which take place in schools occur gradually in response to social conditions which influence the cur¬ riculum and methods of teaching in subtle and indirect ways. Examples of developments within the educational system which have resulted from the comparatively unobserved influence of great social forces are to be found in the American adoption of a unit educational system which contrasts sharply with the dual system common in Europe; in the reading methods of learning and teaching practised in American schools; and in the great expansion of our school population resulting from the industrial evolution of recent decades. The fact that the costs of education have mounted rapidly since 1910 is now widely advertised by critics of the schools, but the fundamental reasons for these costs are little understood. If the need for education of the people in American communities is recog¬ nized, there naturally arises the question : How is this education to be pro¬ vided ? There seems to be only one real answer to this question. School ad¬ ministrators who are in intimate contact with the older members of the community must see to it that information is constantly transmitted to patrons of schools as to the kind of progress that is being aimed at by the revision of the curriculum and by changes in methods of teaching. The Department of Elementary School Principals could very advantageously devote some of the energy of its yearbook committees to the task of prepar¬ ing in detail the types of information which citizens need to know. The proposal which is here made is intended to emphasize the importance of attention to the large social problems which school officers need in these days to study and master. Too often school principals concentrate all their energies on problems of internal management. They should recognize the fact that someone has to keep up communication between the school and the general public. The teachers cannot do this, and the superintendent of schools is far less intimately acquainted with the patrons of schools than is the principal. Department of Elementary School Principals 401 REPORT ON 1934 YEARBOOK JOHN S. THOMAS, PRINCIPAL, CLIPPERT SCHOOL, DETROIT, MICH. The 1934 yearbook of the Department of Elementary School Principals is to develop the subject of The Principal and Aids to Teaching. To pro¬ duce a yearbook during times of stress and difficulty demands the actively interested participation of all members of the Department. The chief purpose of this yearbook is to provide a handbook for the use of principals. Previous yearbooks have given the principal collections of practical articles on administration, supervision, the community, and the libraries. This yearbook will compile effective ideas on the uses of the various aids to the teacher and the textbook. Emphasis is placed deliberately on the use of different aids to provide possibilities for enriching the instructional program of the elementary school. During times when the broadened curriculum of the school is under at¬ tack, this yearbook will discuss means to provide more than a drab routine teaching of the three R’s. Principals must be constantly alert to the pos¬ sibilities available in teaching the core of the elementary curriculum thru a variety of materials and methods. The proposed outline of the yearbook includes chapters on the following groups of subjects: maps, globes, and charts; mounted pictures, newspaper clippings, and magazine illustrations; posters, exhibits, displays, and mu¬ seums; trips, excursions, and lectures; duplicating and mimeographing de¬ vices; stereopticons, balopticons, and lanterns; phonographs; silent and talking pitcures ; and radios. While these may not be all the aids to teach¬ ing, they are the ones that are used most frequently. Principals are urged to begin the prepartion of articles at an early date. Submission of outlines of proposed articles to the Editorial Committee is frequently of great assistance both to contributors and to the Committee. Members are asked to contribute articles which give practical answers to questions raised under the topics of the proposed yearbook outline. WHICH WAY IS FORWARD? WILLIAM C. KNOELK, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, MILWAUKEE, WIS. The frontier-fostered concepts of individual action, of relief from eco¬ nomic and social restraint, of limitless amounts of “free” land and lumber, must be either abandoned or changed greatly. Extreme individualization has to give way to a more conscious group welfare. Difficult as is the economic phase of this transition, the social — with its emotional concomitants — is positively tragic. In attempting to make the rule of the majority square with reason and intelligence we find that we have neglected the principal factor — the atti¬ tude of the individual. 402 National Education Association We may well start with the principle of preparing for change by teach¬ ing adjustment to change. This means that our pupils shall be taught and given — insofar as nature permits — physical, mental, and emotional health, and habits that will progressively accommodate the individuals to “make the greatest possible contribution to society and at the same time give them the greatest possible personal satisfaction.” On the basis of this, the following plan for educating for greater social efficiency is suggested as the proper way forward : ( 1 ) Education must be recognized as much wider than the school, and other agencies of education must also be made to fulfill the newer ob¬ jectives. (2) When the child is with us only thirty hours a week out of a 168- hour week and is in bed for, say, only fifty of the sixty-three that should be allotted to that item, what can we say of the false emotional stimulation that comes thru lurid scenes in the movie theater and thru tense situations broadcast over the radio? (3) We must recognize in the classroom what the term “democracy” and training for democratic ideals implies. (4) Is it not barely possible that what we deemed absolutely essential to an educated and well-prepared child in a democratic society was not at all imperative? (5) We must have recognition of the emotional nature of the pupils in socialization and in stimulating the “immeasurable qualities” of school ac¬ tivities. Emotions and attitudes are more important in determining con¬ duct than knowledge. (6) As Wickman’s study indicates, the complaint, submissive, dependent behavior is no longer adequate. (7) The symptoms displayed by the submissive pupil may indicate emo¬ tional maladjustments more imperatively in need of correction than the impertinence of the independent trouble-maker. (8) We must have in the classroom recognition of the value of open- mindedness, tolerance, courage, fairness, and unselfishness. Greed is not scientific. THE TEACHER LOOKS AT THE PRINCIPAL JULIA L. ANDERSON, TIMOTHY O. HOWE SCHOOL, SUPERIOR, WIS. Every principal should have vision. In our present era of democratic teaching it is most necessary for both teacher and principal to have a de¬ finite vision of what is to be accomplished. The architect plans a cathedral. The principal works with finer materials — the possibilities of children. The purposes are the building of character and guidance in living. The vision of the principal should extend even farther. He is the director of the many personalities in his school. Having vision the principal can generate courage, hope, enthusiasm, confidence, trust, and faith in his teachers. Department of Elementary School Principals 403 The second quality I feel every principal should have is faith in his teachers. He should think of his teachers as specialists in their own line. He should trust his teachers and make them feel he really appreciates them. He should be constructive in his criticisms and see the forest beyond the trees. The third quality should be mutual understanding between teacher and principal. Teaching is an invisible process. It is an influence of mind upon mind. This influence should be made positive thru the law of mutual un¬ derstanding. Fourth, every principal should have tolerance. Tolerance is to realize that to every human being, life is an individual and personal problem. It is to allow to each individual perfect freedom of thought and action, cul¬ tivating gratitude, patience, charity, and faith in his fellow workers. WHICH WORLD? AARON KLINE, PRINCIPAL, PULLMAN SCHOOL, CHICAGO, ILL The last fifteen years have brought us radical changes in our schools. The “do not whisper, stay in your seat” attitude has given way to a freer, home¬ like atmosphere. The normal life of the child as found in our most intelli¬ gently managed homes has been brought into the school world. By this change both the school world and the world outside of the school have been made better for our children. Educators, notably Dr. Meiklejohn of the University of Wisconsin, are now calling attention to another abnormal school world. In the school world attitudes toward certain virtues are made on the ideal plane. Honesty and truthfulness are abstract virtues never to be violated. In this make-believe school world unselfish service to mankind is exalted. Great feats of engineers and of financial barons are looked upon as evidences of the business world’s devotion to public interests. Railroad companies and great industrial cor¬ porations are seen as unselfishly contributing to the needs of modern society. Finally the young man is ready to leave this ideal make-believe school world to enter that other world of adult life for which he is supposed to be prepared. He soon discovers that he is in a strange world for which he is not prepared. Here he finds that service to humanity is generally not the unselfish kind he learned about in school. Dollar patriots get contracts for their com¬ panies at immense profits, politicians feed the poor with money from graft, and professional men move about for personal gain with little regard for opportunities of service. Business acumen consists of ability to get greater profits for the corpora¬ tion and still stay within the provisions of the law. Individual business honor hides behind boards of directors. Justice from courts and juries is of one brand for the poor and quite another for the rich. What can be done about it? The school will not soon give up its idealism, nor will the world of adult life adopt the idealism of the school world. Since neither world will adopt the other in toto, is there an intermediate ground 404 National Education Association that might be acceptable to both? If there is no intermediate ground will the business world permit the tax-supported free public schools to teach what is, in contrast to what should be? Business is in a state of paralysis. Abundance of goods for consumption, and plenty of consumers, but we seem to be unable to bring the two together. For what part of this situation are the schools responsible ? Tax-supported schools have helped to solve other problems in our national life. Will the public permit them to help in this dilemma? Certainly the evils of business and adult life will not be aued unless the dangers that now exist are pointed out to the new generations. MUSIC WITH HOMEMADE INSTRUMENTS CHARLES C. WEIDEMANN, TEACHERS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA, LINCOLN, NEBR. The present economic crisis is testing the resourcefulness of teachers in utilizing the common materials in their immediate environment as a means of instruction of youth. This is true in the field of music as it is in other sub¬ jects. One of the difficulties of organizing and promoting public-school in¬ strumental music is the fact that musical instruments are relatively quite expensive. In the elementary school, the problem has been partially settled thru the commercial production of kindergarten rhythm bands and har¬ monica bands. An extension of the answer may be found in the direction of utilizing materials common to the everyday life of the child. Wood, pottery, paper, glass jars, bottles, rubber bands, bamboo, and iron are examples of materials that in one way or another may be made to produce musical sounds. It is possible to construct as many as twenty instruments for a total cost not to exceed fifty cents. This fact alone makes its appeal to boards of educa¬ tion ; but this is secondary to the prime fact that the child directly lives and enjoys the activities associated with the construction of an instrument of his own choice. This movement is not new. Homemade musical instruments have been made for thousands of years, if the historical records of musical instruments in our museums are to be trusted. Furthermore, innumerable evidences of such instruments are in our midst, in the schools and homes of young people. WHAT IS MENTAL HEALTH? O. H. PLENZKE, ASSISTANT STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, MADISON, WIS. It will be admitted that the attempted answer to the question does not rest upon the firm foundation of scholarly research. It is not a conclusion ob¬ tained by laboratory labor. Nor is it the answer of a specialist in mental health. Being devoid of correlations, deviations, and validities, the round¬ about definition here suggested is, at best, only a summary of open impres¬ sions openly arrived at. Department of Elementary School Principals 405 The past two decades have witnessed a great extensiv n in the training period for teachers. There is available an overwhelming mass of professional knowledge for the improvement of our craft. Methods have been refined. Planned supervisory programs have replaced hit-and-miss inspections. Attrac¬ tive and practical textbooks are supplemented by splendid teaching helps. Administration is concerning itself more and more with the improvement of instruction. Under such favorable conditions one might expect teacher fail¬ ures to approach zero. But, despite our progress in these lines, too many school people fail. There must be factors apart from preparation which are vital to success in school work. It happens to be one of my duties to administrate the state certification laws. Annual reports upon the success of every applicant are received. Too frequently the report advises against reissuance of the certificate for reasons given. In some instances the sad fact of a dismissal is recorded. A graduate of a fine college or university, who should have made good, has lost out. Another hard-earned college degree and all the homes built thereupon come to an unhappy ending as far as teaching usefulness is concerned. You will insist that many dismissals are based upon excuses and trivialities rather than valid reasons. That is granted. The state certification bureau reveals that many unfavorable reports con¬ sist of indefinite general terms such as poor personality, weak character, and other attributes which bear an unknown relationship to academic attain¬ ments. Analysis of these general descriptions indicates that the applicants may be slaves to prejudices, inhibitions, and fears. Their mind-set may be hard¬ ened against adaptation to changing conditions, in fact, their nervous system may be insulated with respect to society in general. They are bound to the beliefs and credos of bygone days, the guidance of new evidence notwith¬ standing. They cannot grow, i.e., increase their ability to meet and evaluate new situations. Others just cannot get along with people. Obviously, in these cases, an unhealthy mentality directs activity which throws them into con¬ flict with reality and the everyday world. They are out of step and out of tune. Let us enumerate a few reported causes of failure resulting from un¬ social attitudes and ways of thinking. Of course, they cover a wide range and permit only rough grouping. The first seem to grow out of failure to accept the fact that education is a cooperative enterprise in which all must function, not as rugged individualists but as components of interdependent levels and parts. This unfortunate inclination is reflected in the following criticisms taken from reports: 1. Will not cooperate with others. This shortcoming is the mode in the distribution. 2. Refuses to take suggestions. 3. Invites suggestions, listens to them, and then disregards them. 4. Considers his department the only important one in the school and displays little interest in matters of general student welfare. 5. Tries to hold students to unwarranted standards of performance, thus leading to high percentage of failures. 6. Cannot get along with co-workers. 406 National Education Association Other criticisms appear to be outgrowths of fundamental weakness, lack of stamina, and vacillating judgment. Under this general heading we find reports such as : 1. Lack of confidence 2. Doesn’t stand up under questioning 3. Inability to chart a course and follow it 4. Cannot settle matters and forget about them. Worries about the consequences of decisions made. This deplorable time-consuming trait brings on senility long be¬ fore it is due. 5. Applicant is crushed and downhearted over poor test results. Here again, lack of confidence is the underlying defect. 6. Argues constantly with pupils 7. No ambition or initiative 8. Not resourceful in solution of problems 9. Pities himself 10. Too nervous, goes to pieces 11. Afraid to admit difficulty and too self-sufficient to seek help 12. Phlegmatic in every way. Another barrier to success is due to faulty conception of our purposes. Many applicants receive negative ratings because of a distorted point of view. No basic philosophy of life or education is manifest. Comments upon this type are: Unwillingness to abandon old beliefs, emphases, or methods. This person has no pioneer spirit, never experiments and is content to follow routine. The deficiency cannot be laid at the doors of training schools or mental inflexibility due to ad¬ vancing age. Still another type, deserving more pity than censure, is the teacher who, in addition to meeting the arduous responsibilities of teaching, enters into a solemn compact with himself to reconstruct the life of the community, purge it of all iniquity and make it safe for future generations. With all their sin¬ cerity and desire to do good, many of these crusaders have been relieved of teaching duties to devote their undivided time and enthusiasm to reforming the world. This sort seems to revel in the tactical error of opening up tense controversial issues in the classroom. While free inquiry must be respected the public has not yet approved classroom discussion of all economic, social, or moral issues, especially if the subject is pertinent to the locality. Zealots in these ranks court trouble by continually condemning that which they dis¬ avow. They forget that, according to character education studies, it is better to elucidate the good than to condemn the bad. The danger of over-aggres¬ siveness in reforming community standards is plain, yet there is a sort of blurred mental state which sees the desired end but fails to comprehend con¬ sequences. Too many cut their careers by over-indulgence in reform activity. One more type will conclude the list. There is a mentality which is ab¬ solute, unyielding and uncompromising. In the classroom he is plaintiff, judge, jury, and bailiff. The school doesn’t exist for the pupils whose par¬ ticipation is about nil. Criticisms of this group are as follows : 1. Unsympathetic with parents 2. Treats pupils as a mass without regard for varying personalities Department of Elementary School Principals 407 3. Unreasonably strict disciplinarian. Will have order at any cost 4. Resorts to ridicule and sarcasm 5. Will not concede anything. Does not recognize this is a give-and-take world 6. Insists upon prerogatives in the adjustment of difficulties. You are correct in your assumption that the foregoing is not a positive or direct definition of mental health. Its localization and analysis are negative — an attempt to show what mental health is not. The inexhaustible cases show that mental health is a composite of innumerable elements and that lack of it militates seriously against professional efficiency. Their fears, their preju¬ dices, their unsocial reactions to their fellows, their ego-centric tendencies, their absolutism, their sealed minds, their defensive attitude, each in turn, arrest mental growth so indispensable in the cooperative scheme of organized school education. Mental health, I finally venture to say, is the antonym, the reverse of the undesirable traits and mental habits presented above. What, if anything, can be done about it? The possible remedy or rehabili¬ tation falls within the province of mental hygiene. COORDINATION OF COMMUNITY AGENCIES FOR THE MENTAL HEALTH OF YOUNG PEOPLE VIRGIL E. DICKSON, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, BERKELEY, CALIF. Mental health is probably the most significant factor to be considered in the adjustment of behavior difficulties of youth in any community. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that there is almost unanimous agreement among students of social difficulties that if we are to reduce crime and mis¬ behavior in a lasting way it must come thru a greater use of preventive meas¬ ures than from measures of punishment. If we are to prevent the misbehavior of youth, therefore, we must study to discover the causes or the symptoms of trouble early enough to fit the behavior of the youth into constructive chan¬ nels instead of allowing it to drift into destructive channels. It was with this thought in mind that the heads of various departments dealing with youth in the city of Berkeley more than 12 years ago planned an organization for cooperative effort. This organization is called the Co¬ ordinating Council. The chiefs or heads of the following city departments are ex-officio members of this Coordinating Council : the Schools, the Police Department, the Health Department, the Recreation and Playgrounds De¬ partment, the Department of Charities and Social Welfare, the Judge of the Justice Court, the Chief of the Probation Office and Juvenile Court. The purpose of this Coordinating Council is to study the community activities and interests of the city for the purpose of developing the best pos¬ sible program for the proper guidance and control of youth in the city. The Council is a deliberative body or planning commission. It meets for one hour each week. Each department submits policies and plans of that department for suggestion and criticism. Each department may if it chooses submit prob- 408 National Education Association lems that are difficult to solve. The Council has no executive or administra¬ tive authority whatsoever and never votes to determine what shall be the policy of any individual department. As a matter of fact, it exists only as a counseling group with no power to act except that which is embraced in each department separately. However, there sits at the council table each week the executive head of each department of the city government having official charge or control of the welfare of the youth of the city. Here rests the executive authority to do whatever the city can do for its youth. Frequently agreements as to policies to be followed are worked out in the Council and the policies recorded in our minutes so that all departments may be familiar with the plans for community activity. Each department keeps its own records of cases of social adjustment but these records are freely ex¬ changed between departments whenever occasion seems to warrant. This avoids much useless duplication. Serious cases of maladjustment are brought before the Coordinating Coun¬ cil for discussion, the purpose being to develop a clearer understanding of all departments or a better method of handling these difficult cases. Case records are kept of successes or failures in each department together with the apparent causes for each. These become the bases for change of policy. The Council not only endeavors to educate the various departments in its own organiza¬ tion, but endeavors to give such education or spread such information as will be helpful in establishing a better community support among cooperating agencies and the general public. During recent years partially, at least, thru the efforts of the Coordinating Council there has been made available thru the public-school system of the city for difficult cases of maladjustment of children and youth, the services of a psychiatrist, a physician, a psychologist, and a staff of social case workers. By means of this expert service it is hoped not only to prevent delinquency and misbehavior in the serious cases under study and treatment, but to keep such accurate records of causes of misbehavior, of successes and failures in treatment, that we may develop a better technic for the management of the youth of the community. We believe that the Berkeley Coordinating Council, with such adapta¬ tions as are suitable to fit the needs of various cities or communities, is a step in the right direction for the development of a better mental health program among young people. The drifting process so commonly found, the quarrel¬ someness and distrust between departments working in the same community, the overlapping of records and of activities so common in many cities, we believe can best be smoothed out by a coordinating council similar to the Berkeley plan. We cannot hope to solve our problems by each going his own way or by the drifting process. This Council furnishes a social planning commission com¬ posed of the responsible heads and executives of the official social agencies of the community. Department of Elementary School Principals 409 RESPONSIBILITY OF TEACHER-TRAINING INSTITUTIONS FOR THE MENTAL HEALTH OF PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS CAROLINE B. ZACHRY, DIRECTOR, MENTAL HYGIENE INSTITUTE, STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE, UPPER MONTCLAIR, N. J. In the face of our national emergency the only hope of security for our children is their security in adults. Are we preparing teachers who are emo¬ tionally mature enough to provide this sense of security for our children ? Are classroom teachers being prepared to understand the emotional needs of the child ? Altho mental hygiene training is vitally important for the class¬ room teacher, it is only a small part of the total picture. Fhe most important service that we can give toward the mental health of the school child is thru our care of the mental health of the school teacher. Only stable, mature adults can develop stability and maturity in children. The work of the Mental Hygiene Institute at the State Teachers College begins with the college freshmen. The first contact of these freshmen with the Mental Hygiene Institute comes thru a course in hygiene which is based entirely on their own problems — emotional, social, and physical. In the sophomore year these young people approach their study of psychology and mental hygiene entirely thru the problems of real children. Students have a practical opportunity to do remedial work with children. This training impresses the student-teacher with the fact that he is not merely teaching subjectmatter but the total personality of the child. He learns to look upon the child’s integration as his definite aim in education. The child’s social adjustment is just as truly the teacher’s responsibility as is his arithmetic. Likewise, our responsibility for the teacher s total personality is quite as great as our responsibility for his total training. Discussions of children’s problems lead to problems of pupil-teacher rela¬ tionship, and the student-teacher is easily led to realize his responsibility for being a well-integrated person and for having the personality qualifications that lead to success in teaching. From the objective point of view of trying to understand the child’s behavior, he arrives at the realization of his need to know more about the origin of his own behavior. At this point he finds ade¬ quately trained mental hygienists ready to help him with his personal problems. The purpose of this set-up is to train teachers so that : 1. They may attain better insight into their own personalities. 2. They may have a proper sensitivity to the effects of the atmosphere of their own classrooms. 3. They may gain ability to handle mild problems that arise daily in the classroom. 4. They may gain ability to recognize incipient problems of a more serious nature and to cooperate with experts in the handling of these problems. 410 National Education Association IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL HEALTH IN THE ELEMEN¬ TARY-SCHOOL PRINCIPAL W. R. DAVIES, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, SUPERIOR, WIS. Since I believe so thoroly that “as the principal, so the school” I would expect to find the mental health of a principal reflecting itself in the attitude of his school, including every individual pupil, teacher, and custodian under his direction. And this thing called building personality is no myth — it often forces itself upon you before you have been in the building a minute — in the attitude of the custodian, in the reaction of the teacher in the corridor as he greets you, in the whole manner of the group of children as they pass you by — yet this and more does not entirely express how fundamental is this expression of character in a school building. Like the more important and worthwhile things in life, you can feel it, rather than sense it, thru any of the other avenues of perception. How then can a principal attain mental health for himself and a desirable personality for his building — a building one instinctively likes to enter? First of all, by cultivating a calm philosophical outlook on life, and by facing the everyday problems of a principal in that spirit. Equanimity is a wonderful asset for one who would direct the activities of a school. It is the very trait that many a parent, teacher, or pupil does not expect or want to find when they come to the office to explode or to receive punishment. It need not mean lack of force or the inability to reach a decision and stick to it, but this characteristic has meant the difference between the success or failure of many a school man or woman. The second attribute of a principal who has real mental health is an un¬ bounded enthusiasm for the activities of the school, whether of the regular classroom or extracurriculum type. It offsets, in a measure, the equanimity which is so desirable in a principal’s actions toward pupils, parents, teachers, and custodians. If the principal is not vitally concerned, then no one in the building is apt to get enthusiastic about the task of directing children in their activities. And the wise principal when he finds this enthusiasm waning will seek complete rest and relaxation in order that he may return to his work with an enthusiasm that will be contagious and which will give his school pep and spirit. The mentally well principal will, in the third place, possess and keep a sublime faith in the potentialities of each of his pupils and teachers. The worst symptom in the lag of mental health will be the irritation produced by the mere presence of children about him. Here it is of utmost importance that the principal get a new grip on things, so that he will think of the potential good and in a measure discredit the negative tendencies of teacher and pupils. Again, perhaps the finest indication of real mental alertness manifests itself in just being human. How this quality is appreciated by parents, teachers, and pupils! Those with whom you come in contact may admire you for your ability to run the school, but they will love you only as you are human. Department of Elementary School Principals 411 Finally, no one engaged in the work of a teacher of teachers, as well as of pupils, can run a real school unless he has a firm belief in the ultimate good of human existence, the progressive improvement of humankind thru educa¬ tion, and in the American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank. Without such an outlook all else is in vain. One who lives intimately with throbbing, vigorous life, and still is unable to ap¬ preciate the beauty and grandeur of it all, is ill in mind and soul, and in need of the physician. MENTAL HEALTH FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE DOCTOR OF MEDICINE R. A. JEFFERSON, MILWAUKEE MENTAL HYGIENE COUNCIL, MILWAUKEE, WIS. Most mental illness can be thought of as the sum of a long series of faulty adaptations to life situations. If this be true there is but one place to intenupt the forging of this binding chain and that is at its inception. This business of nipping these pathological processes in the bud is one of the majoi inteiests and responsibilities of the mental hygiene movement. Activity such as this can be thought of as preventive but is more rightfully considered as thera¬ peutic since it consists largely in the treatment of socalled behavior disoiders in children. This is the element in mental hygiene which is clinical and which has called for the formation of child guidance clinics, behavior clinics, and research organizations which are studying the foundations of personality in infancy and childhood. Such organizations are manned, as a rule, by specially trained personnel such as psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychiatric social workers. But there is another element in mental hygiene which lies deeper than this and is preventive in the truest sense of the word and this factor is so clearly linked to education as to have become inseparable from it. In this sense mental hygiene is far more than the prevention of mental illness. It is a way of life. It is creative in the positive sense, and has to do with the building of social habits, the finding and fostering of creative tendencies, the development of those elements within the personality which are considered by our contem¬ porary society as wholesome and useful. Man, uneducated, uninfluenced, is a vast inchoate reservoir of diverse and often conflicting strivings. Potentially he is a killer, a thief, a wanton brute. He also may be a well-mannered, safe-to-meet-on-the-street sort of a person. Whatever he becomes is partly a matter of circumstance and of what is demanded of him. He is limited here and prodigally endowed theie according to the configuration of his genetic or hereditary background. Too often theie is set for him a sort of standardized social pattern into which he is expected to fit. Home, school, society expect performance according to some poorly defined norm. Whenever there is too great a discrepancy between the capacity for achievement on the one hand and the demands for performance from 412 National Education Association family or school or society on the other, there will be trouble unless the source of the incapacity can be arrived at, understood, and allowed for, and the other potentialities of the individual developed so as to compensate the inadequacy. Not that all incapacities and disabilities arise out of genetic determinants. I here are few, if any, hereditary factors which in themselves alone determine character traits or, as a psychiatrist would prefer to say, behavior characteris¬ tics. There is ever present the potent force of environmental influence. The neurotic character is perhaps constitutionally disposed but certainly environ¬ mentally determined. Many individuals demonstrate in their infancy and childhood a behavior constellation which indicates the neurotic disposition yet their future as to sickness or health— both physically and mentally— de¬ pends very largely upon the type of environment with which they must cope. If this environment can include understanding of their needs, their disabili¬ ties, their fears and conflicts — if it can provide a healthy background for physical and emotional development their future will become the more secure. As this is accomplished society will have taken a major step toward the solu¬ tion of the vast problems of mental illness and social unfitness in general. In this second phase, then, mental hygiene is largely a matter of education and as such becomes, essentially, the province of the educator. Today, pro¬ gressive education, with its acceptance of the task of building the emotional as well as the intellectual structure of the personality, is confronted by the forces of reaction, frequently, the socalled need for economy but masks the moie fundamental antagonisms to the newer developments. Society continues to expend countless millions giving custodial care to its misfits, the mentally ill and the criminals, and at the same time interferes with the development of the only rational program for reduction of these classes. I am not one of those who count all criminals insane yet there is ample evidence to indicate that a goodly number perhaps as high as 40 percent — show pathological deviation from socalled normal intellectual and emotional attributes. Paralleling the problem of the criminal is that of the socalled insane, the name given to those persons so ill mentally as to make social adaptation im¬ possible. Their number is legion. In Colorado the doors of the state mental hospital have been closed to new admissions because it is so overcrowded. In this country there are more beds devoted to the care of the mentally ill than there are for all of the other sick and ailing lumped together. In view of this who can denj^ that mental illness is a major health problem? Furthermore, it is only too true that the great bulk of individuals suffering from such con¬ ditions never enter mental hospitals. With these facts in mind we must ask ourselves where lies the solution to this problem. Is there a rational hope for the development of a cure or of cures for the insane and neurotic individuals ? The answer is yes — in part, for, of the insane, approximately 30 percent suffer from organic illness which is potentially remedial by medical treatment. Moreover, with the new analytic approach, the psychoneuroses are distinctly treatable altho it is highly ques¬ tionable whether treatment is now relatively successful in more than 50 per¬ cent of the cases. Also, treatment of this type is so expensive and time-con- Department of Elementary School Principals 413 suming as to be prohibitive to all but a very few. On the other hand, 70 percent of the insane suffer not from organic illness but from defective heredity plus inimical environment. This group, combined with the vast number of psychoneurotics who, either thru lack of funds or native equip¬ ment, cannot avail themselves of the best therapy, makes up the great bulk of the mentally ill. This is the mass which really makes of mental illness a social problem. From the social standpoint there is no doubt but that the ultimate answer lies in prevention. Treatment of disease is the province of the physician but prevention is the common responsibility of all. Prevention is not only a matter of instituting safeguards but of mass education. Preven¬ tion of mental illness in particular must be in addition a matter for thoro and widespread study and research. It must encourage the development of a discipline which allows for rational and controlled experimentation. The only pathology demonstrable in the great bulk of the mentally ill is psycho¬ pathology. Every indication points to the probability that this pathology is preventable thru the building of sound and adequate mental, physical, and social habits. The building of habits is accomplished largely thru education and the breaking of habits as well. The ways and means whereby disabilities and defects may be discounted and the individual capacities developed in children of good and bad heredity alike constitute the major problem in edu¬ cation. Experiment is indicated since there are few, if any, charted ways or tested principles. Above all, if the mental hygiene movement is to succeed and if child guidance and progressive education are to fulfill the hope which we have pinned upon them there must be the most intimate and wholehearted cooperation. My introduction to this field came thru medicine to psychiatry to ortho or preventive psychiatry. Later I learned about the developments in the field of education and after witnessing some of these and learning first-hand about them it has become impossible for me to separate child guidance on the one hand and progressive education on the other. In their fundamental aspects they are essentially one and the same. The greatest need of the present perhaps is a universal recognition of this fact so that psychiatrists and educators may meet on the common plane of the classroom and playground and clinic to study jointly the problem at hand. CONDITIONS OF SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT CAUSING MENTAL ILL HEALTH OF CHILDREN CATHARINE ANNA CALDWELL, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, SCRANTON, PA. The White House Conference Reports tell us that one of everv three apparently normal children of self-sustaining families is sufficiently mal¬ adjusted mentally or socially to necessitate special treatment. It points out that at a cost three times that of public education five hundred thousand are todav being cared for in our institutions for the anti-social and the socially inadequate. 414 National Education Association We know that the schools are not to blame for all of this, but we must assume part of it. We are the only organization which gets all children of all classes from early childhood. The hopes of this troubled world are entrusted to us. Are we preparing them to understand life and to meet democracy’s problems ? Would that I were in a position to place in the hands of everyone inter¬ ested in childhood Psychiatry in Education written by Dr. V. V. Anderson of the Anderson School, Stattsburgh-on-Hudson, New York. He says: “Each year seventy thousand new patients enter state hospitals for insane in this country, joining that large army of between four and five hundred thousand individuals confined as mental cases. The conditions from which these individuals suffer are largely the outgrowth of personality prob¬ lems in youth, issues that are recognizable by teachers and parents as ‘nervous¬ ness’ but commonly not dealt with intelligently. If mental hygiene principles are applied, prevention of this insanity is in a large measure possible.” He shows by the case method how this is to a considerable degree accom¬ plished in his experimental school. When we consider some schools from the standpoint of mental hygiene what do we find ? More children than dogs have been ruined by blunders in training. Some are antagonized thru too much domination, going into life with “moral crutches instead of moral nerve.” The Prussian type of discipline is so much easier for the teacher, so much more spectacular and sometimes achieves an effect admired by principals — the type which is not represented here today. In The Normal Mind, Dr. William H. Burnham says, “In the light of our war experience and the modern study of psychiatry, the need of a thoro- going reconstruction of the discipline of the schools from the point of view of morals and mental hygiene is strangely emphasized.” Dr. Burnham frowns upon that type of discipline which zealously cares for the academic needs and loses sight of the integration of the personality. There are schools where the discipline is even more destructive. The re¬ sponsibility for behavior is placed upon the teacher instead of upon the pupil resulting in a most unhealthful teacher-pupil relationship. Other unhygienic procedures known to have been used are demotion be¬ cause of non-conformity ; use of fear and punishment as motivating forces ; indulgence in sarcasm, nagging, and other mental cruelty. Such abuses of one’s authority degrade the personalities of students and may result in permanent harm. Adults think little of the damage that is sometimes done to the child who is labeled “dumb-bell.” Attitudes of in¬ feriority may be formed which will cause even a child of potentialities to be¬ come a misfit for life. One may have a university degree and know little of the development of personality traits in children. And what happens? Sometimes the symptoms of problems are considered without looking into causes. Department of Elementary School Principals 415 If the child is not guided in the school environment to become socially useful and able to cope with realities where will he receive this guidance and what will prevent his becoming an enemy to society ? “But,” someone says, “the public will not stand for these ‘fads and frills.’ ” Then, we say, we realize the necessity today for adjustments and readjustments, in education as in banking. Society used to tell the schools what it wanted. Now we must educate society as to what it needs and graciously give up the real frills. If in this mechanical age there is no provision for education for leisure, it is not difficult to prophesy that there will be a large percentage of increase in the psychopathic population. A danger to the mental health of children is sometimes in our systems of grouping or in our methods of teaching, and sometimes in our testing. Ob¬ viously, it is not well from the standpoint of mental happiness for those children who are from abnormal homes and deprived of associations with well-adjusted children to be grouped together. How often we find the un¬ happy socalled problem children herded together in this section with little remedial work being done and less chance for their experiencing success. For there are “problem” teachers who feel that they are not doing their duty unless a large percentage of this group are failures. Tho these children of such a different level of ability may have received the same identical examina¬ tion as the high I. Q’s they find themselves with no credit for the achieve¬ ment which they have made. This brings us to the need for curriculum reconstruction. Present condi¬ tions have reemphasized that ui]tss we bring about a sufficient degree of flexibility to provide for individual differences and halt the disaster brought on, social inadequacy now extant in some states will become insolvent. We want to know what is being done for the exceptional children. Tax- dodging corporations should be shown the lack of economy in not providing for the crippled, the deaf, those with sight and speech defects, the sub¬ normal and backward children, and the gifted or mentally accelerated, who, by the way, should have gifted teachers and an enriched curriculum. If we are a democracy with “justice for all” the care which these underprivileged need will be provided even tho the state governor is fanatical about road¬ building. It was Emerson who said that the greatest human enterprise is the care and the culture of men. SECRETARY’S MINUTES Minneapolis, Minnesota Executive Committee Meeting, Monday Morning, February 27, 1933 The first meeting of the Executive Committee of the Department of Elementary School Principals of the National Education Association was held in the parlor of President Elizabeth McCormick’s suite, Nicollet Hotel. 416 National Education Association The following persons were present: Elizabeth McCormick, president; John S. Thomas, representing Earl R. Laing, first vicepresident; Margaret C. Mackintosh, fourth vicepresident; M. Emma Brookes, Herbert C. Hansen, and Cassie F. Roys of the Executive Committee; Aaron Kline, retiring member of the Editorial Com¬ mittee ; and Eva G. Pinkston, executive secretary. President McCormick called the group to order. The usual procedure of business was suspended and a discussion of the Chicago program took place. It was decided to have only one department breakfast at the summer meeting and this to take place on Monday. This change was made so that the members of the department would have an opportunity to attend their state breakfasts on Tuesday. The representatives of the Chicago meeting were strongly urged not to allow our hosts to prepare for lavish entertainment of their guests. A motion was made by Miss Brookes and seconded by Miss Mackintosh to suspend the reading of the minutes of the Atlantic City meeting, each member having read them in the October issue of the National Elementary Principal. Motion carried. There was a discussion of different ways to increase the membership in the Depart¬ ment. A motion was made by Miss Mackintosh and seconded by Miss Roys that wherever conditions warranted it in certain states that district enrolment chairmen be appointed instead of state chairmen. Motion carried. A motion was made by Mr. Hansen and seconded by Miss Brookes that a letter be sent to all state enrolment chairmen expressing appreciation for their cooperation and for the splendid work done in enrolling and interesting members in joining the Department this past year. Motion carried. A motion was made by Miss Roys and seconded by Miss Brookes that the Executive Committee extend to Dr. Frank W. Hubbard, a vote of appreciation for his very excellent work on the bulletins for this past year. Letters and telegrams expressing regrets that they couldn’t be present were read from Earl Laing, A. B. Heacock, Lillian Towne, and H. B. Norton. John S. Thomas, chairman of the 1934 yearbook, reported that the thirteenth year¬ book will be as follows: 1. The name will be The Principal and Aids to Teaching. 2. It will contain eleven chapters. 3. Instead of sub-topics under each heading there will be specific questions. 4. Generally speaking there will be modifications and change of plans so that in the future better and better yearbooks are produced. 5. Yearbook to be more and more a handbook in evolving and administering aids to teaching. 6. Leaflet will be sent to all prospective contributors soon after 1933 yearbook is out. Mr. Thomas presented the following recommendations of the Yearbook Com¬ mittee : a. Follow the plan of this year and have only one meeting. This meeting to precede the meeting of the Department of Superintendence. b. Suggest that a report be prepared by Editorial Committee and such report be read at Chicago by president or executive secretary. c. Individual stationery be given each member of committee. Mr. Thomas expressed the appreciation of the committee for the much extra work done at headquarters. A motion was made by Mr. Hansen and seconded by Miss Brookes that the report be accepted and appreciation be expressed for the splendid work done. The Execu¬ tive Committee realized the extra burden caused by having only one meeting. Motion carried. No action was taken about recommendations of Editorial Committee. Meeting adjourned. Department of Elementary School Principals 417 Executive Committee Meeting, Tuesday Morning, February 28, 1933 The second meeting was held in the parlor of President Elizabeth McCormick’s suite, Nicollet Hotel. The following persons were present: Elizabeth McCormick, president; John S. Thomas, representing Earl R. Laing, first vicepresident; Margaret C. Mackintosh, fourth vicepresident; M. Emma Brookes, Herbert C. Hansen, and Cassie F. Roys of the Executive Committee; Aaron Kline, retiring member of the Editorial Com¬ mittee; Bess Clement, new member of the Editorial Committee; Frank W. Hubbard, associate director of research department of the National Education Association; and Eva G. Pinkston, executive secretary. The president called the meeting to order. The minutes of the meeting on Monday, February 27, 1933, were read and approved. A motion wras made by Miss Brookes and seconded by Mr. Hansen that the report of the executive secretary be accepted and appreciation expressed for the detailed way in which it was presented. Motion carried. An informal discussion was held about plans for the summer meeting at Chicago. Mr. Kline was again instructed not to allow the principals of Chicago to embarrass themselves by planning lavish entertainments. He was asked to keep prices within the reach of all. At the request of the president the Chicago principals were to be asked to take full charge of the annual banquet. A motion was made by Mr. Hansen and seconded by Miss Roys that the Depart¬ ment of Elementary School Principals offer to the Joint Commission on the Emer¬ gency in Education, space in the National Elementary Principal for June, if they wished to use it. Motion carried. There was a discussion about the sale of previous yearbooks. A motion was made by Mr. Thomas and seconded by Miss Mackintosh that yearbooks previous to the last issue be reduced in price and that a sliding scale be used. The price is to be deter¬ mined by the executive secretary. Motion carried. Miss Bess Clement of the Editorial Committee gave a brief report of the tentative plans and titles selected for future yearbooks: 1935 — The Principal and the School-Life Activities 1936 — Leadership in the Principalship A motion was made by Mr. Hansen and seconded by Miss Roys that Miss Clement’s report be accepted. Motion carried. Due to the absence of Miss Shove, Mr. Thomas read her report of the work of the Editorial Committee of this year. Miss Roys made a motion, seconded by Miss Mackintosh, that Miss Shove’s report be accepted and hearty appreciation be ex¬ pressed to the committee for the work done and that the report be made a part of the minutes. Motion carried. Miss Shove’s report was: February 27, 1933. Report of Editorial Committee — 1933 Helen B. Shove, Chairman Madame President, Executive Committee Members, Executive Secretary: Being unable to be present, I desire to make a brief statement for the Editorial Committee having the Twelfth (1933) Yearbook of the Department of Elementary School Principals. The book is ready for the press with but one exception, after in¬ tensive work on the part of the committee, Dr. Frank Hubbard and assistants in the Research office. Some over a hundred manuscripts were received from the school and library fields. What suited the purposes of the Yearbook have been welded into a unified volume which, we hope, will interest and serve both school and library folks. We have labored better to organize and reduce the page volume of the book. We have tried a simple evaluation sheet which may be improved the coming year. 418 National Education Association We believe the method of having all manuscripts read and evaluated by each mem¬ ber before reaching Dr. Hubbard is an advance over our previous method. The three-day meeting, previous to the Superintendence convention, with such prepara¬ tion, has seemed most fruitful and inspiring. Dr. Hubbard and the Research Divi¬ sion have been exceedingly helpful at all times. The executive secretary, Miss Pinkston, has advised constructively and has done a great deal to promote the best interests of the Yearbook thru the Bulletin. The committee members, Aaron Kline and John Thomas, have been tireless in their efforts for the Department and have given a service that few can fully ap¬ preciate. The broad experience, unselfish interest, and sane leadership of Aaron Kline should be utilized by the Department as he concludes his splendid service on this committee. The plan and organization for the 1934 Yearbook under the leadership of John Thomas promises outstanding success. The new member, Miss Bess Clement, gave real help at her initial meeting with the committee and promises unusual abilities and interest. The chairman wishes to express appreciation for the opportunities of service which membership on this committee offers, but regrets that a combination of the times and unusual circumstances has not permitted a greater contribution. Anticipat¬ ing the coming year as one which will challenge and interest, and, we trust, be of increasing value to the Department, I am Most respectfully yours, {Signed, Helen B. Shove) Helen B. Shove, Chairman , 1933 John Thomas Aaron Kline A motion was made by Miss Brookes and seconded by Miss Roys that the Depart¬ ment of Elementary School Principals consider the advisability of holding a joint meeting with the Department of Supervisors and Directors of Instruction at the summer meeting in Chicago and appoint Miss Mackintosh of New York to confer with Dr. Hosic and Mr. Hansen to select an impartial chairman from Chicago. Motion carried. After a discussion of the various ways of holding the election of officers a motion was made by Miss Brookes and seconded by Miss Roys that the present method of the election be changed so as to vote by ballot. Motion carried. A motion was made by Mr. Hansen, seconded by Mr. Thomas, that the executive secretary be instructed to make a plan of honoring people who have been longest in the service, this person or persons to be the guests of the Department at the banquet at the Chicago meeting. Motion carried. Miss Mackintosh offered resolutions from the New York City Principals Associa¬ tion. Mr. Hansen made a motion, seconded by Miss Roys, that these resolutions be accepted and be given publicity in the June issue of the Bulletin. Motion carried. These resolutions were read by the executive secretary at the Wednesday after¬ noon, March 1, program of the Department. Resolutions from the Boston Principals Association, sent by Miss Lillian Towne, were read by the executive secretary. Miss Roys made a motion, seconded by Mr. Thomas, that appreciation be expressed to the Boston club for their thoughtfulness and their interest in the Department. Motion was made by Mr. Thomas and seconded by Miss Brookes that Miss Roys, Miss Mackintosh, and the executive secretary be intrusted to write a letter to the Minneapolis Principals Forum and chairmen of committees expressing appreciation for the arrangements made by them for the meetings of the Department and for their lovely hospitality. Motion carried. Meeting adjourned. Department of Elementary School Principals 419 Chicago, Illinois The Department of Elementary School Principals held two general sessions in the Upper Tower Ballroom, Stevens Hotel. The beautiful musical programs which preceded each session were given by an elementary-school orchestra composed of 250 members from the Kay and Ella Flagg Young Schools, directed by E. H. Bergh, and a rhythm band from the Lowell School, composed of 200 kindergarten chil¬ dren, directed by Mary Helen Blaney. W. R. Davies presented President McCormick with a gavel made of the steer¬ ing gear of the first trading vessel to enter Lake Superior. The gift was made pos¬ sible thru the courtesy of one of Superior’s old residents. The topics and speakers for the meetings were as follows: First Session, Monday Afternoon, July 3, 1933 A Symposium on Mental Hygiene What Is Mental Health? O. H. Plenzke, assistant state superintendent of public instruction, Madison, Wis. Coordination of Community Agencies for the Mental Health of Young People, Virgil E. Dickson, assistant superintendent of schools, Berkeley, Calif. Responsibility of Teacher-Training Institutions for the Mental Health of Prospective Teachers, Caroline B. Zachry, director, Mental Hygiene Institute, State Teachers College, Upper Montclair, N. J. Importance of Mental Health in the Elementary-School Principal, W. R. Davies, superintendent of schools, Superior, Wis. Mental Health from the Standpoint of the Doctor of Medicine, R. A. Jeffer¬ son, director, Milwaukee Mental Hygiene Council, Milwaukee, Wis. Conditions of School Environment Causing Mental III Health of Children. Catharine Anna Caldwell, public schools, Scranton, Pa. Report on 1934 Yearbook, John S. Thomas, principal, Clippert School, Detroit, Mich. Second Session, Wednesday Afternoon, July 5, 1933 Meeting the Emergency The Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education, John K. Norton, professor of education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. The Children of the Depression, Joseph Rosier, president, National Education As¬ sociation; and president, State Teachers College, Fairmont, W. Va. Business Meeting Reports of Committees A delicious “brunch” was served Monday, 11:00 a. m., at the Chicago Woman’s Club. At this delightful family get-together there were more than two hundred present. President Elizabeth McCormick in her greetings stressed the importance of cooperation and organization, especially during these trying times. She an¬ nounced the following nominating committee: Cassie F. Roys, Omaha, Nebraska, chairman; A. B. Heacock, Los Angeles, California; L. Daisy Hammond, Dayton, Ohio; E. G. Grafton, Dallas, Texas; and Ellen M. Sanders, Chicago, Illinois. In the Spanish Room of the Medical and Dental Arts Building, 185 North Wabash Avenue, where the Chicago Principals have their club rooms, the semi-annual din¬ ner was held at 6:00 p. m., July 4. The national holiday motif was carried out. I he beautiful surroundings and a splendidly arranged program made this occasion one of the interesting events of the convention. 420 National Education Association On Wednesday afternoon, July 5, the Chicago Principals were at home to visit¬ ing principals from 4 to 6 in their club rooms. An enjoyable skit from the “Strangest Interlude” was presented. Refreshments were served. At the business meeting on Wednesday afternoon, July 5, the president gave an inspiring talk about keeping the curriculum as it is today. She showed how sub¬ jects which are considered by some as fads and frills are so essential for life. Re¬ ports from the following committees were read and approved: Committee on Inter¬ national Relations, Mason A. Stratton, chairman; Committee on Necrology, M. Emma Brookes, chairman; Committee on Resolutions, A. B. Heacock, chairman; Report of 1935 Yearbook, Bess Clement, chairman. Due to the absence of John S. Thomas, chairman of the 1934 Yearbook, Frank W. Hubbard, associate director of research of the National Education Association, was asked by President McCormick to report the progress of the present yearbook and to tell about the 1934 Yearbook. He called particular attention to the helpful¬ ness to principals which the 1933 Yearbook will render and he urged members of the Department to send in articles for the 1934 Yearbook. On motion of Cassie F. Roys, Omaha, Nebraska, chairman of the Nominating Committee, seconded by William E. Hendrie, New York, N. Y., the following offi¬ cers were elected for the ensuing year: Aaron Kline, Chicago, Illinois, president, Elizabeth McCormick, Superior, Wisconsin, first vicepresident; Mason A. Strat¬ ton, Atlantic City, New Jersey, second vicepresident; M. Emma Brookes, Cleve¬ land, Ohio, third vicepresident; Ernest L. Markley, Wheeling, West Virginia, fourth vicepresident; Margaret C. Mackintosh, Brooklyn, New \ ork, fifth vice- president; Executive Committee: A. B. Heacock, Los Angeles, California, Herbert C. Hansen, Chicago, Illinois, Cassie F. Roys, Omaha, Nebraska, and Earl R. Laing, Detroit, Michigan. The president directed the executive secretary to read the telegram received from the Honorable John Boyd Thacher, mayor of the city of Albany, inviting the Department to hold its next meeting in that city. The executive secretary was in¬ structed to write Mr. Thacher thanking him for the invitation. Meeting adjourned. Executive Committee Meeting, Monday Morning, July 3, 1933 The meeting was called to order by President McCormick in Room 451-A, Stevens Hotel. The following persons were present: Elizabeth McCormick, president, Earl R. Laing, first vicepresident; Lillian M. Towne, second vicepresident; H. B. Norton, third vicepresident; Mason A. Stratton, fifth vicepresident, M. Emma Brookes, A. B. Heacock, Herbert C. Hansen, and Cassie F. Roys of the Executive Committee; and Eva G. Pinkston, executive secretary. Before any business was transacted Earl R. Laing introduced Lillian M. Towne, who presented to President McCormick, a gavel made from the railing of a stair¬ way of a school built in Boston in 1792. It was the first public school of more than one room. (For story of the gavel see October Bulletin.) Minutes of the Minneapolis meeting were omitted on motion of Herbert C. Han¬ sen, seconded by Cassie F. Roys. Meeting recessed to 9 a. m., Tuesday, so that group could attend “brunch” at the Chicago Woman’s Club. Executive Committee Meeting, Tuesday Morning, July 4, 1933 The second meeting of the Executive Committee was held in room 451-A, Stevens Hotel. The following persons were present: Elizabeth McCormick, president; Earl R. Laing, first vicepresident; Lillian M. Towne, second vicepresident; H. B. Norton, third vicepresident; Mason A. Stratton, fifth vicepresident; M. Emma Brookes, Department of Elementary School Principals 421 A. B. Heacock, Herbert C. Hansen, and Cassie F. Roys of the Executive Commit¬ tee; and Eva G. Pinkston, executive secretary. President McCormick called the meeting to order and asked for a reading of the minutes of the previous meeting. Minutes of the meeting of July 3 were read and approved. The report of the executive secretary was read and discussed. An expression of appreciation of the work done at headquarters the past year was made in a motion by Miss Brookes and seconded by Mr. Hansen. Motion carried. In studying the problems of finance, the Budget Committee was asked to make a proposed budget for the Department for the year 1933-34. Herbert C. Hansen, chairman of the Budget Committee, submitted the following report: Budget 1933-34 Total estimated receipts . $17,500 Office expenditures and salaries . $7,000 Travel . 1,000 Printing and postage . 7,500 Permanent fund and annuities . 1,200 Insurance and contingent fund . 800 $17,500 On motion of Mr. Laing, seconded by Miss Brookes, the report of the Budget Committee for 1933-34 was approved. Mr. Heacock asked that plans be studied for paying of the expenses of the Execu¬ tive Committee to the summer and winter meetings. He suggested that letters be written to boards of education and superintendents stating the importance of the attendance of the Executive Committee and asking that they pay the expense of the person who has been honored in their city. Motion by Mr. Laing, seconded by Mr. Heacock, that the executive secretary be directed to exercise every possible economy in publishing the yearbook and the Bulletin. Types of economies suggested were — bids on publications, time of pub¬ lishing, number of pages, graphs, cuts, etc. Motion carried. On motion of Mr. Heacock, seconded by Mr. Stratton, it was ordered that for this next year the time of publishing the yearbook be left to the executive secretary. Motion carried. Motion by Miss Brookes, seconded by Mr. Norton, that the financial reports for 1932 and 1933 be placed in the October Bulletin. Motion carried. Motion by Miss Towne, seconded by Miss Roys, that the sale of yearbooks be left to the discretion of the Executive Secretary. Motion carried. Motion by Mr. Heacock, seconded by Miss Brookes, that the price of the bulletin, The National Elementary Principal, be twenty-five cents as long as it is a thirty-two page publication. Motion carried. Motion by Mr. Hansen, seconded by Mr. Heacock, that a vote of appreciation be sent to those who have made possible the many fine changes in the bulletin, expressing at the same time the hearty cooperation of the executive committee. Motion carried. Motion by Miss Roys, seconded by Mr. Laing, that a letter be sent to Dr. George F. Zook, United States commissioner of education, asking that a study be made of elementary education of the United States, similar to the study on secondary edu¬ cation recently completed by his office. Motion carried. President McCormick explained fully the reasons as to why a joint program with the Department of Supervisors and Directors of Instruction was not given at this time. She expressed the hope that such a meeting might be arranged some¬ time in the near future. 422 National Education Association Miss Towne told of the suggestion by Dr. Emerson that a committee be formed for the study of alcohol and narcotics and made a motion seconded by Mr. Strat¬ ton that the Department of Elementary School Principals ask to be represented on Dr. Emerson’s Committee. Motion carried. Motion by Miss Roys, seconded by Miss Brookes, that the executive secretary write the New York City Principals’ Association commending them for the fine contribution made by the Committee on Health of their association, and expressing to them thanks for copies received. Motion carried. Motion by Miss Brookes, seconded by Miss Roys, that appreciation be expressed to our president, Elizabeth McCormick, for the efficient service which she has rendered the Department this year and that she be commended for the worth¬ while and instructive programs which she arranged for both the Minneapolis and Chicago meetings. Motion carried. A motion was made by Miss Brookes and seconded by Mr. Heacock, that a vote of appreciation be given the principals of Chicago for their delightful hospitality and that they be thanked for their personal service in making this meeting most profitable and enjoyable. Motion carried. A motion was made by Miss Brookes and seconded by Miss Towne, that an expression of appreciation be sent to the Evanston Teachers Association for in¬ viting the officers of the Department of Elementary School Principals to their en¬ joyable reception and tea at the Shawnee Country Club on Sunday, July 2. Motion carried. Meeting adjourned. Department of Kindergarten-Primary Education The department of kindergarten education grew out of a meeting of the Froebel Institute of North America, which met in connection with the Association’s meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1884. See Proceedings , 1884 :74. The name of the Department was changed in 1927 to the Department of Kindergarten-Primary Educa¬ tion. The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are: President , Mrs. Livia Youngquist Peterson, 328 Dempster Street, Evanston, Ill. ; Vicepresident , Norma Smith, State Supervisor of Elementary Edu¬ cation, Montgomery, Ala. ; Secretary , Edith Alden Rosa, 401 Fullerton Parkway, Chicago, Ill.. Facts relating to the establishment of this Depart¬ ment and records of its meetings will be found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1884: 74 1885 :349-368 1886:500-559 1887:331-361 1888:323-359 1889 :441-482 1890:543-581 1891:527-568 1892:251-303 1893 :321-381 1894:679-704 1895:510-560 1896:471-514 1897:584-613 1898:589-619 1899:530-574 1900 :365-402 1901 :500-539 1902 :409-429 1903 :377-406 1904 :415-437 1905 :341-372 1906 :626-629 1907:455-474 1908:501-541 1909 :437-456 1910:375-415 1911:477-515 1912:607-632 1913:425-445 1914:405-420 1915:629-671 1916:289-310 1917:417-429 1918:151-155 1919:171-178 1920:191-202 1921:461-469 1922 :969-985 1923:705-718 1924:583-596 1925:478-503 1926 :497-527 1927:457-472 1928:411-433 1929 :425-448 1930:367-389 1931:467-481 1932:407-414 [ 424 ] HIGH LIGHTS OF THE DENVER CONVENTION OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR CHILDHOOD EDUCATION MARY E. LEEPER, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, ASSOCIATION FOR CHILDHOOD EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. Lights strongly influence our daily lives. There are guiding lights that hold us to the safe course and show us the way just as the high, clear and strong lights point out the path for the night mail planes. There are protect¬ ing lights that tell us when to stop and change and go, the red, yellow, and green traffic lights. There are inspirational lights, warming and comforting, like candlelight and the light of an open fire. All of these lights we found in Denver. There were many guiding lights pointing out the safest courses for teach¬ ers of young children to follow. These were found in the morning spent in visiting the Denver schools, the educational and commercial exhibits, the group discussions where there was active participation by many teachers. The discussion on reading disabilities was of intense interest to many. The discussion of the conference period particularly emphasized the needs of the individual child, the need of the teacher to organize her own thinking, and the dangers of routine criticism. The group discussing creative music not only listened to excellent talks on underlying theories but saw instruments made by children in the Denver schools and heard songs whose words and music had developed from the experiences and emotions of those children. The discussion on meeting the present emergency in education brought out studies of the various methods used by different communities to retain kindergartens when their existence was threatened. These case studies came from Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. All pointed to the fact that a community truly aroused to the needs of little children will not let their kindergartens close. It was at this conference that Mary Dabney Davis of the Office of Education urged every primary and kindergarten teacher to undertake some piece of systematic research in order that she might have real facts concerning children’s learnings and develop¬ ment to place before the citizens of her own community. Dr. Davis volun¬ teered to assist in such an undertaking anyone who would write to her and ask for help. At this same conference Miss Wahlert of St. Louis, said : Today more than ever, parents and teachers must get together to think in terms of child welfare, take an inventory of what the home can do — where the school must supplement if children are to come thru this era with fewer scars. Parents have had no preparation for these rapid social and economic changes. With the rapid shifting in the patterns of home life, with practises and attitudes no longer accepted or seem¬ ing to work can children stand the stress and strain? This common interest — the welfare of children — can bring the home and the teacher closer together. It will be the teacher’s responsibility to bring this about. Everywhere about us we are aware of the insecurity of institutions, ideals, old standards. Unfortunately there are many places in this country where insecurity is felt by the teacher as well as by the rest of the wage-earners, but she puts aside all 1 425 ] 426 National Education Association feeling of self and helps the children get their only feeling of security from her. The school is just the same happy place even if the rest of the world is in a sorry mess. The teacher is the one who is the same. From our guiding lights we turn to the traffic lights of red, yellow, and green. These lights prevent our accidents, demanding that we stop, or change, or go. Dr. Reynolds of the Horace Mann School provided the red stop light, the light that makes us pause and consider, when he called atten¬ tion to the 28,000,000 children and the schools set up to prepare them for life. Dr. Reynolds believes the modern school for the modern child should develop within him four simple powers: to know things; to do things; to think things; to feel things. A modern school should determine as scientifically as possible, what, out of the great mass of human learning, it is worthwhile for a boy or girl to know. Yes, the modern school should teach children to know the truth. Let them know the truth about our politics, our economic system, our social injustice, our wars. Let them know what liberty is, but let them also know where it does not exist: let them get the American concept of equality but let them know where in America equality is but a name. It is not enough to know the problems of life: they won’t be solved unless somebody does something about them. A good school is one in which the children learn to do things. You want the school to build character into your boy. It won’t do it by preach¬ ing to him — nor can character be built by beating. A good school and incidentally a good home is one which constantly sets up situations in which doing the right thing is desirable to the child. In that way, and that way only can character be developed. And next, the modern school should teach a child to think — not do his thinking for him. I believe that the school owes it to me to help me teach my child how to think straight — in the face of objective evidence. An eminent lawyer once told me that a good citizen is one who has the qualities of an honest juryman; that is, a good citizen like an honest juryman is one who, when faced with a civic decision, weighs all the evidence on this side of the case then on the other and by means of straight thinking arrives at an honest conclusion. And finally a good school should develop within children the power to feel things. What we know does not make us what we are. What we think does not necessarily distinguish us as individuals. Even what we do is not an index of our real selves, as modern psychology will substantiate, but, what we feel, and no one in the world knows what that is except ourselves — what we feel, that we are. Knowing, doing, thinking are after all more or less artificial ; feeling is reality. Nothing great was ever thought or done which was not first greatly felt. The yellow traffic light announces “Prepare to change.” Dr. Hall who spoke of “The Teacher as an Individual” gave us our signal for “prepare to change.” We have been attacked from all sides as never before. We know that it is not a bad thing for our schools to be criticized if the sympathy behind the criticism makes the attack stimulating rather than discouraging. We acknowledge with all humility that probably we would have profited by more criticism in the past. It is hard to accept the fact that along with money and a sense of security, we have also lost a certain professional prestige or standing in public esteem. But it has made us think — and that is something for which to be thankful. I believe we have chal¬ lenged our own work as never before and that we have reached certain conclusions which will motivate us next year. Department of Kindergarten-Primary Education 427 What the individual is in all his human relationships determines his value to the community. We who teach all the children of all the people must not develop a professional clannishness which keeps us apart from community life. There seems to be a peculiar engrossment in teaching, which tends to crowd out normal interests necessary to balanced living. There also seems to be a tendency to lose perspective and thus to magnify details and to become limited to shop talk in our contacts with our friends and neighbors. The inevitable attrition of the school¬ room may wear thin our saving sense of humor, and we may take ourselves too seriously. Conservation of her individuality is as much the problem of the teacher as is pro¬ fessional growth. It is of vital importance that she secure sufficient freedom in thought and action for development of her individuality. This only will give sincerity and color to her vocation. The answer to the question “Can one be a teacher and at the same time an indi¬ vidual ?” is Yes. The proof lies in the successful personal lives of many teachers. But I am convinced that it is never accidental. It is the result of a definite plan and a controlling purpose. In the informal atmosphere of a modern classroom, where pupils participate freely in all activities, the teacher can be herself — natural, direct, genuine, spontaneous. Indeed, in this way only can she find and give happiness and help in her association with responsive children. Children recognize sincerity. It is their touchstone and the teacher’s open sesame. A teacher must recognize her responsibilities as a citizen and inform herself upon public issues of importance. We say that, but do we avail ourselves of these oppor¬ tunities, not obligations? Are our convictions formed by the brilliant woman whose current events class we attend, or do we also listen to the man in the garage, the woman who runs the club or restaurant where we eat, adviser at the bank, or the saleswoman in the shop we patronize? Do we know and respect and digest the opin¬ ions of a large number of people, or do we fall back on the Reader’s Digest ? Have we discovered any compelling interest in the world of nature which pulls us out of doors in spite of ourselves and provides the safest possible escape mechanism? Has any art or craft recently given our unskilled hands and brain a new source of satisfaction, not in the product but in the process? Dare we live out our lives without another degree (even under salary pressure) when we need long periods of rest and relaxation or time for other pursuits which, alas, bring no credits, nothing but inner satisfaction. It takes a real person to be real ; but children will accept no spurious leadership. It is a great adventure to live a life filled to the brim with human experiences. Such a life is a challenge to every power we possess. It is comparatively easy to learn how to teach ; but it takes a lifetime of schooling to learn how to live with under¬ standing, tolerance, and sympathy. Professional training may give us pride in mental achievement. Living with our fellows gives us humility. We rejoice in every bit of skill which makes us more helpful to children; but we must take our direction anew each day. “Seek ye the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” It is usually easier to obey the green light that says “Go” than it is to heed the red and yellow lights. Dr. Threlkeld speaking on “Educating the Whole Child” urges us to attempt new things, to attempt new responsibilities, to go forward. He asks these questions : “Do we have the kind of society that makes it possible for the whole personality constructively to express itself? Is our society failing 428 National Education Association to provide the proper conditions for the constructive expression of the whole child?” How many of us feel that we are doing the thing in life which we would rather do as compared to all other vocations available? No matter how much we talk about educating the whole child, the child, when he grows up, will be denied a certain very important component of complete living if he is not privileged to follow a vocational pursuit which he can follow zestfully. There must be a place for everyone, a job, if you please, in which he can not only make a living but, more important still, one in which he can express himself constructively. It is possible for each person to have a function to perform in life which he can identify with the most noble purpose which it is possible for him to conceive. But if we are to have a social situation appropriate to the individual who has been edu¬ cated in accordance with the concept of the whole, integrated personality that the newer education seeks to develop, we must, as adults, bring about the social changes necessary to produce a condition in which the individual may, by reasonable effort, procure security thruout his lifetime and express himself in his leisure time, and at all times for that matter, in terms of an ever-growing, ever-enriching life. There is a vast social frontier here. We shall have to become social explorers and engineers if we are to conquer it. It is in one of those periods calling for rapid adjustment of the social order that we live at the present moment. We should not be afraid of the challenge. We should look upon it as the greatest of all possible challenges to our leadership in social engi¬ neering. Many significant adjustments apparently are now under way. How they will work will depend upon the extent to which the people themselves give intelligent consideration to them. We school teachers have been in the habit of thinking that our sole duty with refer¬ ence to social problems lies in teaching the young certain concepts of living. But let us bear in mind that this is not enough. We must give attention to the social changes that must be made if life at large is to synchronize with the ideal we have in mind for the life of the individual. We must be active in leading the way in social reconstruction. The third group of convention lights I shall compare to the intimate soft glow of candlelight and firelight — not too obvious. They are the quiet lights that bring beauty of thought and feeling — that bring peace to the inner man and lasting strength for daily living. There were myriads of these soft happy lights : The lovely music that preceded many of the programs The beautiful pictures in color of the Colorado wild flowers with which an evening program opened A friendly tea at the Museum of Art The lecture on Poetry and the Child The drive of sixty-five miles thru the mountain parks Even-tide at Red Rocks The thoughtful hospitality of our Denver hostesses The music and dancing of Indians Contacts with 706 kindergarten and primary teachers registered at the convention. Speeches may soon be forgotten ; but the pleasures of friendship, the memories of mountainsides of blue larkspur, the confidence imparted by the everlasting hills — these remain to glow and shine within us always, Department of Kindergarten-Primary Education 429 MUCH ADO ABOUT REPORT CARDS MARJORIE HARDY, PRINCIPAL, FRIENDS SCHOOL, GERMANTOWN, PA. Much ado about report cards in our kindergarten-primary school was a wholesome agitation which became a point of departure for organizing a parents’ group for the purpose of explaining present practises in school, and the subsequent doing away with report cards. The fact that report cards in 1930-31 were being sent home twice a year instead of four times a year concerned some of the parents who were in the habit of thinking of their children’s progress in terms of academic standing rather than developing character, personality, and real learning. As a result of the parents’ meetings there was a more active interest in the school by parents who always had been interested and who had stood behind the school and its endeavors but knew not how they might best help the school. Discussions in grade groups of the purposes and outcomes of present school practises led to the question of an intelligent way to give a report of the pupil’s progress in school. This led to the formulation of a report card by the teachers of a kind that would clinch the points discussed in meetings and that would satisfy the parents. Incidentally, later, when it was sent home it brought to parents who did not attend meetings these purposes and outcomes in a way that assured the school they would be pondered over, for there was a column on the report card into which the parents were to put their checks on many of the same items checked by the teachers. However, before this report card was put in its final form for use in 1931- 32 a mimeographed copy of it was given to the parents asking them for criticisms and suggestions. More helpful suggestions were received from parents after the cards had been checked, signed, and returned to school near the end of the second semester than were given before. The report card just described served a very definite purpose at this time. The parents of each child were reached in a way that assured the school of some reaction on the part of parents. The chief criticism of the card was that even tho detailed, it gave neither a picture of the child nor the understand¬ ing of the school which the school wished to give. Consequently the next step in 1932-33 was to send no report cards home, but substitute for them the individual conferences with parents, one near the end of the first semes¬ ter, and one near the end of the second semester. To go from this rather detailed report card, which was sent home twice a year, to no report card may seem an abrupt change. It was, but the school felt that the parents were ready for it. It was felt that thru the means of having individual conferences with parents would come: (1) a better understanding of the school curriculum; (2) a better understanding of the child for the teacher as well as for the parent; (3) a better understanding of the problem the school has in giving a report of pupil progress in a satisfactory way; (4) a stronger bond formed between home and school; and (5) a means of educating the public to the worth of school practises. 430 National Education Association In preparation for the conferences the teacher’s part was to be able to tell how the child had progressed during the year, using a goal sheet prepared by the school for each grade level as a basis for judging (each teacher had 25 or more children) ; and to have ready to show to parents samples of the child’s written work of various kinds. The schedules for conferences were taken care of in the kindergarten¬ primary office and with the teachers’ approval were mailed to the parents on form sheets prepared for the purpose. Parents with more than one child were, for their convenience, scheduled for more than one conference on the same day. Accompanying each notice of conference was a mimeographed sheet stating the school’s philosophy. The principal and the teachers planned a procedure to use in giving the reports at the conferences which would con¬ serve the time of both parents and teacher. Suggestions were given the teacher for meeting individual differences in parents. The school counselor, who gave the children standardized tests, prepared for the teacher individual graphs for each child showing his progress and that of the group, and in the cases of children who fell below the median a line showing what the child had done sometime previous with the same kind of test. At the time of conference the teacher ( 1 ) gave the parents an unchecked goal sheet for them to use as the teacher discussed the child in the light of that sheet (the parents could take home the goal sheet) ; (2) showed the graph sheet after first stating its purpose and the use made of it; and (3) asked parents any questions about the child she wished and gave parents an opportunity to ask questions, to make comments, and to give suggestions. At the last conference the parents were given a written statement to keep which summed up the child’s characteristics. The kindergarten-primary principal was present at each conference which concerned a child who in any way was having great difficulty in social behavior or in school work. The teachers had one more thing to do, something upon which much importance was placed by the school, and that was a brief record of the conference written by the teacher in an examination book provided for the purpose — one book each for the parents of each child and to be used thruout the primary grades for recording conferences. Such points as the following were recorded : whether or not both parents attended the conference ; the reaction of parents to this conference method of giving reports; a list of questions asked by parents and comments and suggestions given ; and signifi¬ cant facts gleaned by the teacher from the parents about the child. It must be stated that 100 percent of the teachers were for this method of reporting pupil’s progress. The light thrown on the child thru parent contacts as well as light thrown on the parents helped the teachers to go about their work of dealing with personalities more intelligently. Let us see what was revealed by some of the teachers’ records of con¬ ferences and thru observation of parents. Department of Kindergarten-Primary Education 431 I. Better understanding of the child by teacher and parent 1. One mother said she liked this way of getting reports. She was surprised to have the teacher say one nice thing about her child. 2. Several parents told spontaneously of what parent the child was the favorite. 3. Interference and bullying of older brothers and sisters were reported. 4. A mother said she could see now that returning to school late in the fall did handicap a child. 5. The sudden nervousness in school of a child was understood when the mother reported that the child had been locked for half an hour in the rumble seat of a car, and a few days later had the experience of being at the circus while a hurricane was raging which infuriated the animals and crashed tent poles. The child told his mother that if he had his life to live over he would not have so many awful things happen to him! 6. The teachers could sense many things in parent-child relationship from the conferences. The conferences gave opportunities for teachers to help parents set up goals for home where eighteen of the twenty-four hours are spent. The parents were led to see that home and school programs should not interfere with each other. Parents who had a great deal they wished to talk over with the teacher were urged to come at another time and continue the discussion. II. Better understanding of the school 1. Parents were glad to know more specifically than a card could tell just how the habits of behavior were expected to vary at the different age levels. 2. Several mothers remarked that they could see that the school was trying to do what the home was trying to do. 3. The following questions asked by a parent indicate that he considered things other than academic standing of importance. a. Is Mary a good sport? b. Is her disposition aggressive? c. Has she the kind of mind that retains what she learns? d. Is she over-competitive? 4. The goal sheets eliminated any question or doubts on the part of parents as to the place of the three R’s in the curriculum. The graphs showed that objective evidence as well as subjective evidence was used in determining progress in the tool subjects. 5. Several parents expressed relief in knowing what their part was in the child’s learning. 6. A father (a lawyer) expressed great surprise and interest when shown how each child’s errors and difficulties in reading were diagnosed. 7. As a direct result of the conferences two children who had been withdrawn from school and entered in other school (the parents sensing no difference in schools), were reentered in our school. III. Better understanding of the problem which the school has of reporting pupil progress 1. Ninety-eight percent of parents liked this way of reporting. 2. Thirty-five fathers came to the conferences with the mothers. 3. Parents saw the place of the standardized test. They saw that while the graph showed the child’s progress based on objective evidence it was the result of one test only and was a test of achievement rather than of ability. 432 National Education Association IV. Stronger bond between school and home 1. A greater number of parents visited school. 2. There was a better attendance and more activity at group grade meetings. 3. Theie was a better attendance, especially of fathers at the evening meetings. 4. Fewer complaints have come to the school started from a person’s misunder¬ standing of school practise. Good constructive suggestions based on an intelligent understanding of school practises have been given by parents. V. Educating the public 1. An eldeily man with no children in the school greeted the principal outside of school, with, “I think it fine the way the school knows each child and w hat he needs. Wonderful! ’ (Of course the school has studied individual needs for years but the public didn’t realize it.) 2. More children from new families were entered for next year than was expected there would be in this time of depression. It has been pointed out by educators how the “school’s failure to make clear what the school is doing has led to disastrous retrenchments which are now being forced on the school systems during the present crisis.” It has been suggested that superintendents and teachers are not in a position to enlighten the public but that the principals are. My belief is that it is up to the teachers to do it. They can do it thru better teaching, the results of which speak for themselves, and they can do it thru individual conferences with parents for these reasons: 1. No one understands better than the teacher the children in her care. 2. No one understands the school curriculum as it is put into practise better than the teacher. 3. The intimate contact with the parent over the concern of his child, his most precious possession, is far-reaching and compelling, and it is at this time that it is best to make clear what the school is doing. My plea is for more scheduled, intelligently directed conferences with patents in which attention is focused on the child and school and home as a means of making home and school places for developing a race of people who will learn a way of living” which demands unselfishness, tolerance, dependableness, industriousness, good habits of work and an emotional re¬ sponsiveness to rich emotional stimuli, with an appreciation of the beautiful in music, in representative arts, in nature, in literature, in speech, coupled with moral obligation to realize it ; and educating the public to their re¬ sponsibility in making possible home and school conditions for this develop¬ ment — and by so doing at this time they help to meet the present crisis in the schools. "I hink what it would mean to the education of children if the parents of each kindergarten-primary school child met the teacher of his child in an intelligently directed conference. Department of Kindergarten-Primary Education 433 SECRETARY’S MINUTES Chicago, Illinois The officers for the Department of Kindergarten-Primary Education elected at Atlantic City in 1932 were unable to serve. For that reason the Association requested Miss Julia Wade Abbot to sponsor a program for the Chicago meeting. This pro¬ gram followed a luncheon given by the Chicago Public School Kindergarten Primary Association. Mr. William J. Bogan, Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, gave a brief but inspiring talk before presenting Miss Abbot, who spoke about the Denver meet¬ ing of the Association of Childhood Education. Miss Abbot presented Dr. Mary Dabney Davis of the Office of Education, who gave a brief outline of the work in her Department. Miss Mary Leeper, Secretary of the Association of Childhood Education, gave the high spots of the Denver meeting. “Much Ado about Report Cards” was the subject of a talk by Miss Marjorie Hardy, principal, Primary School, Philadelphia, Pa. This closed the luncheon program. A business session followed. Mrs. Jones, President of the State Kindergarten Association of California, was elected chairman of this session. This action was necessary as the Department was without officers. The report of the Nominating Committee which had been authorized by the Asso¬ ciation was accepted and the following officers were unanimously elected: president, Mrs. Livia Youngquist Peterson; vicepresident, Miss Norma Smith; secretary, Miss Edith Alden Rosa. Motions Miss Anna Jenkins of Los Angeles, California: That the President of the Depart¬ ment appoint a committee to determine the best means of cooperation between this Department and the Association of Childhood Education. Seconded and carried. Mi ss Helen Baldwin of California: That the incoming officers of the Department be requested to ask for representation on the Joint Commission on Emergency in Education, and that state representatives be notified of regional meetings, to the end that the Department may have representation at such meetings. Seconded and carried. Motion from the floor: That a Nominating Committee of five be appointed — two from the floor, and three by the President of the Department — to prepare a slate to be acted upon in 1934. Seconded and carried. The names of Miss Helen Baldwin of Oakland, California, and Miss Ethel Rose- land of Los Angeles, California, were presented from the floor; the other three are to be appointed by the President of the Department. Meeting adjourned. . ♦ Department of Lip Reading The department of lip reading was established at the Philadelphia meeting of the National Edu¬ cation Association, in July 1926, following the required successive meetings of the group, and after a petition had been presented to the Association. The officers for the year 1933-34 are: President , Coralie N. Kenfield, Teacher of Lip Reading, San Francisco Public Schools, 617 Shreve Building, San Francisco, Calif. ; Vicepresident , Estelle E. Samuel- son, Supervisor, Education and Employment Work, New York League for the Hard of Hearing, Inc., 480 Lexington Avenue, New York, N. Y. ; Secretary- Treasurer, Jane Cronholm, 1213 Seventh Avenue, Rock Island, Ill. Meetings are held once each year in July. Facts re¬ lating to the establishment of this Department and the record of meetings are to be found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1926 :1067-1 100 1928 :435-449 1930 :391-400 1932 :415-422 1927:473-486 1929:449-462 1931:483-494 [ 436 1 SPECIAL EDUCATION AND THE HARD OF HEARING FRANK G. BRUNER, DIRECTOR OF SPECIAL SCHOOLS, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, CHICAGO, ILL. Modern society is thoroly convinced of the value of education in spite of the carpings of certain newspapers. There is a conviction too, that every child has a right to the kind of education that will best fit him to take his place in the world. Regardless of the character of his handicap, he is entitled to edu¬ cational training up to the full measure of his ability to learn. Assuming, then, that a hearing defect constitutes a serious handicap to a child in his school work, the problem of the hard of hearing obviously falls within the province of special education. Some cities take care of the hard of hearing in classes with the deaf. Others have special schools or classes for them, while still others keep these children in the regular classes, and provide supplementary instruction in lip reading two or three class periods a week by a specially trained teacher who travels from one school to another for this purpose. That the hard-of-hearing child should not be placed in a class with the deaf seems reasonably certain. They already have their speech and language background and, if it seems advisable, may be taught by means of voice am¬ plifying devices. Their rate of progress should be much more rapid than that of deaf children. Then, too, in classes with the deaf, hard-of-hearing children inevitably take on the mannerisms and habits peculiar to this group. Whether a hard-of-hearing child can carry on his school work in classes with children of normal hearing, provided he is given additional instruction in lip reading, will depend upon his intelligence and on his hearing loss. No child should be removed from normal contacts except when it becomes abso¬ lutely necessary. Our experience in Chicago has been that most children with very serious hearing defects require an educational regimen which differs radically from that of the regular grades. They do satisfactory school work only when placed in special classes where the membership is small and where the instruction is individual. With a hearing loss of 20 to 30 percent their speech often becomes defective or unnatural, and they require more attention than can be given in two or three lessons a week by a peripatetic lip-reading teacher. Where the hearing loss is less than 20 percent, several lip-reading lessons a week may be very valuable against the day when the hearing be¬ comes more defective, or lost entirely. The first step in a program for hard-of-hearing children is the discovery of those who require special attention. Determining the amount of hearing loss, its cause, and its probable development are clearly matters for otologists. But there are not a sufficient number of otologists in the country to examine adequately the ears of all children of school age. The first selection must therefore be made by some other agency. Experience has demonstrated that classrooom teachers who have not been carefully trained to test hearing, do it very unsatisfactorily. Nor are the examinations made by school medical inspectors on the whole any more satisfactory. Tests with the 4- A Graybar [ 437 ] 438 National Education Association Audiometei in the hands of a nurse or a teacher carefully trained in its use, bring good results when the findings are checked by competent otologists. This is the method we are trying to follow in Chicago. Oui next problem is to determine just how many children suffering with more than 12 percent hearing loss in one or both ears should have lip-reading instruction. Clearly not all, nor indeed any considerable proportion of them. Many w ill be found to have nose, throat, and middle ear congestions which " respond to medical and surgical treatment. To my mind this is the most important result of a testing program, as these complications, if neglected, might lead to serious hearing losses, if not to deafness itself. I am not altogether familiar with the results obtained where children enrolled in regular hearing classes, are given lip-reading instruction by peri¬ patetic teachers. If such a plan were followed consistently 8000 hard-of- hearing children would require this instruction in the city of Chicago, whereas at the present time we are reaching less than 300. We were about ready to launch a more extensive lip-reading program when the depression hit us. Unquestionably the greatest need presented by the hard-of-hearing school child, and the one which is most inadequately met, is his preparation for employment. These chddren should have vocational guidance and after they have gone to work, their careers should be carefully followed and directed. I know of no place where this type of program is being carried out in a satis¬ factory manner. It is however, the cornerstone to success in the education of the hard of hearing. Loss, of hearing is not a handicap which need affect an individual’s eco¬ nomic independence, his social usefulness, his happiness, or his leadership in the community. It is our province as educators, and a challenge in particular to those of us engaged in special education, to so train the hard of hearing in school that they may go out into the world wholly self-respecting and self- sustaining members of society. A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN LIP READING MRS. HARRIET ANDREWS MONTAGUE, ASSISTANT EDITOR, Volta Review , VOLTA BUREAU, WASHINGTON, D. C. There has not been a century of progress in lip reading. The actual progress in teaching lip reading to adults covers a period of forty years. Neither adults nor children received instruction in this art in the United States prior to 1860. This was partly due to Thomas Gallaudet’s introduc¬ tion of the manual system of teaching the deaf. The first oral schools for deaf children were opened in 1867 and the following years. Adults applied to these schools for lip-reading lessons, but the teachers had not developed a system adapted to the hard of hearing, and the instruction was slow and difficult. Alexander Graham Bell did much to further the cause of lip reading. He called the first lip-reading conference in Chautauqua in 1894. This marked Department of Lip Reading 439 the beginning of the modern period of lip reading. The forty years since that date may be divided into decades which show roughly the progress made. From 1894 to 1904, the first private schools of lip reading for adults were opened. Edward B. Nitchie of New York and Martha E. Bruhn of Boston began to develop their methods. From 1904 to 1914, private schools in¬ creased rapidly in number, as graduates of the Bruhn and Nitchie schools opened classes in the larger cities thruout the country. From 1914 to 1924, lip reading was introduced into the public schools. Evening classes for adults were established, and lip reading was taught to hard-of-hearing children in the grammar grades. The period from 1924 to 1933 has seen a great expan¬ sion in public interest, and lip reading has attained a definite place in public systems of education. The modern tendency is toward making lip reading entirely a public- school activity. This means that the standards for training teachers will be higher and more exacting. There may also be developed tests of lip-reading ability, which are now lacking. Among modern departures are the Jena Method, taught in Michigan State Normal College ; the use of motion pictures in lip-reading instruction, being experimented with at Ohio State University; the vibration method being taught in schools for the deaf, which develops phenomenal lip-reading ability; and the psychological experiments being carried on at Clarke School. THE LEARNING AND TEACHING OF SPEECH READING BESSIE L. WHITAKER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF SPECIAL EDUCATION, STATE NORMAL COLLEGE, YPSILANTI, MICH. When visible effects of the movements of the organs of speech are under¬ stood in terms of meanings as audible effects are understood, there is speech reading, that is, there is what might be termed speech seeing. Normally there is what might be termed speech hearing. Speech reading, in the sense used in this discussion, becomes necessary when there is a cut-off in the auditory pathway to the brain because of the failure of the conducting mechanism (the ear), which normally receives the air vibrations that are set in motion as one person speaks to another. The object of this discussion is the consider¬ ation of the way in which speech-reading ability is acquired. The direct approach to the subject is chosen. We seek to point out a con¬ ception of the process of learning speech reading that is in line with physio¬ logical psychology. We consider it as what has been termed in the speech laboratory the genetic development of the interpretative process of speech. In the nature of speech lie the problems of our interpretation of speech. As one talks the speaking is seen in its total effects of natural phrase inter¬ play. Speech is not simply a phonetic event. The difficulties of interpretation on a phonetic basis, on the assumption that movement effects in talking correspond definitely to individual sounds, are well known. Hence the futility of training in the phonetics of facial alphabets. 440 National Education Association But the complete pattern of actual speech, including the rhythm of speech, must be aroused by means of the seemingly inadequate slight tho constantly occuiring visual stimuli. These must be made adequate — and here is the point of the discussion — thru the arousal of the complete kinesthetic or mus- culai -sensation pattern of actual speech in one’s own speaking processes. 1 his is brought about by a full association process, a fusion of the full pattern of speech with the slight visual appearance. When these visual appearances, •acting as stimuli, arouse the complete motor pattern and this is established in habit, the speech-reading ability is functioning. Sensations reach the different areas of the brain and fuse. To effect this mete must be expenence registered in the brain thru one pathway — the muscular-sensation pathway — coincidentally with the experience thru an¬ other pathway — the open pathway of vision of movement. The slight visual stimuli then become the means of the speech interpretation. I he foundation for the arousal of the muscular sensations in speaking is in the organic feelings. The shifting of dominance from the old auditory pathway to vision of movement and kinesthesis is in the genetic order of the development of sensory paths, the order of the process of original (infant) orientation and speech development: (1) organic feeling, (2) kinesthesis and touch and pressure, (3) hearing, (4) and (5) vision of movement, vision of letters. So much of the conditions for speech reading, just indicated, is in the mechanism of the association process, involving the auditory, the visual, and the motor-speech areas of the brain. Of course there is operative at the same time the con elated functioning of the brain at higher levels and centers for the meaning patterns, as in all perceiving. But vision of movement for speech interpretation or speech reading is made effective thru the rearousal of the muscular-sensation or kinesthetic pathway. This emphasis of kinesthesis is the central idea of our work in the Michigan State Normal college at Ypsilanti. The practical significance of speech reading is in the significance of speech as a means of human intercourse. Without intercourse one is cut off from life. FINDING THE HARD-OF-HEARING CHILD HAZEL WALKER, AUDIOMETER EXAMINER, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, CHICAGO, ILL. Deafness in children, as in adults tends to conceal itself, tho not for the same reason. Children who do not hear perfectly are not always aware of the fact. I have found many children who have never had an earache or any trouble with their ears who have imperfect hearing. Children who are back¬ ward in school wTork are often retarded because of defective hearing, while this condition may not even be suspected by the instructor or the child himself. Defects in school children’s hearing vary from slight defects that are scarcely noticeable, to deafness so severe that segregation of such children in separate smaller classes is necessary. The first objective in our hearing tests Department of Lip Reading 441 should be to detect the children who are severely handicapped, and segregate them in smaller classes where they can be given lip reading. The second objective is to find the group of children with moderate defects who do not require segregation, but can overcome the handicap with treatment, and a recognition of the situation by the child and the teacher. Many of these chil¬ dren should be given a foundation of lip reading for future insurance altho many of them will have the defect cleared up permanently. The hearing tests which I have been carrying on in the Chicago Schools have been done with the 4-A Audiometer and the 2-A Audiometer. The 4-A Audiometer, for those who are not familiar with it, is a machine for survey work. It is a machine similar to a victrola. Ear phones are attached. Eight to forty children may be tested at one time, or an individual test may be given to a child too small to write numbers. The children with ear phones on one ear listen to numbers from a record, writing what they hear on a sheet of paper. The numbers come thru in weaker and weaker tones as tho the person speaking were walking away from them. The test shows in black and white where the child stops hearing. It shows quickly the child with normal hear¬ ing. If a child hears no numbers on this record his hearing loss is over 30 percent. It is the showing in black and white that has the effect on the child, the parent and the teacher. These tests must be made very carefully however. The result of the first test should not be taken as final. Concentration and attention have much to do with hearing. Nervousness and fear affect con¬ centration and attention. The child comes for a second chance interested in doing his best. Consequently the results of a second test are more accurate. Whisper tests are given to children in the kindergarten, first and second grades, and those children who fail to hear at fifteen or twenty feet are given an individual audiometer test, the examiner writing the numbers as the child tells her what he hears. These children are not hard to test if a game is made of it. The follow-up work is very important in this work. Due to present finan¬ cial conditions in Chicago we have had to leave it to the principals and the teachers to follow up the cases found in their schools. I believe I can safely say this work has been done rather well under the circumstances. The cooperation of the clinics and the otologists of the city has been splen¬ did. Hundreds of tonsils and adenoids have been removed due to these tests, and many, many cases have been treated without charge. Many of the parents follow me up after the child has had treatment for a retest, and it is very gratifying to realize the improvement brought about by a few treat¬ ments by a doctor who understands the condition. Proper seating in the classroom is very necessary for these children. I do not advocate the front seat, but a seat second or third back in the middle of the room, for these children have to hear what is said in the back of the room as well as what is said in the front of the room. They should be allowed to move around the room when they need a more advantageous seat. The knowledge of the teacher of the child’s defect helps as she often talks more directly to him. 442 National Education Association I have been talking of the cases which can be helped and adjusted in the group, and they are numerous, but there is the group which should for their own good be segregated. I do not believe, however, in segregating a child until it has been shown that there is nothing that can be done to help the condition. If the prognosis is “nerve involvement progressive deafness,” then the sooner the child can be given lip reading the better. These are the children who are put in our hard-of-hearing department. A small percentage of chil¬ dren have been sent to these departments this year. There is often parental objection to this segregation. At the Bell School one of the larger centers for the deaf and hard of hearing, Miss Mattocks has tried out the experiment of letting these chil¬ dren be enrolled in the regular classes but has released them for lip reading certain periods of the day. This has worked out very nicely and to date these children have been able to hold their own. There are 75 or 100 children with marked hearing defects carrying on in their grade work in the regular schools, in spite of this handicap. They are the natural lip-readers. They should have some formal work in lip reading and it is my hope that next year we will be able to handle this for them. However before leaving the schools where I have found these children I have called them to me and given them a talk on the necessity and possibility of lip reading. The 2-A Audiometer for those who do not understand this machine, is a different test, used for those children who show more than a 30 percent loss of hearing. It is an individual test and shows to the examiner and to the otologist whether high or low tones are gone, apparently making it easier for the doctor to ascertain more readily where the trouble lies. In very deaf children remnants of hearing may often be detected by the 2-A Audiometer. I am only scratching the surface of this work in Chicago. I have a plan for next year I am hoping to be able to carry out. The financial situation in all school systems at the present makes it impossible to be allowed larger appropriations for the work. With the cooperation of the otologists interested in this work, I am hoping to be able to have them go into the schools and teach the teachers to give whisper tests to all children. This will eliminate the defective cases quickly and give me more time to check up and follow up the defective cases with the Audiometers. To date it is only a hope, another year will prove whether it can be done successfully. SECRETARY’S MINUTES Chicago, Illinois The seventh annual meeting of the Department of Lip Reading of the National Education Association was called to order on July 4, 1933 at Hotel Stevens, Chicago, Coralie N. Kenfield, president, presiding. The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. A letter of greeting from Caroline F. Kimball, first president of the Department, was read. The reports of the secretary-treasurer were read and approved. As no official reports from committee chairmen had been received, the secretary’s reports on the publicity committee, the program committee, and the re¬ vision of the constitution committee were read and approved. Department of Lip Reading 443 In reviewing the work of the past year the president said that the Department was interested in the welfare of three groups, namely, the hard-of-hearing child, the hard-of-hearing adult, and the teacher of the hard of hearing. She spoke of the mimeographed publication Method and T echnique as being one way of bringing teachers into closer touch with each other thru the exchange of new ideas in present¬ ing material. With reference to the memorandum for the Department of Lip Reading as compiled by the Department of Research, N. E. A., and entitled The Education of the Deaf and the Hard of Hearing she felt that teachers should from time to time send in statistics regarding registration figures, or any data throwing light on the work for the hard of hearing in any given district in the United States. She said that the memorandum merely offered a hint as to what teachers might accomplish thru their membership in the Department of Lip Reading of the National Education Association. The president urged teachers to help local libraries, and especially teachers’ libraries of the public schools, to secure lip-reading texts, and books and pamphlets dealing with deafness. She cited the fact that she herself contributed her copies of the Volta Review and of the Auditory Outlook to the Teachers’ Library in San Francisco. A letter from Elise H. Martens, president of the Department of Special Education was read. In this letter the Department of Special Education cordially invited the Department of Lip Reading to associate with and to become a part of the Department of Special Education. “It is understood that such action is not to prevent those whose major interest is the education of the deaf and hard of hearing from organizing themselves into a section of the Department of Special Education should this be the desire of a sufficient number.” Action was left to the incoming administration. The constitution in its revised form was read and voted on, article by article, and then adopted as a whole. Before calling for nominations for officers the president stated that altho there was no provision in the bylaws, it was an unwritten law in the Department that no officer should serve more than two years in succession. She said that the present secretary had devoted a great deal of time and effort in carrying out the duties of the office during the past two years, and had rendered most efficient service but that she was not a candidate for re-election. The following officers were elected for 1933-34: Coralie N. Kenfield, San Francisco, president; Estelle E. Samuelson, New York, vicepresident, and Jane Cronholm, Rock Inland, Ill., secretary-treasurer. The president then appointed Helen Scriver a committee of one to confer with the officers of the Department of Special Education to devise ways and means whereby the Department of Lip Reading might associate with and become a part of the De¬ partment of Special Education and yet not lose its own identity. A vote of thanks was given to the Sonotone Corporation for wiring the hall. The secretary was asked to write the usual notes of thanks, and to send to each member a copy of the constitu¬ tion as adopted. It was reported that 90 people had been in attendance at the program and that the fifty ear phones furnished by the Sonotone Corporation had all been in use. Registrations at the exhibit booth on the lower floor of the hotel exceeded 100. Meeting adjourned. ■ Department of Rural Education The department of rural education grew out of the Department of Rural and Agricultural Education which was authorized by the Board of Directors in 1907. See Proceedings , 1907 :44-45. At the Chicago meeting in 1919, the Department was re¬ organized with three organized rural groups then existing — the National Association of State Super¬ visors and Inspectors of Rural Schools, the County Superintendents' section of the National Education Association, and the National Association of Persons Engaged in the Preparation of Rural Teachers — under the name of the Department of Rural Educa¬ tion. See Proceedings , 1920:279. The officers of the Department of Rural Education for the year 1933-34 are: President , Agnes Samuel- son, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Des Moines, Iowa; Vice-president, R. E. Jaggers, Director of Teacher Training, State Department of Educa¬ tion, Frankfort, Ky. ; Secretary , Mrs. Katherine M. Cook, Chief, Division of Special Problems, U. S. Office of Education, Washington, D. C. ; Executive Com¬ mittee: M. S. Pittman, Director of Rural Education, State Normal College, Ypsilanti, Mich. (Term ex¬ pires 1934) ; Helen Hay Heyl, Assistant in Rural Education, State Education Department, Albany, N. Y. (Term expires 1935) ; 0. H. Plenzke, Assistant State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Madison, Wis. (Term expires 1936) ; Fannie W. Dunn, Profes¬ sor of Rural Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. (Term expires 1937) ; Sue Powers, Superintendent of Shelby County Schools, Memphis, Tenn. (Term expires 1938). The Department meets twice each year, in Febru¬ ary and in July. Facts relating to the establishment of this Department and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1907: 44- 45 1914: 877- 907 1921: 523- 616 1928: 453- 543 1908:1187-1215 1915:1131-1159 1922:1099- 1222 1929- 463- 541 1909: 953- 992 1916: 613- 636 1923: 745- 841 1930: 401- 499 1910:1081-1114 1917: 599- 613 1924: 651- 714 1931: 495- 540 1911:1117-1161 1918: 271- 293 1925: 522- 576 1932: 423- 453 1912:1365-1413 1919: 281- 288 1926: 537- 600 1913: 801- 818 1920: 271- 303 1927: 497- 559 [ 446 ] A PROGRAM TO MEET THE SITUATION O. H. PLENZKE, ASSISTANT STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, MADISON, WIS. What the public needs is understandable information about education. The teaching profession as a whole has been too smug in its reliance upon universal desire for good schools. That general desire is now being scuttled by economic fear, distortion of facts on school costs, and continual pressure to reduce property taxes upon which, unfortunately, schools still have to depend for support. The foes of education have easy entree to the best means of disseminating propaganda to drive the harassed citizen to desperation in seeking relief without a clear conception that the hard-won gains of years may be destroyed. Each state should so organize its forces that the people may be given accu¬ rate information about school costs and services. An apologetic defense must give way to aggressive sponsorship of education. Under-cover and lateral attacks must be met with a vigorous offense which not only justifies educa¬ tion in good times but makes it all the more imperative to maintain standards during “off” periods. The only business that has had a heavier load to carry since 1929 is education. The best agency to correlate a program of fact-projection is the state edu¬ cation association. Under its leadership the state department, the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, League of Women Voters, American Legion, and other groups may be made an effective aggregate in behalf of education. THE EFFECT OF THE PRESENT ECONOMIC SITUATION ON RURAL SCHOOLS WILLIAM A. BOERGER, COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, ST. CLOUD, MINN. While in some sections conditions are still encouraging, the area in which non-payment of taxes threatens to impair rural-school activities greatly ex¬ ceeds that of the former kind. This situation grows out of the general depres¬ sion and will not yield to efforts based exclusively upon educational plans. The condition is nationwide, but the remedy must be purely local and must include the efforts of financiers, manufacturers, and legislators. Cause and effect are too widely separated, in actual physical distance as well as in their economic interrelation, to enable any single group to devise and put in opera¬ tion a general emergency plan aiming at a lasting solution. Actual sacrifice on the part of all concerned will play a large part in local alleviation, and a wise program of future activities will act as a safeguard against the return of the malady. Rural sections must be made to appreciate the cultural value of a school-acquired education, as distinguished from its money-getting ability, and the dollar standard of measuring results will have [447] 448 National Education Association to be translated into terms of service, tho that service be rendered in the humblest of farm labors which the school must help to raise to an equal dignity with other occupations and professions. Two great factors will have to cooperate toward bringing about these results. On the one hand rural people must be filled and inspired with a wholehearted confidence. This can only come thru a sincere and honest dis¬ charge of duty on the part of those engaged in the work, without any efforts toward catering to unrelated commercial interests. On the other hand our rural teachers will have to abandon their present readiness to apologize for the line of work in which they are engaged, and to substitute therefor a great, ennobling pride ! CURRICULUM CHARACTERISTICS AND TRENDS IN RURAL SECONDARY SCHOOLS EMORY N. FERRISS, GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y. The problem of providing a curriculum-offering meeting modern de¬ mands and sufficiently extensive and varied to suit the abilities, interests, and purposes of rural youth has several angles. All studies of the subjects offered by the rural high school have forced one to the conclusion that its program is predominantly academic in character and that the central core is most frequently composed of the more traditional subjects. Altho the investigation of requirements for graduation indicates some gain in the direc¬ tion of . flexibility the traditional idea of discipline seems even yet to hold much influence. The data on trends or changes, on the other hand, seem to show rather clearly that subjects are being introduced that have possibilities in the direction of closer relations to modern life and modern problems. Again, the data indicate that the curriculum offerings have been becoming more extensive each year. In a sense, each of these inferences is probably correct. Altho the data indicate that all size-groups of rural high schools are add¬ ing to their curriculum offerings more than they are dropping, two facts not mentioned before indicate that schools with enrolments of fewer than 150 pupils, and they comprise at present about 90 percent of the rural high schools, cannot extend their offerings much beyond what they are now offer¬ ing. The first fact is that, with the present teaching staff, the pupil-teacher ratio in those schools is less than fifteen to one. The second fact is that the median teaching load of teachers in those schools at present is about four different subjects representing two major subjectmatter fields. Unless a new organization of subjectmatter reducing the number of subjects, or a new method making it possible for one teacher to handle successfully two or more subjects at a time, comes to our aid, some solution to the problem of cur¬ riculum offerings must be found apparently other than that of merely adding new subjects. Again, correspondence courses cannot, it would seem, be looked Department of Rural Education 449 to for a solution because of a number of inherent weaknesses, such as teachers untrained in courses pursued, and the lack of personal contact on the part of the pupil with persons interested in the subject studied. There is, it would appear, a fundamental problem to he solved before adequate and suitable programs of studies can be provided in rural high schools. The data on characteristics of programs of studies and on require¬ ments for graduation indicate the persistence of the theory of curriculum emphasizing the traditional academic core and the disciplinary value of certain specific subjects. The data on changes or trends indicate the entrance of the theory of subjects related to individual and social needs. These are really two irreconcilable points of view. According to the former all pupils in rural high schools, since we do not know what they may do ultimately, should be required to study the subjects ordinarily demanded for college entrance and of general value as disciplines. This point of view is supported by those who maintain that these traditional subjects should be the core of all rural high-school curriculums and that in the smaller schools they should be the curriculum. The second point of view which is less clearly defined and which has resulted in the introduction of the newer subjects, particularly in the larger schools, cannot be successful in the fullest sense so long as the traditional view has the weight it now has in rural high schools. Yet, this second point of view must, it seems to the writer, prevail ultimately, if the rural high school, particularly the smaller school, is to meet most adequately its educational responsibilities. In the writer’s judgment, the second point of view as it should be defined, will represent the application in the curriculum of the rural high school of a philosophy of secondary education with three major tenets: (1) that the curriculum offerings of the rural high school must contain educative mate¬ rials representing all the various types of learning situations necessary for a rich and well-rounded growth and promotive of exploration of the various types of abilities; (2) that the subjects, or units of subjectmatter required of all pupils must be reduced to the minimum and must possess high proven values in promoting those personal and social characteristics and adjustments essential or highly desirable for all normal persons rather than those subjects regarded as valuable in the training of a select group with pronounced aca¬ demic interests and abilities; and (3) that in the upper years there will not be one core but opportunity increasingly afforded the pupil to select and pursue one or more cores or sequences according to his interests, abilities, and needs. The adequate interpretation of such a philosophy of curriculum offerings will require the intimate study and analysis of the educational interests and needs of all children living in rural areas. In conclusion, the consideration of the curriculum characteristics and trends in rural high schools indicates the operation of two conflicting and irreconcilable theories of secondary education. In practise we are still in large measure trying to meet the educational needs of all pupils thru curriculum materials originally designed to prepare a select group for entrance to college when the idea of general discipline was prevailing. Newer subjects of more 450 National Education Association direct relation to the everyday affairs and activities of modern life as lived by the ordinary man and woman, and in which great group most of the pupils at present in our high schools will ultimately find their place, have been in recent years gaining some recognition in the curriculum offerings of rural high schools. They have become, however, only supplemental to the older vested subjects, rather than subjects regarded as having within themselves vital growth materials. Since the curriculum offerings of rural high schools are often severely limited, the most immediate and serious problem appears to be the determination of the major responsibilities and objectives of the smaller secondary schools and the development of primary curriculum offer¬ ings designed to yield the most in the way of direct values to the greatest number of rural boys and girls. Schools able to do more should then, it would seem, develop additional sequences and cores, as far as possible, or feasible, directly bearing upon the special interests and needs of specific groups and pupils. SOME MAJOR CURRICULUM PROBLEMS IN THE RURAL SECONDARY SCHOOL \ WILLIAM H. BRISTOW, DEPUTY STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, HARRISBURG, PA. A study made under the direction of the Society for the Study of Educa¬ tion in 1931 called attention to the fact that schools that were organized on the junior-senior high school basis seemed to offer the greatest amount of promise in connection with programs of rural education. Other studies which have been made have also found this to be true. The findings of Professor Spaulding in connection with the National Survey for Secondary Education, indicate very definitely that schools which have been reorganized on the junior-senior high school basis do offer to the boys and girls a more satisfac¬ tory program. These materials will be contained in detail in the report of the Survey. The overlapping and inefficiency of the very small high school is generally recognized. Suggestions for improving the situation in isolated schools have been offered by many, particularly Mr. Gaumnitz of the United States Office of Education and Professor Winds, formerly of that office and now of the University of Virginia. Professor Winds is working intensively on a project in schools in one of the Virginia counties. In discussing the problem Mr. Gaumnitz has said : Equalization in providing educational opportunities results in the establishment of many small high schools and the small high school as now commonly organized and administered, cannot provide equality of educational opportunity. Curriculum offerings in these small high schools are too limited and stereotyped to fit either the collected or individual needs of the children whose lives they touch. Mr. Gaumnitz further states: Thus the secondary education of the child attending the rural or small high school is in most cases circumscribed by an untrained and over-burdened teaching staff; Department of Rural Education 451 it is limited to a narrow and maladjusted program of educational activities; and it is handicapped by the meagerness or the entire absence of educational equipment. The number of pupils available in the average local high-school district in rural communities is so small that in most cases it is impossible to furnish at reasonable costs a quality of secondary education commensurate with social need, and if such quality of education is undertaken, the cost is apt to become very high. First, What is the worth to the development of rural children of the educational opportunities offered in these small high schools? Do the values obtained justify the expenditures? Are the social services resulting from the establishment and main¬ tenance of a high school in every local community such as to warrant extreme efforts and costs? Second, Can the same results and the same values be achieved thru better planning and better organization of our secondary-school program? Can these results be ob¬ tained at greatly reduced costs? Can plans be effected thru which equal expenditures will buy for the rural child a higher quality and a more useful type of secondary education than he now obtains?1 There are many hopeful signs of progress along the line of forming a larger unit of school administration. Pennsylvania is now attempting to organize education with a larger unit of school administration. A local effort to reorganize schools in one county is described as follows : An attempt is now being made in Columbia County to meet more satisfactorily the needs of the boys and girls of the community thru the organization of a series of small junior high schools. For the most part these schools take the place of organiza¬ tions which previously included grades 9, 10, and 11. The years included in the junior high schools are grades 7, 8, 9, and 10. In Columbia County the organization of three junior high schools has been made a part of the consolidation program and in a number of cases an attempt is also being made to work out a system of vocational agriculture and vocational home economics for pupils in grades 9 and 10. The recent efforts in Missouri seem to hold the greatest possibility in readjusting the rural high-school program. In the Missouri program a com¬ plete system of junior-senior high schools has been suggested. The problem of curriculum reorganization which confronts all secondary schools is even more important for small units. Suggestions which seem to be most pertinent are : ( 1 ) The integration and correlation of certain sub¬ jects, and the elimination of subjectmatter which is not pertinent to modern life; and (2) The reorganization of courses so as to be within the experience of rural boys and girls. For a number of years suggestions have been made as to the use of cor¬ respondence courses in extending the work of the small secondary school. This is one of the most hopeful possibilities yet offered. Such correspondence courses would not only fit into the work of the day school, but would also provide opportunities for extending the services of the school to adults. It would eliminate the present tendency to have the whole program of studies of the school conditioned by those who are most influential in the community and who must have four years of Latin or some other special requirement 1 Gaumnitz, Walter H. The Smallness of America’s Rural High Schools, U. S. Department of the Interior, Office of Education, Bulletin, 1930, No. 13. Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1930, p. 66, 68, and 69. 452 National Education Association to meet certain specific college requirements. It would make possible an ex¬ tension of present opportunities which can never be hoped for except as some plan of directed study is made a part of the program of the small school. The administration of these courses will vary with local conditions. The development of pupil personnel programs and guidance practises is as much needed in the small rural secondary school as in the larger school. A personnel program to accompany the other administrative readjustments in the school seems to be necessary, if we are to place in effect our sugges¬ tions with reference to individualizing pupil programs. Modification of records such as those developed by the American Council on Education to meet the needs of small schools, and to be used in solving individual curric¬ ulum problems, will be helpful. It is a difficult task to convince teachers and principals in small schools that they do not know “all that should be known about their pupils.” Close investigation reveals that the very situation in many of these schools prevents the school from having significant and meaningful information on which to guide and help the pupil. STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF ONE-TEACHER SCHOOLS FRANCIS G. BLAIR, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, SPRINGFIELD, ILL. The practical man on the job who sees that children are coming to school and must be given the best educational opportunity possible while they are there, makes this one criticism — that some of the radical proponents of the larger system seem unwilling that any effort should be made to improve the instruction and the quality and quantity of educational opportunity in the one- teacher schools. It would look as if they were afraid that if the one-room school could be improved so that it gave a really rich or worthwhile educa¬ tional opportunity that one of the main arguments for the larger unit would be taken away. However this may be from a theoretical standpoint, state superintendents of public instruction and county superintendents who have a very real and a very practical duty to perform will continue to seek out ways and means for providing new programs and new technics of teaching as well as new physical equipment to make the education of the rural child as interesting and as valuable as possible. Having attended a one-room school and having taught in one I find is both an advantage and a disadvantage to me. I have never been able to share the ultra-pessimism of some people who have never had such experiences in a one-teacher rural school. And while I am convinced that many of the one-room schools in Illinois should be dis¬ continued, I am also convinced that they can be made a very effective instru¬ ment for giving the young people a thoro and worthwhile education. A recent survey in Illinois has shown that the children who come from the rural schools thru the small two- and three-year high schools into the senior high schools rank very high in their standing with those who have come up from the larger town and city systems. This, of course, may be due in part Department of Rural Education 453 to the education that comes from the life on the farm. But I am of the opinion that many of the sweeping criticisms which are leveled today against the one-teacher school have in mind the kind of school which has largely disappeared. Every year in Illinois it is my custom to visit one-teacher schools in a number of counties of the state. In those schools where they have in¬ stalled what may be called the individual study plan for the pupils in the upper grades and where competent teachers are employed, I have seen as good a quality of teaching as I have found in the very best city-school systems. The old school where every class came up for recitation each day and where the teacher’s time was largely given over to discipline and to hearing pupils recite little bits that they had committed to memory, may still exist here and there, but it is not the characteristic school. In some of the counties of Illinois there are rural school music supervisors employed by the several districts, who visit these schools and I have been surprised to find how effective and worthwhile this work is. In certain counties special teachers of reading from the teachers colleges meet with the younger rural-school teachers on Satur¬ day and give them immediate aid in meeting their pressing difficulties. More¬ over, each of the five teachers colleges has taken over a number of rural schools where the students who are preparing to teach in the rural schools make observations and assist the teachers in charge. They get that first-hand knowledge of how to organize and to instruct a one-teacher school. If anyone will take the trouble to visit these rural training schools and to see the spirit of enthusiasm and the unusual results which follow, they would at least be forced to conclude that there are one-room schools which are providing a very high-grade educational opportunity for their pupils. EDUCATIONAL LEGISLATION IN 1933 WILLIAM JOHN COOPER, U. S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. This year some 44 state legislatures were in session at one time or another. It appeared to be a most important time for schools in view of the crisis. In general, we may say that education held its own. That is, in most of the states, it did not receive any serious set-backs. Furthermore, some of the legislators voted for reforms for which educators have worked for many years. In general, however, the movements for a larger school district and for higher qualifications for teachers which have had the approval of school experts for many years were left alone. Some of the more promising pieces of legislation passed are the following: Alaska this year undid the damage which the legislature of four years ago did. It created a territorial board of education of five members appointed by the governor with the approval of both houses of the legislature. Each member will serve for six years and this board will appoint the commissioner of education. Anybody who knows Alaska and the difficulty of travel therein will realize how ridiculous it was for a man who was to receive $5000 a year to seek public election in that vast territory. 454 National Education Association The Iowa legislature provided that a board of education may establish a kindergarten upon the filing of a petition signed by the parents or guardians of twenty-five or more children of kindergarten age. This is a step in the right direction and we believe will lead to more kindergartens. Indiana made provision for state reimbursements of school corporations in the amount of $600 per annum. It further provided that the minimum salary shall not be less than $800 for elementary teachers and $1000 for high-school teachers. In Maine, the legislature provided for the appointment of a commission of fifteen representative citizens to study public-school finances. The com¬ mission is empowered to employ such experts as, in its judgment, seem advisable. New Mexico provided for free textbooks to all the school children of the state. These are to be paid for from an excise tax of four cents per gallon on lubricating oil. The legislature also provided for the abolition of county boards of education and created a school district which shall be known as the “Rural schools of — - County, New Mexico.” Such school district may take in any territory not already a part of it or annexed to a rural municipal independent district. The boards will consist of five members elected for six-year terms. It also provided a statewide retirement system for teachers. New York has provided for fewer supervisory districts. Whenever a vacancy shall occur in the office of a superintendent the state department is required to conduct a survey and ascertain whether or not it is necessary to fill this place. North Carolina established a statewide eight-month school system in place of the six-month system which it created in 1931. The Oregon legislature set up an educational commission composed of seven citizens appointed by the governor to study the matters of organiza¬ tion and finance in the elementary and secondary schools of the state. The Washington legislature provided for greater equalization of public- school support by increased state contributions. Of this legislation, Superin¬ tendent Showalter wrote: The legislature just closed has given us some of the most progressive educational measures ever enacted in this state. Indeed, more important school law has been writ¬ ten during the last sixty days than has been passed during an entire decade. This has been primarily due to two things. First, the educational forces of the state have stood as a unit, with all of their friends cooperating in support of the school measures introduced. Second, the governor of our state has stood squarely back of his promises to improve our school conditions. The first is a mark of higher attain¬ ment in professional attitude. The second is the fulfillment of a man’s unqualified faith in the worth of public-school education. . . . The legislature of West Virginia has abolished all independent school districts and has vested the control of schools in a new county board of edu¬ cation. It has provided for the election of the county superintendents here¬ after by this county board. It also fixes higher qualifications for schoolboard Department of Rural Education 455 members and for county superintendents. The legislature provided that the minimum term for elementary and high schools shall be nine months or such part thereof as the maximum levy and state equalization fund will permit. Many citizens, and including school people of course, have been eager to learn where sufficient funds have been provided to avoid serious loss in educational facilities. Some of the outstanding tax legislation for the support of schools may be noted in Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Washington. Idaho has levied a tax on chain stores of $5 for one store to $500 for 20 stores. This money goes to the support of the school equalization fund of the state. Indiana imposed a tax on intangible property. Ten percent of this goes to the state and 90 percent to the county. Of the latter, three-fourths are to be distributed to the school corporations. In Minnesota, the legislature provided first for an income tax and the creation of a fund from this tax to be distributed to the state on the basis of compulsory school age population. It, too, provided for a tax on chain stores, the revenue from which is to go to the schools. South Dakota also enacted a gross income tax which it is estimated will enrich the schools by approximately four million dollars per year. Washington enacted a business and occupational excise tax which it is estimated will approximate eight million dollars per year, all of which is to be used for the current school funds. This legislature also enacted a tax on chain stores, 90 percent of the revenue from which is to be used for school appropriations. Idaho, New Mexico, and Washington are also among the states which have enacted improved methods for equalizing their school funds. We must at this time, however, express our regret at what seems to be a backward step in the state of Arkansas. This state abolished the state superintendency and the state board of education, giving the governor the power to appoint a temporary board to serve until a state superintendent can be elected by the people. It also abolished all county superintendents and placed their duties in the hands of a county examiner to be appointed by the county court for a two-year term and to receive a salary not in excess of $650 per year. From Maine, we have a report of a reduction of $250,000 in the state budget for schools. Maine is one of those states in which the state’s propor¬ tion of the schools has been about the same percentage for the past forty years. In 1930 it was a little over 2 percent less than it was in 1890. We regret that the legislature saw fit to make this reduction. In Iowa, we note that a bill providing for standardization and centraliza¬ tion of the purchase of supplies was defeated. We do not know anything of the merits of the particular bill under discussion, but we do wish to observe that in general this is a backward step. We note with regret reductions in teachers’ salaries in many states. Idaho has reduced its appropriation from 20 to 39 percent of the amount appro- 456 National Education Association priated in the last biennium. Iowa, we are told has fixed a $40 per month minimum flat salary for teachers holding all types of certificates and with all kinds of experience. Maryland is reported to have reduced all county taxes from 67 cents to 47 cents per hundred dollars of assessed valuation. Preliminary reports from the election, June 17, from California seem to indicate that a constitutional amendment having to do with school sup¬ port has passed. This would appear to put more of the burden of school sup¬ port upon the state. We cannot be sure however at this distance. All in all educators must feel thankful that in a day of such distress with so many people out of work, that support for the schools seems to be forth¬ coming in most of the districts. The schools that have been closed because of finances have been remarkably few and they have been in the hardest hit portions of the country. MEETING THE EMERGENCY PROBLEMS IN CONSOLI¬ DATED SCHOOLS C. P. ARCHER, STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE, MOORHEAD, MINN. Emergency problems in consolidated schools are much the same type as in other schools ; namely, those relating to finance. Evidence collected by the United States Office of Education and by the writer indicates that the most frequent method of meeting the emergency is to cut the budget and reduce the salaries of teachers and other employees. Evidence collected from seven midwestern states indicates that the reduction trends previously re¬ ported by the United States Office of Education for the past two years will be even greater for the school year 1933-34 than for any previous years. If we are to judge by recent reports, we are also facing a radical rise in commodity prices. The probable decrease in the value of the dollar will mean much hardship for teachers who have received for 1933-34 the sharpest reduction in salary of any year, and this deep cut is made without regard to the fact that salaries have been seriously reduced for the past two or three years. In addition to salary reductions for teachers, janitors, and bus drivers, there is some evidence of curtailment of activities such as music, art, and occasionally athletics. Some teaching combinations have been effected which enable schools to discharge a few teachers and thus save some money. In some cases, bus routes have been lengthened to reduce costs. In most cases there is evidence of an effort on the part of teachers to accept the responsi¬ bility and carry on a full program of activities, even with a larger load and on a reduced salary. Few changes have occurred which indicate permanent improvements in education. The depression, which should have brought many needed reforms, has brought little. It should be the mission of those of us who are interested in the future welfare of education to keep before the minds of the people the lessons of the depression, and exert every effort to secure permanent changes which will help prevent a return or continuation of present condi¬ tions. Some needed changes are as follows: Department of Rural Education 457 1. A new system of taxation — This means the substitution of income taxes, sales taxes, luxury taxes, and the like for a part of our present property tax. 2. Larger units of taxation and administration — Records of consolidated and rural schools reveal enormous waste of money and effort in the purchase of supplies and in the employment of teachers. The county or larger district unit should be used. 3. Radical changes in curriculum — We must prepare boys and create, and thus make new jobs, rather than merely prepare for the old ones in the same way. Farm boys and girls must also be taught all the way thru school how to take their places in the political and social life of our nation. They must also learn to cooperate for common economic gain, if they are to compete with other industries. 4. The elimination of our useless and inefficient system of teacher appointments by the application method — Teacher appointment and promotion should be based on records of fitness without solicitation of the teachers themselves. SAFEGUARDING INSTRUCTION IN THE EMERGENCY RAY P. SNYDER, DIRECTOR, RURAL EDUCATION DIVISION, STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, ALBANY, N. Y. The rural-school problem is an economic problem. School finance consists of at least two factors — wealth and organized ability to use wealth wisely and efficiently. Quality of instruction is dependent upon both factors. People want trained teachers when they are so organized that they can express their desires in a community of interest by the selection of efficient school officials. Up to its capacity the small school is not inherently weak. It is what lies back of the small school — the district unit of administration — that is weak. Some small schools are very progressive schools. Due to a scientific system of state aid, instruction has been maintained in New York in all schools of all types for the school year of thirty-eight weeks. The equalization quota is the “gold standard” of New York’s system of state aid around which revolve all other quotas and types of aid. Its chief factors are valuation and number of pupils in school attendance. The pro¬ tective value of this system of aid is due to the fact that New York’s budget is derived entirely from sources of indirect taxation. Thus, real estate is benefited by this plan of aid. Few states have the resources of indirect taxation that New York has. Therefore, for the benefit of America the federal government must find a scientific way to distribute school aid to the less wealthy states and par¬ ticularly to those that are largely agricultural. If it were not for a scientific system of aid many schools in rural areas of New York would now be closed as they are closed in some states of the union. Budgets have been slashed and salaries lowered but nevertheless, because of a sound plan of aid, all New York state’s schools have been kept open. New central districts have been organized, transportation has been provided for high-school children, rural training departments have been organized. A program of instruction in rural areas on a basis of equality of oppor¬ tunity is impossible without equalization of school support. 458 National Education Association RURAL PROBLEMS AND THE COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS MRS. CORA B. RYMAN, SUPERINTENDENT, DECATUR COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS, DECATUR, ILL. I wish to acknowledge at the beginning of this discussion that it is much easier to enumerate the problems confronting those of us who serve in rural districts than to suggest cures for them. Diversified and manifold are the duties imposed upon the county superin¬ tendent of schools. In fact, other than the three specific duties as adminis¬ trator, supervisor, and clerical machine, the county superintendent’s office must be a clearing house, a sort of refuge for a multitude of details that do not rightfully belong there but have no home elsewhere. Sell the school to the community — The county superintendent should be a good salesman. To be sure, the school belongs to the community, but very few fully appreciate the benefits derived from it. Selling the school to the community requires personal contact on the part of the county superin¬ tendent and the teacher. Never miss an opportunity to talk with school di¬ rectors and the community about the school. Community clubs and parent- teacher associations afford a splendid opportunity to create school interest and sell the school to the community. Educational progress is in direct pro¬ portion to the public opinion of the community. In order to provide better school advantages we must improve public sentiment. Organize school officers — In my county we have a School Officers Asso¬ ciation. We meet twice each year, in March and in August, and talk over school problems. Out of this cooperation have developed many helpful fac¬ tors. At the close of the school year each board meets with the teacher and also the superintendent. Plans are made for the coming year, a school budget is outlined, and the tax levy is then made accordingly. It pays to cultivate schoolboards, always striving to be diplomatic and tactful, and never losing our sense of humor. This must be the aim of the county superintendent. I trust the time will soon come when qualifications will be required for those serving on schoolboards, the one heading the list to be an interest in and knowledge of school affairs. This would lessen the work of the county superintendent. Cooperate with all agencies that are organized for the good of the com¬ munity — The school is only one agency in the great field of education. Per¬ haps it is the one that most of us are serving and the one we are most inter¬ ested in. The school and the county superintendent must cooperate with all agencies that are working for the helpfulness of boys and girls and the betterment of the community. Let us teach cooperation and sympathetic understanding. Let us teach the Golden Rule, and this must be done in our rural communities by personal contact. Curriculum — Too long we have endeavored to fit our children to the curriculum rather than plan the course to meet the needs of the children. Too long have we put all the children thru the same mill and how sadly have we been disappointed when we did not have a uniform grist. Happily Department of Rural Education 459 this fallacy is being rapidly corrected and the curriculum is made so elastic that it conforms to the idiosyncrasies of each particular child. This can be done only thru the good judgment and common sense of the teacher and the cooperation of the parents. The teacher — Down thru the years, one of the problems of the rural district was to secure competent and qualified teachers. The old theory that anyone can teach in a rural district has been exploded and schoolboards are demanding that teachers be properly trained and qualified to teach the one- room country school. In my county our boards require one year of normal or college training and many of our rural teachers are college graduates. These standards have been brought about thru the interest of our school officers. In my section of the country it is not so much lack of training on the part of the teacher as it is lack of sympathy and understanding of rural life and its environment. The art of knowing how to get along with the community is a great asset to the rural teacher. We covet for all rural teachers adequate preparation and sufficient training for efficient teaching, but we also realize that with all this must come energy and persistence to use these required facilities. Meager training plus an abundance of energy and determination to succeed often spell success, while splendid training and preparation coupled with little desire to succeed usually spell failure. Seemingly the all-important problem facing our public-school system is the financial situation. I do not agree that it is. I have faith in our great commonwealth, in the American taxpayer. I have faith to believe that out of this overwhelming crisis will dawn a new day for our republic, a day when those ideals of righteousness and truth will prevail over greed, selfish¬ ness, and political chicanery. Our people must and will realize in a keener way that the perpetuity of our government rests upon the training, the culture of our youth, and we can progress only thru the enlightenment and character of our young people. This sentiment will surely hasten the day when here in our United States we will be willing and anxious to spend our money keeping children in school rather than incarcerated in our penal institutions. Statistics today show that we are spending approximately ten times as much for the main¬ tenance of penal institutions as on the upkeep of our schools. They also show that only a very small percent of children graduating from the eighth grade ever darken the door of such institutions. Last year in Illinois we spent $150,000,000 for schools, $520,000,000 for luxuries, and $850,000,000 for automobiles and upkeep. Only two and a half cents out of each American dollar is spent for the maintenance of the public schools and twenty-two cents is spent for luxuries. Upon the rural schools of today is imposed a perplexing and challenging task. They must educate youth for the new conditions of rural life. The school must not turn the dreams of the ambitious youth to the city as the only challenge for worthy achievement, but must make the farm a more attractive place in which to live and stimulate material prosperity and happiness of the nation. 460 National Education Association PRESERVING ESSENTIALS IN TEACHING COUNTRY SCHOOLS FLORENCE HALE, FIRST VICEPRESIDENT OF THE N. E. A.; AND EDITOR, The Grade Teacher , new York, n. y. What are the essentials in the education of rural children? They may be divided under two heads: (a) The socalled practical subjects necessary for earning a living, and (b) the cultural subjects necessary for a well-rounded life. These two essential objectives are very closely related to each other. In the large, they do not differ widely from the objectives of the town or city-school system. Because of the isolation of his environment, the rural child in many instances needs to have much more emphasis placed upon the cultural subjects. Reading, arithmetic, penmanship, geography and history are probably unquestioned everywhere as essential subjects and are in no great danger of elimination in this emergency. Cultural subjects, such as music, art, to¬ gether with some of the newer subjects like health education, home eco¬ nomics (meaning homemaking) and industrial arts or vocational education are not as well understood in rural communities and are under fire at the present time. There is no question in the minds of educators as to the importance of these subjects and no need of taking time to argue about their merits. The question is, as my subject indicates, how to acquaint the public with their importance in order that they shall not be eliminated from the curric¬ ulum. The need of the interpretation of these subjects to the public is not confined, however, to rural communities. In my opinion, one great reason for the attack on all these school subjects is that the educators have not learned how to explain their methods to the taxpayers in simple, non-tech- nical language that can be easily understood, that sounds sensible, and that shows plainly why people should be spending their money to support the schools and to pay for the teaching of these subjects. The greatest need dur¬ ing the coming year in rural communities is for teachers and county super¬ intendents to make definite plans for explaining the curriculum and methods to the everyday citizen in this simple language. If any of these subjects can¬ not be explained in this way, then I should have great doubts of the wisdom of retaining them in the curriculum. Teachers get together in their meetings and spend hours and hundreds of words in explaining their purposes to one another, but the public at home remains in the same hazy condition of mind regarding the school regardless of these meetings. The men and women in the rural communities are work¬ ing hard to pay their taxes, to feed and clothe their children, and cannot be expected to read educational journals or to study education. They base their criticisms of the school largely upon the way they were taught when they went to school. Many of them had no music or art in their schools and so it seems to them a foolish expenditure. If the educator can only learn how, thru the press, thru public meetings, and thru personal visits to the home, to Department of Rural Education 461 translate his school language into common, everyday, sensible English and to formulate his arguments in words that the ordinary person can under¬ stand, half the battle for all the school subjects will be won. Parents have been blamed too much for not visiting the schools. Fathers and mothers are having a hard struggle during the busy working day to earn a living. The school and its interests must be brought to them thru evening gatherings and thru the newspapers. Educators will do well thru the coming critical months to give attention to this matter and to work out a careful systematic plan for this interpretation of the schools to the public. ■ l V . Department of School Health and Physical Education The department of school health and physi¬ cal education had its beginning as the Depart¬ ment of Child Study which was created at the Asbury Park meeting in 1894. See p. 40 of the 1894 Proceedings. In 1911 the name was changed to the Department of Child Hygiene. See Proceedings 1911 : 870. In July, 1924, the Department was merged with the Department of Physical and Health Education under the name of the Department of School Health and Physical Education. See Proceedings 1924:96. The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are: President , A. W. Thompson, State Director of Health and Physical Education, State Capitol, Lan¬ sing, Mich. ; Vice-president, Edna W. Bailey, Associ¬ ate Professor of Education, University of California, Berkeley, Calif.; Secretary-Treasurer , James E. Rogers, Director, National Physical Education Serv¬ ice, 315 Fourth Avenue, New York, N. Y. ; Executive Committee: A. G. Ireland, State Director of Health and Physical Education, 1208 Trenton Trust Build¬ ing, Trenton, N. J. (Term expires 1934) ; William E. Burdick, State Director of Physical Education, 7 East Mulberry Street, Baltimore, Md. (Term expires 1935) ; Ethel Perrin, American Child Health Asso¬ ciation, 450 Seventh Avenue, New York, N. Y. (Term expires 1936) ; F. W. Maroney, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. (Term expires 1937) . The Department meets once each year, in June. Facts relating to the establishment of this Depart¬ ment and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1893: 615-678 1895: 944-950 1896: 893-936 1897: 870-915 1898: 929-959 1899:1064-1096 1901: 758-770 1902: 739-758 1903: 817-846 1904: 803-841 1905: 755-779 1906: 711-713 1907: 925-950 1908: 998-1045 1909: 745-788 1910: 921-948 1911: 905-938 1919: 315-321 1927: 561-581 1912:1141-1151 1920: 311-321 1928: 545-567 1913: 667-694 1921: 517-522 1929: 543-558 1914: 683-720 1922:1085-1098 1930: 501-527 1915: 971-994 1923: 744 1931: 541-560 1916: 681-698 1924: 637-649 1932: 455-466 1917: 521-533 1925: 577-597 1918: 339-357 1926: 601-624 [ 464 ] GROWTH COMPARISON OF ATHLETES AND NON¬ ATHLETES FLOYD A. ROWE, DIRECTOR, BUREAU OF PHYSICAL WELFARE, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, CLEVELAND, OHIO In a questionnaire gotten out to the teachers of physical education in junior and senior high schools, the teachers were asked to report on the height and weight increases of boys on football squads and also on a com¬ parable group of boys not taking part in football. The result of this investigation showed in a crude way, and particularly in junior high school, that boys taking part in football (and we play touch , not the regulation game) did not grow either in height or weight as much as did boys who only took part in the required physical education program. There appeared to be without question an appreciable slowing up of the growth process for the boys taking part in athletics during the period of competition, as compared with boys not so taking part. This slowing up of growth processes was sufficiently large so that it was a measurable thing, both for increase in height and increase in weight. Another noticeable fact was that more boys taking part in athletics lost weight, and that they lost more weight than did the boys of the non-athletic group. The change in rate of growth in senior high school, while noticeable, was not as marked as it was in junior high school. This, no doubt, because the older boys are nearer their maximum sizes and the rate of growth is not as great as in the younger “teen” age boys — the growth curve either weight or height in general flat¬ tening out as the boys reach maturity. The gross records coming in from all the schools, however, were not sufficiently accurate to warrant the placing of a great deal of dependence upon them, since in some instances the checking of height and weight had no doubt been left to boys and some rather apparent inaccuracies appeared. Records were next taken of the boys taking part in athletics as opposed to those not active in athletics in junior high schools only. The importance of accuracy was stressed and in carefully checking the results turned in, the reports from three schools contained no discoverable apparent inaccuracies. This group consisted of 67 boys in the athletic group and 65 boys in the non-athletic group, paired according to weight and height at the beginning of the study. From these two groups, it was discovered that between the period Septem¬ ber 1 to December 1, the sixty-five non-athletic boys gained in weight an average of 3.15 pounds per boy and gained in height an average of 35/100 of an inch, just over one-third of an inch. The group of sixty-seven boys competing in athletics gained on the average of 1.18 lbs. per boy and gained in height an average of 28/100 of an inch, just over a quarter of an inch. 1 hese figures are gross figures covering boys of all ages and sizes and for that reason are possibly not particularly impressive, altho certainly they are highly suggestive. 1 465 1 466 National Education Association The next step in the investigation consisted of a study of two groups one of twenty-five boys and the other of twenty-eight boys, observed very care¬ fully over the period September 23 to December 2. The results obtained checked with those first quoted ; namely, a substantial positive increase in growth as measured by weight and height for the non-athletic group as compared with the athletic. Following this study attention was directed to a study by Boas who points out that there is a different growth rate for boys of the same age but of different initial heights. The experiment was therefore continued in a school where the boys in the two groups were carefully equated as follows. Each of the boys com¬ peting in athletics was matched with a boy not in athletics on the following points at the beginning of the experiment : Age, weight, height, and P.L.R. (Probable Learning Rate — equivalent to EQ.), thus eliminating in large measure the problem of the influence of age, weight, and height on growth, as suggested by Boas. That is, one boy seventeen years old weighing 150 lbs., being 65 inches tall, probably does not have the same probability of growth a boy aged seventeen years, weighing 120 lbs., being 60 inches tall has. An attempt was made as described above to hold constant experiment¬ ally — not statistically — the three items of age, weight, and height. The average gain for the group of boys in athletics was 1.06 lbs.; the average gain for the boys not in athletics was 2.43. Again a positive height incre¬ ment was discovered in favor of the non-athletic boys. Three items were considered in the data next presented which were collected by Mr. Riley of Fairmount Junior High School. They were: weight, height, and lung capacity. The following data are presented, then, for all the boys over the total three-year period. Because the school is a small one, and population shifting, the final groups contained only some thirty boys each — a highly selected group but one considered representative nevertheless. Your attention is directed to the known and recorded fact that the boys under observation were either participants or non-participants in athletics for the entire three-year period. This item is of importance. Considering, then, first, weight — the average increase in weight per boy for the athletic group for the three-year period was 23.7 lbs., while that of non-athletic boys was 30.85 lbs. Using Garrett’s Formula to determine the reliability of the difference between two averages, one finds that were the experiment to be repeated one hundred times under similar conditions like results would be received regarding increases in weight between ath¬ letic and non-athletic groups ninety-eight times. Regarding the height increase as between the non-athletic group and the athletic group over the three-year period, Riley finds the average increment of growth in height for the non-athletic group 3.79 inches, while for the athletic group he finds 1.85 inches. Treating these data statistically as de¬ scribed before, one finds that there is an absolute certainty that the non- Department of School Health and Physical Education 467 athletic group will gain more in height than the athletic group were the experiment to be performed an indefinite number of times under similar con¬ ditions. For the statistically-minded, the standard deviation of the sigma of the differences of the two averages is plus or minus l1/*. Considering now, lung capacity, the average increase in lung capacity over the three-year period for the athletic group is 37.9 units. For the non- athletic group 54.5 units. From Garrett’s Formula, we find that were we to repeat this experiment 100 times under similar conditions, like results would be secured 99.5 times. When the average ages of the two groups of boys were considered, it was discovered that there was exactly one year’s difference between the average of the groups. The average age of boys taking part in athletics was 16 years 8 months, while the average age of the boys not taking part in athletics was 15 years 8 months — this at the end of the three-year period. Therefore, in order to equate the ages experimentally, the growth data for the first year of the boys not taking part in athletics were eliminated and compared with the growth data of the same items for the first two years of the boys participating in athletics. This means then that the following data apply to two groups of boys — one taking part in athletics, and one not taking part in athletics, but over the same two-year age period, namely 13 years 8 months to 15 years 8 months. So far as weight is concerned, it is discovered that the non-athletic group gained 18.65 pounds and the athletic group gained 17.75 pounds. Treating these data as described before, were the experiment to be conducted one hundred times under similar conditions, the non-athletic group would gain the most sixty-five times. So far as height is concerned, the average gain being 3.06 inches for non¬ athletes and 1.27 inches for athletes, there are 9999.95 chances out of 10,000 that were the experiment performed as described, the boys taking part in athletics will not be found to gain as much in height as those not taking part, or statistically speaking the standard deviation or sigma of the differ¬ ences of the means would be zb5.5. So far as lung capacity is concerned, it is discovered that the chances are 98.4 out of every 100 that the non-athletic group will have a greater de¬ velopment in lung capacity than will the athletic group. The averages found aie 45 units increase for the non-athletes as opposed to 21 units increase of the athletes, or zb 2. 14 sigmas. All of these figures are, even in spite of the small number of boys observed, startlingly thought-provoking. A consideration of these data then seems to indicate a substantial difference iii the growth rate of boys in junior high school according to year. Further, the growth late for height appears to be appreciably different from that of weight. Boas points out that growth rates for boys of the same age but noticeably ifferent sizes is sure to be different, The non-athlete in the group studied 468 National Education Association is 1 inch shorter than the athlete, but 3.6 inches heavier, age constant. These differences do not seem sufficiently large to affect the results of the study. After the validity of all the data presented has been carefully considered, there remains the question or problem as to whether or not anything of a vital nature has been discovered. The groups compared have been selected by the natural process of the inclination of the individual ; that is, no boy in the athletic group had any compulsion placed upon him to take part in athletics. In other words, he had a desire to compete. At the same time, no boy in the non-athletic group was required to refrain from competition. He just didn’t have the desire to compete. Therefore, since these two groups are separated by a marked difference of desire and are natural and rather highly selected groups (selection being contingent upon the single character¬ istic of desire to compete in athletics) one cannot help but ask the following questions. Were the boys in the athletic group denied the privilege of com¬ petition, would they have gained more in height and weight than they did? The second question, of course, is the reverse of this : were the boys in the non-athletic group required to compete in athletics, would their growth have been any the less? There appears to be little or no possibility of securing data directly which would even tend to suggest answers to these two questions. Those of us who have had experience in coaching athletic teams have many times at¬ tempted to interest large, strong, healthy boys in athletic competition, only to discover that the competitive spirit was entirely lacking and, therefore, expected performance was not obtained. All of us are entirely familiar with the fact that two boys or men of exactly the same size and weight to the pound and inch are not necessarily evenly matched in any competitive enterprise. Dr. T. Wingate Todd of the Brush Foundation, Western Reserve Uni¬ versity, suggests a solution to the problem which is at least worthy of con¬ siderable thought. Dr. Todd’s suggestion is that boys of athletic temper¬ ament mature earlier than do boys of non-athletic temperament, and that therefore, since the athletic group is composed of boys who have matured earlier, age considered, than the group of non-athletic boys, the athletic boy is not going to grow as much as the non-athletic boy over the period studied. In other words, the curve of average growth either of weight or height for athletic boys would be found to lie above and to have a more pronounced slope than that of the non-athletic boys thru the earlier years— from ten to twelve or even fourteen years of age. After this point the slope of the curve of the growth for the athletic group would naturally fall off, and therefore be found to have a less pronounced slope than that for the non-athletic group. There remains then the outstanding job of determining not only the rate of growth of two groups during the period of athletic competition but the rate of growth of two groups prior to athletic competition. A study to determine the truth or falsity of Dr. Todd s suggestion would Department of School Health and Physical Education 469 cover a five- to eight-year period, but it seems to be well worth the time and effort spent since certainly no one wishes to condemn interschool ath¬ letic competition on incomplete data with so large a possibility that after all, the data, while telling the truth over the period named, is but a half- truth which is at all times most dangerous and damaging. Boas points out that the period of maximum average growth is 14 years 6 months ± eleven months — or from 13 years 5 months to 15 years 7 months or corresponding to the junior high-school age. Therefore, if the physical education program is important anywhere as affecting growth, it is most important in the junior high-school years. In conclusion, more problems are thrown in just to complicate the situ¬ ation further. If the growth increments in weight, height, and lung capacity are affected by competition in athletics as indicated in the studies reported (a) Who knows but that the growth or development of the mind may also be affected ? (b) Is it the nervous strain of athletics or the excessive expenditure of energy which causes the difference? (c) Can it be determined by controlled experiment? (d) What part does maturity take in athletics? (e) Do the more mature boys only compete? (f) Is there a permanent loss for the boy in athletics, or does he have a period of accelerated growth compensating for the loss during the athletic season? (g) Does the boy of rapid growth during his fourteenth year become the athlete? (h) Would it be better to have physical education five periods per week for cer¬ tain age groups and excuse older or younger boys entirely? These are but a few of the problems suggested. Many others of greater importance have no doubt suggested themselves to you. THE CONTRIBUTION OF CHILD HEALTH DEMONSTRA¬ TIONS TO THE HEALTH EDUCATION PROGRAM MAUDE A. BROWN, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, LAWRENCE, KANS. Demonstrations will, in this paper, be interpreted as including those proj¬ ects whose purpose is to put into practise the conclusions of research. They are not research but are the essential next step, working out ways and means by which the truths uncovered by research may be utilized in the ordinary course of human existence. Demonstrations take the results of research out of the laboratory into life. They work out the difficulties to be encountered in making use of the accepted conclusions of research and, if unsurmountable obstacles are met with, they refer the problem back to the research workers. Later on then, when research has reached a new level, another demonstra¬ tion group somewhere, under another name it may be, will put results into trial practise. Thus, progress. The long series of these oscillations between research and demonstration which have marked the development of health education would, if it were possible to trace, be outside the scope of this paper. Finally, the time seemed 470 National Education Association ripe for a more comprehensive try-out of the net conclusions thus far gen¬ erally agreed upon as to the essentials of child health. A group of more comprehensive projects, called child health demonstrations, were launched by the Commonwealth Fund and have now become public health history. In the perspective of the intervening years, some generalizations stand out which have stood the test of subsequent thinking, of paramount importance, including all the rest, is that of the power of coordinated effort, the utter ineffectiveness of discrete. From this major assumption of the essential unit nature of the problem follow certain corollaries. 1. That health education is not a specific member of the curriculum but that the connotation of the word is twofold and may more accurately be expressed as health in education and education in health. 2. That the problem of teaching health is the same as the teaching problem in general. In other words — the trouble with health is that it is being taught as badly, or almost as badly, as are the other subjects. 3. That all functions of the child (including the learning process) are functions of the whole organism. 4. That this organism is an organic part of the whole community and no one of its problems can be considered apart from its membership in the social group. Education cannot be carried on in sections, by an arbitrary time-table. 5. That this organism cannot be dealt with in cross section but is literally a part of an infinite and unbroken physical chain, extending back to remotest ancestry. 6. That the acceptance of the unit nature of the responsibility for the education of the child does not complicate but simplifies, and that any sincere cooperative effort bears fruit amazingly out of proportion to the effort ex¬ pended by any one individual of the group. And conversely, that one weak link nullifies the effort of the rest. 7. That our great need is to revive the power which we seem literally to have lost, of governing our behavior by our judgment, to act from reasoned premises. We accept the testimony of scientific authority as to what is neces¬ sary to do in order to bear and rear healthy children. And in spite of a facile emotionality in our declared love of children, we act in direct denial of the dicta of unquestioned authority. 8. That this inability to act from reasoned premises is itself the most serious health problem in education. It is the logical, the inescapable result of our acceptance of the easiest way — the substitution for real teaching of the lazy-backs of artificial incentives. The child is so used to the rewards and punishments which have no causal relationship to the behavior which calls them forth, that it is not strange that by the time high school is reached there is literally no power to order his own conduct by his own thinking. 9. That the highest aim of education, the development of the highest degree of individuality in the pupil, is reached by supplying all most uni¬ formly with the fundamental essentials of vigorous development common to all. The individual differences were provided for a generation or a thousand Department of School Health and Physical Education 471 generations ago, and individual characteristics flower most diversely on the sturdiest stock. This, in the opinion of the writer, is thus far the culminating contribution of the long series of efforts alternating between research and demonstration, to bring fundamental order out of the chaos of individual education: to tell the teacher and the parent that this is not the bewildering problem of planning for diversity, but the comprehensible one of planning for the few universally accepted and demonstratedly attainable essentials for building a vigorous child — not a bright child, nor a musical child, nor a beautiful child, not even a white child, but a child. Then surround it with nothing but freedom, and individuality takes care of itself. But neglect one essential, let one member of the coordinating human en¬ vironment of the child deny his responsibility, and the work of the rest might as well have been left undone. REPORT ON THE EVALUATION OF TEACHER-TRAINING INSTITUTIONS PREPARING TEACHERS FOR SER¬ VICE IN HEALTH AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION N. P. NEILSON, CHIEF, DIVISION OF HEALTH AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION, STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, SACRAMENTO, CALIF. It appears ( 1 ) that every child in the elementary and secondary schools is entitled to be influenced by a health and physical education program adapted to his varied and changing needs; (2) that every child is entitled to be taught by a carefully selected and well-prepared teacher ; (3) that teachers must be selected and trained in an institution according to some plan ; and (4) that these things should be guaranteed to the child by the state. The state has at least five avenues thru which it can exercise the function of guaranteeing to the child the opportunity for an education: (1) legal enactments; (2) distribution of financial aid; (3) the granting of certificates to teachers; (4) the approval of institutions for teacher-training purposes; and (5) the approval of local courses of study. States differ in their willing¬ ness to exercise control thru these and other avenues and also differ in their standards. We can agree that the functions mentioned are legitimate state functions. Boards of education, school superintendents, and principals generally de¬ sire to employ well-qualified teachers. In the fields of health and physical education they are much confused because they do not know which teacher¬ training institutions are doing good work. The ability of institutions to pre¬ pare teachers, from the standpoint of number and quality of their staff members, facilities, and course offerings, varies greatly. How can the school administrator who interviews an applicant for a position in health and physi¬ cal education be sure the professional preparation has been of good quality ? Can a set of standards be formulated and then be used in evaluating the pro¬ grams of institutions professing to train health and physical education teachers for certain types of positions? Can we assist administrators to improve school 472 National Education Association programs thru better teachers, and help teacher-training institutions them¬ selves to see and do their work better by developing standards which they must meet and maintain before their names appear on a certified list as providing an adequate teacher-training program ? In developing a set of standards with which to evaluate the ability of an institution to prepare teachers for service in health and physical education, the point of beginning is with the needs of the child who is to be taught by the teacher. A study of the physical, mental, and social needs of children will determine for us the program of health and physical education to be provided in a particular school segment. The program must be taught by a teacher. The teacher must be prepared in an institution. The teacher-training institution should provide the staff, facilities, and courses which will prepare the teacher to teach well the program of health and physical education which the child needs. It is the business of the state to choose the institutions which may prepare teachers for certain fields of service and then grant certificates which entitle the trainee to teach after he has completed satisfactorily the prescribed course, and has met other requirements. While state certification requirements and teacher-training curriculums are intimately related, agreement on the former should not precede agree¬ ment on the latter. State certification requirements should grow out of a knowledge of the teacher-training program necessary for the preparation of teachers so they will be competent to teach the program the child needs. In our problem, therefore, we need not be greatly disturbed over the in¬ equality between states in their standards of certification. The real problem for us is to secure substantial agreement on what constitutes an adequate teacher-training program in health and physical education, and how this can be measured. Teacher-training institutions professing to prepare teachers for service in health and physical education in the elementary and secondary schools must be familiar with the programs which are taught and which should be taught in these schools to meet the health and physical education needs of children. The common and basic characteristics of an adequate health and physical education program in the elementary and secondary schools are : 1. Every pupil enrolled in the elementary and secondary schools should have a health and physical education program daily. Physical activity is essential for normal growth and development and for health maintenance. 2. The length of physical education periods should be related to the age of pupils. The instructional period in elementary schools should be from 20 to 30 minutes in length; in junior high schools from 40 to 50 minutes; in the senior high schools from 50 to 60 minutes; and in the junior college 60 minutes. Pupils of elementary-school age need from 3 to 5 hours of physical activity each day in order to develop the organic vitality needed as a basis for good health. Periods before school, morning recess, noon hour, afternoon recess, and after school should be utilized as additional play periods under the supervision of competent teachers. Department of School Health and Physical Education 473 3. An educative and protective program in health and physical education should be provided. 4. The physical education program should be largely natural in type, rather than formal. Play which involves natural bodily movements and the big muscles is more interesting to children than participation in formal exercises invented by adults. 5. The health and physical education program should include a large variety of activities. Each type of activity should make a general and specific contribution to the development of children. 6. Emphasis on the instructional, intramural, interschool and play day programs in physical education should be well balanced. Girls should not engage in interschool athletic contests ; intramural athletics and play days are more developmental for the great mass of girls. For boys, interschool athletic championships might well be limited to sensibly arranged local leagues, and winning games should not be the main objective. No highly organized inter¬ school athletic competition should be provided for pupils below the seventh grade. 7. Above the sixth grade, separate classes in physical education should be arranged for boys and girls. Men teachers should teach boys, and women teachers teach girls. For social development, boys’ and girls’ classes should occasionally be combined for activities which permit, such as swimming, tennis, archery, volley ball, and social dancing. 8. In the secondary school, considerable emphasis should be placed on physical education activities which are useful to adolescents and adults dur¬ ing their leisure time. Swimming, tennis, handball, volley ball, golf, and rhythms are examples of such activities. 9. Extraneous awards for participation in health and physical education activities, if given at all, should be limited to awards having little money value. The joy which comes from participation and accomplishment in ac¬ tivities is more lasting than the satisfaction of receiving awards. 10. The school should provide a health protection program sufficient to meet the needs of all pupils. This program should include protection of physical, mental, and social health. Every child should be physically and emotionally well before the school should spend money in trying to educate him. The services of physicians, nurses, dentists, and other health service experts are necessary. Every effort should be made to make the school en¬ vironment safe and hygienic. 11. Records of pupils’ condition, behavior, and attainments in health and physical education should be kept. Records of health examinations, physical examinations, enrollment, class and activity assignments, and achievements in various phases of the program should be kept and used to the advantage ot the child. 12. The health and physical education program should be adapted to the needs, capacities, and interests of the child. Pupils’ needs should be deter¬ mined thru examinations conducted by health service experts and teachers. Children differ in their physical, mental, and social needs. The health and 474 National Education Association physical education program should contribute to the development of every pupil according to his needs. 13. Provision for exemption of pupils from health or physical examina¬ tions should be made for those who object to such examinations. Exemp¬ tion from examinations should not excuse pupils from the health and physical education program. No pupil should be excused from physical education. 14. The school should work closely with the home in an effort to secure the correction of defects found thru the examination of pupils. Community agencies should secure the correction of remedial defects of pupils from indigent families. 15. Pupils returning to school after a long illness should for a time have a modified program of physical education. Vigorous physical activity during a period of convalescence may prove detrimental to the health of the pupil. 16. Pupils should be classified for activity. Age, weight, organic power, strength, skill, interest, and structural and functional defects are some of the factors to be considered when classifying pupils for activity. 17. Achievement tests should be given to determine pupil improvement. Knowledge of the pupil’s development should be used as the basis for modifying the pupil’s program. 18. The health and physical education programs should be carried on under competent leadership. Teachers should be well prepared. Their train¬ ing in the physical, biological, and social sciences should be extensive. In addition, they must know education in general, and have specific preparation in physical education activities and in the health and physical education sciences. 19. Only those teachers of health and physical education who represent the highest ideals in morals and personal character should be selected to teach health and physical education. Pupils develop character qualities thru physical education activities. Teaching thru example is more powerful than teaching thru precept. 20. Teachers of health and physical education should have teaching abil¬ ity of a high order. The complexity of the problem of pupil differences and the infinite variety of problems connected with the many kinds of health and physical education activities require that the teacher have rare ability if he is to be successful. 21. Management of the health and physical education program should be in the hands of school authorities. Outside groups frequently gain control of some phases of the program. Many of the evils connected with the com¬ mercialization of athletics are due to non-school control of athletics. 22. Local and state supervision of health and physical education pro¬ grams should be established and maintained. General and technical service is useful in advancing the program and assists teachers and administrators in making their work more effective. 23. Adequate facilities, equipment, and supplies should be available for the conduct of the health and physical education program. The school site should be level and large enough to accommodate the various types of ac- Department of School Health and Physical Education 475 tivities in the program. The number of different kinds of play areas required is related to the number of pupils to be accommodated. Courts and fields should be properly arranged and prepared, and boundary lines kept marked. 24. Indoor facilities should be provided for the health and physical edu¬ cation program. Exercise floors, health unit rooms, offices, dressing rooms, shower rooms, special rooms, a swimming pool, and lockers are needed in the secondary school. 25. The amount of equipment and supplies necessary for the health and physical education program depends on the nature of the activity and the number of pupils participating. 26. Facilities, equipment, and supplies should be safe to use. The play¬ ground area should be fenced ; separate and well protected play areas should be arranged for small children ; developmental types of playground equip¬ ment for elementary schools should be properly installed ; and frequent inspection of all materials for safety should obtain. 27. There should be no discrimination in the provision of facilities, equip¬ ment, and supplies for the boys’ and girls’ health and physical education programs. Neither program should be favored to the exclusion or detriment of the other. * - - „ . ' Department of Science Instruction The department of science instruction is an outgrowth of a State Department of Natural Science Teachers which was organized at a meet¬ ing of the Colorado State Teachers Association in 1894. See Proceedings , 1894 : 951. It was first known as the Department of Natural Science Instruction. The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are: President , Ellen Eddy Shaw, Curator of Ele¬ mentary Instruction, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 1000 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, N. Y. ; Vicepresident , Ira C. Davis, University High School, Madison, Wis. ; Secretary , Mildred Fahy, Principal, Schneider School, Chicago, Ill. ; Treasurer , Ralph C. Bedell, 3619 Wyandotte Street, Kansas City, Mo. This Department meets once each year, in July. Facts relating to the establishment of this Depart¬ ment and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1895: 951-958 1896: 937-967 1897: 916-958 1898: 959-984 1899:1097-1117 1900: 592-608 1901: 771-802 1902: 759-789 1903: 847-895 1904: 843-896 1905: 781-825 1906: 719-720 1907: 951-957 1908: 965-998 1909: 789-828 1910: 949-967 1911: 939-992 1919: 289 1927: 583-597 1912:1153-1193 1920: 305-308 1928: 569-589 1913: 695-716 1921: 663-666 1929: 559-577 1914: 721-773 1922:1239-1265 1930: 529-542 1915: 995-1028 1923: 843-860 1931: 561-575 1916: 699-749 1924: 753-774 1932: 467-480 1917: 535-555 1925: 598-608 1918: 295 1926: 625-636 [ 478 ] NATURE STUDY— FOUNDATION FOR WHAT? ELLIOT R. DOWNING, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF THE TEACHING OF SCIENCE, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. Science as an instrument of public-school education should impart to the individual those major values which science has contributed to the progress of the race, namely, skill in the use of scientific laws for the solution of life problems, ability to think in a scientific manner, and certain motivating desires, ideals, and attitudes. These major goals can only be accomplished if and when the energies of all the science teachers are concentrated upon them, because the time allotted to science is brief. Nature study has never been very clear as to its objectives. It has been prone to adopt as major goals things that are but parts of a whole, parts that are quite irrelevant in themselves and only significant when taken in conjunction with the rest of the whole. If one reads the literature dealing with the aims of nature study he finds the most frequently mentioned aim to be “to teach children to observe.” So nature study has often resulted, perhaps in many schools still results, in cluttering the minds of pupils with a lot of useless facts. Real observation is always and only one element in scientific thinking. It is a part of the whole job of problem solving. To try to teach observation by and for itself is like trying to train one leg of a horse to race when it is severed from the rest of the animal. One cannot conceive Pasteur or Faraday starting a day’s work and saying to himself, “Now, this is my observation day.” Clem Thompson in his analysis of some eighty-four state and city courses of study in grade-school science (1920) found that the courses aimed chiefly at an acquaintance of pupils with the names and life habits of com¬ mon animals and plants and with a few physical phenomena. Lois Mathis’ recent analysis of the newer courses (1932) shows that they are concerned much more with acquainting pupils with those scientific ideas that have been significant in giving men an understanding and control of their physical and biological environment. This is a difference that indicates a move in the right direction. There is little evidence even in these late courses that nature study is trying to participate in establishing either desirable emotionalized standards or skill in scientific thinking. John Dewey calls this last objective the most important aim of science in the schools. Nature study has been prone to set up its own objectives and formulate its own course of study with little regard to what science work came later in the school. The same may be said of general science, biology, chemistry, and physics. Each science has gone its own way and paid little attention to its predecessors or successors. We have, therefore, no generally recognized standards of accomplishment for the various grade levels in science. The supervisory officer demands that the pupil graduating from the grades shall have the ability to read, speak, and write simple English with some degree of facility, and he demands skill in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and [ 479 ] 480 National Education Association division of integers and fractions. But so far as I know, no school yet rec¬ ognizes similarly definite outcomes of science instruction as essential tc graduation from the grade school. The science curriculum must be a unified whole, not, as it is largely at present, a series of disjoined incoherent fragments. It should be stated in terms of the skills, abilities, and attitudes to be achieved rather than in terms of the subjectmatter to be handled. It must be planned from the top down for one must know what the superstructure is to be before he can lay foundations. Nature study, or for that matter, any science, will never come into its own as a potent factor contributing to the important outcomes of education until all science teachers cooperate to produce a unified science course with definite outcomes for each grade level, these outcomes so sequential that the early ones will be recognized as essential prerequisites to the later. The new nature study course cannot be built by patching together selec¬ tions from existing courses. Present courses are not the result of the survival of the fit. They are for the most part based on the whim or fancy of the individuals who wield the scissors and paste-brush to produce them. Nor can we depend on the experts in the several fields of science to tell us what should go into the elementary science course. They are too far re¬ moved from childhood as a rule to be familiar with the psychology of grade pupils. They are, moreover, saturated with the subjectmatter and method of producer science while public-school pupils need consumer science. The selection and organization of the course cannot be based on studies of children’s interests. The studies thus far made in this field are absolutely contradictory in their results. They show, if anything, that children’s inter¬ ests in nature materials are a result of what they have been taught rather than an indication of what they should be taught. The one feasible way to determine the knowledge content of the science curriculum is to go out into life and find out what science Mr. Everyman needs to solve the problems involving science that arise in his life, and make that the subjectmatter of the science instruction. There are two possible ways of attacking this job. First, you may list all the problems of a scientific nature that arise in your community and teach pupils how to react to each, how to adjust a lawn mower, how to put in a new fuse when the electric lights go out, what to eat for each meal each day in the month, to plant orchard trees on a hill top rather than in the valley, to turn out the gas rather than blow it out. The list of such prob¬ lematic situations is too long to make it possible to habituate pupils to the proper reactions, to even the more important ones. Herriott listed 576 in his community in the field of physics alone. Moreover, you have no assur¬ ance that the pupil will remain in his community. He likely will go where an entirely different set of adjustments must be made. And you may be quite sure that the problems of a scientific character that will confront him twenty or thirty years hence will be largely unlike those of the present day and generation. This first alternative seems therefore quite impracticable. Department of Science Instruction 481 Second, pupils may be given a mastery of the most important principles of science, i. e., taught not only to understand the principles but to apply them to problems of the sort that arise in life. Principles are judged im¬ portant in proportion as they are needed in actual life situations. The 576 things that Herriott found needed to be done in the field of physics in his community involve only a dozen principles. Principles are universally applicable both in time and place. The more important principles have been fairly well determined in the order of importance by a number of objective studies in the fields of chem¬ istry, physics, and biology. These principles become the more specific objec¬ tives of instruction under the major knowledge goal. Similarly the important elements and safeguards of scientific thinking and the more significant emo¬ tionalized stands to be achieved by science instruction must be listed as the specific objectives under these major goals. Each of these specific objectives — each principle, for instance — must be analyzed in order to see what are the elements of the apperceptive mass needed to assure its mastery. To illustrate, the law of the conservation of energy has been found, by the objective studies, to be the most important principle of physics. It should be placed as low in grade instruction as possi¬ ble in order that no pupil will leave school without a mastery of this law of greatest significance in this field. Miss Murdoch’s experimental study shows it can be reasonably mastered at the eighth grade level but that many minor concepts needed as a basis of its understanding can be clarified in lower grades. This law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed ; it may be changed from one form to another, always in equivalent amounts. Now evidently before the law itself can be mastered pupils must know what is meant by energy, creation, destruction, and the forms of energy. The clari¬ fication is always based on sensory experiences. Pupils may fly kites to feel the force of moving air. They may drive nails with a hammer and feel how mechanical energy is changed to heat when they touch the hot nail heads. They may connect up a battery to a motor and see how electric energy is changed to energy of motion, or they may operate a hand dynamo to light a small electric light and experience that the faster they turn the dynamo the brighter the light glows. Such experiences, interesting and significant at the grade level — third, fourth, or fifth perhaps — where they are introduced, are given pupils to clarify concepts needed to comprehend the law of the conservation of energy the mastery of which is to be attempted at the eighth grade. This accom¬ plishes one of the specific objectives of the major goal of imparting to pupils that knowledge of science which is and has been of greatest significance to mankind. Thus and only thus can we make each bit of science instruction purposeful and make it fit into a unified science course that will accomplish the major goals we set out to reach. Only as we have the knowledge of science which we possess in the form of principles can we use it to solve the problems we encounter whether 482 National Education Association they may be problems concerning which we have to do something in a practical way or problems we solve to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. I am traveling in the club car at the front of the train on the Michigan Cen¬ tral’s “Wolverine.” As the engine, running at high speed, scoops up water from the trough between the rails, great drops are thrown up onto the windows of the car. I notice that these do not run straight down the window pane but diagonally from the upper corner near the engine to the lower corner farther from the engine. I wonder why. I hunt around in my store of knowledge for some scientific principle that will apply to this problematic situation. At last I hit upon the law of composition of forces. Then I see that the drops are acted upon by gravity at the same time the window pane is slipping under them with the speed of the train. Can I calculate approx¬ imately the speed of the train from this diagram of the composition of forces, drawn by the drops on the window pane? Here I have a quantitive problem that whiles away the tedium of journey. If you will look back in your own experiences to those occasions when you have applied your science to the solution of a problem you will find that you have similarly made use of some principle you know. Some of these important yet fairly simple principles can be mastered by pupils in the intermediate grades, others must be placed in later levels of the school. The nature study teacher, even in primary grades, can be clarifying concepts necessary to their understanding — concepts which are in themselves worthwhile to pupils of the lower grades. Time will not permit outlining in detail the formulation of curriculum material and its appropriate grade placement to accomplish the other major goals of science teaching. I should like to have pupils, as a result of their public-school science, achieve such emotionalized standards as ( 1 ) a pro¬ found feeling of wonder, awe, and reverence for the magnitude and com¬ plexity of the universe in which we live; (2) a lively admiration for the self-sacrificing devotion of such men as Pasteur, Faraday, Kepler, Lavosier, who have contributed to the welfare of mankind rather than devoting their energies to exploiting their fellows for their own selfish ends, and (3) an attitude of mind that impels the individual to consult experts in fields where his own knowledge is inadequate. It is one of the main functions of science instruction to transform the immature, illogical thinking of the pupil who is swayed by fancy, whim and current unfounded beliefs to scientific thinking — to make him skillful in using the elements and safeguards of good reflective thought. The child can think quite as efficiently as the adult provided the problems with which he is faced deal with concrete situations. He is usually discouraged, however, in his efforts. He is spanked for taking the clock to pieces to see what makes it go or for cutting into his drum to see where the noise comes from altho he is using a perfectly good scientific method to satisfy his curiosity. The author has given a test in the use of the elements and safeguards of scientific thinking to thousands of pupils in junior and senior high schools. The results show that pupils who have had much science are no more pro- Department of Science Instruction 483 ficient than those who have had little or none. In other words, science as it is now taught neglects quite completely this important outcome. The nature study teacher, then, should be giving pupils a mastery of some of the important yet simple principles of science even well down in the grades. He should be giving his pupils such experiences as will clarify the concepts needed as a basis of understanding other principles that will come at later school levels. He should begin the development of skill in problem solv¬ ing or scientific thinking, at least set a good example of such even with kinder¬ garteners, for youngsters early learn by imitation. He should lead pupils in those activities which will help to establish important emotionalized stand¬ ards. In a word, his work is foundational. It must be part of a whole, not a disconnected fragment. While some of his work is preparatory to that which will come at later levels, it must also be significant in the life needs of pupils at the grade level where it is introduced. A TECHNIC FOR HANDLING LARGE CLASSES RALPH C. BEDELL, SCIENCE DEPARTMENT, SOUTHWEST HIGH SCHOOL, KANSAS CITY, MO. The purpose of this paper is to describe a technic of teaching large general science classes and demonstrate the influence of class size on the results obtained when this technic of instruction is used. The results, in general, confirm other studies of class size which show that measurable student out¬ comes are not affected when the number of students in a class is increased from thirty-five to sixty. The technic of instruction employed is called the work sheet procedure. 4 he course was organized into units and each unit was taught in as nearly the same manner as its subjectmatter would permit. Each unit was intro¬ duced by a preview of about twenty minutes’ length given orally by the teacher, the purpose of which was to give the students a general idea of the unit and to stimulate them to study. The oral preview was followed by the students reading the section in the text entitled “What You May Expect To Find in This Unit.” The students then turned slowly thru the pages of the text which made up the main body of the unit to notice the main headings, problems, and illustrations. This process was intended to orient the student to the unit and in most cases consumed approximately one class hour. As soon as a student had completed the above he was given the first page of the work sheet material for the unit. On each work sheet there was a mimeographed list of questions and problems to which the student wrote the answers in the space provided. As soon as the student had finished the first sheet, he turned it in and received the second, and so on until all of the work for the unit had been completed. At the end of each day the teacher marked all sheets that had been turned in, filed those that were satisfactory, and returned to the students those that contained errors. Each student then 484 National Education Association corrected his errors and turned in the sheet again. This process was continued until all answers on the sheet were correct. All correct sheets were kept by the teacher. In marking the errors the teacher used a check mark to indicate the incorrect answer if only a minor error had been made. If the answer showed that the student had made a serious mistake in thinking, suggestions were written on the margin of the sheet. In those cases where it seemed advisable for the teacher to give the student individual assistance, a note to that effect was made on the paper, and the following day the student would receive the needed assistance during the regular class hour. The class hour was spent by the students in working out their work sheets and in conference with the teacher regarding any portion of the work which was not clear to them. These conferences were usually with only one student at a time, but where several students were having the same difficulty a con¬ ference was held with those students in one group. In no case did the teacher give the exact answer required by any question on the work sheets, but did give the necessary information and explanation to enable the students to work out the required answer provided such additional help was necessary. All laboratory work was by teacher demonstration and was performed at a time best suited to the majority of the class. Laboratory equipment was left on the demonstration table for two or three days after the demonstration to permit students to examine it or to repeat the demonstration if necessary. There was no time limit set for the solution of any one work sheet, but there was a time limit set for the completion of the entire unit. Since the work sheet material was divided into three levels of achievement, it was necessary for the student to roughly budget his time if he expected to reach his goal. On the date set for the close of the unit, a comprehensive objective examination over the material was given. The results of this examination were the principal factor in determining marks. It is essential that the work sheet material be properly constructed if this technic is to be successful. In this instance all such material was written by the teacher. The first step in constructing the work sheets for a given unit was to make a list of the important facts and principles which were considered as desirable outcomes of the unit. These were then divided into three groups according to the teacher’s opinion as to the difficulty and the importance of each fact or principle. Those that were considered as essential to the course and within the comprehension of the majority of the students were placed in the M group. Those considered next most difficult were placed in the S group, and those most difficult and requiring the broadest scope of information were placed in the E group. For each fact or principle, exercises or problems were devised which required the use of the given fact or principle for their solution. These exercises or problems were then divided into the above mentioned groups. In several instances exercises were inserted in the S and E groups which covered the same principle as an exercise in the M group, but such exercises in the more advanced groups always involved a broader application of the given principle than the exercise used in the M group. The three levels, or groups, of exercises, thus, were determined on the basis of Department of Science Instruction 485 minimum essentials, difficulty, and extent of application of the principle involved. The construction of the exercises, in every case possible, was done in such a way that the student would be required to study the material in the text and interpret it for the answer to the exercise. That is, in nearly all cases, the student could not answer an exercise by merely finding a word or phrase in the text and copying it on the work sheet. The exercises were arranged to follow the text used, General Science for Today by Watkins and Bedell (Macmillan) . At the conclusion of the M group of exercises each student was required to make an outline of the subjectmatter in the unit. In the S and E groups the student was required to do a certain amount of outside reading from books related to the unit. A list of books available in the school library was given to each student for each unit. If the student finished his work sheet material ahead of time, he was permitted to go to the library during class hour to do this reading. The library was available to any student at any hour in the day during which he had a study hall or at any time after school hours. The students were permitted to do projects connected with the unit. At the end of the unit, those students who had done outside reading reported orally to the entire class, and those who had done projects presented them to the class. This usually required from one to two days of time, after which the unit examination was given. The examinations were all of the objective type, either true-false or multiple choice. In constructing them care was taken to devise questions on each of the facts and principles developed in the unit. As far as possible the questions were worded in such a way as to require thinking on the part of the student instead of mere memory. This was done by setting science situations and requiring the student to react to interpretations or causes which might or might not be the correct ones. All students took the same examinations. To determine the effect of class size on the efficiency of instruction by the above technic one class with an enrolment of 61 was compared with two smaller classes, each of which had an enrolment of 38. The average daily attendance of the large class was 57.8 while that for the two small classes was 35.2 and 36.5. All classes were taught by the above method and by the same teacher. The classes consisted of boys and girls regularly enrolled for general science in Southwest High School, Kansas City, Missouri. Students in the large, or experimental, class were paired with students from the small, or control, classes on the basis of ability rating, chronologi¬ cal age, and results from the Terman Group Test of Mental Ability, the Haggerty Reading Test, and the Kansas City General Science Test. Initial and final tests were given to permit the measurement of gains. For either gains in knowledge or scores on final tests, the results show no statistically significant differences between the large and small groups. The author believes that a highly trained teacher with a capable assistant could handle five classes of approximately sixty each without undue strain to either teacher or assistant. 486 National Education Association NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE RURAL SCHOOLS IRVING F. PEARSON, SUPERINTENDENT, WINNEBAGO COUNTY SCHOOLS, ROCKFORD, ILL. By definition natural science is organized knowledge concerning the physical universe. The elementary study of natural science may therefore include many traditional elementary-school subjects such as physiology, hygiene, nature study, agriculture, and most phases of geography. For the purposes of this presentation this inclusive interpretation of elementary science will be employed. The rural-school field presents an excellent opportunity for the introduc¬ tion of a unified course in elementary science. It is exceedingly unfortunate that in the midst of environment which lends itself most effectively to the practical study of this subject, so little of it is found. In spite of the advance of consolidation, tens of thousands of small rural schools still exist and will be with us for many decades yet to come. If one rural school per day were to be abandoned, twenty-eight years will have elapsed before the last rural school in the state of Illinois will have disappeared. In the midst of scientific educational contributions to the advancement of other institutions are school people going to continue to neglect the little rural school? We trust not. Modern rural-school organization and procedure will yield very nicely to the introduction and use of a unified course in natural science. The com¬ plicated organization (or lack of organization) in the old-time rural school has been alleviated by the alternation and grouping of subjects, and more recently by the introduction of an adaptation of the individualized instruction system. Both of these plans, by the way, are largely the contribution of the state of Illinois, and the late Mr. U. J. Hoffman, assistant state super¬ intendent of schools, a true friend of the rural school. In spite of the continued improvement in rural-school practise there is need of greater consolidation of subjects with resultant effects in the increase of the length of the study periods and more consistent and effective effort generally. Subject unions could be effected under the headings of English, which may include reading, composition, spelling, language or grammar ; social sciences, which may include history, civics, and economics, as per Dr. Rugg’s plan ; and certainly natural science which may include the subjects mentioned heretofore. Individualized instruction in rural schools provides a technic which allows an individual, after mastering the minimum essentials of an assignment by way of vertical advancement, to expand as far horizontally in his unit of study as his time and ability will permit. The slow pupil will master the essentials only, while the more brilliant pupils are released to work upon related projects, experiments, notebooks, workbooks, encyclopedic and library study, and socialized activities. The new program of rural-school instruc¬ tion involves on occasion the use of supervised or directed study, socialized Department of Science Instruction 487 recitation, group and individual activities and, in fact, affords the oppor¬ tunity for the employment of most of the modern teaching devices and methods. How may a unified course of natural science study best serve the modern rural school ? It should follow closely the recommendations of your Depart¬ ment of Science Instruction and those of the Thirty-first Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, as well as scientific guides which may be produced later. % The Thirty-first Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education suggests the following as points of study about which an ele¬ mentary science course should be centered : the universe, the earth, the earth’s atmosphere, life, conditions essential to life, variety of life, the physical environment of life, adaptations of life, interdependence of life, health, chemical and physical changes, light, electricity and magnetism, and inven¬ tions in the home and in industry. For rural-school purposes this list should be extended, where necessary, to include all subjects now presented in geography, physiology, hygiene, agriculture and nature study. The elementary course in natural science in rural schools should take cognizance of the many natural opportunities for practical observation and study presented in rural environment. The greatest laboratory available, nature itself, is vibrantly present at all times. It should be used, respected, and loved. The natural science materials which are to be presented must be scien¬ tifically graded, vocabularly tested, and centered about the subjects of greatest natural interest to the pupils of the respective grades and ages. Too often are these items neglected in the production of courses of study because those who produce them are professionally interested in the content and not so well versed in the methods of presenting it. The elementary science course of study should capitalize the use of modern teaching devices, particularly the workbook and other work-type material, simple experimentation, project making, and unit study. The material must be attractively organized and presented, rather than formal and fearful as judged by the child. It, of course, must develop the desire to know more and more about the marvelous order and activity of things about us, rather than to burden the child with an antipathy toward scientific study, engendered by unwise pedagogy. The organization and method employed must have all the naturalness that a science of nature in itself reveals. Finally, the course of study in elementary natural science must impart a respect for the beauty, the orderliness, the exactitude, and the truth of creation, thereby constituting a tremendous force for moral and cultural good. Thousands of rural schools of America will gladly receive and use a course of study in elementary science which course respects modern rural- school organization and teaching technic and which in a natural way employs the natural advantages of a rural setting. Department of Secondary Education The department of secondary education was established in 1886. It lapsed temporarily in 1924. In 1931 it was revived by the Delegate As¬ sembly of the National Education Association at its annual convention in Los Angeles. The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are: President , Ernest D. Lewis, Room 1901, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, N. Y. ; Vicepresident , Frank E. Barr, Balboa High School, San Francisco, Calif.; Secretary , Ann E. Ryder, Dickinson High School, Jersey City, N. J. ; Treasurer , George M. Strong, East High School, Columbus, Ohio; Regional Directors: Grace M. Davis, Modesto High School, Modesto, Calif. ; Asa E. Foster, Starling Junior High School, Columbus, Ohio; Robert W. House, Salem High School, Salem, Va. ; Grace Kenehan, Chester S. Morey Junior High School, Denver, Colo. ; Augustus Ludwig, Pershing Junior High School, Brooklyn, N. Y. This Department meets once a year in July. Facts relating to the establishment of the Department, its revival, and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1887: 393-442 1888: 401-433 1889: 497-533 1890: 613-655 1891: 615-687 1892: 333-373 1893: 177-242 1894: 743-794 1895: 579-635 1896: 557-619 1897: 644-699 1898: 664-700 1899: 601-817 1900: 428-453 1901: 565-604 1902: 455-492 1903: 429-486 1904: 473-536 1905: 423-479 1906: 633-636 1907: 521-710 1908: 577-667 1909: 479-522 1910: 443-533 1911: 555-657 1912: 663-765 1913: 469-499 1914: 445-488 1915: 723-753 1916: 517-574 1917: 253-284 1918: 177-189 1919: 195-204 1920: 209-230 1921: 667-678 1922:1267-1293 1923: 861-880 1924: 775-802 1932: 481-492 [ 490 ] MATHEMATICS IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL EDWIN S. LIDE, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. In a survey of instruction in mathematics, as a part of the National Survey of Secondary Education completed in 1932, outstanding practises were sought thru analysis of more than a hundred courses of study and thru per¬ sonal visitation to selected schools. In all particulars, junior high-school courses were constructed with more care than were those of senior high school: in the case of objectives, the junior high school emphasized the more practical, while the senior high school emphasized disciplinary and cultural values; newer and richer ma¬ terials appear in junior high-school courses, embodying algebra and intuitive geometry and social and economic uses of arithmetic, while those of senior high school remain largely traditional; interest of junior high-school pupils is sought thru the application of mathematics to the needs of mankind thru the ages and thru the use of practical problems, while in senior high school college preparation largely dominates. In junior high school the recommenda¬ tions of the National Committee on Reorganization, except with respect to the development of functional thinking and emphasis on college preparation in grade nine have been carefully followed. A few senior high schools are pointing the way to better correlation and more practical emphasis on materials of instruction. Courses of study are for the most part of a formal nature. What may be indicative of future trends is the attempt in some centers to concentrate on revealed weaknesses and to give more attention to general orientation, individual differences, and measurement of results. THE CHANGING CURRICULUM IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS LEONARD V. KOOS, PROFESSOR OF SECONDARY EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. ; AND ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SURVEY OF SECONDARY EDUCATION The changes in the secondary-school curriculum reported are those dis¬ closed in a number of investigations made in connection with the National Survey of Secondary Education. These investigations differ from most studies of trends by ascertaining the changes in the programs in identical groups of schools at two different periods, one set of programs for each group of schools being those in use in 1930 and the other the programs in use at some earlier period. Trends were studied for both junior and senior high schools. In junior high schools there has been a rapid increase in the proportion of work in non-academic subjects somewhat at the expense of academic subjects. The only academic group experiencing a notable gain was the social studies, [ 491 ] 492 National Education Association whereas the other increments were in the fine and practical arts, and physical education. In addition, increased amounts of time were being devoted to what may be called the “social-integrative activities, such as homeroom activities, clubs, and activities in the assembly or auditorium. Another marked trend is in the disappearance of specialized aspects of subjects, such as “gram¬ mar,” “composition,” “reading,” “spelling,” and the emergence in their place of more general titles like “English.” This trend appears in several subject fields. The changes are in line with the acknowledged special pur¬ poses of the junior high school. At the senior high-school level a chief change is in the addition of many new courses, the additions affecting all subject groups, but science, mathe¬ matics, and foreign language less than others. The trend in required work at this level is away from mathematics and foreign language and toward English, the social studies, and physical education. The displacement of specialized by general courses has progressed more slowly than at the junior high-school level. An investigation of the work actually taken by graduates while in high school shows a striking shift away from foreign language and mathematics and toward English, the social studies, and the non-academic subjects. For the most part the shifts at both levels are in the direction of the recommendations of those who have been urging curriculum reform. These persons are primarily impatient at the rate of change. ENGLISH IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL DORA V. SMITH, COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. What are the major trends concerning English revealed by the National Survey of Secondary Education? First, there has been a general reduction of time devoted to English as a subject in the junior high-school years. Second, certain trends in the teaching of composition stand out clearly. Analysis of aims from 156 courses shows large emphasis upon the funda¬ mentals of expression and a correspondingly low place accorded to elements of style, forms of discourse, and the technical study of rhetorical principles. Third, there is a tendency to place relatively little stress upon oral English and letter-writing in comparison with their importance in everyday life. The findings are so contrary to the recommendations of experts as well as to the results of scientific investigations into curriculum problems that they would seem to merit the serious concern of those engaged in curriculum revision. There is evidence, however, that when oral composi¬ tion is engaged in, the activities are nearer life situations than are the cor¬ responding activities of written composition. Department of Secondary Education 493 A fourth tendency appearing in certain recent courses of study is the re¬ organization of composition about functional centers like those suggested by the investigations of Dr. Roy I. Johnson and the Clapp committee of the National Council. The proposed centers are seven in number: (1) conversa¬ tion and discussion; (2) instructions, directions, and explanations; (3) announcements, reports, and speeches; (4) story-telling, (5) writing expla¬ nations, stories, and poems; (6) letter-writing; and (7) word study and spelling. The final trend in the teaching of composition concerns the program of study in grammar. The 156 courses examined are unanimous in their purpose to teach that amount of grammar which is necessary to function in correct speech and writing. No other aims are mentioned with the exception of grammar as an aid to literary interpretation, which occurs in three courses out of the 156. In spite of this agreement upon a functional content in gram¬ mar, the number of topics listed for study varies from 45 to 149. Once more we are forcibly reminded of the fact that nobody knows what grammar is functional and what is not. Clearly one of the first steps in any program of curriculum making in English is the scientific investigation of this problem thru controlled experimentation in the classroom. FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL HELEN M. EDDY, UNIVERSITY HIGH SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, IOWA CITY, IOWA Instruction in the modern foreign languages is at present in a transition stage. Because of the lack of authoritative objective data, courses of study have been organized until very recently almost wholly on the basis of sub¬ jective opinion and an analysis of the processes of language learning and teaching, with little experimental support. Steps have been taken by the Modern Foreign Language Study to put the teaching of modern languages on a scientific basis. The Committee on Investigation has set forth the following guiding principles for the organization of a rational modern- language program. The objectives proposed for any course must take into account the realities of the situation, such as the time at the disposal of the majority of the pupils, their age, ability, knowledge, and interests; the linguistic and personal equipment of the teacher ; and all pertinent adminis¬ trative conditions. The content of the course is to be chosen and organized with conscious reference to the aims and is to consist of learning activities as nearly like the proposed outcomes as the classroom situation will allow. The criterion for the selection of subjectmatter and classroom procedure is objective evidence that these are the materials and activities best adapted to the attainment of the proposed aims within the allotted time and under the conditions that prevail in the classroom. Objective standards of achieve¬ ment are to be set up based upon actual classroom performance. 494 National Education Association Within the limited time at its disposal, the Committee on Investigation for the Study was unable to complete or even to initiate research or experi¬ mentation upon all of the problems that need solution. The Committee’s proposed list of problems for investigation and research includes over a hundred items. The foreign language situation in the junior high school is still in a chaotic state. Courses are offered in modern languages, in Latin, and in a considerable number of schools, in general language, and may be found to begin in every term except the second semester of the ninth grade. Observation of selected classes in foreign language in the junior high school indicates that the best teachers, at least, have been eminently success¬ ful in shaping course content and in devising pupil activities suited to the early adolescent. The problem of proper articulation of the work of the junior high school in foreign language with continuation courses in the senior high school remains, however, a perplexing one. Nor is a decisive answer available to the question of the value of the earlier beginning. The general language course offers a possible solution to the problem of articulation, while serving also to some degree as an exploratory course in foreign language and providing general information in itself. The aims, content, and values of the course in general language, however, need to be more sharply defined on the basis of objective data derived from careful experimentation. FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL CHARLES H. HANDSCHIN, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHERS, MIAMI UNIVERSITY, OXFORD, OHIO All are agreed that reading, real reading, is the prime aim. There is a problem for each teacher to solve. It is this. I must teach a reading knowledge in two to four years in high school, or two years in college. How much time can I put on speaking and grammar and still achieve the former? Every teacher solves this problem for himself, according to his lights and circum¬ stances; that is, every teacher who has freedom. Modern language teachers are doing better than some years ago. More is being read thruout ; less stress is being laid on speaking. Segregation into good and poor sections with no stress on speaking for the poor sections is coming in college and must come in high school. If we wish to guarantee a reading knowledge in two years these two points must be taken advantage of to the full. But it must not mean merely old-style translation. A passable pro¬ nunciation must be taught and made habitual the opening week or weeks. Other devices are being and must be used instead of mere translation. Be¬ sides, we have come to make use of two kinds of reading — intensive and extensive. Department of Secondary Education 495 Modern language teaching has been very creditable for many years in spite of what many may suppose as I shall show from the statistics of the College Entrance Examination Board. This poor opinion of modern language teaching on the part of many is due to two things: First, the misconception that since we were advocating a direct method, the public expected our students to be able to speak the language taught, and since we paid con¬ siderable attention to speaking, reading received less attention and so suffered. Second, the public expected too much. A speaking knowledge cannot be taught in two years nor even a reading knowledge in two years in high school, unless under exceptional circumstances. But modern language has been as well taught as any other subject and better than many, according to statistics of the College Entrance Examination Board, “It has, for the last twenty-five years, stood consistently well above the average (roughly 800,000 papers enter into the tabulation) which is true of no other subject except Greek. This, however, with 15,000 papers is not comparable to modern languages with 140,000 papers which means, as we know, that Greek classes were much smaller.” I believe the educationists who have been critical of modern language instruction will be willing to grant this contention if we can guarantee a good reading knowledge after two years in high school. We need not attain any speaking knowledge in high school and very little in college to satisfy this sort of opposition. I believe, however, it will be better for modern language to have it taught in the senior high school than in the junior, for in the senior high school we shall have a better chance of achieving a reading ability in worthwhile material. As a contribution to the question mentioned above the speaker proposes a new philosophy of modern language teaching. The present philosophies are (1 ) diagnostic (help after the damage is done) ; (2) teaching pattern forms in the hope that they may be useful in the future. The new proposal is to create a classroom situation in which the student desires to express himself — in English in poor sections, in the foreign language in good sections. A new technic of creating such a situation is reported concretely by records of actual classroom discussions. SOCIAL STUDIES IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL W. G. KIMMEL, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. ,' AND PRESIDENT, N. E. A. DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL STUDIES A teacher of the social studies in Atlantis, possessed of an independent income, decided to take a leave of absence from his activities and visit foreign countries to make a firsthand investigation of instruction in his field of major interest. Among the countries visited, he became so interested in what seemed to him to be certain anomalies in social-studies situations in the 496 National Education Association secondary schools of the United States that he decided to make a more intensive investigation of courses of study, classroom situations, and the relation of instruction in these subjects to typical environmental situations in American life today. While the youth of Europe are marching under the banners of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, with compasses, charts, points of reference, and an enthusiasm for the journey, regardless of uncertainties as to the destination, our youth, according to this observer, are floundering in confusion, trying without adequate points of reference or appealing symbols, to find their uncertain way thru the ever-widening area between American ideals or fictions and realities. That our youth, confused by the maze of contradictions between pretenses and realities, try to gain their bearings amidst the multi¬ plicity of appeals of institutions and entrenched groups, retraces its steps, and then advances boldly in an uncertain direction, is not surprising to the observer, because our youth, with many misgivings and reservations, are merely imitating the adult population to a greater or less extent in their desire for approval and prestige. Adult groups and institutions, according to our critically-minded observer, are much more concerned with the induc¬ tion of youth into conventional stereotypes than with provisions for their guidance thru the maze of institutional arrangements towards patterns of conduct that will eventuate into the good life for them. After considerable reflection upon the entire situation in the teaching of the social studies in our country, he finally concluded that when the Ameri¬ cans as a people — not merely 10 or 20 percent of them — shall begin to dis¬ place wishful thinking and sentimentalism by logical and fearless thinking and other evidence of intellectual poise and maturity, when American educators shall be governed by basic ideas rather than slogans in their think¬ ing about the contributions which the social studies may legitimately be expected to make to the social education of youth, when they shall apprehend the basic purposes in the teaching of the social studies as the search for and comprehension of ideas in ever-widening and many-sided relationships rather than chasing phantom dreams about reforming contemporary society by magic formulas and platitudes, when they shall emphasize instruction in the inalienable rights, and their implications, possessed by citizens rather than merely stress conformity to platitudes and stereotypes, a great improve¬ ment in the quality of instruction in the social studies may reasonably be expected. Then, he presumed, youth might have an even chance to cope with social situations of all kinds with the aid of trained minds, flexible powders of thought, a more intelligent conception of citizenship, and an alertness in detecting superstitions, propaganda, and fallacies in reasoning imposed upon them by dominant groups and institutions; in short, he predicted that intelli¬ gence and greater maturity in thought and responsibility in action might then be expected to eventuate into the good life for youth, and that they might be expected to use these attributes in pioneering toward a better social order. Department of Secondary Education 497 MUSIC IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL ANNE E. PIERCE, UNIVERSITY HIGH SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, IOWA CITY, IOWA Less than one hundred years ago Lowell Mason introduced music into the public elementary schools of Boston. Somewhat later, as the high school became an agency in the educational process of the United States it gradually found recognition as a part of secondary education. Since its inception in the school program, music has from time to time undergone various changes in aims, content of the course of study and methods of teaching. It has, how¬ ever, attained virility as a school subject only within the past few years — years which have witnessed its expansion from compulsory chorus meeting once or twice a week without credit to credited offerings in theory, history, appreciation, instrumental and vocal music. Altho showing a phenomenal development in the character and extent of its offerings since the early years of this century, music as yet does not hold a large share of time in the program of the majority of schools. Yet, despite its place on the schedule and the confusion which sometimes attends its administration, according to the Biennial Survey of Secondary Education, 1926-28, over 26 percent of the students in high schools reporting studies were registered in some form of music instruction — more than in drawing and art, home economics, Latin, French, German, Spanish, geometry, physics, chemistry, shorthand, and typewriting. In 1930 the quinquennial report of secondary schools approved by the North Central Association showed that in the schools represented more than 38 percent of the students included some form of music in their secondary training. It must be admitted that at the present time the problems of educators are multiplied by the current economic recession which has brought about a “fad and frill” crusade, a movement not new, however, in the educational world. Probably music is the oldest of the educational fads for the term was applied to it at its introduction into the school system many years ago. Altho not always wisely taught and administered, it has without doubt justified itself as an educational tool. Whatever its faults in the school system may be, they are not inherent in the subject itself. Thruout the ages it has proved to be one of the most useful of social cements and a healthy outlet for the emotions. Certainly teaching boys and girls to recognize the difference between good music and poor music and to prefer the good is an indubitable contribution to their lives as civilized people and to the national standards and ideals. The present crisis will not be in vain if it serves to arouse in teachers of music a desire to correct defects now apparent in the instruction of their subject and causes them to reconstruct their courses so as to meet the challenge of a social and economic organism obviously now undergoing change. 498 National Education Association MUSIC AND ART IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL H. ROSABEL MCDONALD, CHAIRMAN, ART DEPARTMENT, THEODORE ROOSEVELT HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK, N. Y. Our average presentday classroom practises differ little, in my observation, from those of ten or twenty-five years ago, except that in general they are more chaotic, less disciplined, less directed, more theoretical, more technical, more tricky, less realistic, less honest. We are busy with: 1. Making designs for things, posters, textiles, objects of art 2. Learning design principles 3. Learning facts about art works and artists 4. Learning short-cut, fool-proof methods to get design and composition via dynamic symmetry 5. Expressing ourselves in the latest French manner or according to the style of the best selling American magazine illustrator or commercial artist. Skill must come last, expression, first. By expression, I do not mean the chaotic, modern arty stuff there is no excuse for. I mean those things that honest children do when fear of media is removed, that represents themselves, their kind of vision, their interpretation of their world. Abstractions are not natural or interesting to many young adolescents. They do not express them¬ selves in or by abstract relationships in art unless especially influenced to do so. The natural thing for them is the concrete and the dramatic and the personal. Therefore, their art expressions should be allowed to be these things. Expression, as an educational goal, means the freeing of man, the return¬ ing to him of the use of his natural equipment of eye, voice, and movement that modern civilization robs him of. If we find art has a particular function in this process of developing expression capacity, and we actually use it to this end, then we do not have to go further to justify its place in our cur¬ riculum. The trouble will be found then to be with the rest of the curriculum. Unless it gives, not only thru art classes, but thru all the subjectmatter studies, as great an opportunity to expression of individual reaction as it does to the acquisition of facts, it will keep on producing another generation of adults such as have produced our present crisis, unconscious of their real selves, of their social environment, acquisitive to the last degree, to get some¬ thing out of every source from every authority other than the authority of their own courageous individual reaction, their own personal response. Our fundamental educational basis must be on the psychological needs of man as an individual and the function of the particular nature of art work in relation to this need. It is an old idea, but we art teachers seem to have lost sight of it in the making of organized courses of study if, indeed, it ever was used as the primary consideration in art teaching in secondary schools. We need to do a lot more clear thinking before we can be sufficiently con¬ vincing even to the thinking public that art is a fundamental educational tool. Department of Secondary Education 499 COMMERCIAL AND VOCATIONAL SUBJECTS IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL VICTOR H. NOLL, INSTITUTE OF SCHOOL EXPERIMENTATION, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. Comparison of the number of different courses offered in commercial and vocational lines by secondary schools today with similar data for about eight years ago, shows a greatly increased diversification and specialization. In commercial work more than twice as many differently named courses are now found as were listed by Counts in his study of the senior high-school curriculum. Among the most commonly offered subjects in the commercial field are bookkeeping, business English, business management or business organization, commercial arithmetic, geography, and law, general busi¬ ness training, journalism, machine calculation, office practise, retail distribu¬ tion, salesmanship, shorthand, and typewriting. It is interesting to find that the comprehensive high school offers on the average, at least as great a variety of commercial subjects as the high school of commerce. The tendency is for the former to offer a greater variety of subjects whereas the latter provides greater opportunity for specialization. The contrast in industrial arts is even greater. In 1924, Counts reported that approximately two-thirds of all the time devoted to this type of work in the schools included in his study was devoted to the two subjects of mechani¬ cal drawing and manual training. Today auto mechanics, carpentry, cloth¬ ing construction, electricity, machine shop, millinery, printing, sheet-metal work, bench and mill work are commonly offered in many general high schools. Of course, not all schools offer all those mentioned. Some schools, however, offer all these and more. The amount of work offered in each sub¬ ject varies widely, being in some cases hardly more than a smattering, perhaps a half unit of work, the class meeting less than five periods a week, to rather intensive specialization for one or two and even three or four years. 4 he greatest opportunity for specialization is found in the socalled specialized schools. This is true for commercial work in high schools of commerce and for industrial training in technical high schools and trade schools. 4 he ex¬ ception to this statement is the large cosmopolitan or comprehensive high school where a program of studies is offered that is very broad and which sometimes provides opportunity for considerable specialization as well. Vocational training on the secondary level is broadening its scope and also increasing the opportunities for specialization. One is tempted to suspect, however, that except for commercial training in commercial and compre¬ hensive high schools, and trade training in trade schools, what we offer as vocational training in most secondary schools is mostly bait for holding the reluctant or unwilling in school and essentially play-work rather than seri¬ ous vocational training. The firsthand observation of all types of secondary schools substantiates this viewpoint. On the other hand, it may not be the training that is at fault, but the pupil. Many get into an occupation without specific training for it while others with such training fail to get in. 500 National Education Association VOCATIONAL SUBJECTS IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL FRANKLIN J. KELLER, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL OCCUPATIONAL CONFERENCE, NEW YORK, N. Y. A little over two years ago the New York City Board of Education ap¬ pointed a Vocational Survey Committee to survey the vocational opportuni¬ ties in New York City and, on the basis of its findings, to formulate a com¬ prehensive program of vocational education. These findings are printed in a report called General Recommendations on Vocational Education and Guidance in New York City. They indicate how the curriculum ought to be changed, in which institutions it should be carried out, and the kind of teachers and supervisors who should be responsible for its administration. The principal recommendations were: 1. That vocational education is a phase of secondary education, and the boys and girls in industrial high, continuation, and other vocational schools, are entitled to teachers, buildings, equipment, and all other facilities con¬ sistent with their needs and exactly the same high quality as that in the best high schools. 2. That in connection with the planning of every vocational school build¬ ing there be organized for a centralized school embracing one trade or a related group of trades, a strong advisory committee of employers and em¬ ployes ; and for a general neighborhood school, that is, a vocational high school, an advisory committee or representatives of local organizations of employers, employes, parents, and other civic groups. 3. That the board of education organize two types of schools and develop to the full extent of its potentialities an existing third type, namely: (1) a limited number of central special schools, each of them housing all stu¬ dents taking instruction in one trade or group of related trades (full-time, part-time, apprentice, and evening), (2) regional general schools (voca¬ tional high schools) the main function of which shall be continued voca¬ tional guidance thru try-out and social science courses for all students beyond the junior high-school level and of all ages beyond fifteen, with short unit training courses in those vocations not covered in central schools; and (3) junior high schools in every neighborhood which shall provide try-out and occupational information courses for all students up to the age of fifteen and for retarded pupils up to the age of sixteen. COMMERCIAL SUBJECTS IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL LLOYD L. JONES, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, COLUMBUS, OHIO Our government has gone into business. It will affect everyone in our jobs, our pocketbooks, and our living. Education for economic citizenship is the need of the hour. Education for businesslike living is the only thing Department of Secondary Education 501 that can pull this country of ours out of the mire of depression and out of the bog of economic illiteracy. Closing schools, pleading school administrators, frantic teachers, bad business, unsocial industrialism, questionable banking — all are reflections of economic illiteracy. For these many centuries, education has been warring against all kinds of illiteracy except the kind that is closest to the happiness and the stomachs of all people. It is simply unthinkable — this persistent neglect of general business information for all persons ! When schools and communities get into business or financial difficulties, we shout in desperation for people to help. We even try to talk business to our public but we have seen to it that our public schools have given educa¬ tion in every field and area except education for businesslike living. No wonder that we are in trouble. Where have people been able to get some idea of what business is all about and how it affects them? How are we going to expect sympathetic and enthusiastic cooperation in the pending economic recovery acts from people who do not have the foundations of ele¬ mentary business undertaking? It is a fundamental principle that people are afraid of and usually stand against that which they do not understand. Now if you are going to stand by while the federal Congress passes recovery acts that reach down into your pockets, your business, your hours of work and your jobs, then you ought to provide some means of educating people for whom you provide such legislation. Commercial education in the changing curriculum of the high school has been pleading for the past three years for school administration to do some¬ thing about education for economic citizenship — for general business in¬ formation. If the foundational business information course is not good and adequate and sound, how can the super-structure — the commercial sciences in the eleventh and twelfth grades be sound and worthy and adequate? Education for the consumer is in the making. Young people are going to get economic information from the schools or elsewhere. It certainly would be much better to provide in the schools a basis for economic guidance rather than allow events to shape themselves by a strictly academic and negative attitude. The problem of education for economic citizenship is on our front door step. The issue cannot be dodged. HEALTH AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION IN THE CHANGING CURRICULUM OF THE HIGH SCHOOL JAMES EDWARD ROGERS, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL PHYSICAL EDUCATION SERVICE, NATIONAL RECREATION ASSOCIATION, NEW YORK, N. Y. During the past ten years, no subject has progressed more rapidly in the curriculum of secondary education than that of health and physical educa¬ tion. Some of the outstanding developments are : 1. The health service program of schools is a combined responsibility of home, community, and school. 502 National Education Association 2. The health service work within the school is not a medical, but an edu¬ cational problem, hence it comes under the general supervision of the edu¬ cational administrators — superintendents and principals. 3. Health education — instruction in hygiene or healthful living — is not concerned with old-fashioned anatomy and physiology, but with wholesome living. There have been changes in the content of health education texts. We are not concerned with the knowledge of subjectmatter so much as with healthful living thru right habits and wholesome attitudes. 4. There are better health courses of study that are graded and based upon individual needs and follow modern curriculum-making procedures. 5. There has been a vast improvement in the program of physical educa¬ tion activities. These programs are no longer concerned with exercise, the building of muscles, or with the coaching of athletes. Physical education is now planned to give a well-rounded program of games, sports, athletics, aquatics, rhythms, gymnastics, graded and based upon individual needs. It is very much concerned with outcomes. Its objectives are health, physical fit¬ ness, and neuro-muscular coordination, development of play habits for the wise use of leisure time, sports for sportsmanship — hence character training and education not of, but education thru, physical activities. There is a marked growth in the development of intramural sports. Mass participation is being preferred to varsity championship tournaments. The ideal — a game for every boy and girl and every boy and girl in a game — is rapidly becoming a reality. Educational athletics rather than spectator ath¬ letics is rapidly growing in favor. RELATION OF SECONDARY SCHOOLS TO HIGHER INSTITUTIONS P. ROY BRAMMELL, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, CONNECTICUT STATE COLLEGE, STORRS, CONN. One of the viewpoints of this paper is that, in line with the reorganization of education in the United States, the concept that there are distinct units of secondary and higher education which need to be articulated should give way as rapidly as possible to a concept which views these units as integral parts of a single educational experience. Not all pupils will reach the same stages in this experience, but all should be privileged to go as far as their capacities will permit. If the junior high school and the junior college are properly “isthmian” in their function, then education is properly a single mainland, and the dark rivers which used to separate the units, and which become the educational valley of death to many young people, should be eliminated from our system. Another concept is that the subjectmatter offerings and requirements of secondary schools and higher institutions should be modified in the light of their known direct relationships, or lack of it, to the offering above or below. This is not set down in conflict with the excellent principle that the learn- Department of Secondary Education 503 ing materials of the school should fit the present life and needs of the learners. In fact, if all the subjects required at present which are not related directly to success on either the upper or lower level were eliminated from the programs of studies, ample opportunity would exist for schools to enrich their offerings to suit the diversified needs of the learners and of the com¬ munities in which the schools are located. It is generally admitted that such a concept as the one just stated would cut out at least some of the traditional subjects. The third concept is that along with the elimination of the barriers that have existed at the junctions of the educational units there must be developed an effective system of guidance which gets pupils into schools appropriate to their abilities and interests and which tends to bring about the discontinuance, with the success feeling, of the educational experience at the close of an appropriate level of study. Whatever the plan of guidance developed to bring about such an adjustment of pupils, it is clear that it must be a cooperative enterprise, not thought of as terminating at any particular junction of units but continuing uninterrupted as long as the educational experience continues. RELATIONS BETWEEN THE HIGH SCHOOL AND THE COLLEGE MARY E. COURTENAY, DEAN OF GIRLS, LINDBLOM HIGH SCHOOL, CHICAGO, ILL. There is a deep-seated conviction among many teachers that the one-time dominance of the college over the secondary school, inherent in the original nature and purpose of both, is a lingering handicap to complete efficiency. True, the dictatorship of the university has yielded slowly to the democratic pressure of increasing numbers and changing values in education. Accredit¬ ing agencies have gradually responded to the demand for modified entrance requirements. The higher institutions show a growing generosity in the con¬ sideration of recommendations and the interpretation of credits. Selective processes of securing enrolment have become steadily less selective. Despite these significant signs of greater latitude, however, the university still exerts a determining and often a deterring influence over the organization, the cur¬ riculum, and, most of all, the attitude of the teacher in the secondary school. Thus the high school of today retains the traditional organization borrowed in its infancy from higher institutions. Its curriculum, expanded to include vocational and technical training, and enriched by a wide range of cultural extras still echoes the traditional conviction that the real business of the sec¬ ondary school is to lay a firm foundation for a superstructure of higher edu¬ cation, and that the training provided for those preparing for college is the best for those not going to college. The average high-school teacher, with this academic background and aspirations, is loath to admit that college is not the summum bonum of all desirable development. He finds it difficult to reconcile himself to what he terms lowering the standards, and what 504 National Education Association really is facing the situation honestly and intelligently, and dealing with it effectively. Mass education, thrust upon the secondary school without adequate pro¬ vision, confronts the high school with a twofold obligation : to give to the few, who are able and eager to profit by further academic training, the best possible preparation ; and to give to the many, who have neither the desire nor the capacity for higher education, but are equally worthy of develop¬ ment, the fullest possible development. We must be honest enough to admit that all pupils are not educable to the same degree or by the same means; that the academic or bookminded type is not the only one to render valuable serv¬ ice to society ; and that each type is deserving of the development of which he is capable both in measure and in kind. We must be willing to segregate students according to their aptitudes and interests. The colleges and universities have not escaped the inroads of mass educa¬ tion which has multiplied and intensified the problems of the secondary school, and offered a new challenge to every unit in our educational system. In the frank recognition, by the school, the college, and the university, of the fact that there are fundamentally different types of students, with differ¬ ent capacities for education, but all worthy of the training of which they are capable, lies the source of greater power and broader service. The secondary school must dedicate itself to a thoro investigation of its facilities, its pos¬ sibilities, and its responsibilities, and whatever rebirth is necessary for in¬ creased effectiveness. The colleges and universities must be prepared to lead with growing generosity and wiser guidance in this period of unprecedented changes and unparalleled demands. RELATIONS BETWEEN THE COLLEGE AND PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL GEORGE WORKS, DEAN OF STUDENTS AND UNIVERSITY EXAMINER, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. One of the most commonly used criteria for admission of students to college is conformity of credits offered to a specified curriculum pattern. May I call your attention to the results of two recent studies of this question ? The study by Holzinger using records of approximately 600 students who were graduated during the four-year period from 1926-27 to 1929-30 and for whom scores on the psychological examination of the American Council on Education were available, leads one to the conclusion that, when intel¬ ligence is taken into account, high-school and junior-college preparation in any of the standard academic subjects here studied is- about equally good preparation for later college work. Douglas has made a study of 305 members of the 1930 class in the Uni¬ versity of Oregon, all of whom were in residence for five consecutive terms. Students presenting two units of credit in foreign language did no better on the average in college than students who presented no units in that field. No Department of Secondary Education 505 effective threshold to bar poor students may be set at less than five units of foreign language. Setting such a threshold at any number of units in for¬ eign languages operates to bar practically as many superior students as poor ones. Similar conclusions may be drawn in the case of other subjects. Not only was there no relation between pattern of high-school credits and col¬ lege success, but apparently there is little relation between the mastery of any particular subject and college success. One seems forced to conclude that, at best, pattern of high-school units as a means of selecting good college risks is but another way of measuring intelligence and industry, and a distinctly inferior one at that. Compared on the basis of predictive usefulness to psychological test scores, high-school marks, and principal’s ratings on college promise, the pattern of high-school credits is obviously definitely inferior. The author of this study feels certain that a few decades hence our present practise of selecting college entrants on the basis of minimum credits in certain fields of high-school credits will seem a curious and inexplicable anomaly. The abandonment of all prescriptions of subjects except as they may be essential prerequisites for certain fields of work, e.g., engineering, is sug¬ gested. The results of this procedure would be: (1) Entrance of capable indi¬ viduals would not be barred; (2) the secondary school would be freed to meet the needs of its clientele. SECRETARY’S MINUTES Chicago, Illinois First Session, July 3, 1933 “The Changing Curriculum of the High School” as revealed by the series of studies made by the National Survey of Secondary Education was the focal point of all conferences held by the Department of Secondary Education at the Chicago meeting. The entire first session was given over to papers read by Associate Director Leonard V. Koos and a large number of survey specialists. This session consisted of a general meeting and eight subjectmatter roundtable conferences. The com¬ plete success of these conferences points unmistakably to the desire on the part of secondary-school teachers for other such opportunities. An informal talk was given at this general meeting by James B. Edmonson, of the University of Michigan, re¬ garding the activities of the Joint Commission on the Emergency in Education. Luncheon Conference, July 4 A luncheon conference at the Auditorium Hotel was briefly addressed by William John Cooper who, by virtue of his office as Commissioner of Education, was in gen¬ eral charge of the Survey, and by Charles Judd of Chicago University, one of the Survey “consultants.” Second Session, July 5 The second general session dealt with “The Relations between the College and the Public High School.” Papers were read by P. Roy Brammell, School of Educa¬ tion, Connecticut State College, a Survey specialist; by Mary E. Courtenay, dean 506 National Education Association of girls, Lindblom High School, Chicago; and by George Works, dean of students and university examiner, University of Chicago. Abstracts of these papers and of those read at the first session may be found on preceding pages. Business Meeting, July 5 Following the second regular session of the Department, the annual business meeting was called to order by Ernest D. Lewis, president of the Department of Secondary Education. The minutes of the previous meeting, held at Atlantic City, were read by the secretary, Ann E. Ryder, Dickinson High School, Jersey City, and approved. The president gave a brief survey of the activities of the Department during the past year and suggested profitable work still to be done. The treasurer’s report, in the absence of the treasurer, was read by F. A. Sheri¬ dan, president of the Columbus, Ohio, High School Teachers Association. The re¬ port showed a balance of $235.73 on June 29 with unpaid bills amounting to $443.21. The loan made by the New York City High School Teachers Association, according to the report, had been reduced by the payment of $50 on March 27. During the election of officers, which followed, Lolabel Hall, vicepresident of the New York City High School Teachers Association, presided. It was suggested from the floor that inasmuch as the times were critical, it would be wise to reelect the present officers as they knew the work already done and would be apt to carry on with better results than a new group. A motion to reelect all the officers was then made by L. Sullivan of Cincinnati, Ohio, and seconded by E. R. Johnson of Colum¬ bus, Ohio, and was carried. Meeting adjourned. Department of Secondary School Principals The department of secondary school princi¬ pals was organized in Topeka, Kansas, in 1886, under the name of the Department of Secondary Instruction. See Proceedings , 1887:393. Anticipat¬ ing the proposed merger of the National Association of Secondary Principals with the National Educa¬ tion Association, the name of the Department was changed to the Department of Secondary School Principals. The officers for the year 1933-34 are: President , Robert B. Clem, Principal, Shawnee High School, Louisville, Ky. ; First Vicepresident , Charles F. Allen, Supervisor of Secondary Education, Public Schools, Little Rock, Ark.; Second Vicepresidenty Harrison C. Lyseth, State Supervisor of Secondary Education, Augusta, Maine; Secretary-Treasurer , H. V. Church, 3129 Wenonah Avenue, Berwyn, Ill.; Executive Committee : William E. Burkard, Principal, Tilden Junior High School, Philadelphia, Pa. ; D. A. Morgan, Principal, Shawnee Mission Rural High School, Mer- riam, Kans. ; W. W. Haggard, Superintendent, Town¬ ship High School and Junior College, Joliet, Ill. Facts relating to the establishment of this Depart¬ ment and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1887: 393-442 1888: 401-433 1889: 497-533 1890: 613-655 1891: 615-687 1892: 333-373 1893: 177-242 1894: 743-794 1895: 579-635 1896: 557-619 1897: 644-699 1898: 664-700 1899: 601-817 1900: 428-453 1901: 565-604 1902: 455-492 1903: 429-486 1904: 473-536 1905: 423-479 1906: 633-636 1907: 521-710 1908: 577-667 1909: 479-522 1910: 443-533 1911: 555-657 1912: 663-765 1913: 469-499 1914: 445-488 1915: 723-753 1916: 517-574 1917: 253-284 1918: 177-189 1919: 195-204 1920: 209-230 1921: 667-678 1922:1267-1293 1923: 861-880 1924: 775-802 1925: 450-477 1926: 637-652 1927: 599-677 1928: 591-650 1929: 579-632 1930: 543-595 1931: 577-620 1932: 493-524 [ 508 ] THE STATE AND ITS HIGH SCHOOLS E. W. BUTTERFIELD, STATE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, HARTFORD, CONN. This statement is now being much discussed: “In Europe they plan a secondary-school education for only 10 percent of all children. Here we seek such an education for all children. Can we afford to give opportunities of secondary education to all? Shall we not revise our plan to approach more closely the European standard?” In a republic public education is not a gift, not charity, not a contribution to the needs of poor and unfortunate parents. Its purpose is to adjust growing citizens to a growing world. We educate not to relieve parents but to protect and perpetuate our investment in culture and civilization. Yet this question asks if we, that is, the rich, the intellectual, the cultured, the old families can afford to give, can we tax ourselves and also tax the poor, the mediocre- minded, the uncouth, and those of foreign birth so that we can make a present of secondary education to those not of our own personal status? It may well be that four out of five college professors and college graduates will nod with approval to a plan which would restrict high-school education to 10 percent of all children, provided that their children and those of their neighbors be in the 10 percent. Besides the fallacy which the word “give” connotes, a very practical question arises. The question that faces us is not what we can give to the child, but what can we to our own advantage do with the child until he reaches the age of competence and employment. Very bluntly, parents and the state must do something with children until they are old enough to go to work. Fifty years ago this meant until they were fourteen, now it means until they are eighteen. Children reach the secondary-school door at fourteen. If only 10 percent are allowed to enter, some employment must be found for the 90 percent. Let us begin with the girls. Every main avenue for employment at fourteen has now been closed. The factories will not receive them. Even in the cotton mills larger and more complicated machinery has forever put an end to child labor at the loom. The department stores no longer want these chil¬ dren. These stores are run by men and women, and except for the Christmas rush, the stores want young people but no children. Housework has been closed to them too. This was very common in 1900 but today houses have electrical and other appliances and the kitchen girl is not employed. Further¬ more, marriage is closed to them. For boys the story is not different. The care of horses, the milking of cows, special farm activities gave employment to thousands of farm boys in 1890 and continues to do this in European countries. In great measure this work with us is now gone. Changes have come so that the presence of minors in industry up to the age of eighteen by our certain knowledge and probably up to the time of majority at twenty-one is an economic disadvantage. [ 509 ] 510 National Education Association There is, then, but one answer. If we adopt the European status of 10 percent of fourteen- to eighteen-year-old children in school, we must accept the standard of living that produces employment for 90 percent of these children. This means a reduction to a status of peasantry on the farm and of child labor in the cities. We have outgrown this and in America public education will continue to be offered to all children of secondary-school age. IMPROVEMENT AND ECONOMY IN INSTRUCTION R. R. COOK, PRINCIPAL, THEODORE ROOSEVELT HIGH SCHOOL, DES MOINES, IOWA There are three possible ways of reducing instructional costs: (1) reduce educational offerings; (2) reduce teachers’ salaries; (3) increase the num¬ ber of pupils per teacher. The average taxpayer does not want his children’s educational opportunities to suffer. Teachers do not want their salaries cut. It may be possible to meet a goodly portion of the necessary reduction in school taxes by finding more efficient teaching methods. We need to make more extensive use of our stronger teachers. By more efficient methods, such teachers should be enabled to teach larger numbers of pupils. If so, the public can afford to pay them good salaries. In two of the Des Moines high schools there are at the present time experi¬ mental units in each of which a master teacher, with the assistance of a well trained but inexperienced apprentice, is teaching five classes of sixty- five pupils each. The instructor makes extensive use of mimeographed out¬ lines and tests. He has two rooms, one a classroom for recitation purposes, the other a workroom for the use of the apprentice. The apprentice grades papers, prepares outlines and tests, gathers and tabulates reference readings, assists absentees in making up their work, aids slow pupils and keeps class records. General class recitations and lectures are reduced to a minimum. Thirty-minute discussions are held two or three times each week, some of these consisting of group discussions in which the class is broken up into small units, each under its own student leader. Short tests are given every few days and major tests at the close of each unit of work. The results up to date indicate that pupils of ability are benefiting from the challenge to greater independence and initiative. They are being thrown more on their own resources and have more time and incentive to work. The weak pupils are receiving more individual help and guidance than formerly. Test scores and marks at the close of the fall semester show results as good as those secured in the past in small classes, by the same instructor. The experiment will result in a financial saving to the school district of about 20 percent of the salary of two experienced teachers. 'The writer wishes to challenge others to carry on similar experiments in different subjects and with different methods, believing that secondary schools have only made a beginning in their movement toward improvement and greater efficiency in classroom methods. Department of Secondary School Principals 511 DIRECTED LEARNING AND THE UNIT ASSIGNMENT ROY O. BILLETT, SPECIALIST IN SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION, U. S. OFFICE OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. All learning originates in the interaction of the individual with his en¬ vironment, that is, in experience. From unguided experience the individual receives no guarantee of his own growth, success, and happiness, and society obtains no promise of continuous improvement. Hence, in terms of the func¬ tions of the school, education must be the result of “guided experience” and synonymous with “directed learning.” The modern educator has caught a vision of the possibilities inherent in directed learning both for the individual and for society. He perceives that if these possibilities are to be realized the random efforts of individual edu¬ cators and school systems must be replaced by collective action. Five aspects of the work to be done may be noted. First, valid objectives toward which pupils should work must be established. These objectives should range in a harmonious series from the most general and ultimate to the most specific and immediate. In the formulation of these objectives due consideration must be given to the pupil’s hereditary make-up, to his normal processes of growth, and to the nature of the social order in which he will participate. Second, a controlled environment must be created wherein the pupil, by means of planned activities and experiences may attain the various objectives in optimum sequence. Third, the pupil’s activities and experiences must be intelligently supervised and directed. Fourth, valid and reliable methods must be employed to determine when each objective has been attained. Fifth, each objective must be so attained that the pupil is challenged to move toward new objectives which have appeared, by no means accidentally, beyond the new horizon. As a part of a general movement toward the more efficient and valid direction of learning, the fundamental changes which have occurred during the past quarter of a century in the philosophy, the psychology, and the principles of education have been followed or paralleled by radical changes in classroom procedure. In the secondary school the most thoro-going change has been introduced under the name of one or another of ten plans, methods or technics which in the aggregate may be designated as “plans characterized by the unit assignment.” These plans are known in educational literature as (1) the project method, (2) the problem method, (3) differentiated assignments, (4) long-unit assignments, (5) the contract plan, (6) the laboratory plan, (7) individualized instruction, (8) the Morrison plan or some modification, (9) the Winnetka technic or some modification, and (10) the Dalton plan or some modification. Studies conducted in connection with the National Survey of Secondary Education have revealed that in the actual practises of outstanding secondary schools these procedures differ in name only. A central feature of each plan is the direction of learning by means of some form of the unit assignment, with resultant modifications of classroom procedure. 512 National Education Association In the use of plans characterized by the unit assignment much confusion can be avoided if a clear distinction is maintained between the “unit” and the “unit assignment.” Studies made in connection with the survey indicate that the “unit” is best defined as a concept, attitude, appreciation, knowledge, or skill to be acquired by the pupil, which if acquired will presumably modify his thinking or his other behavior in a desirable way. Thus defined, the units of a course are the objectives of the course. On the other hand, the “unit assignment” should be regarded as consisting of those required ac¬ tivities and experiences which have been planned by the teacher to enable the pupil to master the unit. In outstanding schools in which one or another of the various plans characterized by the unit assignment is used, a well-defined teaching and learning cycle has evolved. This cycle is typically divided into four phases: (1) the introduction, (2) the individual-work (or laboratory) period, (3) the period of class discussion, and (4) the testing period. Detailed discus¬ sion of the purposes of each of these phases and of the methods used in each is impossible in this brief abstract. However, it should be said that the re¬ sulting classroom procedure bears little if any resemblance to the traditional “recitation.” The possibilities of successful direction of learning by means of the unit assignment and by means of the accompanying changes in classroom pro¬ cedure far transcend anything so far accomplished, largely because the units and unit assignments now in use in the best secondary schools are purely the results of empirical and often hasty analyses of existing subjectmatter. Only rarely do the units and unit assignments in use rest on even meager research into pupils’ normal activities, psychological stages of growth, present needs, immediate interests, or probable adult needs. Such strikingly important matters as the determination of the optimum sequence of units, the correlation of assignments, the differentiation of units and assignments for pupils of different interests, abilities, needs, and aims, for the most part are arrived at unsystematically by workers laboring under the pressure of teaching and administrative burdens which preclude the use of the methods of scientific research even if the workers were trained in the use of such procedures. The improvement of practise could be immeasurably accelerated if, in conjunction with the present widespread, empirical attack on the problem of directed learning, a constant research program were kept continuously under way directed by the ablest research workers available. Much of the research work would produce materials of nationwide usefulness, certainly needing only minor modifications for local situations. Classroom teachers and supervisors would be constantly supplied with the products of research and would give such materials the acid test of classroom use. The research program would be constantly oriented by criticisms emanating directly from the classroom. The problem of correlating an extensive research program with the present widespread empirical attempts to improve units and unit assign- Department of Secondary School Principals 513 ments now in use, is one which should receive the attention of state and national organizations interested in secondary education. The vast amount of effort now being expended to improve the direction of learning should be coordinated and a greater certainty of continuous improvement should be assured. THE RELATIONSHIP OF REGIONAL ACCREDITING AGENCIES TO SECONDARY EDUCATION DURING THIS CRISIS J. B. EDMONSON, DEAN, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR, MICH. It has been proposed that the regional agencies should suspend their standards during this period. I have no sympathy with any such proposal unless it is agreed that the standards have possessed no great degree of validity during the past decade. If the regional associations were to declare a moratorium, the secondary schools in many communities would be at the mercy of persons who have no interest in providing an adequate program of secondary-school instruction. In such a period as this the standardizing agencies can be of great help to secondary schools by being lenient in de¬ serving cases and by being severe in treating bogus claims. The regional associations should be lenient in the application of stand- aids for accrediting in those cases where the school authorities and the communities are making an honest and determined effort to meet the re¬ quirements. There are scores of cases where schools deserve a marked degree of leniency. In all probability there are some cases where alibis and flimsy excuses, are offered for failure to meet reasonable requirements ; even in periods of prosperity such evasions and excuses were offered by some school authorities and some communities. The regional agencies should become more aggressive in attacking the problem of effective articulation between the colleges and the secondary schools. Too long the secondary schools and the colleges have been friendly enemies. The time has come when there are so many common enemies of both secondary and higher education that we must eliminate any unnecessary feuds within the profession. Possibly we need to cease talking about coopera¬ tion between colleges and secondary schools and devote our attention to a discussion of a vigorous defense of education by united forces. The regional associations should attempt to develop a better agreement as to the real philosophy of American secondary education and then make a determined effort to have this philosophy understood by teachers and laymen. Unless we can reach a better agreement on the scope and objectives of secondary education, we shall find it extremely difficult to evaluate present programs and to make plans for the future. 514 National Education Association THE RELATIONSHIP OF STATE DEPARTMENTS OF EDUCATION TO SECONDARY EDUCATION DURING THIS CRISIS WILLIAM H. BRISTOW, DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT, STATE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, HARRISBURG, PA. Because of social and economic uncertainty it becomes increasingly im¬ portant that the state, representing society’s administrative agency, deter¬ mine the direction in which education should be going. This should not mean a stereotyped, predetermined program which will condition boys and girls to set ways of action. It does mean, however, that educational objectives should be clarified and that out of our present seeming confusion should come some agreement as to what schools are for. The Youth Movement in America is in the American high school, now enrolling over 50 percent of those eligible to attend. Courses of study offered to this vast army of young citizens must be organized around social, economic, political, and industrial problems of real interest. Indi¬ vidual needs must also be considered if we hope to conserve for democracy and the future this vast reservoir of potential strength, if we wish to de¬ velop an American personality able and willing to face squarely problems of personal, state and national concern. The present emergency threatens to disorganize and devitalize second¬ ary education programs in many respects. State departments of education should act as a steadying influence in helping local districts to stabilize educational programs and prevent wholesale reorganization without thought to the consequences which such reorganization will have upon the equity which presentday youth have in the future — an equity which can be safeguarded only by guaranteeing to them these present educational opportunities. THE RELATIONSHIP OF COLLEGE ENTRANCE BOARDS TO SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN THIS CRISIS MAURICE J. LACY, HEADMASTER, JAMAICA PLAIN HIGH SCHOOL, BOSTON, MASS. I join Dean Edmonson in his belief, that in the present crisis, in view of the wave of criticism of American education that is sweeping thru the country, it is incumbent upon every element in our educational system to have a self-examination to ascertain what features of our educational system have met the test of time and what require adjustments. Dean Edmonson’s second recommendation is that regional agencies become more aggressive in attacking the problem of effective articulation between colleges and secondary schools. The fact which he stated that, instead of accepting pupils merely on the basis of their ability to pass examinations, many colleges are making use of high scholarship tests, Department of Secondary School Principals 515 measures of ability, and records made in high schools in a variety of fields of work, is a hopeful sign. Progress is being made along that line and the charge that colleges are indissolubly wedded to the “entrance by examina¬ tion polic)^ is rapidly being disproved. Further articulation between colleges and secondary schools, as a result of joint study by both groups, will heal up the sore spot in their relations. Dean Edmonson’s third recommendation “that the problem of the cur¬ riculum of the secondary school should be re-attacked in the light of the social and economic development of the last few years” is, I believe, the most important of his five recommendations. ^Training in economics in its various phases, I believe, is the most clamoring need of the secondary- school curriculum. By economics, I include every branch that treats of proper saving or wise spending of the money we earn. If colleges would give an impetus to instruction along this line, if they would give as much credit to such causes as they do to the conventional language and mathe¬ matics courses, the secondary schools would be given an inspiration that would aid them to develop these thrift courses for all their pupils. Again, I believe that greater training in citizenship must be given in our secondary schools, if our country is to prosper. In general, our pupils, other than those enrolled in the college course, receive an elementary training in civics. As a rule, such a course generally not accredited by col¬ leges, is omitted from the college curriculum. Intensive and realistic train- ing in government should be a feature of all secondary-school courses to the end that a higher type of citizenship will prevail thruout the land. I would also recommend an elementary course in law for every secondary- school pupil. The woeful results occasioned frequently by the abyssmal ignorance of our citizens in the matter of civil law is an indictment of our educational system. Between a year of mathematics or a foreign lan¬ guage and a year of instruction in law, I recommend the latter. Indications point to the fact that in the future the working hours of our citizens will be lessened and the time for leisure will be correspondingly increased. How are we training future citizens for the use of this leisure? What are we doing in cultivating an appreciation of the fine arts? For example, music, perhaps, of all the fine arts, has the most general appeal among all people. What are secondary schools and colleges doing to foster an appreciation of music? If colleges would credit a course along this line, again great impetus would be given to the work. There are a few instances of changes in curriculum that could be made. Of course, some of the conventional college preparatory course would have to be removed, but are not the substitutes in thrift training, in law, in citizenship, in music appreciation, worthy of serious consideration? In this crisis, as never before, comes the opportunity to make adjustments in cur¬ riculum. This is the chief duty just now of both colleges and secondary schools. 516 National Education Association The fourth recommendation is “that regional associations should be lenient in the application of standards for accrediting in these cases where the school authorities and the communities are making an honest and de¬ termined effort to meet requirements.” Let me cite the custom of Harvard which admits without examinations any member of the upper seventh of a class in a school of the above category. The test of such a system depends upon the ability of such pupils to maintain the required standing in the college. In general, I believe that colleges are considerate in this respect. In return, secondary schools enjoying this privilege must prove worthy of the trust placed in them by the colleges. The fifth, and final, recommendation “that regional associations should encourage a greater amount of experimentation in our secondary schools” 1 heartily endorse. It is only by such experimentation that educational progress can be obtained. When colleges encourage such experimentation and accredit this work, secondary schools will feel free to experiment with their college prepara¬ tory pupils. The fear that such experimentation conflicts with the pre¬ scribed college preparatory curriculum makes secondary schools timid about engaging in this desirable experimentation. Might it not be well, if the impending adjustments in our system of secondary education are to come, to have these adjustments made by coun¬ cils of secondary school and college administrators with the assistance and advice of leaders in thought outside our ranks? They are the ones who actually have tested in various walks of life the value of the education the schoolmen have given them. I leave this idea as a final suggestion for consideration. The application of this idea, iconoclastic tho it be, may aid educators in their efforts to improve our system of secondary education. IMPROVEMENT AND ECONOMY IN THE HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUM JESSE H. NEWLON, DIRECTOR, LINCOLN SCHOOL, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. The depression and its attendant hysteria are forcing decreased expendi¬ tures, but let us not deceive ourselves into believing that these cuts are in any justifiable sense economies. The educational program should be re¬ tained intact. Capital expenditures can be postponed ; staffs can be reduced by not filling vacancies. Salaries should be decreased as little as possible. Teachers should give evidence of their willingness to share the public burdens, but we should also show that we have some intelligence and realistic appreciation of the facts of the situation. It is essential that the educative process should be carried on in the most effective manner with the least possible dawdling and waste. Some have contended that the period of secondary education should be shortened. Is such a proposal wise or possible ? This question cannot be answered merely Department of Secondary School Principals 517 in terms of experimentation within the existing school organization, for that leaves out of consideration powerful social and economic factors. It can be answered adequately only in terms of national aspirations and resources. Just now we are in the paradoxical position of being poor because we can easily produce great wealth. Obviously the situation demands the application of intelligence. It means that the period of youth will be lengthened and that universal education must be provided up to eighteen or twenty, or possibly twenty-two years of age, and that such work as youth may do will be increasingly for educational and less for productive purposes. Given our modern technology, have we still the natural resources requisite to such an educational program? Our resources and technology will not only support universal education thru high school but will compel it. Where, then, is the waste in the high school ? Is the high school deficient in that it does not employ good methods of teaching? Is it inefficient in that the students do not learn well the subjectmatter set out to be learned ? Is the high school providing for American youth today the education that con¬ temporary American life demands? The great demand of our time is for a social intelligence and leadership capable of finding solutions for the problems of today, and it is here that we find the challenge to the American high school. The high school will render its best service if it gives the individual an understanding of the culture in which he lives, of the social, economic, and political problems which flow from the onward rush of the industrial revolu¬ tion. Does the high school provide such education? It is at this point that we find the waste in the American high school. The present situation calls for nothing less than a redirection of our whole secondary-school curriculum. By what process shall we go about this redirection ? First of all, a thoro-going analysis of our American culture in all its major aspects is required — a study of the status of esthetics, of the family and other institutions, of the role of science and technology, of the economic and industrial system, of government, of international relation¬ ships, social and moral problems, of education itself. This is a practical measure that can be undertaken by any high-school faculty. There is no reason to suppose that America cannot support an adequate program of secondary education. The logic of our resources and technology will inevitably bring universal education in American to age eighteen or twenty. To utilize our resources for the benefit of all requires minds equipped with the social concepts and outlook of today and tomorrow. Secondary education must be reconstructed in the light of these principles. If the Department of Secondary School Principals will think in large terms and courageously, it will exercise great influence in the period of reconstruction upon which we are entering. But we must go beyond the walls of the school to find the answers to many of our educational problems. 518 National Education Association ADAPTING THE JUNIOR HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUM TO THE NEEDS OF THE PUPILS HARL R. DOUGLASS, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. The high-school curriculum should be formulated with the purpose of contributing to the welfare of the nation. In the past the central theme has been the individual interest of the pupil. The maintenance of secondary schools by taxes paid by all of the people cannot be justified, if education is to be regarded merely as a means of aiding some individuals to get ahead of others or to possess some intellectual or cultural adornment which others do not possess. The advocates of the public high school who persuaded the public to take over the support of secondary education were not interested ultimately in the individual pupil who would go to them. They were concerned with the increased welfare of the nation which they believed would result from providing for secondary education. They believed that free secondary educa¬ tion would operate to insure honest democratic government, to reduce crime, and to promote general economic prosperity. High-school enrolments have doubled every decade since 1880. Yet in 1933 we now witness the tragedy of thousands of lawbreakers being paroled to prey upon the people because the workhouses and penitentiaries are crowded ; municipal and, to a lesser extent, state and national government, reek with legal and illegal bad faith and dishonesty; a quarter of our popu¬ lation are dependent upon charity; the machine and the money-lender are detaching men from their jobs and farmers from their land in such numbers that we are on the verge of a return to feudalism. All this in spite of a national surplus of labor, food, raw materials, machines, and transportation. The high-school curriculum and the high-school teachers must be faced in the direction of making the contribution to the solution of these problems which the nation has every right to expect. This contribution can be made only when young men and women leave the high school with sound ideals of civic righteousness and of social justice, and with a greater knowledge of government, economics, and current affairs than the average college graduate now has. This will not only mean a revision of the high-school curriculum but a new type of training of high-school teachers. THE TEACHING AND LEARNING SITUATION IN JUNIOR HIGH-SCHOOL CLASSROOMS H. H. RYAN, PRINCIPAL, WISCONSIN HIGH SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, WIS. The need for economy in school finance compels the junior high school to give careful consideration to relative values. Some of the activities of the school day must be eliminated to save expense. The question is, what activities? Department of Secondary School Principals 519 Many thoughtful parents show an unmistakable interest in the type of school activity which we call extracurriculum. Some of the things that parents say and do in this connection suggest a decidedly greater importance and value for these activities than for the items which appear in the program of studies. Perhaps these parental attitudes should be credited more than we have credited them, as criteria of the worth of various school activities. The demand of the socalled taxpayers’ alliances in various parts of the country that the frills” be eliminated from the school program should lead parents and teachers to reflect that there are subjects in the secondary- school curriculum which are there because they have always been there, because it is eminently respectable to offer them, in spite of the fact that only the scantiest intellectual or social profits can be traced to them. If “frills” are things that are ornamental rather than useful, such subjects as Latin and algebra will have to fight to survive the housecleaning. The actual frills are not at all what the apostles of minimum school expendi¬ tures have in mind when they inveigh against “frills.” The social problems of this country and of the world in general are so tremendous as to demand first place in the thoughts of secondary-school pupils. Critical economic and sociological facts must be so thoroly taught to adolescents that junior high-school graduates will never be content with anything less than a real and constructive solution of these problems. Even if solutions were now ready, they could not be introduced into the political order without a persistent demand for better things, from a people united in the conviction that a crime ridden society of technological paupers is utterly unnecessary. PUBLIC RELATIONS OF THE JUNIOR COLLEGE G. H. VANDE BOGART, PRESIDENT, NORTHERN MONTANA COLLEGE, HAVRE, MONT. The junior college, new as it is, has proved during the past three decades of its existence the fact that it is doing, and is prepared to do with still greater effectiveness, a most essential work in American education. Vitally impor¬ tant as is the junior college, it is most essential that the public know of its distinctive place in education, of the service that it is giving, and that it bids fair to extend in greater measure as it assumes a larger range of functions and as its potentialities become realizations. It is obvious that no institution may progress far beyond the understanding of the community which it serves. It is equally obvious that the able and far-sighted administrator will recognize the problem of public relations as one of the major divisions of his work. The subject of public relations of the junior college will be presented by considering three practical questions, each of which occurs to us immediately when we consider this phase of administrative responsibilities. These ques¬ tions may be stated as follows : 1. What materials are to be supplied in the field of educational information? 2. Thru what media may the various organizations, groups, and individuals of the community be reached? 520 National Education Association 3. What further developments may be effectively attained in the public relations of our junior colleges? Much research of value has been completed in the field of public-school publicity. Attention has been given for many years, also, to the scientific study of public relations of higher institutions. In the case of the junior college, much of our earlier study of publicity must be re-evaluated in terms of ad¬ justment of these important institutions to the economic conditions of the present day as they are reflected in our schools. The very newness of the junior college has given it flexibility of program and of policies, and has made it especially alert to opportunities for service to its community and for adjustment and reorganization as these have become necessary at the present time. A new fund of information must be collected, organized, and placed consistently, continuously, and completely, before the public. Well- prepared publicity is an asset not only to the local institution but to the junior college movement as a whole. THE NORTH CAROLINA PROGRAM OF STATE SUPPORT AS AFFECTING HIGH SCHOOLS ELMER H. GARINGER, PRINCIPAL, CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL, CHARLOTTE, N. C. North Carolina has equalized educational opportunity to the extent of a six months’ term. The state in 1931 took over the complete support and op¬ eration of all public schools for six months. Money is collected from property and income where it is, but is distributed evenly where the educational needs are. In the past the current expense for the rural child was 46 percent of that of the largest cities. Six times as much effort to support a given educational program was necessary in some counties as in others. The new legislation provides equal opportunity at greatly reduced costs in most counties where levies on property for current operation of schools are reduced on an average of 61 percent. Many districts have better schools and longer terms. Unless pooling of funds had taken place a great number of schools would not have kept open. Dissatisfaction with the plan of state control comes from the cities and counties that find the State Board of Equalization committed to the prin¬ ciple of limiting all budgets. Education is demoted, not promoted in these places. Is this limitation the sign of a “new frontier the supplanting of local autonomy for state bureaucracy? Should cities that want and can pay for better schools than the state minimum provides not be allowed to have them? Few object to the principle of state support. Does it follow that state con¬ trol is necessary or wise ? Will it not mean a deadening uniformity of work and a stultifying of effort? Many North Carolina schoolmen feel that such is the case after their experience of two years. State support is a notable achievement. It has given life and hope to im¬ poverished rural communities. Under a state board of education set up not for Department of Secondary School Principals 521 reduction of taxes primarily, but to give the most effective education to the youth of the state, the plan of state control might operate differently. ANALYZING OBJECTIVES IN MUSIC EDUCATION RUSSELL V. MORGAN, DIRECTOR OF MUSIC, CLEVELAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MUSIC, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, WESTERN RE¬ SERVE UNIVERSITY, CLEVELAND, OHIO The prime objective in music education is the development of emotional power to be expressed thru skills and controlled by musical intelligence, pro¬ vided with proper life relationship and by understanding of its vital place in the everyday life of man thruout all ages. Differentiation in opportunity should provide not only different avenues for development of musical ability but should also quite definitely provide different levels and amounts of training for the varying talent levels of the student body. It is necessary to realize the four pathways to musical reaction, namely : (1) physical; (2) sensuous; (3) intellectual; (4) emotional. Each of these pathways must be utilized and the value of our training depends upon the balance we secure among these four approaches. The specific objectives in the study of music might well be expressed as follows : ( 1 ) emotional expression ; (2) satisfaction in skills; (3) development of musical intelligence ; (4) crea¬ tive power; (5) a background of musical history and vocal and instrumental literature; (6) aesthetic appreciation ; (7) social relationships. If the proper balance is secured in the procedures aimed at these objectives, music education will not be a dry technical study lacking inspiration, nor will it be an emotional “spilling over” without controls. It should result in an in¬ telligent performance or hearing of music that has back of it the throbbing power of emotion which gives it vitality. ANALYZING ART OBJECTIVES IN THE HIGH SCHOOL INDIANOLA WILLCUTS, SUPERVISOR OF ART EDUCATION, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, DULUTH, MINN. The art program for secondary schools has changed. Freehand drawing no longer appears on the curriculum. Art appreciation has taken its place. New courses of study are being made on art appreciation thruout the United States, but of those on the market at present, perhaps that by Forrest Grant for the secondary schools of New York City is the most outstanding. An analysis of this course will be the best analysis of art objectives in the high schools. The printed course called “Art Appreciation” is an art product in itself and worthy to be displayed on the table of any art room. Mr. Grant says that the purpose of the course “is to reveal to the pupil the beauty of nature and the arts so that he may recognize and enjoy the world 522 National Education Association of beautiful things about him and gain an appreciation of the finest, which will reflect beauty in his life and in his living.” He gives as his aims the following: (1) To engender love of beauty by bringing pupils into personal contact with beautiful things — a Lalique bowl, a tapestry from Perugia, a delightful flower ar¬ rangement. (2) To develop good taste by helping the pupil to cultivate the habit of thought¬ ful consideration before making decisions — For which room is this picture best suited? This room is on the north side of the house. Shall the overdrapes be in warm or cool colors? (3) To enrich life and train for leisure by acquainting the pupil with the finest expressions of the past — thru pictures, museums, and books. (4) To gratify a desire to create by affording the pupil an opportunity to exercise his imagination thru creative design — by blockprinting a wall hanging or making a beautiful box, etc. (5) To encourage talent by discovering the gifted pupil — by permitting classes to use various mediums in different problems, he may discover the one medium in which he can work most efficiently. Because of this present emphasis on “creating” there have come about two kinds of creative problems — those which are the products of children who have been taught a technic and products by those who have been allowed just to “create.” Concerning this “creating,” William H. Kilpatrick, professor of education, Teachers College, states the following tasks for art teachers: First of all, develop or aid or build or encourage the power and disposition to create. Second, teach an appropriate technic. Third, build or develop art appreciation. The kind of creating for which Dr. Kilpatrick stands is the kind for which we must all stand if products are to be worthy of the name of “art” products. Finally, “Let us agree,” says Mr. Wiseltier, “that it is not our main pur¬ pose to produce artists. We are teaching art appreciation that will function in everyday life.” INDUSTRIAL ARTS OBJECTIVES AND THEIR ATTAINMENT HOMER J. SMITH, PROFESSOR OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. Proposed objectives of industrial arts are: (1) to develop skill in the use of common tools; (2) to afford industrial Information and social intelligence; (3) to foster appreciation of good ma¬ terials and workmanship; (4) to further intelligent choices of life occupa¬ tions; (5) to inculcate worthy personal traits and attitudes; and (6) to provide a measure of specific occupational training. We must stress our courses as worthy parts of the fundamental training of all boys. We must show that our subjects and methods make a contribution Department of Secondary School Principals 523 that is unique and that should be denied to none. And, this privilege should be extended to the boys in private and parochial schools. If industrial arts is really a function of full development, we stand rebuked until every American boy has these advantages regardless of his school connections. Our slogan may well be: Industrial arts for every American boy, and trade or technical train¬ ing for carefully selected boys in the number that can be placed. Everyone should have some knowledge of the purposes, the working con¬ ditions, and the employment possibilities of our industrial society. One’s edu¬ cation is not complete in these days without some understanding of the history and trends of manufacture and exchange. So many people are either directly concerned or so clearly affected that industrial information and insights have become a necessity. The elementary six-grade school can encourage self-expression of manual type and insure acquaintance with the rudiments of work life and work rela¬ tionships. It will suffice if elementary children learn that industry is impor¬ tant, that it is greatly diversified, that men work so that they and others may live, and that sooner or later each child of today must play his part in the labor that is life. The industrial work of the junior high school is best conceived as informa¬ tional and exploratory. The chief aims at this level are physical coordination, industrial intelligence, and a start in the direction of occupational choice. To attempt to match the community type and need at this level is to deny the major purposes of the junior high school. There must be increased provision for vocational courses in the offering of the senior high school. The industrial arts work in this unit should tend to the highly practical under an elective system. One of the chief needs just now is to make the high schools so democratic and so attractive that young people will be kept longer out of competition with their elders who need the work so much. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN JUNIOR-COLLEGE ADMINISTRATION W. W. CARPENTER, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI, COLUMBIA, MO. Junior colleges come and go but the total number and the total enrolment are rapidly increasing. The percentage of change in the administrative head of the junior college lowered from 15 percent in 1932 to 12 percent in 1933. I his would indicate growing stability in the face of the depression. A com¬ parison of the directories of 1932 and 1933 also indicated that the two-year organization is growing in popularity. There seems to be a rather unusual movement, probably as a result of the depression, to advocate reducing teachers colleges to junior colleges. The staff appointed to survey the higher-education program of the state of North Caro¬ lina recommended that two teacher-training institutions be reduced to junior colleges. The staff appointed to make a study of the government of the state 524 National Education Association of Texas recommended that four teachers colleges be made junior colleges and become branches of the University of Texas. The report of the survey of higher education in California sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching makes the fol¬ lowing recommendations: . . that the junior college should be recognized as the completion unit of free, tax-supported, public education; that graduation from it should be marked by the title of “Associate in Arts” ; that the curriculum should be broadened espe¬ cially along the lines of “social intelligence” and adult education; that increased emphasis should be placed upon better counseling and guidance; that education of freshman and sophomore grades, whether given in junior colleges, in teachers col¬ leges, or in the university, should be upon the same basis, as far as possible, espe¬ cially as regards preparation of instructors and financial support; and that under present conditions the development of four-year, independent, regional colleges from junior colleges should not be permitted. Kansas City, Missouri, under the auspices of the North Central Associa¬ tion of Schools and Colleges is carrying on an experiment to determine if the time usually devoted to the work of the high school and junior college can be shortened by one year. The first class under the new plan will graduate in 1933. The Universities of Missouri and Kansas have agreed to cooperate with the experiment by admitting the graduates of the new plan with junior standing. The problems of the high-school postgraduates are closely related to the problems of the junior college. The number of postgraduates in our high schools has been increasing over a series of years. It has been estimated that the army of unemployed graduates knocking at the high-school door numbers 100,000. The presence of large numbers of such students offers a real chal¬ lenge to our school systems. Can work be organized for them that will not only keep them off the streets and employed but also that will better equip them for service? The problems confronting those dealing with the high- school postgraduate are largely those being successfully handled by our junior colleges. The junior college may be called upon to make many an in¬ vestigation and many a contribution to school reorganization and adjustment during the period of this crisis. A STUDY OF HIGH-SCHOOL PUPIL POPULATION IN AID OF THE REVISION OF THE CURRICULUM L. W. SMITH, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, BERKELEY, CALIF. The staff of the Berkeley public schools, like those in many other cities, is in the process of continuous revision of its curriculum. Many problems arise in connection with such a project which it is difficult to follow because of the lack of dependable information. During the last few years it has been the practise to carry on researches of various kinds from a practical point of view to provide as much of this needed data as possible. Department of Secondary School Principals 525 The high-school courses are based upon what are supposed to be the courses given in the elementary schools and the junior high schools of the city. In how far is it possible to depend upon the principle that the foundation work is laid by the curriculum as taught in the Berkeley public schools? A question¬ naire was prepared and filled out by every pupil in the Berkeley high school on October 4, 1932. There were approximately 2700 pupils in the senior high school. One of the purposes of the questionnaire was to find out how many of the students now enrolled had gone thru the Berkeley system. Another question we wished to answer was how many students had had an opportunity to take the exploratory courses given in the junior high schools. Summarizing the results, 34 percent of the students now enrolled in Berkeley high school attended Berkeley schools continuously from first grade to date. Some students attended in Berkeley for a time, dropped out, and re¬ turned later. Percents attending each grade in Berkeley schools from first to ninth ranged from 42 percent attending the first grade in Berkeley to 80 per¬ cent attending the ninth. Eighty-two percent of all students enrolled attended a junior high school in grades seven and eight. How much work of an ex¬ ploratory nature was offered by those junior high schools outside of Berkeley we have no means of knowing. Nine percent attended an eight-grade gram¬ mar school. Material on hand as a result of this research shows clearly that the high- school courses cannot be completely set up on the assumption that certain types of work have been done in the curriculum in the lower grades and in the junior high school. In this connection the data herein developed indicate that the pupils going thru the junior high schools must, as far as it is at all practicable, be exposed to the exploratory courses and these courses must be conducted in such a way as to establish clearly in the minds of the pupils the character and significance of the trial courses which they are taking. It is further made clear that the counselling department should see to it that all of the pupils shall have had at least the minimum number of trial courses provided for. Another important conclusion is that the general and trial courses already established in the high school must be fully utilized for the benefit of those pupils who for one reason or another did not have opportunity of taking these courses on the junior high-school level. THE SECONDARY-SCHOOL IMPLICATIONS OF CERTAIN INDUSTRIAL STUDIES IN EMPLOYMENT RESEARCH VERNE C. FRYKLUND, INSTRUCTOR, INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. A wide variety of tests administered to groups of factory workers prove that classification of workers according to abilities, duties performed, and training time required for proficiency is possible. 526 National Education Association A classification consisting of five classes — A, B, C, D, and E — was made at the Employment Stabilization Research Institute, University of Minnesota. There are 2.8 percent class A workers, 7.8 percent class B workers, 33.7 per¬ cent class C workers, 44.5 percent class D workers, and 11.1 percent class E workers found in industry. They are listed in order of the abilities they pos¬ sess. Class A is the highest type of worker and Class E is the lowest, or the common laborer. Tests sucessfully differentiated these workers according to classes. Factory workers are eighth graders and practically no mathematics is re¬ quired of them. Only .3 percent of a total of 4040 factory workers of all kinds needed to make calculations of any sort and these calculations involve only the simplest arithmetic. It would be well for the administrator, who knows that a particular boy is destined to leave school for factory work, to permit him to spend considerable time in the shops and give less time to formal subjects. Let him become ver¬ satile in the use of machines and in performing operations on them. Let the shop teacher teach him what little arithmetic he needs. Even the development of ordinary reading ability, for those boys who must leave school early, could be left to the shop teacher thru his utilization of written instruction sheets. Only classes in civics and hygiene need be taught formally for these boys who must leave school early for factory work. COOPERATIVE STUDIES IN SECONDARY EDUCATION IN NEW YORK STATE GEORGE M. WILEY, ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, ALBANY, N. Y. The major interest in progressive secondary education in New York state during the past four years has been centered in the cooperative studies which have been carried on by groups of principals representing every section of the state and also every type of school. Furthermore, the significant feature of this activity is found in the word “cooperative.” Many principals were en¬ gaged in these studies and in attacking these problems. The large number of men and women in administrative work in secondary education who made up the membership of these groups insured a breadth of vision and a common denominator of thinking without which no progressive program in any level of education can be developed. As illustrative of the cooperative character of these studies even in these early stages it may be noted that the superintendents, principals, and high- school teachers were kept in close touch with the work that was being carried forward. The first tentative draft of functions or “theses” as they were called, was sent out to thousands of teachers inviting their comment and urging a full expression of their point of view. These reactions from the teaching staff were analyzed and used in the two later revisions. Department of Secondary School Principals 527 The fact that each teacher was invited to express his or her own thought in detail regarding these proposals had a profound influence on the thinking of the entire teaching staff. In other words, a new philosophy was beginning to modify the practises in secondary education long before any formal report appeared. Another phase of the initial work was of no less significance, the cooperation invited from pupil groups. The second step brought us face to face with specific problems dealing with the readjustments needed in secondary schools. As an aid toward insuring reasonably adequate factual data regarding the nature of the adolescent groups in junior and senior high schools several research studies were carried on by the research division of the state department in addition to those already mentioned. It will be appreciated that we were confronted with many more issues than could be given prompt consideration. After careful consideration the follow¬ ing problems were selected for study, each assigned to a separate subcom¬ mittee. 1. The reorganization of the social studies to meet the needs of adolescents in a modern social democracy 2. The function of directed study as a classroom technic in the redirection of secondary education 3. The problem of constants in the curriculum 4. The place of guidance as an aid in the realization of the purposes of the secondary school 5. What types of secondary schools should be organized and what reorganization of present high schools are advisable to serve more adequately the adolescent population ? An immediate result of these cooperative studies, and one of far-reaching significance, is the fact that the large majority of secondary teachers of the state are now thinking purposefully regarding the philosophy underlying secondary education. Another immediate outcome is the coordinating effort of research workers, school administrators, and classroom teachers. Possibly the most immediate outcome is a changed point of view. The thinking of the teacher has been thoroly aroused. Even some principals have been awakened to the fact that secondary education has deep social significance. As a result, purposeful and constructive experimentation is being carried on in scores of schools and centers thruout the state. All such studies and experimentation should be continuing as well as co¬ operative. We have no thought that the five problems which have been men¬ tioned will be in any sense finally settled when the several reports appear in printed form. The challenge is in the problem rather than in its final solution. The school system which assumes that it has solved all curriculum problems is ready for burial. The constantly changing complexity of the social, indus¬ trial, and economic order in which we live compels the school to use every resource at its command in readjusting its work to meet these rapidly chang¬ ing conditions. Only as such problems are recognized as continuing in character will reasonably satisfactory outcomes be attained. 528 National Education Association SECONDARY EDUCATION IN THE NEW DEAL H. L. DONOVAN, PRESIDENT, EASTERN KENTUCKY STATE TEACHERS COLLEGE, RICHMOND, KY. What will be the attitude of the spokesmen of the new deal toward edu¬ cation? This is a question of no small consequence. The answer to this ques¬ tion will have an important bearing on the final outcome of this issue. It is a well-known fact that the opponents of the new deal are enlisted behind a movement to curtail the educational opportunities of the children of this country. Special privilege, everywhere entrenched, would like to liquidate intelligence. Many agencies are devoting their utmost energies to block the spread of education. They have decreed a moratorium on secondary and higher education. Will they succeed? It is our opinion that the ultimate destiny of the new deal hangs on the answer to this question. It cannot be said for America today that we have yet provided universal secondary education. In the new deal will we permit the accident of one’s place of birth or the chance of one’s abode to determine his opportunities for intellectual development? We expect the new deal to take cognizance of the forgotten children of our country as well as the forgotten men. We confi¬ dently expect to see the high-school enrolment continue to increase until at least 80 or 90 percent of all the children of secondary-school age will be in attendance. If the 2,000,000 children of high-school age could be sent back to school this fall, thus releasing their jobs to adults, what effect would this have upon unemployment? Have the spokesmen for the new deal considered the possi¬ bilities for at least a partial solution of the problem of unemployment that may lie in this direction? Would it not be wise to spend a few millions of these billions of dollars in the erection of public high schools? Without de¬ preciating the value of a road or bridge, is not the school of equal value to a civilization? If some of these billions can be used to erect secondary schools, the unem¬ ployed can be set to work building structures that will prove a benediction to our present and future generations. If the educators of America could ring the school bell next September and summon back to school the 2,000,000 youth now employed, national recovery would be advanced more than by any proposal so far advocated. Let us examine another side of this picture. A study of the 1930 census shows that there are approximately 11,500,000 children in our nation in the age group 14-17 years inclusive. If 5,387,000 are in school and 2,000,000 gainfully employed, this would account for 7,387,000. But there are 11,- 500,000. Where are the other 4,113,000? Are they listed in this vast army of twelve to fourteen millions of unemployed or are they the forgotten chil¬ dren of America and not counted anywhere? I have not the data with which to answer the question, but if they are registered as a part of the unemployed this problem may be solved by education. Where are these four million chil¬ dren of high-school age who are neither employed nor attending school? Department of Secondary School Principals 529 What are they doing? Is there any association between their idleness and the widespread crime wave of our country? Society should have long ago recog¬ nized that youth will be served. We have the choice between spending more money for education or more money for courts, jails, and penitentiaries, for, again I repeat, youth will be served. I cannot conceive a new deal for man¬ kind without a corresponding new deal for the children of our nation. One of the major problems of secondary education in the new deal is the instruction of youth in the constructive use of their leisure. If secondary edu¬ cation is to achieve results in this direction, it will necessarily give new em¬ phasis to what the conservative, reactionary, and stupid people term fads and frills in education. Whenever this opprobrium is applied to that work of the schools designed to prepare children for the leisure they will assuredly have in the new deal, you may be sure it has been used by unthinking individuals who have not analyzed the problem or by selfish persons who are attempting to escape taxes. If the citizen is to achieve the high purposes for which the new deal stands he will have to become both a more intelligent and a more active participant in the social order. The secondary school of the future will, therefore, be com¬ pelled to give increasing emphasis to government, politics, economics, soci¬ ology, and industry. These subjects will necessarily have to be interpreted to the adolescent student in terms he can comprehend. A zeal comparable to his enthusiasm for athletics and sports should be engendered. Contemporary civilization should be analyzed ; the good idealized ; the bad anathematized. Adolescence is a period of life when ideals can be most effectively planted in the minds of children. Advantage should be taken of this period to sow the seed of good government and give the youth a vision of the possibilities of a better social order. As the schools of America have been of inestimable value in helping the nation to meet calmly and with fortitude the critical period thru which we have been passing, likewise the schools of tomorrow — more especially the secondary schools — will be the most potent of all social forces in bringing into existence the new deal with its potentialities for the social redemption of our people. The old order has been well served by the American public- school system ; its contribution to the new deal will be of even greater significance. MAINTAINING HIGH-SCHOOL STANDARDS UNDER PRESENT CONDITIONS C. E. HINSHAW, PRINCIPAL, KOKOMO HIGH SCHOOL, KOKOMO, IND. The economy wave which is sweeping the country is making it extremely difficult for the schools to function efficiently. Already, the agitation carried on by certain groups in the interest of econ¬ omy is having its effect, (a) Building construction has been practically sus¬ pended. As a consequence, thousands of pupils are attending school on a part- time basis, while other thousands are insufficiently housed, (b) Approxi¬ mately, 100 city school systems have been forced to reduce their terms by 530 National Education Association twenty or more days, (c) The teacher load has been greatly increased, thereby giving the individual pupil less personal attention from the teacher. This is due to an unusually large increase in the enrolment in high schools without a corresponding increase in the teaching force, (d) Teachers’ salaries, always low, have been reduced to a point where the first signs of a revival in the busi¬ ness world will cause hundreds of our best teachers to leave the schools for more lucrative employment, (e) Libraries and school equipment have been allowed to deteriorate, due to lack of funds with which to make replacements. What can be done to arrest this wave of false economy, so that the boys and girls of today may not be deprived of their educational opportunities? First, there is need for strictest economy in all school expenditures. These economies must fall most heavily upon those items which interfere least with the prog¬ ress of the child’s education. Second, we must resell the educational program to the public. We will never have any better schools than the people want. A desire for the best schools must be recreated. Third, there must be a re¬ vamping of our entire tax system. Local communities can no longer support their schools. The state and local community must join in this enterprise. ORGANIZATION OF EXTRACURRICULUM ACTIVITIES IN THE MODERN HIGH SCHOOL JOSEPH ROEMER, DIRECTOR OF INSTRUCTION IN THE PEABODY JUNIOR COLLEGE - DEMONSTRATION SCHOOL, NASHVILLE, TENN. In the growth and development of extracurriculum activities in high schools there is a growing tendency : 1. To place an “activities period” in the regular daily schedule. 2. To evolve a permanent system of office records and reports. 3. To devise means of measuring the “outcomes” of the program. 4. To organize a graded course of activities that will “lead on” from grade to grade. 5. To stabilize the programs by articulating them with the curriculum life of the school (intracurriculum). 6. To insist on teachers having definite and specific training in sponsor¬ ing the various pupil activities. 7. To centralize all matters of finance thru a system of internal account¬ ing under one person, by means of a budget. 8. To eliminate “athletic abuses” by reducing all the major sports thru competition to their rightful place in the program. 9. To organize supervisory programs as in curriculum activities. 10. To devise a system of “checks and balances” thru some kind of a “point scale” whereby balance may be secured in pupil participation. 11. To require certain “credit for graduation” thus insuring a minimum social and moral training for all pupils. 12. To employ “directors” of extracurriculum activities. 13. To do guidance thru the extracurriculum activities. 14. To initiate some research work in the solution of many of the problems. Department of Social Studies he department of social studies was formerly the National Council for the Social Studies and was created as a Department of the National Education Association by the Board of Directors at the Indianapolis meeting of the Association in 1925. The officers of the Department for the year 1933-34 are: President , W. G. Kimmel, 1004 Physics Build¬ ing, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. ; First Vice-president, Howard Wilson, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. ; Second Vicepresident , Edgar Wesley, Assistant Pro¬ fessor of Education, University of Minnesota, Min¬ neapolis, Minn. ; Secretary-Treasurer , Bessie L. Pierce, Associate Professor of American History, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. ; Board of Direc¬ tors: Erling M. Hunt, Assistant Professor of History, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. (term expires 1934) ; R. L. Ashley, Head, De¬ partment of Social Science, Junior College, Pasadena, Calif, (term expires 1934). Facts relating to the establishment of this De¬ partment and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1926 :653-663 1928 :651-654 1930 :597-606 1932 :525-532 1927 :679-695 1929 :633-642 1931 :621-632 [ 532 1 THE INVESTIGATION OF THE SOCIAL STUDIES IN THE SCHOOLS: THE FIFTH YEAR1 A. C. KREY, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. It has been customary during the past five years to have at this meeting a report of the progress which the Commission on the Social Studies in the Schools is making. This is the fifth and last year of that investigation. By action of the Commission all fact-finding studies were to be completed by June 30. The committee appointed to sift that material for issues and recom¬ mendations to place before the Commission is now at work. The Commis¬ sion is to meet in the fall and is to complete its deliberations before the close of the present calendar year. It is scheduled to make its report to the American Historical Association under whose auspices the investigation has been con¬ ducted at the annual meeting to be held this year at Urbana, Illinois, during the last week in December. Such is the program which lies before the Commission during the half year which remains to it. Tho every year has presented its problems and its diffi¬ culties to the Commission, there is no member of that body who is not will¬ ing to admit that the half year which remains promises to be the most difficult. Time and circumstance have exercised their sway over the work of the Commission as over so many other human affairs. It was the hope of the Commission that the various studies which were made for it should likewise be available to the teachers, administrators, parents, and general public in¬ terested in this field of instruction before the work was completed. This was contemplated as a means of enlisting the criticism, advice, and suggestions which might be of service in formulating its final recommendations. Only three of the studies have as yet definitely appeared — the first, a statement of the problem as the Commission saw it. Charles A. Beard drafted this state¬ ment for the Commission and it was published under the title A Charter for the Social Sciences in the Schools. The second furnished a background for the problem — An Introduction to the History of the Social Sciences in the Schools. This work was drawn from the vast knowledge of the history of the teaching of these subjects which had been accumulated during a lifetime by Henry Johnson. Compelled by time to forego a comprehensive history of the subject, the author succeeded nevertheless in touching upon an amazing num¬ ber of its aspects in his brief exploratory survey and doing so in the vivid, sparkling, and incisive manner which is peculiarly his own. The third vol¬ ume, Citizens’ Organizations and the Civic Training of Youth by Bessie L. Pierce, is likewise the fruit of much antecedent labor and reflection. In this work are set forth the educational programs of the more important and more typical public organizations which are concerned about the teaching in the schools. This material which in practise has often been so highly influential had never been brought together before where teachers and administrators 1 Papers by R. M. Tryon, professor of the teaching of history, University of Chicago, and Ernest Horn, professor of education, University of Iowa, delivered before this Department at Chicago, are published in full elsewhere. [ 533 ] 534 National Education Association could view it as a whole. The author has been widely praised for the rare judgment displayed in selecting the important and typical from the more than 1000 organizations which she investigated and even more for the scholarly impartiality with which she has presented the views of these organizations. I wo other works are now in press. The volume describing the experience of the Commission with the new-type test contains the accounts of the various tests by Edgar Wesley, Mary Kelty, Marion Clark, Luella C. Pressey, R. M. I rabue, and A. M. Jordan. Truman L. Kelley who directed this work describes the methods used. The volume also contains a critical ap¬ praisal of tests as an aid to teachers of social science subjects, by the chairman of the Commission. I he volume on the service of geography to the social sciences is by Isaiah Bowman and includes supplementary studies by Edith Parker and Rose B. Clark. This volume brings together material and ideas in a way not touched by either geographers or social scientists and yet of intimate interest to both. I his volume will be read with great interest by a wide audience. I he other volumes of the report now nearly ready for the press will, it is hoped, appear before the end of the year. C. E. Merriam has brought to¬ gether out of the richness of his long study and intimate acquaintance with the political problems of the times a statement of the new civic education which teachers and public alike will read with interest and profit. G. S. Counts, who has directed research for the investigation during the past year, has completed his vigorous and clear statement of the changed out¬ look of education in an industrial age. This will be of interest to all educa¬ tors as well as teachers in this field. It likewise should appear early in autumn. Jesse H. Newlon has made a study of the relations of the school adminis¬ trators to the problem of the social studies and its teachers. This work brings together the fruits of many studies of schoolboards and school administrators and should help to give school administrators a new orientation in the social scene. It should likewise help the teacher to a fuller understanding of the problems which the administrators face. I he work of Merle Curti on the social ideas of educational leaders promises to be of great interest to educators, school administrators, and teach¬ ers as well as a significant contribution to the intellectual history of this country. Bridging the gap between the administrator and the teacher, Howard Beale has made a study of the growth of tolerance in the teaching of the social studies. He has confined his attention to the schools, elementary and secondary. The problem has usually been treated at the university and col¬ lege level. His work therefore constitutes the first systematic study of this problem as it appears in the schools. L. C. Marshall has prepared for the Commission the most complete ex¬ position thus far made of the process approach to social education upon which he has been working so many years. Those who have followed his work will welcome this extended treatment and all teachers, not only of social science, will find it stimulating. Department of Social Studies 535 The Commission has cooperated with the American Council on Education in supporting the experimental reading material project directed by C. H. Judd. Many in this audience are probably familiar with the six pamphlets which have already appeared and are looking forward to the others which are announced. W. C. Bagley and G. S. Ford are preparing a volume on the teacher. This will include supplementary studies by T. Alexander, W. G. Kimmel, and others. Dependent as this work is upon the other phases of the investiga¬ tion it will be among the last to appear. Nothing has as yet been said about the two studies which deal most di¬ rectly with the problems of the classroom — the curriculum and method. The two scholars to whom the Commission has entrusted the presentation of these vital topics are both to address you today. They will give you a fuller and clearer account of the problems which they have faced than I can do. This resume of the separate studies which the Commission plans to publish is only a part of the story. It leaves out of account the contribution which the thousands of teachers and administrators and officers of public organi¬ zations all over the country and some abroad have made in various ways. While each of the volumes will make some acknowledgment of this assist¬ ance this will represent only a fraction of the debt. I would like to take this opportunity in behalf of the Commission to thank those of you who have re¬ sponded to questionnaires, submitted to interviews, undergone inspection, criticized manuscripts, judged tests, and written letters describing treatments of various problems. The character and quality of this report owe much to this help, more in fact than can ever be adequately acknowledged. In the preparation of its final conclusions and recommendations which will constitute the last volume of its report, the Commission will draw not only upon the studies which have been here listed, and the supplementary reports which have been made to it, but likewise upon all the major investi¬ gations which have been made in recent years. The national surveys by our colleagues in other subjectmatter fields, mathematics, classical languages and modern foreign language have been used. More directly related to our work, the comparative Study of Civic Training published by the University of Chicago Press, and the reports of the International Committee on the Teach¬ ing of History are on the desks of all the Commission members; also the United States Census of 1930, the several surveys conducted by the United States Office of Education, the reports of the national commissions on law enforcement, child welfare, cost of medical care, housing, economic trends and most recently the social trends. With most of these investigations the Commission has had direct contact thru the active participation of its in¬ dividual members. The published reports have furnished constant advice and guidance. The appreciation and appraisal of this vast accumulation of records is a staggering task for even well-trained scholars. We can only hope that the Commission includes members of unlimited scholarly capacity who can em¬ brace it all without losing a true perspective and balanced outlook on life. 536 National Education Association \ We hope the Commission will be able to see our society whole despite this great mass of detail — all the more accurately because of the detail. We hope that, recognizing the demands of the growing youth in the schools, it will outline a program which will prepare that youth more adequately to grapple with the problems of society than we ourselves were prepared. That the Com¬ mission is fully aware of the challenge is certain, and that it meets the chal¬ lenge with courage to do its best is equally certain. That its best will be equal to the task is a hope which it can only share with you. SECRETARY’S MINUTES Chicago, Illinois First Session, Monday Afternoon, June 29, 1933 The Department of Social Studies held a Joint Session with the Department of Secondary Education in the Lower Tower Ballroom in the Stevens Hotel. Attendance was limited to about 300 persons by the size of the room, with a large number of persons turned away because of lack of space in the crowded room. Sarah A. Stokes, Parker-Junior High School, Chicago, presided. The program was based on the Social Studies Section of the National Survey of Secondary Education. Social Studies in the Changing Curriculum of the High School W. G. Kimmel, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. Discussion Leader: Winfield L. Rice, acting director of high school civics, Public Schools, New York, N. Y. A spirited discussion of various aspects of the social studies in secondary educa¬ tion, in which many persons contributed, concluded this program. Second Session, Wednesday Afternoon, July 5, 1933 The program was devoted to the Social Studies Investigation sponsored by the American Historical Association. Approximately 350 persons were in attendance, with an estimated equal number turned away because of the size of the room. Papers included; The Progress of the Investigation of the Social Studies in the Schools: the Fifth Year A. C. Krey, director; and professor of history, University of Minnesota, Minne¬ apolis, Minn. One Hundred Years of History in the Secondary Schools of the United States R. M. Tryon, professor of the teaching of history, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. The Problem of Meaning in Reading With Special Reference to the Social Studies Ernest Horn, professor of education, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. Catherine Tierney, Supervisor of Social Sciences, Chicago Public Schools, de¬ scribed the Social Science Exhibit in Connection with the Century of Progress and the National Education Association. A brief discussion dealing with the papers read, the different aspects of the Social Studies Investigation, the several parts of its Report, and allied phases, followed. The Report is published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 597 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. Officers of the Department-National Council for the Social Studies — elected at its sessions held in connection with the annual meeting of the American Historical As¬ sociation in Toronto, December, 1932 — will continue to serve in their respective po¬ sitions. (See historical note.) Department of Special Education A PPLICATION FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT of a Depart- ment of Special Education was made at the Atlanta convention in 1929. A petition bearing more than 250 names was presented at that time. The creation of the Department was authorized a year later at the convention in Columbus. In Los Angeles the group of teachers and adminis¬ trators interested in special education met on July 2 and final plans for the creation of the Department were made and a constitution was adopted. The fol¬ lowing officers have been elected for the year 1933-34 : President , Lavilla Ward, Supervisor, State Depart¬ ment of Education, Madison, Wis. ; Vicepresident, Florence N. Beaman, Montefiore School, Chicago, Ill.; Secretary -Treasurer, Vesta Thompson, Haven School, Portsmouth, N. H. Facts relating to the establishment of this De¬ partment and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1931:633-644 1932:533-542 ENRICHING THE LIFE EXPERIENCE OF EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN PAUL A. WITTY, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, EVANSTON, ILL. The stricture that special education for mental and physical deviates has consumed thru wasteful and elaborate expenditure, an unjustifiable part of our annual three billion dollar educational budget, is considered carefully. The writer finds a glaring inadequacy in the presentday provision for ex¬ ceptional children; indeed, special educational opportunity for exceptional children is so rare and so inadequate as to appear ominous from the stand¬ point of social welfare. Of one million five hundred thousand gifted children in the United States, only about four thousand are placed in special classes wherein enrichment of the curriculum occurs. Similarly inadequate, if less important from the point of view of human progress, is the special provision for the mentally subnormal. The physically handicapped, too, are infrequently given special educational opportunity in our public schools. The expenditures for all types of deviates are very low in terms of our total educational budget. The uncompromising fact stands out clearly: We have failed utterly during the past two decades to give adequate opportunity to atypical children in our public schools. The situation for the gifted is lamentable, since these mentally superior children represent our greatest national asset. The writer recommends ac¬ celeration or grade skipping for this group as one practical way of effecting an adjustment which will result in providing mentally stimulating tasks and con¬ sequent growth. The social and physical needs of these children may be met by sifting children from several academic levels for group participation in physical and social pursuits. This recommendation is given force by a recent evaluation of forty studies of accelerated pupils in the elementary and sec¬ ondary school, and in college. The investigation shows that acceleration is associated with desirable attainment in all types of adjustment for which data have been assembled. Experiments are needed dealing with special education for exceptional children. In more than a decade of experimentation, we have developed as¬ tonishingly few enrichment programs in our public schools. The writer sug¬ gests some points wherein enrichment may mean a merging of life experience with worthwhile school endeavor. These include enrichment thru the language arts. Experimental data from two studies of gifted children are introduced to suggest a direction for efforts in encouraging free reading and in developing creative work in writing. Data are presented to demonstrate the significance of a continuously graded program in the fine arts which is designed to capitalize the artistic ability of talented children. Curriculum flexibility is stressed in order that children with special interests and abili¬ ties may have opportunity for varied expression and development. Plans are discussed for providing educational experience that will create leadership, and that will lead children to respect, to demand, and to follow the highest [ 539 ] 540 National Education Association type of leaders. The school is viewed as the great social laboratory in which individual differences are discovered and utilized in fostering maximum growth and development. The curriculum must be in keeping with the mat¬ uration levels of children in interest, in ability, and in attainment. Sug¬ gestions are given by which maturation levels may be more fully explored and utilized in developing true enrichment for exceptional children. AN ENRICHED PROGRAM FOR PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED CHILDREN BESS R. JOHNSON, PRINCIPAL, DAVID SMOUSE OPPORTUNITY SCHOOL, DES MOINES, IOWA Our consideration today is, What have we done and what can we do to enrich the program for handicapped children? Personally all my plans seem to come back to one great ambition: to help each child feel he is a normal boy or girl, or at least to say with the little elf man, “I am just as big for me as you are big for you.” Instead of going into a theoretical discussion of an enriched program, may I tell you briefly of the things we believe have meant most in enriching the program of Smouse School. Our school system as a rule does not permit Scout and Campfire work on school time, but since our transportation of crippled children makes after¬ school clubs impossible, we were allowed to have one hour per week for such activities. Outside leaders have organized and supervised Boy Scout, Girl Scout and Campfire groups, and we believe they have helped greatly in pro¬ ducing a more normal adolescent life for our boys and girls. Our student council has been our most inclusive and most representative group. Representatives come from each room in the school, beginning with the first grade and including the deaf department. Affairs of state have been settled in a truly dignified manner. Teacher advisers have spoken only when requested to do so. It seems to me that physically handicapped children need this experience even more than normally healthy pupils. For so many years they have been told, “You may do this,” “You should not do that.” To be health-conscious and to make your own decisions is so different from being handicap-conscious and to have someone else make every decision for you. School assemblies and all school programs give these children an outlet which many of them have never experienced. We have concentrated on one all-school spring program each year. A May fete gives such grand chances to dress up and to use many, many children. In the deaf department we found two children who danced beautifully, another girl who plays the piano well, and many of our crippled little folks love to cover braces with costumes and forget them in the joy of being somebody else. Our occupational therapy we have crowded into our art program, un¬ labeled and unsung, but just as truly occupational and therapeutic. It has given the children an opportunity to create, and how they love it ! Here equip- Department of Special Education 541 ment makes the difference between theory and practise. A potter’s wheel, a loom, and a jig-saw give a marvelous chance for muscle development for certain children who become so interested in the creation that they forget to be bored with the exercise. It takes a wise art teacher with the patience of Job to check on his children and give them individual work when he has so many individual differences to consider. A wise teacher is also going to watch for chances to broaden the children’s experiences by field trips. We have found parents who drive cars very will¬ ing to help take children on trips to such places as a farm, a flour mill, a fire station, a historical building. Where trips are impossible, vicarious experience by means of the splendid visual aids on the market today is valuable. If we can give our physically handicapped children a regular school program, sur¬ roundings conducive to good work, a broadened life thru extracurriculum activities, physio-therapy when needed, an enriched art program, well quali¬ fied and interesting teachers, I believe our pioneering will lead to something of which we may be justly proud. AN ENRICHED PROGRAM FOR SOCIALLY MALADJUSTED CHILDREN RUBY COUTU, DEPARTMENT OF CHILD GUIDANCE AND SPECIAL EDUCATION, MADISON, WIS. During our years of dealing with problem children in Madison it has be¬ come apparent that we must find some means of dealing with the maladjusted child within his own social group. We have felt that this can be done thru en¬ riched curriculum and recreational programs. With this in mind we have made two studies, the results of which are being used in a definitely organized program for adjustment thru schoolroom activities. The first is a study of sixty-two children definitely known to be maladjusted, in which we have used recreational and extracurriculum group activities as the means of ad¬ justment. The second is a complete personality study of every child in one of our fourth grades, undertaken in order that individual difficulties and mal¬ adjustments might be brought to light and dealt with by the classroom teacher herself. From these two studies certain facts stand out clearly. First, person¬ ality studies should be made for every child at the beginning of each year as a part of the school routine and should be used by the teacher. Second, social responsibility and desirable attitudes can be developed thru recreational interests including club work, classroom activities, and social programs. Third, we have gained from these studies some definite suggestions useful to the teacher in enriching the classroom program to help the socially mal¬ adjusted child. These suggestions include the project method of teaching, dramatics, art, literature, supervised recreation, clubs of various types, and citizenship programs. 542 National Education Association Our general conclusions from these two studies are, first the need for personality studies of every child in order to locate and treat the problems of maladjustment, and, second, the value of schoolroom activities for such tieatment. In any neighborhood populated by socially and economically underprivileged children we should advise the use of extra-school activities to help make needed adjustments outside the schoolroom. For schools located in areas where the general facilities for recreation are good, we feel that the problems of most socially maladjusted children can be adequately treated by the classroom teacher himseif. Such a program will add very little to the teacher s tasks, and it will add much to the achievement and the enjoy¬ ment of his work. WHERE ARE WE NOW?— A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF SPECIAL EDUCATION VIRGIL E. DICKSON, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS AND DIRECTOR, BUREAU OF RESEARCH AND GUIDANCE, BERKELEY, CALIF. The outstanding fact in the philosophy of education in this country is that every child shall have an opportunity for education suited to his capacity and his needs. We stress education for life values. The same criterion applies to exceptional children and to normal children alike. Each child must first of all be reasonably happy. He must then be helped to give to life that which is commensurate with his own abilities. Hence in evaluating our present practises of special education we need to ask ourselves: “What can this individual contribute to life and what joys can he get from life in the light of his capacities and the requirements of his environment?” WFat, then, should education for the handicapped stress? Certainly it must be something more than vocational rehabilitation, important as that is. Nothing less than the whole life of the child is to be considered, and social and emotional values are preeminent in his adjustment. Most handicapped children will live under some degree of supervision and protection. They will be only partially self-supporting. They need to be trained, therefore, to live within a normal world, contributing their bit to the social structure without being expected to reach the level of attainment of their normal fellows. To what extent shall we separate exceptional children into special classes or schools? As to the gifted , experience offers no conclusive evidence that these should be set off in special classes. I heartily approve of ability group¬ ing within schools, but not of a special school for the gifted. My prejudice on this point is built primarily upon the behavior of parents of gifted children and of other adults, who destroy the fineness of social poise and service by overbearing pride and egotism. The socially maladjusted we do not wish to set apart unless it is absolutely unavoidable. We give them clinical treatment in school, at home, or in a foster home if the home is impossible, and last of all within an institution. The speech defective we do not separate from other children save for the amount of time needed for training in speech cor- Department of Special Education 543 rection. Most of their work they carry on with normal children in regular classes. The mentally deficient are educated both in separate schools and in units within the regular schools. In a recent survey made of large cities 62 percent of such children were reported as being cared for by the latter method. If they are not to be placed in institutions (and only the most serious cases need such treatment), then they should certainly be kept in contact with ordinary life situations to as great an extent as possible. The blind, the deaf, and the crippled must have special method and equipment, but they too want normal life contacts and should be provided with such associations as far as it is possible for them to profit by them. The cardiac, pretuberculous, and anemic we separate for the time being into special classes, but our policy is to get them back into normal groups as soon as possible. After all, we come back to the individual attention for individual needs. Consider how the child varies from other children. Teach him to compensate for his handicap and to express and to use his powers to the maximum. Teach him how to get along with other children. Most of all, teach him how to be reasonably happy. If this is done he will share life’s values as well as do the rest of us who are not supposed to be handicapped. SPECIAL EDUCATION IN GERMANY— WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM IT? GERTRUDE ROSER, INSTRUCTOR IN SPECIAL EDUCATION, MICHIGAN STATE NORMAL COLLEGE, YPSILANTI, MICH. Special education in Germany has grown from 1893, when 32 cities were training 2290 mentally retarded, children, to the point in 1927 when 3966 classes made up of 71,902 children were being maintained in 750 cities. Centralized schools are preferred there rather than special classes distributed thruout the regular schools. A very real and alert social consciousness of spe¬ cial education exists in Germany. The public recognizes the necessity of the work. Much of this feeling can be traced to the early work of the medical profession, the first group to enter the field. Vocational work is emphasized in German special schools. Other subjects, such as arithmetic and nature study are correlated with the vocational sub¬ jects. Field trips are strongly advocated and widely used. In all the schools teachers correlate the work of the classroom and the shops with situations which these children encounter in out-of-school life. A large amount of hand work and shop experience is given wherever possible. Gardening, due to its importance in the everyday life of Germany, receives much attention. Practically every school has its garden with a plot, however small, for each child. Since he has exclusive care of that plot a sense of pride and responsi¬ bility is fostered. Some of the gardens are quite pretentious and are serious projects. Aside from planting and cultivating, drainage, soil culture, and other phases of gardening are taught. Thus a wide range of training may result from one project. 544 National Education Association Special teachers in Germany are on the whole much more thoroly trained than in this country. The psychology of the special school, pathology, physiology, and research methods are some of the subjects studied. Special examinations in addition to those given for regular grade certificates are required of special school teachers by most states. At first many teachers did the required reading and studying at home and took the examination when they felt prepared. Some universities later offered vacation or extension courses dealing with special class methods and problems. Now it is generally advocated that the teacher desiring to enter the field of special education, study for one year at one of the Heilpadagogische Instituts. It is quite evident in Germany that the special education system is based upon the teacher. Thoroly trained and aware of the individual needs of the child, the first aim is to mold and develop each to his fullest capacity. Even working with limited equipment the teachers have used the material at hand to attain their ends. Experimental teaching projects now being conducted in Germany carry out still more completely theories of teaching based on the intellectual and emotional characteristics of the individual child. ARE WE PLAYING FAIR WITH THE PERSONALITY PROBLEM? EDWARD H. STULLKEN, PRINCIPAL, MONTEFIORE SCHOOL, CHICAGO, ILL. Work with a group of 1800 problem boys enrolled during the past three years in the Montefiore School of Chicago indicates that one of the most important problems in school adjustment is that of the personality deviate. Personality is built upon a physical foundation, and some physical defects, especially glandular disturbances, contribute strongly to the development of undesirable personalities. The mental development also plays an important part, and much of our mass education with its closely graded systems and its overcrowded classrooms is unable to handle the complex problems of securing better integration of the personalities of those children who deviate even slightly from the rank and file. The adolescent age with its attendant emotional instability is a particularly important time in the development of personality. Studies of home conditions of poorly-adjusted boys indicate that there are many social and economic factors operating to increase the difficulties facing the school in its attempts to play fair with the personality problem. No single factor in attacking the problem is greater than that of the personality of the teacher. School administrators must remember that teachers are human beings and that they have personalities quite as much as the children and that the clash of pupil and teacher personality is fraught with possibilities for good or evil. Work with problem children indicates the necessity for complete case studies of each individual child, including facts as to physical, mental, emotional, social, economic, and personality traits. A complete study of the whole child is a necessity whenever personality difficulties are involved. Department of Special Education 545 Since the school’s problem cases are present and persistent, they often cannot wait for the delay of referring them to social agencies outside of the school. If a school is fortunate enough to have its own social workers, it will be possible to give to the child the immediate study and individual attention he needs. Work at the Montefiore School shows that the school’s social worker because of her knowledge of social work can often stimulate other agencies into action when teachers and principals fail to do so. Then, too, action can be speeded when the school thru its case study can say to an outside agency that the problem is a pressing one and that there are psychological moments which must be seized if the case is to be benefited by treatment. In no case can any adequate attack be made upon the problem without a complete understanding of the whole complex life of the individual child. BETTER COORDINATION OF SERVICES FOR PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED GROUPS IN SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY PROGRAMS LAVILLA WARD, STATE SUPERVISOR OF SPECIAL CLASSES FOR DEAF, BLIND, AND DEFECTIVE OF SPEECH, STATE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, MADISON, WIS. School program — The development of education during the past few decades based upon the recognition of individual differences has made a place in many of our public-school systems for special classes for physically handi¬ capped children, thereby promoting opportunities for better educational and social development. In the progressive schools of today, in which the need of the individual child is the primary objective, special classes may become an integral part of the school, regular and special teachers cooperating to meet the needs of the children. Special class children have their recesses with the regular classes. Wfth guidance and help in preparation from a special teacher it is possible for many of these children to do much of their work in the regular grades. They may enter high school for the academic course or take a modified course in prevocational training. The vocational guidance department may make a study of each child and direct his industrial and vocational training along lines in which he shows aptitude and in which it will be possible for him to work. All special classes for physically handicapped children in public schools are nominally under the direction of the principal of the school. However, in order to bring about a real coordination of services, not only the principal but the superintendent and supervising teachers must be interested sufficiently to give guidance and active support. In systems in which this is true there is no difficulty in getting children transferred to special classes, with the exception of the occasional objection of parents. Teachers not only receive with interest and understanding the children from the special class but they become alert to the manifestations of the various defects and constantly refer children to the special teacher. It becomes a give and take proposition on a 50-50 basis. 546 National Education Association Community program — Of first importance is the cooperation from various clinics in physical diagnosis, treatment, and guidance in emotional adjust¬ ments. Until very recently the medical profession on the whole has concerned itself chiefly with the medical problems these cases presented along with their deviation and correction. Now it is beginning to realize a responsi¬ bility in recommending special education when it is necessary. Of second importance is the coordination of activities in the various service and welfare organizations such as the Y. M. C. A., Y. W. C. A., Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts. Many of our children who are deaf, hard of hearing, and defective of speech belong to the Junior Y groups, especially in athletics and in some educational and health activities such as dramatics and dancing. All arrangements made in the regular public schools should be carried on with the objective of serving physically handicapped children on an equal basis with normal children. The plan of leaving the children wherever pos¬ sible in the normal environment of home and community is invaluable. Their adjustment as members of the social body is best promoted by their partici¬ pation in the activities of the normal social group. It is our belief that a fuller and more complete life is thus made possible for physically handicapped children. THE MENTAL DEVIATE— A PROBLEM IN CURRICULUM ADJUSTMENT FLORENCE N. BEAMAN, MONTEFIORE SCHOOL, CHICAGO, ILL. An experiment in curriculum development for mentally deficient children carried on in public day-school classes has yielded some pertinent facts con¬ cerning curriculum content and its method of application. This experiment, conducted for the past four years at the Montefiore School in Chicago, sought to develop material based upon the following factors: (1) the future life needs of mentally retarded children as revealed by research data on voca¬ tional pursuits and social adjustment in the community; (2) the effect of selected material upon the wholesome development of all phases of the child’s make-up; and (3) definite emphasis upon experiences designed to contribute to the commonly needed social development. The education of the experimental group was concerned with two aims, namely, broad general experience in social activities and specific training in habits and skills. Physical needs, academic needs, vocational needs, and social needs were all taken into consideration. Provision for a preliminary period of observation to determine the social status of each pupil was made. A rich environment was provided in a room equipped with all types of sensory-motor material with which the children could play with freedom. During this period the teacher observed the reactions of the individual, the predominant social interests of the group, the child’s motor facility, and the resourcefulness of the individual in creating enjoyment out of his own environment. Immediately following the short period of observation an elastic program was built upon social activities, Department of Special Education 547 including story-telling, folk games, folk songs, folk dances, and simple group construction projects. Dramatics, excursions, and parties were intro¬ duced as the children showed growth in social participation. Then, too, came social science projects which had bearing upon necessary academic achievements. The program of academic material evolved concerned itself with the direct needs of the group in carrying on the immediate project. The Montefiore experiment utilized all methods consistent with good educational practise. The general procedures used may be summarized as follows: (1) provision for a period of free activity for the child, in which he attempts to orient himself in his environment; (2) inclusion within the child s experimental activities of a carefully planned program of devices to stimulate his sensory activity; (3) provision of time for the child to ob¬ serve and to integrate his experiences so that they will serve as a foundation for the processes of higher learning; (4) continual strengthening of per¬ ceptual experience thru concrete situations; (5) intensifying of concrete experience thru classroom aids, such as visual education, books, and teacher instruction; (6) correlation of all experiences and integration of school and life experience; (7) provision for specific remedial work in the avenues in which the child is weak. In this experiment close contact was kept with the home and its problems. The clinical facilities of the school were utilized to the utmost. Doctor, dentist, nurse, visiting teachers, truant officers, psychologists, and psychiatrists all contributed liberally to the adjustment of these atypical pupils. The cur¬ riculum evolved and the methods utilized in its administration have proved a partial solution to the problem of meeting the needs of children of retarded mentality. SECRETARY’S MINUTES Chicago, Illinois First Session, Monday Afternoon, July 3, 1933 The business session of the Department of Special Education met after the regular program with Elise H. Martens, president, presiding. The constitution of the De¬ partment was read for information of those present. Motion was made and carried to authorize the chair to appoint a nominating committee and a resolutions committee, same to report Wednesday, July 5. The nominating committee was also to name a representative to the National Council of the N. E. A. The president was authorized to transmit a letter to the Department of Lip Read- ing, inviting that department to affiliate with the Department of Special Education. There being no further business, the meeting adjourned until July 5. Second Session, Wednesday Afternoon, July 5, 1933 The second session met in the spacious quarters of the North Assembly Room, Hotel Stevens, to better accommodate the extremely large representative group assembled. Elise H. Martens, president of the Department of Special Education, called the meet- 548 National Education Association ing to order. A splendid program was presented that centered about classroom and teaching problems, appealing to the various interests of the entire assembly. The first speaker of the afternoon was Virgil E. Dickson, assistant superintendent of schools, Berkeley, California. His subject was: “Where Are We Now ? — A Critical Evaluation of Special Education.” Mr. Dickson said in part: “We are engaged in a great pioneer work. These children, under our special direction, namely: the blind, deaf, cripple, epileptic, speech-defective, mentally retarded, and behavioristic, have a right to be reasonably happy. ... We must teach them how to cope with life situations, how to feel, think and act; teach them life values that will compensate them for their handicaps. They must learn that ‘what you give to life is what life gives to you.’ ” Gertrude Roser, training supervisor, State Normal College, Ypsilanti, Mich., the second speaker, chose for her subject: “Special Education in Germany — What Can We Learn from It?” Miss Roser spent considerable time in Germany studying their methods in that field. She gave a resume of the progress of special education in Germany from the seventeenth century to the present day. Miss Roser went on to say that “in the seventeenth century children segregated for special education were classified as the mentally sick. Medical authorities lent invaluable aid to the teachers of Germany in this work. Germany favors special schools rather than rooms in regular schools. These schools serve a central area. There is no uniform program. There aim is to develop self-supporting individuals, equipped with desirable habits and abilities to cope with life situations.” “Are We Playing Fair with the Personality Problem?” was the next subject of Edward H. Stullken, principal, Montefiore School, Chicago, Illinois. He said: “Every¬ one has a personality, more or less. The bad boy, however, often has the greatest personality. There is a definite relationship between poverty and delinquency — physical defects and personalities. The school must make compensation for these conditions, and the teacher’s personality is one of the greatest factors in this respect, and extremely important. “First of all, the teacher must be calm, well poised and sympathetic. Above all, he must be impersonal in relation to himself, but very personal in relation to his pupils. His discipline must be firm, yet kindly.” Lavilla Ward, supervisor, State Department of Education, Madison, Wisconsin, fourth speaker of the afternoon, presented: “Better Coordination of Services for Physically Handicapped Groups.” She said: “We must regard the physically handi¬ capped child as a potential asset rather than a liability.” She advocated constant daily drills, using acoustic exercises in the correction of speech defects to be given by well-trained, competent instructors. During playground activities she suggested that these children should not be segregated, but should participate with the regular class children, insofar as they were able. Miss Ward emphasized the fact that co¬ operative clinics were most desirable. The essential objective was the physical well¬ being of these children. Specific skills and habits should be developed that would tend to help them make social adjustments and thereby live in a happy, respectable way.” The last speaker on the program was Florence N. Beaman of the Montefiore School, Chicago, Illinois. Her subject was “The Mental Deviate — A Problem in Curriculum Adjustment.” Miss Beaman passed out charts of special class curriculums and showed methods of adapting and modifying subjectmatter to the capacities of special class children. She offered the following program: club period — two hours fundamental drills, story-telling, music, lunch, dramatics, individual instruction, creative work. At the conclusion of the program the business meeting and election of officers took place. A series of resolutions drawn up by the Resolutions Committee was pre- Department of Special Education 549 sented by Virgil E. Dickson of Berkeley, Calif. It was moved and seconded that these resolutions be accepted and adopted. The Nomination Committee presented a list of nominees for executive officers for the ensuing year. They were then elected by oral vote. The result was as follows: president and representative to the National Council of Education, Lavilla Ward, supervisor, State Department of Education, Madison, Wisconsin; vicepresident, Florence Beaman, Montefiore School, Chicago, Illinois; secretary-treasurer, Vesta Thompson, Haven School, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A rising vote of thanks was tendered those who prepared the excellent program for the convention, and to all those who contributed in any way to the success of the meeting. It was announced that Mr. Dickson would conduct a round-table discussion, deal¬ ing with questions or problems with reference to different phases of special educa¬ tion. All who desired to remain were invited to take part in the discussion at the end of the meeting. The session then adjourned. Resolutions I. We express our sincere appreciation to those who prepared the programs and to those who contributed. II. The Department of Special Education of the National Education Association, recognizing the excellent work done by the International Council for Educa¬ tion of Exceptional Children, wishes to cooperate with that organization in every possible way in advancing our common aims and purposes. III. We ask the Executive Committee of the Department of Special Education to plan ways and means of furnishing to us and to the general public infor¬ mation on phases of development and matters of interest in the field of special education. Abstracts of speeches in these sessions are illustrative. We suggest that space be secured in the Journal of the National Education A ssociation, if possible. IV. We ask the Executive Committee to secure, if possible, a place on the series of radio programs, conducted under the auspices of the N. E. A. V. We suggest that the program committee consider requests for the organiza¬ tion of sectional conferences in the annual meetings of this Department. The sections, if allowed, shall follow in general the classification of special groups, as designated by the White House Conference. However, in order to secure desirable cooperation and coordination of all of these groups, at least one of the sessions shall be a general conference embracing all sections. ' VI. The Department of Special Education appreciates the tremendous inspira¬ tion and help that has gone to the workers and the public in all sections of our country thru the published bulletins of the Office of Education, and thru the services that have been carried on in the interests of the education of exceptional children. We recommend that a letter of appreciation for these bulletins and for this service be sent to the commissioner of education, to the commissioner designate and to the Secretary of the Interior by the secretary of this Department. VII. Whereas, For the past three years the urgent need of a careful survey of the problems affecting the education and welfare of handicapped and gifted children has been emphasized by various educational and social organizations of national and international scope; and Whereas, These various organizations have at their annual meetings passed resolutions asking that such a survey be undertaken under the direction of the United States commissioner of education and that the necessary funds be appropriated therefor by the Congress of the United States; and 550 National Education Association Whereas, The seriousness of the problems involved has in no way diminished but has rather been increased thru the period of economic stress; therefore be it Resolved, That the Department of Special Education of the National Edu¬ cation Association reiterate the request that, as soon as economic conditions may permit, such a survey be undertaken under the direction of the United States commissioner of education, and that said commissioner be asked to request the Congress of the United States to make an appropriation of funds needed to carry on such a survey; and be it further Resolved, That a copy of this resolution be forwarded to the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt; Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes ; United States Commissioner-designate of Education, George F. Zook, and to those members of Congress who have manifested an active interest in the welfare of exceptional children. Finally we recommend that the Executive Committee consider the advisa¬ bility of placing this last resolution before the General Resolutions Committee of the N. E. A. next year. Department of Superintendence The department of superintendence was the outgrowth of a meeting of the National Teach¬ ers’ Association in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1865, at which time the state and city superintend¬ ents present decided to form an organization of their own. Final action was taken in Washington, D. C., in February, 1866. The new organization was called the National Association of School Superintendents. In 1870, the National Association of School Super¬ intendents merged into the National Education Asso¬ ciation as a Department. In 1921, the Department was reorganized and a fulltime secretary employed. It publishes a report of its annual meeting and a yearbook which are sent only to members. The officers of the Department for the year 1933- 34 are: President , Paul C. Stetson, Superintendent of Schools, Indianapolis, Ind. ; First Vicepresidenty Milton C. Potter, Superintendent of Schools, Milwau¬ kee, Wis. ; Second Vicepresident , David E. Weglein, Superintendent of Schools, Baltimore, Md. ; Execu¬ tive Secretary , Sherwood D. Shankland, National Education Association, 1201 Sixteenth Street, N. W., Washington, D. C. ; Executive Committee: Charles B. Glenn, Superintendent of Schools, Birmingham, Ala. (Term expires 1934) ; Herbert S. Weet, Super¬ intendent of Schools, Rochester, N. Y. (Term expires 1935) ; Carroll R. Reed, Superintendent of Schools, Minneapolis, Minn. (Term expires 1936) ; Charles S. Meek, Superintendent of Schools, Toledo, Ohio (Term expires 1937). Facts relating to the establishment of this Depart¬ ment and the record of meetings are found in earlier volumes of Proceedings as follows : 1873 :244-271 1874:297 1875:291 1877:253-261 1879 :223 1880:235-236 1881 :252 1882 :Pt.II :1- 112 1883:131 1884 :283-292 1885:160-191 1886 ;333-350 1887 :509-538 1888:513-543 1889-611-613 1890 :365-542 1891 :379-525 1892:559-743 1894-252-592 1895:213-429 1896:231-392 1897:195-316 1898 :303-488 1899 :251-379 1900:183-296 1901:189-348 1902:151-305 1903:139-300 1904:173-332 1905:155-270 1906: 29-214 1907:145-327 1908:129-312 1909:159-330 1910:143-306 1911:161-329 1912: 329-497 1913: 99-354 1914: 133-291 1915: 253-525 1916: 895-1099 1917: 661-845 1918: 473-683 1919: 483-673 1920: 407-536 1921: 679-849 1922:1295-1464 1923: 881-1024 1924:803-961 1925:633-862 1926:665-838 1927:697-871 1928:655-830 1929:643-802 1930:607-770 1931 :645-800 1932 :543-677 [ 552 ] GENERAL SESSION, MONDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 27 The Challenge of the New Frontier THE CHALLENGE OF THE PRESENT ECONOMIC DEPRESSION HARLEY L. LUTZ, PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC FINANCE, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, PRINCETON, N. J. I he keynote of this convention is the new frontier of American life, and in this opening general session we are asked to face the challenge of the new frontier. A frontier is a borderline between the known and the un¬ known, the new and the old, the established and the experimental. In a fundamental sense there are always new frontiers, and we are never free from the challenge which they present. I he present economic depression has flung its challenge into our faces. It has temporarily interrupted our economic and social advance. Despite our earlier achievements, we are once more vividly conscious of the eco¬ nomic frontier, and we are directly challenged to show that we still have the individual and social qualities that are required for dealing success¬ fully with adverse frontier conditions. My present discussion and application of the challenge which the de¬ pression presents is necessarily limited to certain outstanding, typical is¬ sues. These are: first, the challenge to our capacity to function as a democ¬ racy; second, the challenge to our sanity and our common sense; third, the challenge to our organizing capacity; fourth, the challenge to our financial capacity ; and fifth, the challenge to our provincial nationalism. In a very real sense all of these are embraced in the first, the capacity of our. democ¬ racy to function during a crisis. The capacity of democracy to function is not challenged only by emer¬ gencies. On the contrary, this capacity is continuously challenged. Depres¬ sions and other emergencies reveal and emphasize the defects of the demo¬ cratic method ; but we must admit that this method, as we have applied it, has not been conspicuously efficient. The reason for this inefficiency is clear enough. The democratic em¬ phasis upon individual rights and freedom necessarily prevents a steady ad¬ vance toward a fixed goal, regardless of obstacles. The ultimate objectives of the national life, aside from that of money-getting, are vague and uncer¬ tain. Having no clearly defined goal, we naturally do not see clearly the road to it. More than this, the essence of democracy is that the people are assumed to determine, ultimately, the national policy. Quite apart from the vagueness and uncertainty as to what this policy should be, the participa¬ tion of all adult citizens as equal members of a self-governing group in¬ volves popular decisions on complicated issues and requires a higher level of general knowledge on difficult subjects than in fact exists. The truth is that democracy is postulated upon idealism, for only an idealist would assume that all citizens are equally well-qualified to make [ 553 ] 554 National Education Association wise laws or to serve competently in any office from that of President down to that of justice of the peace. We have been incorrigible idealists here in America, and we have occasionally wandered from the road into the ditch, as any star-gazer is likely to do. If we bruise our shins, we must accept it as part of the price of star-gazing. A dictator could probably herd us down the middle of the road. No one would fall into the ditch except those who were thrown there by the dictator ; but none would see the stars, ex¬ cept by his gracious permission. Let us grant, then, that the democratic method is that of trial and error. We know that it has been expensive, but we tolerate and even encourage governmental extravagance during prosperous times, altho we complain bitterly against it during hard times. The challenge to all of us who be¬ lieve in this method is to reduce the margin of error and to introduce some rational means of controlling the cost, while preserving the essence of the democratic ideal. I propose for your consideration two steps which involve no sacrifice of this ideal, but which would materially diminish the fumbling and groping that have hitherto characterized our governmental procedure. The first step is the recognition of the distinction between the deter¬ mination of policy and the administration or execution of policies after they have been established. Policy determination belongs to the people, for this is the substance of government by the people. The execution of the policy, which is the substance of public administration, should be left to expert ad¬ ministrators. For example, the question of a new school building is one of policy, and the people have the right to decide such a question. The details of construction are not a matter of policy, but of expert administration. The people have the right to decide whether algebra or Latin shall be taught in the schools, but they are not competent to determine how these subjects shall be taught. The few instances in which this basic distinction between policy deter¬ mination and administration have been faithfully observed, notably some of the cities under the manager plan, represent our highest practical achievement in democratic government. But by and large, we have not adopted this principle. The Congress, the state legislatures, and the city councils, all of which are policy-determining bodies, are continually inter¬ fering with administration. They decline to recognize the need of un¬ hampered, expert administration. In consequence, we do not get as good results under our democratic procedure as it is possible to get. The second step is the recognition of the need and the value of scien¬ tific research in the governmental field. A report recently made by the Twentieth Century Fund reveals that 102 foundations gave $54,600,000 during 1931 for various public purposes, but of this amount, the grants for governmental improvement were only $869,000, or 1.6 percent of the total. Only eight foundations were sufficiently interested in government, or sufficiently unrestricted in their purposes, to contribute to this purpose. Without criticising the interest which these organizations have displayed in health, medicine, and education, it is appropriate to suggest that the de- Department of Superintendence 555 votion of larger sums to intelligent governmental research would contribute immeasurably to the better functioning of the governmental agencies. It should be noted, also, that government itself devotes almost no money to the support of research in governmental problems, aside from the occa¬ sional special investigating commission. In order for democracy to function as efficiently as it is possible for this type of government to operate, it must have the benefit of external, im¬ partial, scientific criticism. At present we lack the agencies and the facili¬ ties for this service. We cannot safely rely upon the press, since the press lacks the facilities for obtaining the data by scientific methods, and it in¬ clines more and more toward the partisan rather than the scientific view¬ point. We cannot rely upon official reports, since it would be unreasonable to expect public officials to pass critical, unbiased judgment upon their own work. Obviously we cannot rely upon popular intuition, unaided by such a knowledge of facts and conditions as can be obtained only thru the col¬ lection, analysis, and interpretation of complex factual data by rigidly scien¬ tific methods. Some of the bureaus of governmental research have served this need for particular communities, altho the quality of their work has been vari¬ able and not always sufficiently high for the purpose. An opportunity of the first magnitude for the foundations, for the great universities, and for any philanthropist who desires a worthy object for his support, is the defi¬ nite promotion of scientific governmental research, with the objective of informing and educating the people upon the matters of policy which they must decide. While it cannot be said that we have proved democracy to be completely successful, it does not follow that we have utterly failed. Beyond doubt we can improve it materially, if we are willing to accept some of the devices which will unquestionably improve its operation. These measures of im¬ provement are the more important during a severe economic depression, when the people have become a suspicious and panic-stricken mob, when the facts in the situation are so complex as almost to defy orderly analysis, and when the populace visits political retribution indiscriminately upon the deserving and the undeserving. The depression challenges us to show that we have the qualities of which an enduring democracy is made. The social psychologists have long been aware of the force of the social group, and of the ease with which group impulses induce an abdication of the reason in favor of the emotions. Our growing social solidarity, result¬ ing from population increase and the extensive facilities for communication, compels us to reckon more and more with the psychology of crowds or mobs. W e are constantly challenged to fight for our individual sanity and common sense against the pressure of the mob mind. During the years 1927 and 1928 we had to fight against the emotional appeal of fabulous riches and the assurance that a new era had come, in which panics were to be no more. Today we must fight to preserve our individual sanity and common sense in face of the mob sentiment that all is lost, that our insti- * 556 National Education Association tutions cannot survive, that the world is headed for social chaos. Democ¬ racy is continually challenged by this emergence of the mob spirit. If we would successfully control ourselves during adversity, we must learn equally to control ourselves during prosperity, for the excesses of one period in¬ evitably lead to the excesses of the other. The present serious conflict of debtor and creditor interests illustrates the point. A tragic incident of the depression is that thousands of persons have lost their small equities in property thru mortgage foreclosure. But in very many cases the original ghastly mistake was made by the lenders, in the days of prosperity, when they loaned without caution, upon inflated values, upon utterly indefensible estimates of continued earning capacity, simply because money conditions were easy. Fortunately the creditor in¬ terests, under the leadership of the great insurance companies, are acting now to correct the suicidal folly of wholesale foreclosure proceedings. It remains to be seen whether they will go further in recognition of their equality of guilt with the borrowers in creating a mortgage debt situation which has now become intolerable. The historical record of economic depressions indicates that they recur with more or less regularity. Each generation reacts and behaves under the impact, however, as if the current catastrophe were as unique and un¬ paralleled as the Flood. Our fathers lived thru a severe depression after 1893, and our grandfathers lived thru a severe depression after 1873. They had their false rumors and alarms, their economic ghost stories, and they encountered the unreasoning fear complex. The historical parallel should suggest, not fatalism but resolution in holding fast while the storm blows. All of our experience reveals that this storm will pass. Our sanity and our common sense are challenged to carry on in that spirit rather than yield to demoralizing fears. Anything that challenges a quality of which we have boasted as much as we have over our organizing ability, touches us on a very tender spot. Our great industries, our vast system of transportation and communication, our far-flung commerce are the evidences of our genius for organization. Our overblown pride in and our unceasing advertising of this ability have seemed almost justified by the results. It is no accident that in the eyes of all Russians, Henry Ford is the greatest of all great Americans. Perhaps it is a tribute to our organizing capacity that there should be after nearly four years of depression, as much economic activity and em¬ ployment as we now have, altho the available estimates of unemployment ratios indicate a higher proportion of employable workers out of work in the United States than in other industrialized countries. The core and es¬ sence of our problem is in the fact that some millions of our able-bodied citizens lack employment and the means of selfsupport. Whether the funda¬ mental difficulty be overproduction or underconsumption need not now detain us. The fact which we cannot escape is that we have this enormous amount of unemployment. We also have vast resources, many idle factories, and great quantities of foodstuffs rotting on the farms or being sold at ruinous prices for lack of buyers. Department of Superintendence 557 Here is a most direct and definite challenge. 1 hus far, we have re¬ sponded to it emotionally rather than rationally. That is, we have elabo¬ rated plans for relief in order to spare ourselves the national reproach that any should starve in the midst of the plenty that surrounds them. We have taxed, and borrowed, and campaigned for private contributions. We have created great corporations and provided them lavishly with funds for relief and rehabilitation. But thruout we have sought to solve the problem of emergency relief and unemployment by compelling those who remain at work to carry the unemployed instead of emphasizing the development of means whereby the unemployed could again support themselves thru their own work. While our relief efforts are the very highest tribute to our sympathy and charity, and to our recognition of the underlying bond of our human brotherhood, they are a serious, reflection upon our intelligence and our organizing capacity. They constitute at best an oblique rather than a direct attack on the unemployment problem. They emphasize the dis¬ position, already too much in evidence, to lean heavily upon government instead of upon individual initiative. A colleague of mine, Professor Frank D. Graham, has outlined the essentials of a program whereby the unem¬ ployed workers and the idle factories may be brought together for the sup¬ port of the otherwise unemployed workers themselves. Since these workers would be supporting one another, they would not affect adversely the ordi¬ nary market and price situation, nor would they be competing with those who still have employment. Fortunately, the essential principle of this suggestion is already being applied in hundreds of communities. Barter exchange has appeared from one end of the country to the other. It is solving the problem of existence for between 500,000 and 1,000,000 persons, and it is accomplishing this result by providing the opportunity of working. Workers and capital goods, otherwise idle, are being brought together in the normal economic rela¬ tionship. The plumber with the toothache and the dentist with a leaky bathroom have discovered that money is not essential to an interchange of services. In many places scrip and certificates of different sorts have ap¬ peared, however, to facilitate the direct exchange of goods and services. In endorsing this movement I am not arguing against government aid or leadership, but rather for a broadening of the emphasis in the relief program. Public funds are unquestionably necessary, and will probably con¬ tinue to be necessary for some time to come. The dispensing of government aid, however, involves no quid pro quo. The recipients get the relief, in cash or in goods, with neither the incentive nor the obligation to render an equiva¬ lent in return. Whether we continue the dole system until it becomes en¬ trenched as a vested right, or embark upon a stupendous program of public works, the funds for supporting one-third of our people must come from the diminished income of the other two-thirds, unless we also recognize the fundamental necessity of enabling the unemployed to help themselves. The barter exchange movement will probably flourish best if it develops from below. That is, it should develop locally and not by an act of Congress 558 National Education Association or a state legislature. But it does need and deserve encouragement, general recognition, the kind of publicity and promotion that can come only from the endorsement and support of prominent business leaders and public offi¬ cials. If the state relief organizations were to devote some of their effort to the promotion of the local nuclei of the barter exchange movement, and to securing its acceptance on a wider scale thru the coordination of the separate local units, they would be emphasizing the return to normal economic proc¬ esses, and they could eventually lessen their demands upon the working members of the community. What is vastly more important, they would thus contribute to the preservation of the morale and self-respect which can be sustained only by giving an equivalent in labor for one’s means of support. Here is a challenge to organizing capacity which comes home to every member of this audience. You can, in your several communities, aid or lead in the formation of local barter exchanges, and in the integration of these units as they appear, and thus strike a body blow at the depression. The depression brings its peremptory challenge also against our financial capacity. We must face it in the field of private finance, and as well in the field of government finance. One theory of the depression is that it is primarily financial, and not economic, in character. It is held that in an economic, as distinguished from a financial sense, our situation was never better. We have an immense capi¬ tal equipment, used only in part. We have a large number of available, well- trained workers. We have a surplus of foodstuffs and raw materials. More¬ over, the health of the people is good. While there is some under-nourish¬ ment, it has not yet become so serious as to bring outbreaks of the diseases characteristic of prolonged dietary deficiencies, such as scurvy and beri-beri. The nation’s death rate has never been lower in the history of our vital sta¬ tistics. On the other hand, our financial condition is said to be deplorable, and our troubles are laid mainly to this condition. But looking at the facts of our financial equipment and resources objec¬ tively, it is apparent that financially as well as economically, the country is in excellent condition. True, there are sections in which the proportion of bank failures has been heavy, indicating the need for higher standards of bank management and regulation. Relatively the heaviest losses from bank fail¬ ures occurred among the small weak state banks not associated with the Federal Reserve system. Viewing the country as a whole, however, our financial situation seems quite as favorable as our economic situation. The Federal Reserve banks have enormous resources; the member banks have almost no indebtedness at the Federal Reserve banks; on the contrary, they now have large excess reserve deposits. Both the Reserve banks and their member banks are in a highly liquid position. The decline in bank deposits has been checked, and some banks are discouraging further savings deposits. The loans to brokers are now negligible in amount. The Federal Reserve note issue has risen to about two and three-fourths billion dollars. The re¬ discount rate is favorable and member bank discount rates are easy. All in all, the banks were never in better condition to support active business opera- Department of Superintendence 559 tions than at present. In fact, we have a favorable economic situation and a favorable banking situation. What prevents the two parts of our economic machine from meshing? If one could really answer this question he would have a fairly complete explanation of the phenomenon which we know as a depression. It can be asserted with some confidence, however, that the explanation is in substantial degree psychological. Our economic and financial machinery are out of gear because, as a people, we have yielded to the mob mind, we have lost some¬ thing of our sanity as individuals, we have accepted at face value every wild rumor and every economic ghost story, however grotesque or unreasonable they may be. The Federal Reserve Board’s calculations of the velocity of deposit cur¬ rency circulation demonstrate the congealing effect of the fear complex. From 1923 to 1925 the total volume of bank deposits turned over from 26 to 32 times annually. By 1929 the velocity of turnover had risen to 45, but in 1930 it had declined to 30, and in the last quarter of 1932 to 16. The temperature of our economic system has been dropping to absolute financial zero. How or where the fear complex is to be broken, no one can say. On more than one occasion in the past a recovery of commodity prices has been the signal, and there is no question that a positive upward price movement now would go far toward the restoration of confidence. Our greatest difficulty is the lack of certain and comprehensive knowledge, and the absence of an im¬ partial, scientific agency for supplying information on vital economic matters, free from the taint of propaganda or commercialism. I have suggested a way of getting unbiased information of this kind for the people, as an essen¬ tial aid to the better functioning of democracy. I insist that we would do better to set about the establishment of such an agency or agencies than to wait for some providential event or the off-hand, happy inspiration of a super-man. In the field of government finance we are challenged to establish reason¬ able and rational control of the cost of government. A demonstration of our ability to deal with this problem would go far to quicken public confidence, as well as to lessen the restrictive influence now exerted by enormous tax loads. I can indicate here only a few of the fundamental elements in expenditure, control. In the first place, we must simplify and coordinate our govern¬ mental structure. Proposals in this direction have thus far met a solid wall of resistance. After twenty-five years of discussion and agitation by Pro¬ fessor Merriam, Cook County and Chicago remain one of the horrible ex¬ amples of chaos in local organization. Two years ago we surveyed and described the conditions in New Jersey which harked back to the “horse and buggy” age. We were complimented on the reports, but there was no further • response. The sacrifice of efficiency to political expediency in the efforts to* reform the federal organization are well known. 560 National Education Association In the second place, we must learn to adjust our financial plans and pro¬ grams to the exigencies of the business or economic cycle. A review of the federal financial policy, for example, reveals that it has been established, ap¬ parently, upon the assumption of an indefinite continuance of prosperity. The revenues of each year must cover all of the expenditures for the year, regardless of their character or of revenue conditions. The federal expendi¬ tures for the fiscal year 1932 included nearly a billion dollars for capital im¬ provements and advances to provide the capital funds of relief corporations operating in aid of self-liquidating enterprises, but these capital expenditures were not segregated from the current expenses in announcing the deficit for the year. 4 his was unnecessarily confusing and alarming, for it implied a more serious condition of the federal finances than in fact existed. It is one thing for a family to run behind on the grocery bill, and quite another for it to show a deficit because a house has been bought with borrowed money. Similarly, it makes quite a difference to imply that the federal government cannot meet its current expenses, as distinguished from the enormous ex¬ penditures for capital purposes. Again, the Treasury during these years borrowed the money that was paid into the sinking fund for the retirement of debt, thereby increasing still fur¬ ther the nominal deficit. Borrowing to pay off debts is an exceedingly slow way of financial salvation. Our plight must be desperate indeed when we throw this kind of make-believe baby to the wolves of financial chaos. A further evidence of the extent to which our federal finances have been geared to the assumption of indefinite prosperity is found in the record of the federal revenue system. After 1921 the federal revenue base was steadily narrowed. Indirect taxes were eliminated or reduced; the income tax rates were reduced, while the ridiculous capital gain and loss provisions were re¬ tained; the states were given an 80 percent credit against the estate tax; custom tariff rates were advanced with the deliberate intention of excluding imports and thus of drying up this source of revenue. It is small wonder that the Treasury finds itself embarrassed during a depression for which the federal revenue system made absolutely no provision. In the third place we must learn how to determine, by independent methods, what the government services ought to cost, and how to make ad¬ justments in these services when it becomes necessary to effect retrenchments. In order to do this, we must develop standards for determining the quantity and the quality of our governmental services. Further, we must establish an acceptable priority in these services, as a procedure for securing the most effective retrenchment at least social cost, if and when a severe reduction of public expenditures becomes necessary. In some states we now have the spectacle of the schools being closed for lack of funds, while the expenditure of funds dedicated to highway purposes continues with little or no abatement. Our new economic and social frontiers are international as well as national. It was conclusively established in 1914 that an apparently local event in an obscure European village could lead to worldwide complications. We did nothing in 1914 to aid in preserving the peace of the world, and we are Department of Superintendence 561 doing our best to pussyfoot around most of the powder and lighted match situations which now menace it. We are ready, evidently, to throw the Philippines into the lap of Japan. We have lost much of our influence in South American affairs. We have steadily refused to join the League of Nations and give to that organization the support which it needs and de¬ serves in its efforts to maintain sanity in world affairs. We have even been blind to our own immediate, selfish economic interests. We have refused to recognize our position as a first rank creditor nation, by making it impossible to realize on our own foreign investments in the only way by which foreign debtors can pay, namely thru a larger volume of world trade. We have encouraged great export industries, only to find their prod¬ ucts excluded from foreign markets in retaliation for our own excesses in tariff rates. Now we are supporting the employees of these industries by the dole. Our farmers are losing their farms and burning their wheat for fuel ; but the Food Research Institute at Stanford University informs me that for some time Germany has had a law requiring a certain proportion of potato flour in all bread, while in some other sections of Europe the bread is worse than it was during the darkest days of the war. It is incomprehensible that anyone could contemplate the economic growth of the forty-eight states of our union, comprising as they do the largest free trade market in the world, and not appreciate the advantages to be gained from a freer movement of goods in international trade. It is equally incom¬ prehensible that anyone should, in the face of this evidence, give support to the proposals that have been advanced in some states for boycotting inter¬ state exchange of goods and seeking to make one state economically inde¬ pendent of the others. Such proposals are strong evidence of sheer economic illiteracy. They may well stand as a warning against the amount of eco¬ nomic superstition and witchcraft that yet abound. They reveal that the desert and mountain country of our economic frontiers are not to be too easily traversed. However lengthy the catalogue of the dangers and difficulties that may lie before, it should not discourage us. The early pioneers knew about the hostile Indians. They knew of the Jornado muerte, as the Spaniards called the dry crossing on the Santa Fe trail. They knew of the toil over the moun¬ tains. If they were not discouraged, shall we, who have benefited so much from their sacrifices, admit our fear or our inability to face the challenge of our own times ? THE IMMINENCE OF SOCIAL CHANGE, THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON A PRICE SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION 1 HOWARD SCOTT, NEW YORK, N. Y. A century ago in this country we had a population of slightly over 12,- 000,000. In the next 100 years that population grew to where it is now over 122,000,000, an increase of tenfold in the century. In 1830 we were consuming in this country less than 75 trillion British thermal units of 1 Stenographic report, not edited by author. 562 National Education Association extraneous energy per annum. In 1929 we consumed slightly less than 27,000 trillion British thermol units of extraneous energy, an increase of three-hundred-fifty-three fold in the century. Back at that time the first Tom Thumb railway locomotive was intro¬ duced, a little perambulator on wheels, driven by steam. We have gone a long way from there to the K-l and the Diesel electric for our motive power on modern railroad transportation. On the Rutherford Division of the Reading Railroad thirty years ago we were hauling 1100 to 1200 tons, with a six-man crew, and making that run in sixteen to twenty-four hours, stopping to coal and water twice. We doubled that tonnage in the next thirty years, but in 1929 and 1930 the K-l type came in. We now haul 7500 tons with a five-man crew and make the run, without stopping to coal or water, in four to six hours. The same progression is witnessed in practically every field of human endeavor, whether it is glass bottles, shoes, steel rails, tin cans, textiles. The acceleration of technological procedures is increasing in time. Our population, as I have pointed out, increases, as we say, as the square of time; all production increases as the cube; debt as to the fourth, and con¬ sumption of energy to the eighth power in time. Therefore, you are build¬ ing up a national situation which, reduced to simple terms, means that you are increasing your productivity and your debt faster than your population, and are putting your goods in “hock” faster than you produce them. In this century of progress thru which we have just passed, we have seen probably the most astounding development of material invention, dis¬ covery, and its application in the social world. We have now reached the point where our productive capacity of this country is so huge, if operated at a continuous load factor, that we possess no possible means, under a price system, of distributing sufficient purchasing power to distribute the prod¬ ucts and services of that physical mechanism. At the same time that we have created the most magnificent producing equipment in the history of man, we have also run up the most terrific debt load of any social structure, over $218,000,000,000 of debt claims against the physical equipment of this country. Our unemployment is now over 15,000,000 which means, of course, that we have 40,000,000 people without any visible means of livelihood. We express it in an engineering way that the man hours per unit produced are declining as T to minus fourth, so that you will witness a further and further substitution of energy for man hours as technological procedures progress. Under a price system, that means further complications. We are vainly trying to seek solutions for the burdens and loads already placed upon our social structure. The solutions are many and varied, that is those that are offered. But they fall within the category of cure-alls, in that they deal mostly with balancing the budget, sound money, political legerdemain, and financial chicanery. Under a price system you only create monetary wealth when you create debt ; you possess nothing of value unless it constitutes a debt claim against Department of Superintendence 563 the community or social system in which you live. In the creation of debt, naturally your primary interest is in building up a greater and greater pile of debt on which to expect annual accruals. So that our national in¬ come, under a price system, is therefore, represented by the total amount of debt claims in existence. Seventy-six percent of all large incomes are reinvested in industry. There has to be reinvestment in industry or it could not expand. In order for that to continue, industry would have to expand 5 percent per annum, or more, in order to act as a reservoir for the annual accrual from the debt certificates of large income holders. When you stop to think that one man produced relatively little a century ago, and 150 years ago his production had' not altered very much from that of 5000 years ago, we technologists point out that social change did not occur from Pericles until James Watt. By that we mean that the rate of doing work was practically constant or, as the physicists would say, socially we were in a steady state of doing work. Man, while possessing a high metabolic efficiency of almost 40 percent, nevertheless has a low rate of output, equivalent, on the average, to 1,500,- 000 foot pounds per eight-hour day, or about equal to the output of a one-tenth horsepower electric motor. The Watt engine, in its maximum size, multiplied the output rate of the human being 234,000 times. That maintained up to the late nineties. Today we have engines of conversion of 300,000 horsepower, or 9,000,000 times the output rate of the human being; 8,776,000 feet of this rate oc¬ curred since the year 1900. In the machine exhibit of the textile industry last week was a machine that would turn out 54 square yards of knit silk per machine, per hour. One man can tend to four such machines. That output is a 600 percent increase over 1920, and 300 percent increase over 1930. One man is capable now of doing over 1600 square yards of knit silk in an eight-hour day. When you contemplate that in 1929 this country produced over 22,000,- 000,000 tin cans in that year, and that Campbell Soup Company, the largest consumer of tin containers in the world, used up 500,000,000 cans to can their tomato soup alone, you see that the order of magnitude of our indus¬ trial problems has reached such a point that you cannot think in terms of local areas or villages, counties or states; but you must consider the problem from that of a continental order of magnitude. When Colonel Drake punched that 200-foot hole thru the earth’s crust at Titusville in 1859, he started another progression. Up until now we have drilled slightly less than 900,000 oil wells in this country and produced approximately 15,000,000,000 barrels of oil. In 1900 we produced 63,000,- 000 barrels of oil, and by 1929 we had reached 1,000,000,000 barrels per annum. Of course, in order to continue such rate of production, we would have to discover oil, that is potential reserves, at the rate of 1,300,000,000 bar¬ rels per annum in order to produce 1,000,000,000 barrels for use. 564 National Education Association All of these things bring up questions of how we are going to handle our¬ selves in the very near future. The manner of arriving at decisions from the time of Pericles to today, socially, has not changed. We still do it on the basis of counting noses, quite contrary to the method used by the scientist, technologist, and engineer in the determination of any functional sequence. From the data at hand, it appears that we cannot long continue to handle 1,000,000,000 installed horsepower of prime movers in this country, the tremendous producing capacity that we have, with the old system of con¬ trol, and the old system of evaluating human beings and of distributing pur¬ chasing power upon the basis of individual participation of man hours. Technocracy points out that if the total producing equipment of this con¬ tinent were operated at a continuous load factor of the most efficient equip¬ ment now available, not depending upon that which may be invented but that which is in existence today, that it would only require of adults be¬ tween the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, 660 hours of effort a year ; and that would guarantee livelihood until death. But you could take a holiday and retire after you are forty-five and still draw your income. In other words, what the engineer is trying to point out today is that the political equality, religious freedom, and civil rights were all right when our forefathers adopted the Constitution of this country, but they adopted that Constitution in the days of ox-carts, spades, and other obsolete equipment. Today we have reached a point where it is not necessary, and it is quite futile to discuss the social structure and social function in terms of subjectives. Technology has proceeded so far that for the first time in the social his¬ tory of man, this continent, under a technological control, can guarantee security to all inhabitants of this continent, from Panama to the Pole and Hawaii to Bermuda, guarantee a security until death; and a quality of in¬ come so high that you would have considerable difficulty spending it within the allotted balance load period for which it was issued. We cannot go on very much further because we are going to witness more moratoriums, both of mortgages and of our general financial situation ; and as more mora¬ toriums are declared, the freezing process, of course, spreads ; and as the freezing process spreads in one field, other fields will demand that their assets also be frozen in order to have self-protection. All of this leads to a more tenuous and a more striking condition than faces us even now. All discussion of sound money is being indulged in by those who will benefit by inflation. We have been in a deflationary process since the socalled debacle. In that deflationary process we have been liqui¬ dating and writing down, and then there was the customary process of mop¬ ping up. But those people forgot that when you conduct a deflationary process upon a large scale, you wipe out millions of prospective customers, and what you liquidate and foreclose on, ceases to be an asset and becomes a deficit. Department of Superintendence 565 Inflation, of course, is only a temporary palliative. To you of the educa¬ tional industry, it will be merely another deflationary move; and to all people who draw salaries, w^ages or small incomes, because you cannot ob¬ tain currency fast enough, nor have you sufficient credit to go into debt. Therefore, the purchasing power of what you receive will be deflated in proportion to the inflation, by the time you receive it; that is, inflation is a process of deflating the worker, the salaried man, the professional man, you might say, the entire middle class. I only have to point to Germany to show you the effects of what happened there in the process of inflation. I should like to touch upon another side of it. The scientist, the technol¬ ogist, and the engineer have been changing the functional sequences or the technic of the means whereby we live in this country, and will continue to do so. We are substituting extraneous energy for man hours on the basis that 1,500,000 foot pounds equals eight hours of any man’s time. That is a process, a progression, which, once started, is uni-directional and irrevers¬ ible. By that we mean that you cannot go back to pre-machine or pre- technological ways of life. It took ninety-six man hours to spade an acre of land. The tractor does it in .088 man hours, or over 1000 to 1. There are similar ratios in the com¬ bine. We would like to see you go back to the old method of making shoes or bottles. Today, with the requirements which we have, a machine will produce 64,000 gross in twenty-four hours. Cigarets in the last three years have jumped from 560 a minute to 2600 a minute, yet that is but a drop in the bucket to what could be done. There is no reason to suppose that we could not achieve within the next twenty years almost as great an acceleration as we have in the last thirty; but it cannot be done under this system because you have no means of distributing the purchasing power sufficient to keep the physical equipment running, without throwing it into oscillation from peaks to very low valleys. In 1893, taking the curve of pig iron, we dropped around 21 percent; in 1907, slightly over 30; in 1920, over 50, and today, over 80. I am trying to point out here that the oscillations are increasing in frequency and in amplitude of time as they do. As they do increase, therefore, it becomes socially more unstable. We have a structure, of course, where we elect everybody, on the basis of popular acclaim, from geographical divisions, without any regard to the functional capacity of either the individual or of the changing capacity of the country. The technologists of education, you might say, are the fabricators of the conceptual equipment of human beings with which they deal with the physical world. It is thru that conceptual equipment or conceptual fur¬ niture, if you like it better, that the human being deals with this physical equipment and functional sequence which the engineer has set up. The engineer, in changing these functional sequences, has up till today worked like everybody else, because he had to ; his main concern was doing a good job, and he hoped that at the same time his boss or his corporation would 566 National Education Association continue to improve. The scientists and technologists and engineers have given no concern until lately. Science has been a matter of the cloisters, something in which you indulged and poked around with at your leisure in the universe, wherever and whenever you felt like it. Due to our creation of energy-consuming devices, we have built up an objective for science, an objective which we cannot in any way avoid or desert, and that is the ca¬ pacity of any given area of the world’s surface to operate the maximum number of energy-consuming devices in that area in time. Copernicus, Galileo, and others removed man from being the center of the universe and placed him on a rotating globe, rather distant from the center of the universe. Darwin came along with Weismann, Haeckel, Men¬ del, and proved that man was kin to all other organic life. We technologists wish to point out that man is not only kin to other organic species but he is kin to every energy-consuming device, whether it be organic or inorganic; and that the rates of growth of energy-consuming devices on a particular area are of fundamental importance to any social structure. They have risen to a point in this country where we can no longer go on juggling the debt pieces in the new deal and hope to get anywhere. We have to deter¬ mine how many energy-consuming devices are going to operate on that area in time, at what factor of efficiency, and at what load factor of operation. This means, of course, that it can only be done under a form of tech¬ nological control and not under a hit-and-miss, laissez-fairre theory of get- what-you-can-when-the-going-is-good. So we say to the educators that new conceptual equipment must be devised to take care of the changing rate of functional sequences, a new technological idealism, if you wish, which for the first time holds forth a concrete and finite objective for this continent, an objective not stated in philosophic preconceptions but in terms of func¬ tional results. In other words, I think that it is time and that we have sufficient energy resources, mineral resources, soil, and precipitation. We have the greatest personnel in the matter of trained technologists and engineers, over 400,000, and over 4,000,000 competent mechanics capable of operating the greatest array of producing equipment ever at the disposal of man. The educational sequence is even larger in numbers. Therefore, it is only a question of time, if present conditions continue, when all those of functional capacity, whether they be in a health department or an edu¬ cational division or in a steel plant, will be called upon to operate the pro¬ ductive and distributive facilities and services of this continent. 4 echnocracy, therefore, proposes that there be entente between those of the educational field, those of the scientific and technical field of this coun¬ try, and all others in labor and in industry of functional capacity. We must lealize that the day is not far distant, at the trends we are now traveling on, when we shall be called upon to decide these issues, not on the basis of the shuffling of debt pieces, not on the basis of foreign trade or of interna¬ tional war debts or the League of Nations, but of men and things in this country. You cannot laugh off 15,000,000 unemployed and 40,000,000 Department of Superintendence 567 people on the verge of a bread-line. At the present trend, it will not be long until you have 20,000,000 unemployed. This is not a message of doom or chaos; far from it. To us, it is a mes¬ sage of hope. For the first time in a century, the human beings on this con¬ tinent are being compelled to have lucid intervals. If it were not for the starvation and deprivation, I would say another three years would be even more beneficial. But the only thing about that is we are running too close to where the oscillations make it so unstable that we have interruptions. From that point of view I should like to point out that this change is coming whether we like it or not ; whether we assist or not. Like all periods of change, you can take one of two attitudes : One, as a fabricator of con¬ ceptual equipment, is attempting to devise conceptual equipment and fur¬ niture that is capable of dealing with these changing conditions. If you as¬ sume that attitude you will be moving forward, we hope, comparable with the rate of acceleration. The other attitude is to adopt the shabby toler¬ ance of liberalism and proceed to straddle the fence in defense of an obso¬ lete and outworn piece of junk known as the price system. What happens in the second case is that the intellectual liberal can never make up his mind. He is afraid of a decision. He is always looking for a man on horseback, that is he will be thought to be a man on horseback by the general public, but he does not really want a man on horseback for himself; he wants a moron on a jackass. There are those two alternatives facing you today. The second one is probably easier, safer, and less arduous, up to a certain period. After that it is quite different. I may point out that Kerensky was one of the great liberals of Russia. He finally went out of Russia in the uniform of a common sailor, in the automobile of the American embassy, bound for a foreign country. I may say that on this continent, if conditions ever reach such a point, there. will be no other country to migrate to. It will be rather hard to get off the con¬ tinent. So that you are faced with the proposition of either providing an objective for the youth of the new America, and, at the same time, security, by which all of the human values may be released ; or, if you adopt the other attitude, the youth of today, the adults of the new America of tomorrow, will hold you responsible, those of you who straddle that fence in defense of that piece of junk, and may God have mercy on your soul ! EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY JESSE H. NEWLON, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AND DIRECTOR OF LINCOLN SCHOOL, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. The American system of education was built not alone on the faith of the people but on wealth created by modern technology. In the confusion of these chaotic years one fact stands out sharply, clearly discerned by all who have eyes to see the direction in which the powerful currents of con- 568 National Education Association temporary life are moving. We shall have more, not less, education in America. Schools and other educational agencies will be greatly expanded. Where a million teachers are required today, two million professional work¬ ers in education will be required tomorrow. It is a fact of profound significance that our system of free public educa¬ tion had its origin a hundred years ago when the industrial revolution was gaining its first great momentum in America. In the two decades that wit¬ nessed the first railroads, the appearance of the reaper, the sewing machine, the rotary press, the electric telegraph, and many other notable inventions, and the rapid extension of steamship lines and factories, the great battle for free public education was won. The development of schools kept pace with the conquest of the continent, the opening up of its great natural resources, and the development of its industries. The twentieth century demands many highly skilled technicians and a very high level of technical and social intelli¬ gence among all the people. As Mr. Howard Scott has pointed out, the ox cart is of simple design and even a stupid person may drive it. The Twentieth Century Limited and the airplane are of complex design, and only highly skilled pilots of steady nerve can safely drive them. Roadways for automobile traffic must be constructed with mathematical precision. The political and economic system of Jackson’s day were relatively simple. Today political and economic processes have become so vast and so complicated that they are manageable only by the most comprehensive and expert knowledge. Indeed, the threatened collapse of our economic system is obviously due to a lack of the intelligence and character which its operation requires. If we cannot supply this deficiency, then we must confess utter defeat by the machine. Technical knowledge commensurate with this social task must be supplied. Education, indispensable to industrialism, has not kept pace with social change. With elementary education compulsory, over half of the youth of high- school age are today in secondary schools. More than a million are enrolled in institutions of higher learning. Attendance upon secondary schools con¬ tinues to mciease even in depression years. Tens of thousands of high-school graduates, unable to find employment, are returning for postgraduate work. What is the meaning of all this? It means that the same technology that demands for its operation an abundance of expertness and a wide diffusion of knowledge makes the labor of these youth for productive purposes not only unnecessary but impossible. Mr. Roosevelt has accepted 3,000,000 as the best estimate of the number of unemployed in the last year of prosperity, and the new President believes a return to the prosperity of the late twenties will see five million now unemployed still without work, so amazing has been the recent advance in labor-saving processes and machinery. Effective utilization of technical knowledge and the energy resources of this continent can have but one result, an enormous increase in the flow of commodities and a decrease in the requiremeents of man power. Productive labor by the young and the old will not only not be required but the hours of labor of all workers will continue to decrease. Universal education in schools or Department of Superintendence 569 elsewhere to age twenty and an extensive program of adult education requir¬ ing the cooperation of innumerable cultural agencies are as inevitable for this country as tomorrow’s sunrise. What this extensive educational pro¬ gram will be we cannot now predict in detail. It is sufficient for our purpose to establish clearly this educational implication of modern technology. If there still be doubting Thomases, let them not forget that no other nation is so nearly self-contained and so rich in agricultural, mineral, and actual and potential forest resources. Surely no people is more energetic and industrious than the American people schooled in the traditions and adventure of the frontier. Modern technology with its marvelous process of continuous mass production — the amazing force that evokes rich crops from the soil and transmutes raw materials into consumable goods — must: be accounted one of our greatest resources. Surely there is no reason for pessi¬ mism or despair in America. We have only to use these resources. It is high time that we eradicate the ignorance and curb the selfishness that stand in the way. Science must be made free to work its wonders for the benefit of all. Unless these great resources can be harnessed to the general welfare, democracy will become a hissing and a byword. Government in America is today in many respects as little suited to a complex urban-industrial civilization as the transportation system of Wash¬ ington’s time would be to the conditions of today. Government activities have been tremendously expanded. In some departments government is effi¬ cient. In most areas it is confused and incompetent. In the improvement of productive processes Americans are radical. We think nothing of dis¬ carding a process or a machine, or tearing down a great building, to make way for a better machine, a more effective process, or a larger and more con¬ venient structure. With regard to political ideas we are most conservative. Government today is creaking under the pressure of powerful forces with which it was never designed to cope, but in political affairs we are afraid of change. As Professor Merriam points out in the report on Recent Social T rends : In business and in mechanical enterprise the general attitude has been that of free and welcome experiment, but the opposite has been true in governmental affairs, where the weight of tradition has been more heavily felt and where pro¬ posals for change have been identified with treason to the state. National, state, and municipal governments need to be reconstructed to cope with modern conditions. Many of our administrative units and pro¬ cedures belong to the age of the stage-coach and canal boat, and not to the age of the airplane and radio. The slow process of piecemeal repair may be totally inadequate to prevent virtual if not complete collapse. Why should we hesitate to take bold measures in political affairs? Constitutional con¬ ventions are needed. Professor Merriam quotes this sentence from the report of the famous Lusk Committee of New York state: No person who is not eager to combat the theories of social change should be entrusted with the task of fitting the young and old of the states for responsibilities pjF citizenship. 570 National Education Association Such a doctrine is nothing short of a social menace. Technology places upon the school the responsibility of education for orderly social change. Our economic ideas largely derive from a period that antedated modern power machinery. Production has become corporate. “Competition, the life of trade” does not fit modern conditions. It does not take a highly sophisticated economist to see this. Indeed some economists seem unable to understand it, bound as their thinking is by old formulae and stereotypes. The American people need to understand the economic concepts and ideas pertinent to the machine age. Our antiquated economic machinery has got to be revamped. Engineers assure us that if all our technical knowledge were applied, poverty could be banished and an abundance of goods supplied for all. Away with the notion that teachers must keep silent with regard to these conditions known to all men! It is time for discerning men and truly patriotic citizens to speak their minds. All this assumes that we still wish to accept the old American ideals of equality of opportunity, of social and economic justice, in a word — democ¬ racy. The democratic principle demands that no individual or group be exploited by another individual or group. It certainly demands a more equitable distribution of the national income. The conditions of poverty under which millions live today are simply intolerable under American ideals. Many conceive democracy to be a form of government. They lose sight of its deeper moral and social implications, while they cling to the mere forms of government as though they were the realities. The right to cast a ballot is of little value to a man who is utterly unable to find a job. There are millions like that today. To them political democracy must seem a horrible illusion. But who shall control and direct technology? This is an educational and social problem of the deepest import. The answer to that question will give direction to all education in the future. In the beginning it must be empha¬ sized that the factor of safety is very narrow. The overturning of an ox cart was not a serious matter. If the Twentieth Century Limited is derailed, much damage is done. The margin of safety in the management of govern¬ ment affairs was very large at a time when the social and economic system was relatively simple and virtually static. The limits of safety in the direc¬ tion and control of our delicately balanced social system are very small indeed. The efficient operation of this system demands the highest technical competence, but Americans have been afraid of expertness. In government they have worshiped at the shrine of the great god, Mediocrity. They have fervently acted on the belief that one man is as good as another. In the moral realm and in social relationships this doctrine is the very essence of democracy. But its application in the affairs of government and in the man¬ agement of our industrial system can mean only disaster. Government, industry, finance are too largely controlled today by men lacking in pro¬ fessional competence, vision, and social ideals. The consequence is mal¬ adjustment, stagnation, depression. Americans must learn the importance of expertness in all departments of life. This means nothing short of the Department of Superintendence 571 transformation of one of the most deep-seated prejudices in the American mind. We must acquire the same respect for expertness in the social realm that we have for expertness in the scientific realm. The technicians who are to direct important social processes must be con¬ trolled. We cannot dodge this problem of control. It is the most funda¬ mental problem in American life. Democracy we accept as basic ; but social and economic democracy, not just the husks of governmental forms long since impotent to cope with the problems of the industrial age. We must, then, apply the principle of expertness and the principle of democracy. This means planning and it means the control of industry for the general welfare. The educational implication is patent. Another social implication with important educational bearings must be considered. The western peoples are passing from an economy of scarcity to an economy of plenty. Industry, thrift, many of the old virtues will be less and less applicable to the world which we are entering. The social problems connected with an abundance of leisure will be tremendous. What values shall be esteemed? For what purposes shall the productive capacities of the new society be used ? What social and institutional arrangement will best serve the good life? What will constitute the good life in the age of plenty? When we ask what are the educational implications of modern technology, many possibilities come to our minds. We may think of the use in the edu¬ cative process of such instruments as the radio, sound pictures, and other mechanical devices. Tho they can never afford a substitute for individual experience, for study and patient inquiry, these technical appliances may work a revolution in educational method. The radio has knit the whole nation into one community. It is a powerful instrument for molding the public mind, tho a dangerous one. But other implications are more funda¬ mental. As I said in the beginning, education will be universal to age twenty, and thruout life, for that matter. Life will become one long process of education. The secrets of the universe and of life will be pursued relent¬ lessly, and the frontiers of knowledge will be pushed farther and farther back. Education to do one’s part in production will be important, but educa¬ tion for living will become relatively of far greater importance in the age of plenty. Two years ago former Ambassador Gerard startled the country with a list of some seventy men, who, he said, controlled America. Educa¬ tion was conspicuous for its absence from that list. But it will not be so when we decide to employ technology for the common good. Then educa¬ tion will occupy an important position in the councils of the nation. Edu¬ cation for living will be the most important business of society. There are other and more immediate implications. We do not as yet know how to get from where we are to our utopia. The transition — that is the big problem. If we follow our present policy of drift, even greater disaster will surely overtake us. We are unable to cope with the problems of industrialism and of the great world society created by the machine be¬ cause the people and most of their leaders still think too much in terms of 572 National Education Association economic individualism. Our immediate task is to give youth and the entire adult population understanding of the twentieth-century industrial society in which they live. I he content of education must be the social concepts and ideas of today and tomorrow. The curriculum of the school must be reconstructed and focused upon contemporary American life. Teacher train¬ ing and the study of education must be redirected in the light of these changed conditions. Nothing is needed so much today as thousands of adult dis¬ cussion groups scattered thruout the nation engaged in the study of the social and economic problems that technology has brought to us. In the remaking of American life, education must take its place as one of the great creative forces in society. It is a vital function of a complex, dynamic, swiftly mov¬ ing social order. When we consider the plight of education today in the light of the facts of modern technology, we see how irrational and short sighted is the present orgy of needless budget cutting. This is the time to spend more, not less, on education. The need for social and economic understanding is desperate. The president of General Motors boasts that his great corporation is spend¬ ing more on research in 1933 than in any year in its history, and yet we have an industrial plant that has scarcely been used to half its capacity and that is operating today at one third or one fourth its capacity. The tragic need of the times is to master the machine. That is the business of politics, and it is the business of education, for education can never be disassociated from our political and social ideals. American education has long thought pri¬ marily in terms of the individual. Technology is forcing it to think in terms of the great society. The times cry out for education for a new, humane society in which all adults will have economic as well as political security. If the million teachers in the country, loyal Americans all of them decide that technology must be used to serve mankind, they will have a host of allies. Have the American people lost their courage? Have our souls shriveled? Have we become so puny that we cannot undertake bold measures? I will not believe such an imputation. We need in America today the realism, the courage, the vision of the Fathers, something of the spirit of 1776 and 1787. I believe that spirit is still alive. Men are thinking deeply today. They will not always tolerate a situation in which men and children go hungry in a land of plenty. American life will be remade as it was in a previous genera¬ tion. Education must teach men how to control the powerful forces which technology has unleashed. With our population stabilized at approximately 170,000,000, as it will be in fifty years, technology can make the American dream of well-being and happiness for all a reality. Childhood and youth will come into their rightful heritage. They will live in comfortable and convenient homes of pleasing design opening out on alluring vistas in beautiful cities designed for the habitation of men, or in the charm of the open country. Generous pro¬ vision will be made for the health and physical well-being of everyone. Large play spaces will be provided in the cities, while all will have access Department of Superintendence 573 to the wild places of the open country. Lovely schools will look out upon pleasant parks. Industry, exchange, government, the arts, social processes and institutions, the rich life of the community will become truly educational for all. With his essential needs supplied, every individual will share fully in the good life. Such an America, once but a dream, is now within our grasp. Will the educational forces of the country accept the challenge ? THE SWORD OVER EDUCATION GLENN FRANK, PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, WIS. I was very much attracted by the repeated use of the word “frontier” in this program. I liked the sense of adventurous advance that it connoted, and yet, since this program was fashioned, the economic and financial plight of the country has become increasingly serious until today, as Mr. Potter sug¬ gested (he did not quote me quite accurately; he never does), I feel much more like speaking about education in a collapsing world than of education for a changing world. Educational leadership today is not so much in the position of having to decide how it will move to the next frontier as to see to it that the stockade on the present frontier is not wholly captured by the Indians. A sword hangs over education thruout the United States. To prevent this sword from sinking to the vitals of the whole enterprise of education, builded of the blood and sacrifice of pioneers, will demand the utmost of statesmanlike cooperation between the leadership of school and the leadership of society. This sword that hangs over education is but sign and symbol of the peril that confronts all of the social and cultural enterprises of our com¬ mon life in this phase of unprecedented depression thru which we and the world are passing. I want to state, with the utmost brevity, just what this peril is and to define, if I can, the problem it puts alike to the leadership of school and to the leadership of society. The sword that hangs over education and the other social enterprises of government is the sword of imperative retrenchment forged in the fires of an irrational depression. The peril lies not so much in the existence of the sword as in the way we wield it. That economy, drastic beyond anything we have been accustomed to think, is imperative in the conduct of local, state, and national affairs no intelligent man will question. Since 1929 our income has gone steadily down and outgo has gone steadily up in its relation to income. The expenditures of local, state, and national government, when related to the toboggan slide down which the national income has raced, have bent the back of the Ameri¬ can people. Either the back must be strengthened or the burden must be lightened. For a nation cannot long endure a consistently falling income and a consistently rising outgo. 574 National Education Association It is confessedly a critical situation that confronts us. In 1931 Americans were putting slightly less than one out of every four dollars of the national income into the enterprises and obligations of local, state, and national gov¬ ernment. When the books of 1932 are fully balanced, we shall probably hnd that at least one out of every three dollars of the national income went into the enterprises and obligations of government. According to the analyses of the National Industrial Conference Board, in 1928 approximately 11 per¬ cent of the national income went into taxes, whereas in 1932, it was estimated some months ago, some 33 percent of the national income went into taxes to carry the enterprises and obligations of government. 1 here are those who would have us believe that this dramatic rise of the tax diaft on national income from 11 percent to 33 percent in fours years is due solely to an unintelligent and unjustified, a wasteful and worthless, development of the public services of organized government. That lie must be nailed at the outset unless public thinking on the scientific, social, and educational enterprises of government is to be gravely muddled and grossly misled. The man in the street, hearing of this rise in the tax draft on national income from 1 1 percent to 33 percent in four years, is all too likely to think that the cost of the public services of government has trebled in that time. Obviously this is not true. Had the national income remained steady at the 1928 level, the tax draft on national income for last year would probably have stood at not more than 18 percent instead of 33 percent, even if all the extraordinary expenditures incurred by depression had been in the picture. The factor that lifted the tax draft on the national income to 33 percent was the dramatic drop in the national income due to the economic muddling that landed us in depression. I am quite aware that this does not remove the stubborn fact that a 33 percent tax draft on national income is a serious matter with which political, social, and economic leadership must wrestle. It does suggest, however, that the blame for the large proportion of the national income now going into taxes cannot justly be placed upon the shoulders of social and educational leadership, but must, to a very material degree, be placed squarely upon the shoulders of the economic leadership that proved incapable of steering our economic ship past the shoals of depression. And now this very leadership that has done most to unbalance the nation’s life is insisting that we shall balance the nation’s budget by plunging a sword into the heart of all those scientific, social, and educational enterprises to which alone we can look to produce a leadership for the future that will be less inept, a leadership that might conceivably use this magnificent machine economy of ours to free the race from drudgery, poverty, and insecurity instead of letting it starve like Midas in the midst of plenty. I, for one, protest the current attempt to make educational leadership the scapegoat for the sins of economic leadership ! Unless this fact is kept clear we shall see an uninterrupted increase in a propaganda that will, with insulting scorn, brand even the most self-sacri¬ ficing public servants as greedy and grasping payrollers. This now popular Department of Superintendence 575 propaganda, if persisted in, will divert men of capacity and self-respect from public service for a generation to come. And it will be our children who will pay the price of this diversion. The most pressing problem now confronting educational leadership is the problem of imperative economy. The gravest peril now confronting educa¬ tional leadership is the peril of irrational budget-making. Educational lead¬ ership will be derelict to its duty if it permits economic leadership, without let or hindrance, to do what it will with local, state, and national budgets. I do not believe that the leadership that led us into depression has earned the right to speak with final authority on the budgetary policies most likely to get us out of depression. Because education’s gravest peril just now lies in irrational budget-making, and because I think it is important that educational leadership concern itself with the broad problem of budget policy in local, state, and national govern¬ ment, I want to speak first of irrational budget-making before I turn to some of the implications of imperative economy. And, since I can speak only by way of illustration, I shall speak only of national budget policy. Now there are three popular assumptions respecting federal finances being sedulously cultivated by certain groups. First, that the present federal deficit threatens the federal credit. Second, that the federal budget must be bal¬ anced at once. Third, that new taxes must be levied and drastic retrench¬ ment effected in order to save the federal credit. I think there is a good deal of hokum in all three of these assumptions. I hesitate to run counter to the counsel of the Baruchs and the Traylors and like business leaders who, in testimony before the Senate’s clinic in economic dislocation, have contended that the road to recovery can be charted on a calling card with the succinct sentence: “Balance the budget.” But I ask very modestly, is this counsel as realistic as it sounds? I speak with some hesitancy respecting the fiscal problem confronting the government because I am but a lay observer of its operations, and I have not followed the fiscal fortunes of the federal government for the last three or four months. I followed with some care the Republican and Democratic discussions of federal finances during the late campaign and tried to check them against available information. Since then I have been so completely absorbed in the relation of the state finances of Wisconsin to the University of which I am executive, that I have not kept federally uptodate. So any¬ thing I say this morning about the Federal budget is subject to check in the light of the happenings of the last three or four months. But certainly as of November last I question much of the budgetary jitters a persistent propaganda has been stirring up. How do those who insist that the federal deficit today threatens the federal credit and that drastic alterations in tax policy and social expenditures must be made in order to preserve the federal credit compute the deficit they are talking about, and what does the deficit they talk about, really represent? As anyone who has made even the most elementary studies of the financial situation knows, there are two popular methods of arriving at the federal 576 National Education Association deficit, used by many of those acting upon the three assumptions I have/ just listed. One method is by noting the rise or fall of the gross federal debt from year to year. Another method is by noting the cash conditions of the federal government on a given date by the simple grocery-store daybook method of checking expenditures against'receipts. Now, granting the technical accuracy of the figures used in statements resting on these two notations, I submit that they do not necessarily give a true picture of the financial status of the government. Let me indicate why such figures standing alone do not. First, take the matter of the gross federal debt: The cold figures on the gross federal debt for the two and one-quarter year period ending last fall were as follows: On June 30, 1930, the gross federal debt stood at $16,185,000,000. Two and one-quarter years later, on September 30, 1932, the gross federal debt stood at $20,611,000,000. These figures indicate a deficiency of $4,426,000,000 or about 4.4 billions. But this cannot be taken as an accurate index of the situation unless we examine two related sets of facts. First, what were the purposes for which this debt increase was in¬ curred ? Were they purposes that should logically be financed out of current income. What were the number and nature of federal assets that might offset that deficiency? Let me mention only one offsetting asset to those figures that many of the budgetary Jeremiahs ignore. When the gross federal debt, in the summer of 1930, was some $16,000,000,000, the net balance in the general fund was only $319,000,000. But when the gross federal debt in the fall of 1932 was some $20,000,000,000, the net balance in the general fund had risen to $862,000,000. In other words, with the offset of the balance in the general fund alone, the asserted deficiency of $4,426,000,000 drops to $3,883,000,000, or a drop from 4.4 billions to 3.8 billions, a difference of $543,000,000, more than one-half billion. It is by ignoring such factors (and I use only this one by way of illustra¬ tion) that an apparent deficit that is far beyond a true deficit can be put up by certain business men to scare legislatures and congresses. If the person alarmed about the condition of federal finances turns from the gross federal debt to the actual cash condition of the federal government on a given date, checking expenditures against receipts, the same uncertainty as to whether he is stating an apparent or a true deficit obtains. It depends upon what is included in his estimate. For the period from July 1, 1930, to September 30, 1932, if the general fund deficits only are considered, they stand at $4,074,000,000. But if all the trust funds and special funds are brought into the picture, the deficit for that period stands at $4,187,000,000. In other words, there is a difference of $113,000,000 in the deficit estimate, depending upon what is included in the estimate, and in many of the supposedly responsible discussions of the federal deficit, you can find the widest variance in what is included. But these variations, due to obscure or obsolete federal bookkeeping, are not the important considerations. The important consideration is whether Department of Superintendence 577 or not there are included in an asserted deficit, expenditures for purposes wnich a rarsighted government should not, in a period of depression, seek to finance by current taxation, by bleeding white the basic services of govern¬ ment, or by withholding valid public works that might at least soften the tragic impact of unemployment. The deficit that is said by some to be threatening the government credit and shaking business confidence does include several such expenditures, expenditures that in my judgment should not be covered now either by a serious rise in taxes or by a serious retrenchment in productive government expenditures. Some of such expenditures that enter into the existing deficit are as follows : (1) public debt retirements of the last two or three years; (2) federal loans and investments, such as the half billion dollar purchase of Reconstruction Finance Corporation stock in 1932; (3), capital outlays, such as the approxi¬ mately one-third billion dollars of public construction in 1931 and in 1932. We shall, in my judgment, deepen the depression if, following the lead of those who think all our ills begin and end in the federal budget, we insist that all expenditures of this sort be lumped with the ordinary expenditures of the current services of government and the total impact be absorbed by a serious rise in taxes and a serious retrenchment in those basic services which alone have made government a stabilizing and creative force. It is my sober judgment, ladies and gentlemen, that the federal credit can be kept sound if as a people we keep our heads and refuse to be rushed by a budgetary hysteria into a wrecking of the scientific, social, and economic services that are the very beating heart of constructive government. It is the part of political wisdom, it seems to me, to spread the load of depressions out over a more prosperous period. Otherwise, relatively speak¬ ing, whenever a serious retardation hits us, we must wreck, in a few years of depression, values and services that will take us a generation to recreate. Balance the budget out of current revenues, with respect to ordinary ex¬ penses? Yes. With respect to extraordinary expenditures, loans, investments, capital outlay, emergency relief, and the like? No. They should be financed out of borrowings and met out of the revenues of a more prosperous time. If now we stop extraordinary expenditures for public work and go re¬ creant to our relief responsibilities, or if we insist upon paying for them out of seriously increased taxes, we shall surely deepen and prolong this depres¬ sion. And if now we cut the heart out of the basic services of government, we shall, in preventing a financial deficit, produce a social deficit for which our children and our grandchildren will damn us. Do not misunderstand me. Upon the imperative necessity for economy in public expenditures there can be no disagreement. I insist only that the situation challenges us to effect that economy with statesmanlike foresight for the future of community, state, and nation. It is possible to be quite as short-sighted in administering economy as in allowing extravagance. And just because there is this possibility of short-sightedness in the adminis¬ tration of necessary economy a grave national danger lurks in our current concern with economy. We can so easily economize blindly or let limited 578 National Education Association interests dictate the schedules of retrenchment. We dare not be. gullible. Alongside the foresight, intelligence, and sincerity behind the insistence that we establish a sounder relation between our income and our outgo, there is much blindness, blundering, self-interest, and sheer insincerity, in the almost hysterical campaign against public expenditures now sweeping the nation. By all means let us give prudence a permanent seat in our public counsels. By all means let us stop waste. But let us be sure that it is real waste that we are stopping. Real economy may mean national salvation. Bogus economy may mean national suicide. I ask you to remember that we could dismantle every federal bureau and stop every civil function of the national government — with the four excep¬ tions of construction, relief, loans for shipbuilding, and the Federal Farm Board— and still reduce the federal budget by only 8 percent. The com¬ plete cost of the legislative, executive, and judicial activities of the federal government absorbs less than two-thirds of one percent of the total federal outlay. Where, then, you may ask does all the money go? Well, for one thing, almost three-fourths of the total expenditures of the federal govern¬ ment go to pay the costs of our current military establishment and to carry the obligations incurred in past wars. That is to say, of every dollar we pay in taxes to the federal government about 75 cents goes into payment for past wars and preparation against future wars. Think of that the next time you are tempted to applaud the blatherskite or jingo who denounces every intelli¬ gent attempt to outlaw war as puling pacifism. The more deeply we analyze the problem of public expenditures, the clearer it becomes that it simply is not the scientific, social, and educational services of the nation that are bending the American back. And yet, thruout the nation, we are trying to balance budgets by cutting the very heart out of the only things that make government a creative social agency. We slash scientific bureaus. We drastically shrink our support of social services. We hamstring our regulatory agencies. We fire visiting nurses. We starve libraries. We reduce hospital staffs. We squeeze education. And we call this economy. And actually think we are intelligent in calling it that. How the gods must be laughing at us! And how our grandchildren will damn us! While we are bleeding white the only things that make government so¬ cially significant, we go gaily on with political and economic policies that are surely setting the stage for further wars and thus fastening securely upon us three-fourths or more of the existing federal budget. And state govern¬ ments thruout the nation are committing the same blind sin. In our states we lay the ax at the root of the tree of all the civilizing agencies evolved dur¬ ing the last half century and at the same time blandly tolerate the multitude of unnecessary and criminally wasteful forms of local government which, essential and unavoidable in the days of bottomless mud roads and the one- horse buggy, are indefensible in this day of good roads, automobiles, tele¬ phones, radio, and the varied new forces that have conquered both time and distance. We could balance our state budget and make unnecessary the sur¬ render or starvation of a single socially significant service if we had the Department of Superintendence 579 vision and courage to effect an intelligent reform of our system of local government. But to effect real economies of that sort is to call for a kind of thought and action we have yet to display. The real issue confronting us is not economy versus extravagance. That question is well on its way to settlement. Leaders who foster extravagance will be broken. The issue is real economy versus bogus economy. The sword that hangs over education and all the other social and cultural enterprises of government is the danger of bogus economy. In the achievement and administration of real economy every responsible schoolman must stand ready to cooperate with the leadership of community, state, and nation. If even one drop of water can be found in any educational stock, now is the time to dehydrate. If there is anywhere in our schools a service that has measurably outlived its usefulness, now is the time to elimi¬ nate it. If there is anywhere anything that has been over-developed, any phase of our program that has been over-specialized, any over-coddling of the student where we might properly ask him to indulge in a little more self- education, now is the time to correct such errors. Now is the time to declare a moratorium on vested interests and those vested ideas of the economic system which, in more normal times, slowed down healthy processes of edu¬ cational reconstruction. But even so utterly sincere and statesmanlike a facing of the challenge to real economy as I have suggested may leave the future of education seriously endangered thruout the nation. It will not be enough to foster real economy. Bogus economy must be fought. Not to save their own skins or to safe¬ guard their salaries, but to discharge their responsibility to the American future, educators, once they have come with clean hands on the issue of real economy, must be willing to put their breasts to the guns in the battle against bogus economy. There is under way a high-powered drive, national in scope and manned by able leaders who are determined drastically to slash the national bill for education at any cost. It is important, for all Americans who want to see the significance of education for the national future safeguarded, to under¬ stand the forces back of this drive. The more obvious forces back of this drive are, I think, three, viz: ( 1 ) The epidemic of fear that grips the nation as it watches its income fall lower and lower. (2) The weakness of a taxation system that, in most places, puts an un¬ due part of the tax load on real and personal property, and prompts millions of harrassed Americans to strike blindly out for relief without any too much discrimination about what they hit. (3) Groups which have always been opposed to adequate support for education and are now taking advantage of the necessity for real economy and the epidemic of fear to achieve their niggardly and anti-social objective. I suggest three broad lines along which I think educators are obliged to move if they are to discharge their responsibility to the future of community, state, and nation. 580 National Education Association ( 1 ) Educators should see to it that the teaching profession and the public are put in possession of all the pertinent facts about any short-sighted and anti-social forces that may be operating in an uncritical drive against educa¬ tional expenditures. This is not to say, let me make sun clear, that educators should set them¬ selves in opposition to sound economies. It is only to say that they must not permit, if they can prevent it, a blind assault on the enterprise of education by limited and anti-social interests bent upon taking advantage of the time to slash the heart out of education in the cold interest of their pocketbooks. (2) Educators should meet an unfair propagandizing of the public with a wise education of the public in the actual facts of the situation. Thousands upon thousands of honest Americans, who have always been the friends of education, have been bewildered by propagandists during the last few months. There is, make no mistake about it, an organized drive of national scope to cut educational support below anything that even this diffi¬ cult time requires. If the bewildered friends of education are not enlightened, the propagandists will be able to get away with a high-handed scuttling of the educational ship instead of buckling down to the unpopular task of fundamental governmental and economic readjustments which, in cutting costs, might reduce the supply of pork. (3) Educators should meet the situation with offensive rather than merely defensive tactics. I mean by this that now is the time of all times to go to the public with far-sighted educational programs the importance of which to the future of community, state, and nation can but be clear to sincere intelligence. To huddle defensively around services without a searching appeal is never justi¬ fied. In a time of stress it is a kind of social treason. Now, if ever, is the time to make manifest to all the central significance of a creative education in the life of a great people. Believe me, I am not so much concerned with what a scuttling of the budgets of scientific bureaus, libraries, hospitals, schools, and like agencies will mean in 1933. For a time, we can do far less work on far less money. For a time, drastically reduced staffs can carry drastically increased re¬ sponsibilities. For a time, we can, even if it will prove bad business in the long run, drastically cut down on the maintenance of the physical plants of our institutions. I am not, let me repeat, so much concerned with what even the severest of necessary economy will mean in 1933. But I am deeply disturbed by what a bogus economy in 1933 will mean for the American life of 1953. The real results of a bogus economy will not show up in 1933. But if now we hi-jack the fundamental scientific, social, and educational services of government, it will be a generation or more before we shall be able to climb back even to the efficiency these services now display. If now we beat down the salary scales of public servants, we shall but succeed in further diverting superior capacity from public service. Business and the professions have long drained off from public service the very sort of men and women Department of Superintendence 581 public service most needs. We dare not intensify this diversion of exceptional ability from public service. I am quite aware that salaries and wages outside public service have had to take drastic cuts in these trying days, but, once the economic curve turns upward, it will be but a question of months until the salary and wage curve in business and the professions will follow the economic curve in its upward sweep, but this will not be true of the salary and wage scales of public servants. And in the meantime, with the memory of the almost insulting scorn to which disinterested public servants are all too often subjected in the midst of an economy campaign, in the year imme¬ diately ahead fewer men and women of outstanding ability will be inclined to give their lives to public service. All of which means that it will be our children rather than ourselves who will pay the price of our short-sighted economy. And this must be remembered: We can postpone the building of a road, a bridge, or a building, and catch up on such delayed construction later on. We cannot put educational opportunity in cold storage for the duration of the depression and catch up on it later on. For the children who are denied adequate educational opportunity now, it is lost forever. And we shall stand convicted of having balanced our budgets with the starved lives and frustrated careers of our sons and daughters. GENERAL SESSION, TUESDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 28 The Administration of Education on the New Frontiers EDUCATIONAL ECONOMY AND FRONTIER NEEDS GEORGE DRAYTON STRAYER, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. Economy in the support of education is desirable at all times. Under existing conditions, thrifty and careful administration of public education is the only basis upon which its essential services can be maintained. School budgets have been cut drastically in most communities thruout our country. The educational frontier was never before so challenging as it is at the present moment. The traditional program, suited to the needs of an earlier social and economic order, will not satisfy presentday conditions. An ever increasing percentage of all boys and girls are enrolled in our secondary and higher educational institutions because of the social necessity for more ad¬ vanced training and because of the reduction in the number of workers needed to maintain production in our machine-served civilization. The problem of successful working and living under present conditions is more certainly associated with the service of the schools than under the frontier conditions, with which our grandfathers and our fathers wrestled. Today for millions of adults continuing education and retraining for new 582 National Education Association jobs is indicated as the only sound solution for them and for society. For all of us the opportunity for creative endeavor, made possible by increased leisure time, can be capitalized by continued learning in groups under the instruction of able teachers, or by individual adherence to a worthy pro¬ gram. For the great majority of adults work in groups under capable lead¬ ership is clearly indicated. I know of nothing more significant than the experiments already under way in this field. In New York, as you know, due to a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the unemployed are teach¬ ing the unemployed. In Des Moines, Iowa, you know of the experiment already under way to organize discussion groups. In Montclair, New Jer¬ sey, we are told, there are already thirty such groups at work. Possibly the most significant challenge to education in the new frontier is to be found in the need for growth of boys and girls, of young men and young women, and of adults in appreciation of the fundamental social problems which confront us. Our schools have to deal with problems as wide as the world in which we live. We have the obligation to guide the thinking of those who are to meet the issues which may result in peace or in war, in the development of a society in which social justice shall take the place of exploitation, and in which men may learn to work together for the common good. I have here a sheet entitled “Moral Disarmament,” a memorandum pre¬ sented by the American and British delegations to the Disarmament Con¬ ference, offering a formal declaration on the subject of moral disarmament, which presents the problem and opens an opportunity to the educational authorities of the countries concerned. May I read this document to you? “The High Contracting Parties, “Conscious of the extent to which the reduction and limitation of armaments de¬ pend upon increasing the trust and confidence of nations in their dealings with each other, and “Conscious that the sense of security which this confidence engenders depends not only upon the present policies of governments but also upon the international under¬ standing of the history and outlook of the nations themselves, and, “Conscious of the fact that the conditions of the modern world make necessary increasing international contacts with proportionately greater chance for either strengthening or endangering international peace. “Agree to recommend to their competent educational authorities the study of the principles and application of pacific settlement of international disputes and of the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, and to prescribe those sub¬ jects to all examinations for government positions which may involve relations with other countries, not only in the consular and diplomatic service, but in all branches of the national government. “Invite the cooperation of the International Committee on Intellectual Coopera¬ tion of the League of Nations to study the services that the cinema, the theater, and broadcasting can render in the furtherance of international understanding and the ways and means for increasing the spirit of tolerance, fair play, and justice among nations.” Can the challenge of the new educational frontier be met, and can we at the same time reduce educational expenditures? The answer may be Department of Superintendence 583 found in part in the fact that many school systems are offering essential services during the current depression for less money than was spent in more prosperous times. The purchasing power of the dollar has increased. All usual governmental costs should show a corresponding decrease. Many school systems have already accepted these necessary and just reductions. The Office of Education, on the basis of a nation-wide study, shows the amount of money budgeted for current expenses in city school systems dur¬ ing the current year to be 6.75 percent less than for last year. It is my per¬ sonal judgment, based upon information now being assembled, that the reductions made on account of budgets, adopted since the beginning of the calendar year will show at least double the percentage reductions reported for the current year. But in making the adjustments due to diminished income, it is of the utmost importance that essential school services be maintained. Indeed, it may be pointed out that in every area the demands made upon the schools are heavier than in times of prosperity. Children and young people need more of guidance and sympathy. Education is called upon more certainly to provide the skill, the knowledge, and insofar as it may, the adaptability which will enable its recipients to adjust themselves to a rapidly changing social and economic world. Conditions of distress caused by unemployment make the maintenance of the morale of children and of youth a matter of primary obligation. It is startling to discover from a review of current tendencies that many boards of education in seeking to reduce their budgets have eliminated from the educational program those services more recently added. Surely there is no justification for this easy road to false economy. Health service and physical education have been omitted in some com¬ munities. This is not economy. The work of doctors and nurses has in very considerable measure resulted in the development of immunity from in¬ fectious diseases over a wide area. Health service for children has un¬ doubtedly contributed to the lowering of the death rate. Physical educa¬ tion is indispensable for the normal growth and development of youth. When children and young people are denied the growth and health which come from physical activities, the saving in such expenditures may be more than offset by increased costs for hospitals, for reformatories, and for jails. Night schools and the broader program of adult education that were just getting under way have been abandoned in many school systems. Libraries, never before so widely used, have been denied sufficient funds to buy books and maintain their personnel. This is not economy. When young people and adults are sufficiently ambitious to spend their leisure time in an effort to improve their status thru education, society loses if it denies this oppor¬ tunity to them. This is the time when opportunities for retraining, for the encouragement of creative endeavor, and for the development of a sounder program of educational and vocational guidance should be carried forward. I wonder if most of my audience remember that stirring address by the warden of the institution in New York State at Sing Sing, when he pointed 584 National Education Association out that the average age of the inmates of that institution was twenty- three years, and when he called upon us and upon those associated with us and responsible for the welfare of young men to provide the education, the sympathy, the understanding, and the opportunity which would save those young men and save society. Kindergartens have been dropped from the program of education in some communities. This is not economy. Young children, particularly in the con¬ gested areas of our cities, need now more than at any other time the service which the schools can offer. It is precisely at this time that their homes are least able to care for them and to provide for them the activities and the social contacts which are essential for their normal growth and development. Classes for the physically or mentally handicapped have been eliminated from the programs, or the offerings have been curtailed in many cities. This is not economy. Society has an obligation to provide a significant opportunity for every child thru the discovery and development of his individual abilities regardless of the handicap under which he may suffer. To deny such oppor tunity is to increase the burden which society must carry in the years which lie ahead. Many of the subjects most recently added to the curriculum of the schools have been dropped or the offerings curtailed. A leport recently issued by the Office of Education shows that even in the more favored com¬ munities offerings in music, in art, in home economics, in vocational education, and in educational and vocational guidance have been decreased. These newer subjects and services have been brought into the school sys¬ tem to meet the demand made upon the schools to fit their programs to the needs and capacities of children of all levels of intelligence and at all varieties of interest and vocational outlook. To omit these subjects or services is not economy. The cost of education is measured not by the sub¬ jects taught but rather by the number of children enrolled in the schools. For many of the boys and girls now in attendance in our schools the newer subjects offer the most certain opportunity for growth in skill, in knowl¬ edge, in ability to engage in precise thinking, in appreciation, and in cre¬ ative endeavor. The traditional curriculum, important as it is, is not and cannot be adjusted to meet the needs and capacities of all boys and girls. Social stability in the United States cannot be dissociated from the promise of equality of opportunity thru education. In many school systems necessary books and supplies have been denied to teachers and pupils. T. his is not economy. One might as well ask the artisan to work without his tools as to expect that teachers can accomplish satisfac¬ tory results without the equipment in books and educational supplies neces¬ sary for the efficient participation by children in the educational program provided for them. The continued intellectual activities of most boys and girls are dependent upon the adequacy of the books and educational supplies and other equipment with which they learn to work during the period of formal education. Department of Superintendence 585 The length of the school term has been shortened in many school sys¬ tems. This is not economy* The teachers of the United States have become a group of professional workers whose salaries represent their annual in¬ come. The cutting of the school term by a month or more with the sugges¬ tion that the salary schedule has been maintained because the monthly pay¬ ment has been kept up results in a loss of opportunity to children and in no corresponding advantage to teachers. In the conquering of the frontier, our forefathers were forced to exercise rigid economy. If we are to serve our society under the current distressing conditions, real economies must be effected. The issue for us and for our society may well be found in the reexamination of our scale of values. We need to ask ourselves whether we care most for the maintenance of our salaries or for the maintenance of the services which the school system has to offer. All of us, teachers and laymen alike, may have to reach a decision with respect to the relative importance of the services which our government has to offer. Surely all of us will agree concerning the necessity of providing relief for those who are out of work and in distress. Surely none of us would deny the importance of protecting the life and property of our people as funda¬ mental to the maintenance of our society. But I question whether there are any other obligations that take priority over education, and I confidently believe that both in our individual and in our collective economy we may find it necessary to eliminate other services and luxuries, in order to maintain the more fundamental service of education. Roads can be postponed ; public buildings may be postponed ; reclamation projects, dams and waterways can wait, but the education of children cannot be postponed. Now is the only time that we can provide them with that edu¬ cation which will make for the perpetuity of our society. There is a very considerable percentage of our total population who have come to enjoy relatively luxurious living. The issue may have to be drawn between the enjoyment of those luxuries, which are now often considered as necessities, and the maintenance of a sound program of public education. In the answer that is given may rest the destiny of our society. But' economies must be made. Let us be realists. We of the teaching profession are under the obligation to accept salary reductions in line with decreased costs of living. But great care should be taken that we do not destroy our program by unwise procedures in salary adjustment. Salary cuts should not operate to deny advancement to younger teachers. It is particularly important in the current social and economic situ¬ ation that teachers be sufficiently supported to enable them to continue to add to their professional competence. It is vital that the supervisory service which is primarily responsible for their growth in efficiency in the art of teach¬ ing be maintained at a high level. When salary reductions reach the alarming proportions already to be found in some areas, there is grave danger of loss of morale and of a decrease in the efficiency of the service rendered. Economies can be effected by the better organization and administration of education thru the establishment of larger units of administration, par- 586 National Education Association ticularly in rural areas. Waste and inefficiency are necessarily associated with the maintenance of many units of administration so small as to render im¬ possible any highly competent service on the part of either lay control or pro¬ fessional administration. It has been my privilege within the past year to visit in two states. I will give you two examples of what I found. In one, five one-teacher schools within five miles, on a concrete highway. In another, two feeble, inefficient, impossible, little high schools within four miles of each other, on a concrete highway. A third, a junior) college, socalled, with nineteen pupils taking the very life and vitality out of a high school with which it was associated. Economy is clearly indicated as well in the development of a more highly professionalized service in the state education offices of our country. Many of them are at the present time understaffed and without the authority which would enable them to serve efficiently the localities over which they have gen¬ eral supervision. If these offices were able to advise and to control in external matters such as the planning and construction of buildings, in the develop¬ ment of adequate accounting and budgetary procedures, in the determination of attendance districts, in the location of buildings, and in the economical organization of the program thruout the whole area of the state, tens of millions of dollars could be saved annually to the taxpayers of the nation. Economies have been effected in many school systems by increasing the size of classes. Where classes have been small, this increase may be justified. It is important, however, to call attention to the fact that in many of the larger school systems classes are already overwhelmingly large, in some cases ren¬ dering efficient teaching impossible. It is necessary to note as well that increas¬ ing the size of classes reduces the number of persons employed, and particu¬ larly the number of younger and more vigorous persons normally recruited for the teaching profession. In the consideration of class size, distinctions must be made among the types of work done. A class in group singing may very well include one hun¬ dred or more children. It is not uncommon practise to find a group of from sixty to a hundred children at work in groups in a large gymnasium under the direction of a competent teacher4, of physical education. But we must not lose sight of the fact that education is an individual matter. When class sizes are increased, it is of the utmost importance to provide those services of guidance and adjustment which will insure proper attention to the individual child. In many communities significant economies can be made in the cost of .operating and maintaining the school plant. Waste and inefficiency are to be found in some school systems directly related to the use of the schools for political patronage. In a large middlewestern city with which I became pretty well acquainted .during the past year, when a new business manager was appointed, every newspaper in the city said, <(And he is to dispense the patronage of the school system.” And they had it right, because, as a matter of careful survey of the Department of Superintendence 587 situation, there is in that city at least $3,000,000 spent every year in excess of any necessity for service in the operation and maintenance of plant. In other cases the need is for the better training of the workers and the better administration of the services related to the operation and maintenance of the plant. Economies can most certainly be effected thru the development of more efficient methods of purchasing fuel and other supplies, the more eco¬ nomical handling of insurance risks, and the more certain control and ac¬ counting for the use of materials and supplies thruout the school system. If you want to get out of the city of Minneapolis something that is worth all it cost you to come to this convention, I recommend that you visit that building in which the plant administration of this city is centered. You prob¬ ably cannot find in any other city in the United States anything quite com¬ parable to the efficiency with which the job is being done here, and you can see the whole thing in operation if you will only go out there to the building where the operation and maintenance of the school plant of the city of Minne¬ apolis is settled. Then after you go there, I hope you will take the taxicab around to the janitors’ school, and then you will know why it is that when you go into a school building in this city you can take out your white hand¬ kerchief and rub it over anything that there is in sight and it will come away just as clean as it was when it left the laundry. In general, better administration of schools thru more adequate budgetary practice may be expected to result in economy. The all too common method of estimating the gross amount needed without defining the program and without detailed analysis of the unit costs involved must give way to more precise methods. No one has a right to propose that he has made a budget until he has clearly defined the program of services which it is proposed to offer. With this program in mind and with the estimates of revenues to be made available in hand, it becomes possible to determine whether or not the expenditures necessary to maintain the program are possible. The budget can be met only when the expenditures for all services, based upon a complete analysis of the costs involved, totals an amount not greater than the expected revenues. Good budgetary procedure requires still further the adherence to the budget as adopted. Each expenditure, from the day the fiscal year begins to its end, must be referred to the provision made in the budget and may not exceed the amount therein provided. When these procedures are followed, waste and inefficiency are eliminated and an economical administration can be maintained. Economy may be effected thru the more complete utilization of plant and equipment already provided and thru the scientific planning of new construc¬ tion. In many communities thru the lengthening of the school day and the reorganization of the school program, more children can be accommodated in buildings already available. In new structures expert planning will reduce the number of cubic feet required per pupil. Other economies may be effected by the more simple and certainly not less beautiful design, by the elimination of useless and costly mechanical equipment, and by the better adaptation of the building to the actual needs of the school program. 588 National Education Association Even when all possible economies have been effected, there will be many local school systems unable to offer significant educational opportunities to children and to youth. This situation is due to the dependence of these tax districts upon the general property tax. From time immemorial we have rec¬ ognized the obligation of the state to provide an equalized opportunity for education to all the children within its borders. Unfortunately the systems of state aid in a majority of the states have not yet been completed to a point where this ideal is realized. In the present emergency, the closing of schools and the denial of opportunity to millions of American boys and girls is clearly indicated unless the state or the nation steps in to remedy the situation. It is possible even in hard times thru the development of a statewide reve¬ nue system to provide for the maintenance of an equalized program of edu¬ cation in every area within the state. The technic required for the distribu¬ tion of such support is already available. The National Survey of School Fi¬ nance in its analysis of the situation has shown the way to measure the need and the capacity to pay upon the part of each administrative area. It has just as clearly indicated the legislation necessary to make effective a system of support that will guarantee the fundamental program of education to every child within the state’s borders. It is the obligation of the profession to bring to the attention of legislators thruout the land the necessity for immediate action in the defense of our system of free public education. But there are cities, rural areas and even whole states which find them¬ selves unable to finance their educational programs. The emergency calls for action by the federal government. Emergency loans should be granted by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to these states in order to enable them to maintain their systems of free public education. The economic situation has undoubtedly justified the extension of credit to railroads, to banks, and to agriculture. But the payment of the salaries of the teachers of Chicago is more impor¬ tant than the keeping of a railroad out of receivership. And the maintenance of school services in Alabama and Arizona is more important than keeping solvent even a great bank. The inability of some of the states to maintain their public school systems just as certainly calls for relief from the federal government. A lack of educational opportunity in any state is a menace to the life of the nation. American boys and girls who are today being denied their educational birthright will be the rulers of our country within the next twenty years. Our economic development, particularly during the period of the past twenty years, has resulted in increased disparities among the states in income. The very nature of our economic system, with its concentration of wealth and income in our larger financial centers, is indicative of the drift toward still greater differences in financial ability among the states. Even if no emer¬ gency existed, further federal support would be indicated as a matter of justice and of equity among the several states. Federal support of education is as necessary a fiscal policy as the support of education by the state in every ad¬ ministrative area within its borders. Department of Superintendence 589 The challenge of the new frontier must be met. Our society is passing thru a period of unprecedented economic distress. Economies can and must be made, but the services of education must be expanded and increased in effi¬ ciency to meet the needs of the crisis. We must fight not only to keep schools open but, also, to provide in them opportunities suited to the needs and capac¬ ities of all boys and girls. We must rededicate ourselves to the realization of the ideal of equality of opportunity. INDEPENDENCE IN SCHOOL GOVERNMENT— A FRONTIER NECESSITY 1 ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY, DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CALIF. The present is a trying time to anyone who is responsible for public budgets or public administration in any form. Having greatly expanded our styles of living, and having mortgaged our future income for new plant and equipment purchased at inflated prices, we now face the necessity of not only contracting our expenditures, but also trying to liquidate our mort¬ gages from markedly decreased income. In all forms of the public service we find ourselvesi confronted with the painful duty of eliminating positions and decreasing maintenance charges. Governors and legislatures on the one hand, and mayors and city councils on the other are today casting about to see where expenditures can be cut so that budgets will come within the greatly reduced paying abilities of the taxpayers. In the various attempts to accomplish the difficult feat of budget balancing, cuts have been proposed in many branches of the public service, and the public schools, as one of the larger spending branches, have frequently been asked to submit; to what has seemed to be more than their proper share of tax reduction. Where no constitutional or legal guarantees have stood in the way, the cuts in the appropriations for public schools, actual and proposed, have often been excessive, and where such guarantees have existed, there have been pro¬ posals for their elimination. In a number of our states it has been seriously advocated that all requirements for fixed appropriations or fixed tax levies for public education be repealed, and that the public school authorities be required each year to go before the legislature, the county supervisors, or the) city council and ask for what they think they need, and take what they can get after all the political interests have been cared for. In other words, it is now proposed by governors and mayors to break down the carefully established fiscal independence of the public school system, and to subordi¬ nate education to the political exigencies of state and local control. The situation in some states has become so acute, and the proposals for the elimi¬ nation of guarantees have been so numerous, that an examination of the real ground for the adequate support of public education may well be in order. In all our educational development, from the earliest times in our na¬ tional life to the present, the authority and power to develop public educa¬ tion have derived from the state, and not, except secondarily, from the local 1 Read by Grayson N. Kefauver, Dean-Elect, School of Education, Stanford University, Calif. 590 National Education Association community. Conceived by the early founders of our republic as a great pub¬ lic interest, ranking with the home and the church as an important bulwark of society and government, public education, like the judiciary, has been set apart in separate sections of the constitutions of our states as an important state function which the legislature has been charged to cherish and main¬ tain. While the county, the city, and the school district have been created as subordinate political divisions for purposes of local administration, and have been endowed with certain governmental powers by the state, the state has, thruout all our history, clearly distinguished between local governmen¬ tal administration and the carrying out of major state interests and func¬ tions. As a consequence of this separation of powers, the function of public education, like the judiciary and for the same reason, has been placed in a separate category in the state constitution and endowed with powers some¬ what distinct from those of the local governmental corporations with which the administrative school districts may be partly or wholly coterminous. This has been done that a major interest of the state — the proper training of the next generation of citizens — may not be subordinated to local gov¬ ernmental needs and expediencies. So important has the consideration of public health recently become, in part as a result of the great hygienic revo¬ lution which has taken place during the past half century and in part as a result of the experiences and lessons of the World War, that we are prob¬ ably now well started on the road toward placing health administration in a somewhat similar major-interest category. There are many evidences of this in the recently-enacted laws of our, states dealing with the enforcement of sanitary regulations. One illustration that may be cited is the establish¬ ment of State Health Councils, as in New York state, with power to super¬ sede any local health ordinance by general state regulation. Any other attitude toward the position of our public school systems would not be in accord with the historical development of education in the United States. While schools almost everywhere, in the early days of our country, arose locally and the organization of education was from the local community outward and upward, this growth took place, nevertheless, in conformity with permissive laws enacted by the state. The first district schools formed and the first district taxes levied were originally permitted by the enactment of state school laws. When the state changed permission to obligation, compulsory taxation for education was provided for, and when the state began to grant aid to the local communities for school support the basis for state school supervision was laid. When the state decided that the school must be free and equally open to all, it put an end to the rate bill and the pauper-school idea. When the state decreed that the school must be free from denominational influences, it ended the giving of any form of public aid to denominational schools and eliminated sectarian control. When the state enacted permissive legislation for the establishment of high schools, it decided that opportunity must be provided, at public expense, for more than elementary school training. When the state established normal schools, it paved the way for the eventual training, at public expense, of all Department of Superintendence 591 who are to teach in our schools. In compulsory-school-attendance legisla¬ tion the state superseded the home in estimating the importance to the child of the education provided. In the elimination of the district system of school control, in the curtailing of various educational abuses, in the insist¬ ence upon educational standards and an adequate school term, in ordering the provision of school-attendance officers, in reinstating teachers illegally dismissed by localities, in formulating a state school-building code, and in many other ways the state has asserted its authority and often has recovered from local administrative subdivisions the authority it once permitted them to exercise, in its name. Thruout all our educational history it has been the voice of the state which has ordered children educated, instructional advantages extended, standards raised, and taxation for education increased. Whenever a major¬ ity of the people have become convinced that educational advances should be made, they have registered this conviction by amending the article on education in their state constitution, or the legislature of the state has em¬ bodied it in the form of a new law, and the creation of a series of free, com* mon, non-sectarian school systems has been one of the notable achievements of our democratic states. The state, tho, thruout all our history, has been the unit in all legislative progress in school control. In reading the article on education in almost any of our state constitu¬ tions, one can experience no doubt that education has been made an impor¬ tant state interest, or that the state is the real unit in educational affairs. The authority of the state in educational matters is clearly implied or asserted, and the directions given the legislature and the governmental sub¬ divisions of the state are often mandatory in character. An examination of the school law of any American state will reveal still further the state char¬ acter of the school system which has been provided. Altho the management and control of the schools of any district or town or city may be placed by law in the hands of locally-elected officials ; altho much liberty of action may be granted locally by the school code ; and altho the large burden for the support of schools may fall on local sources of taxation ; the schools nev¬ ertheless exist to carry out a state purpose, as expressed in the state consti¬ tution and the school law, and the local governing authorities act as agents for the state and can do only those things which the school law permits of being done. Nor can cities in their charters supersede the legal and consti¬ tutional requirements of the state. An examination of the state supreme court decisions on educational ques¬ tions in any American state will reveal still further the same conception of education as a state function. There is scarcely a phase of our state school legal organization upon which the supreme courts of some of our states have not at some time been called upon to rule. In addition to upholding the authority of the state as the ultimate unit for administrative control, these courts have been insistent that the constitutional provisions requiring a uniform school system shall be carried out by the subordinate school units of the state. The insistence has been not so much on the details of procedure 592 National Education Association as on the more fundamental matters of equality in the obligation of main¬ tenance and in the right to enjoy that which has been provided. Thruout all these decisions there runs a fairly uniform trend, viz., that the schools are state schools, established by authority of the state to carry out a state purpose; that the legislature of the state, having tried or permitted one method or form of administration, is not to be restrained from trying an¬ other; that the road to learning has been declared to be the common prop¬ erty of all the people, and that the educational rights of children are para¬ mount; that the state school law is supreme, and cannot be superseded by any city or county charter regulation or school board by-law or rule; that the rights of the parent over his child are limited, and cannot be exercised if in conflict with what the state has determined by law to be the rights of the child or the larger needs of the state; that the officers of the school sys¬ tem, from state superintendent down to teacher, exist in part to guarantee the educational rights of the child, and in so doing act in the name of the state, that equality of educational opportunity shall be provided; that the scope of the school system and the limits of taxation shall be determined by the legislature, when not fixed in the fundamental law; and that it is the right and duty of the state to establish and enforce minimum standards be¬ low which communities shall not be allowed to drop. Any other attitude toward the position of our school systems would not be in accord with the historical development of education in the United States. As a result of more than a century of evolution, public education has gradually been established as a great state interest, and it may be said to be a settled conviction of our people not only that the maintenance of a liberal system of public instruction is one of the important duties of the state, but that such a system of public instruction contributes markedly to the moral uplift of the people to a higher civic virtue, and to increased economic re¬ turns to the state. We of today conceive of free public education as a birth¬ right of the child on the one hand, and as an exercise of the state’s inherent right to self-preservation and improvement on the other. The children of today are the citizens of tomorrow, and to prepare them well for their du¬ ties is both the obligation and the opportunity of the state. All this statement is almost commonplace, as it has been somewhat gen¬ erally accepted in principle at least by thinking people for a long time. In practise, however, the conception of education as a state interest is not as yet so clear in the minds of the majority of the electorate, or even of those who make and administer the laws. Particularly in our cities has there been a tendency, greatly increased within the past few years, to ignore state rela¬ tionships and state purposes and to subordinate the schools to the exigencies of local politics. There has been, on the other hand, a growing conscious¬ ness of state origin and authority and purpose among those responsible for and interested in the conduct of city school systems, and an increasing tend¬ ency to appeal to the courts for the protection of educational rights and for the securing of adequate funds, and to the legislature or to the people for laws guaranteeing to the school system that independence of local munic- Department of Superintendence 593 ipal control, with the consequent freedom from personal politics and politi¬ cal expediencies, which will enable the school system of our cities and counties to pursue their proper course and to care for the education of the future citizenship as should be done. To protect the schools from political exploitation and financial neglect there has been an increasing tendency, for the past half century, to grant fiscal independence to school boards, usually within certain legal limits, which has enabled them to determine the amount of school funds needed and to certify the same for levy, and this without interference by county or municipal authority so long as the sums asked for could be obtained by a tax levy within the limits set by law. There has been a marked increase in such authorization within the past twenty-five years. As cities have pre¬ pared new charters, better administrative conditions for the schools have been inserted, while a number of states have provided for fiscal independ¬ ence for city and town school systems by general state law, thus supersed¬ ing all charter regulations to the contrary. Of the cities of 5,000 to 30,000 inhabitants or over in the United States in 1930, in approximately two- thirds the school board possessed full fiscal independence. In general, the home of fiscal dependence is the North Atlantic group of states, while the West may be called the land of fiscal independence, tho exceptions to these generalizations are to be, found in both regions. In California, for example, all school districts, large and small, and town and city, possess such inde¬ pendence. Each must submit a budget, approved by the city or county su¬ perintendent, but if the amount asked for can be raised within the tax lim¬ its set by law, no mayor, city council, or board of county supervisors can order it out or alter the figures. The school board has been given complete freedom in such matters within the fixed legal limits, and it is responsible to the people of the school district alone for its acts. This is as it should be, in view of the state origin and fundamental importance of public educa¬ tion in our national life. The ultimate conclusion of the process, for our cities at least, is complete independence of the city government, the people of each city school district electing their school board members, and these being responsible only to the people for their conduct of the schools and the money they shall spend — always within the tax limits set by the state con¬ stitution or the state legislature. To such a grant of fiscal independence there is marked municipal objec¬ tion and also some opposition from certain students of municipal govern¬ ment. The objection from municipal authorities and politicians arises largely from the inability of city political authorities, under such conditions of inde¬ pendence, to use the schools for their own local ends, or to subordinate to other city interests the fiscal needs of the schools in determining the city tax rate. Mayors and councils desire to retain control over the appointment of school board members because this tends to give them control over the school system, and they insist on the so-called unity of the budget and the tax rate that the school tax may be fitted into the political exigencies and pre-election promises of the members of the city political administra- 594 National Education Association tion. As an abstract proposition their pleas may sound well enough ; in practise every schoolman and every citizen knows better than to trust them. If the schools are to be free, it is asked, why not the parks and the health, and the police? The answer must be that public education is too important for the future of our national life to trust it to the whims and trades and log-rolling of a political body, elected with no reference to and with no in¬ terest in school administration. In but few of our cities has the sense of civic duty been such as to enable the people to place the schools on an equal footing with other city interests when party and personal political pressure are brought to bear. After the job-providing departments have been cared for, the problem then becomes that of keeping the tax rate down to some pre-election pledge, made with the intent to gain votes rather than to pro¬ mote sound city and school administration, and as a result the schools take what is left after the other city services have been provided for.) Parks, sew¬ ers, streets, police, the city hall, and the municipal services all provide jobs for party followers and naturally come first; the schools are a somewhat idealized investment in future public welfare, giving but little immediate visible return, and carried on largely by public-spirited women whom it is usually impossible to organize and vote. Even tho honest and actuated by good motives, the members of a city council or a county board of supervi¬ sors lack that close touch with and understanding of educational problems which will enable them to appreciate the large future importance of sub¬ stantial expenditures for public education, and when the needs of the schools come into conflict with the apparently much more pressing needs of the va¬ rious city departments, it is the schools which are forced to give way. Yet no other city department, except possibly that of health, represents any large future welfare interest. Even the health department is not so closely coordinated with the government, the home, and the church, as is the school. Examined in this light, the “unity of the city tax rate” becomes an argument of little importance. Even municipal authorities have no hesitancy in set¬ ting up separate taxing organizations when public improvements that minis¬ ter to public convenience or provide jobs seem to call for such action, as water-supply districts, lighting districts, nuisance-abatement; districts, bridge districts, and highway districts clearly evidence. The whole matter of school support seemed fairly well settled, in princi¬ ple at least, until within the past year or two when the acute financial sit¬ uation in this country brought the whole question again to the fore. With the meeting of a large number of state legislatures the present winter, a flood of bills and constitutional amendments have already been introduced which propose to limit seriously or to abolish entirely that fiscal independ¬ ence of the school to which we have attained within the past half-century. Certainly not within the memory of the present generation have the schools been faced by so many dangerous legislative proposals as they are today. How even a five-months school could be maintained in some of our states is difficult to see, if some of these so-called tax-reform proposals are enacted Department of Superintendence 595 into law. Even as it is, schools in many regions are already seriously crip¬ pled, abbreviated in scope, and shortened in term. That general state tax reform is needed in the great majority of our states has been pointed out for decades by students of taxation and educa¬ tional administration. It has for long been a matter of wonder that in many • of our farming states, where the great bulk of taxation has been levied on farm and home property, anything like satisfactory school support could be obtained, even in prosperous times. In the present financial emergency, with many farmers and small home owners unable to pay taxes at all, a change in the entire basis of taxation is more than ever made to seem desirable. That, in addition, some material reduction in the amount of tax levied also is called for is generally admitted. When the taxing authorities confiscate one-third of the income of the nation, as they did last year, and use it for the maintenance of governmental services, the burden is too heavy. To bear a proper share in the general curtailment of public expenses the schools will readily agree, as we all recognize the serious emergency today confront¬ ing the nation; the objection is to the selfish and unthinking attempts on the one hand to force as much as possible of this reduction on the schools, and on the other hand to the calculated effort to sweep away that fiscal independence of the schools which has been won as a result of so much ar¬ gument and struggle. It is the present attempt to reduce the schools to the position of a yearly suppliant before the city council, or the state legislature to which we must strenuously object. We all know only too well what the final result would be. It clearly is the right of the people thru constitutional amendment, or acting thru their representatives in the legislature, to fix the rates of taxa¬ tion for schools which they are willing should be levied, but so long as the schools remain within the tax limits so set they should be allowed to deter¬ mine their own budget and expenditures. This claim is made because of the fundamental importance of public education as a creative social service, and because tax-levying authorities tend too often to neglect this major claim. In cases of emergency, as the present situation has well shown, school au¬ thorities are willing to reduce expenditures according to their proper share, but without fiscal independence they will be forced to undesirable sacrifices. That times such as the present place greater burdens on the schools than do prosperous times, and that vocational education, health services, evening schools, adult education, and public-library services all need greater attenr tion and more money for maintenance than in good times, almost nobody dealing with the problems of tax support, except school people, seem to real¬ ize. Many of the present legislative proposals would strip the schools of all but the bare essentials, and eliminate all those supplemental services which are of such large importance to government and industry alike dur¬ ing periods of depression and wide-spread unemployment. There are many other forms of public expenditure that can far better stand curtailment. To take, for illustrative purposes, one item of expense that could well be reduced in the present fiscal emergency, we will select highways. While a good hard road is a very desirable addition to one’s comfort while traveling 596 National Education Association by motor, and that it facilitates transportation and reduces its cost will be admitted by all, yet highways, desirable as they may be, in no way repre¬ sent such an important social service or national interest as does public edu¬ cation. We could materially curtail highway work for a few years and scarcely note the loss, but a curtailment of educational advantages cuts heav¬ ily into the future life possibilities of a generation of young people. The . actual waste of money on our highways today, too, in the employment of men to do by hand labor what could be done far better and far cheaper by machinery, is enormous. The proposals for grade-separation improvements, too, to prevent some careless or fate-tempting driver who scorns to “stop, look, and listen” from killing himself, are tremendously expensive and could easily be postponed. One could maintain a good-sized city school system for a year on what one important grade-separation project would cost. With the present general surplus in, population, there is little need today for cur¬ tailing the education of thousands of school children that some careless or drunken driver should be prevented from killing himself by trying to dis¬ pute the right of way with a locomotive at some grade crossing. Grade sep¬ arations, straightening of, curves, and realignment of highways, desirable as they may be in themselves, nevertheless represent expenditures that are of far less importance than the maintenance of adequate systems of public schools, expenditures that can well wait for better times. What is true in regard to the highway costs is true, in greater or less degree, of many other forms of public spending. While willing to cooperate as best we can in the lowering of tax rates on a burdened people, desirous of effecting any possible economies in the admin¬ istration of public education, and agreeing, if the people so decree, to work under a somewhat reduced tax rate, we as school executives should resist with all our ability the present determined attempt of those interested either in mere economy or in other forms of public and patronage service, to de¬ prive the schools of fiscal independence and to reduce the support of educa¬ tion to a yearly log-rolling struggle before some public body for necessary maintenance funds. Still more, in states and cities where fiscal independence has not been attained, the present emergency offers a good opportunity to inaugurate a movement to have certain legal tax rates for schools estab¬ lished in the law, with local independence when within these rates. Careful studies of the experience of American cities, both those possessing and those not possessing fiscal independence, indicate clearly the desirability of remov¬ ing the tax-determining power for schools from the control of the city coun¬ cil, and placing it, within certain legal limits to be fixed by the legislature or the state constitution, with the school authorities for determination. Sim¬ ilar experience in a few states also indicates clearly the undesirability of leaving the state tax rate for schools to the mercies of the legislature. Some guarantee that education, as the major interest of the state which the state constitution and the state courts have declared it to be, will be protected from neglect and exploitation, the present fiscal emergency has revealed as more important than ever before. Department of Superintendence 597 That the leaders in public education in this country today1 face one of the most determined battles to preserve the schools from being sacrificed that economies in other public services need not be made, and that extravagances elsewhere may be untouched, there can be little question. We are on the battle line, whether we wish it or like it, and the situation calls for both defensive and offensive tactics. We must defend the rights which we have won after long and hard fighting, and the opportunity now presents itself to take the offensive and to bring home to the American people that it is of importance, for the future national life, that the educational services to our children be not in any serious manner curtailed. France, Germany, England, Belgium, and Italy, despite their crushing financial burdens and their comparative poverty, have maintained their schools at a high level , there is no economic or public reason why America should not do the same. Reasonable cuts in maintenance charges we will assume, but attempts to sweep aside the established guarantees must be fought, to a finish. IN TESTIMONY OF DR. ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY AND CAPITALIZING THE FRONTIER CRISIS EDWARD C. ELLIOTT, PRESIDENT, PURDUE UNIVERSITY, LAFAYETTE, IND. Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford University is my long-time friend and the friend of many of you. All of us are the professional beneficiaries of his richly productive life. For more than a third of a century, he has given himself with courageous devotion and with scholarly skill to the intricate and infinitely important task of securing, within and without the profession of education, a scientific and usable understanding of the structure and the government of the American school system. Now, the time approaches when he expects formally to retire and to be relieved from the many responsibilities accumulated thru the years. That we are permitted to do that which we now do is a timely and happy application of the law of compensation in human affairs. For there is not a responsible educational administrator today, pro¬ gressively sensible to the conditions essential for the effective operation of the social mechanism called the public school, who is not indebted to this man Cubberley. He is, indeed, the master of those who administer schools well. Any gains which may come to American public education must include a fuller realization of the signal importance of having at all times, men of Cubberley’s personal calibre and intellectual competency on the general staff of the nation’s educational forces. Eight and forty years ago the register of Purdue University contained the name of one, Ellwood Cubberley, classified as a student in the so-called pre¬ paratory department. A sub-freshman he would, I suppose, be called today. He remained in Purdue but one year. I have never thought to ask him why he left. One of two reasons may be assumed ; that he feared the influence of such fellow students as George Ade, John T. McCutcheon, Bruce Rogers, who, as the history of the times now reveals, were then displaying symptoms of becoming dangerous literary and artistic heretics; or there was 598 National Education Association an ambition to test the power of Indiana University for the making of uni¬ versity presidents. At any rate, immediately after graduating from Indiana, we find him serving for five years as professor and president of Vincennes University. From the days of George Rogers Clark and his momentous victory at Vincennes, Indiana has been on the frontier. And the Hoosier has been a restless pioneer, always going to a distant somewhere and not coming back. Therefore, the young Hoosier schoolmaster was true to the breed and trekked clear across the continent to California. It is not unlikely that the spirit for this adventure had been aroused by the going of his old teacher of Zoology in Indiana University — David Starr Jordan — to the presidency of the newly established Stanford University. After two years as a city superintendent of schools and just before the close of the nineteenth century, he metamorphosed into what was then a somewhat rare and more than doubtful variant of the fauna of the educa¬ tional forest — an associate professor of education. My first meeting with Cubberley took place thru the intervention of Henry Suzzallo, who, as many of you can well testify, has spent a good part of his useful life in little acts of personal kindnesses. Quite by chance, Cub¬ berley and I had booked passage to Europe on the same steamer. Suzzallo saw to it that we met at the dock just before sailing. That was thirty years ago. Each of the intervening years has increased my personal admiration and my professional respect for him. He is the wise and gentle schoolman. It is not possible in these brief moments to assess completely the services of Cubberley to American education. One may, however, readily detect his four-fold contribution. He has been what may be called an educational physicist. In a charac¬ teristically clear and concise fashion he has formulated for all of us many of the more important general principles of social dynamics determining the operation of the educational system. He has not been a mere mechanism tinkering with the gadgets of the school machine. For him the school as a major social institution, cannot be understood excepting thru its historical evolution. To those of us who gained our first insight of the continued organic development, thru the ages, of educational institutions and of con¬ trolling educational ideas and ideals from his Syllabus of the History of Edu¬ cation, the versatile productivity of this scholar of education was not sur¬ prising. With the dispassionate attitude of the true scientist, he has ex¬ plored, surveyed, and promoted the professional colonization of every im¬ portant field in the history and administration of American education. Where is there a student of the fundamental problem of educational finance who does not refer to his School Funds and Their A pportionment . Who wrestles with the ever lively question of the certification of teachers and does not consult his volume on that subject. No one more than he has more con¬ structively analyzed the age-old problem of the rural school. Every phase of the organization and control of public schools has been enriched by his investigating mind. Department of Superintendence 599 He has been, too, what may be called a skilful and sympathetic educational physician . The record shows the countrywide number of states, counties, cities, and institutions whose educational ills he has diagnosed and for which he has written health making prescriptions. If the account were to be balanced, Cubberley’s real worth will be found not in his work as an educational physicist, not as an educational physician, not as a promoter of the literature of education, as evidenced thru his edi¬ torship of more than a score of notable professional volumes in the Riverside Series of textbooks in education. Above each and all of these are his achieve¬ ments as a pedagog. He has been, and yet is, a teacher of inspiring dis¬ tinction. At Stanford University, he has created a school of education of far-flung influence. Of vastly greater significance is the fact of his creation of a school of educators. His students, serving as they are in a multitude of places of power, are the living proofs that he is not an individual , but an American institution. As I review the professional services of Ellwood Cubberley, I marvel at the versatile productivity' of his scholarly mind. Thru him education has gained a new place and new dignity in the company of learning. He has been the creative teacher of a goodly portion of the leadership of American educa¬ tion today. Thru him Administration has come to be what it really is — the effective application of human{ leadership. Cubberley may best be characterized as a Foundationalist. By this I mean his life-long insistence that the concept of the state and the concept of edu¬ cation are inseparable. He has more clearly than anyone else insisted upon those conditions that must be met if the political state is to serve the human school, and if the humanities of the school are to become the habits of the state. Here is the foundational problem of our craft and our cause. The struggle about Education today is between the conservatives who want to raid the school because of 1929 , and the conservationists who are determined to raise the school because of 1933 , and the years after. Giving way to the pressure of those mysterious and deceiving forces, once thought to belong to progress, mankind finds itself today on the outer rim of that known region called civilization. We realize that we are on a new frontier, and are faced with new barriers to our action and to our thinking. Whatever be our station, whatever be our abilities as tested in the past, whatever be the quality of our aspirations, there is little chance at this moment that any of us can escape the deep feeling of having been trapped by a destructive cross fire of strange economic and social forces. These traps are our crises. If we are to continue to have the part of the selected and the accepted leadership of American education, what are the new obliga¬ tions resting upon us? This is a question to be answered in terms of rea¬ son rather than by rhetoric. Upon the immediately practical answer we give and the actions we take will depend the continuance of the confidence of those who have been led to believe in us. Crises such as the present are the tests of the worth of any leadership. 600 National Education Association There are at least four interrelated crises of American public education, the responsibility for the meeting of which cannot be evaded by those who presume to direct our public education. These are the Crisis of Educational Equality, the Crisis of Work, the Crisis of the Layman School Officers, and the Crisis of the New Loyalty. For more than a hundred years, the people of the United States have pio¬ neered in the great human undertaking of free education. By means of the free public school system, they have striven to give reality to that fundamental element of American democracy expressed by the phrase, “equality of educa¬ tional opportunity.” School people have long recognized how far we were from any satisfactory realization of this goal. During the first quarter of this century, there was a new crusade to make educational opportunity mean maximum educational opportunity.” Here on the new frontier of civiliza¬ tion the old and the new limitations of our basic educational principle are clearly revealed. No greater responsibility rests upon the leadership of American public affairs than that of reexamining the doctrine of the equality of educational opportunity and redeclaring its fundamental social1 meaning. Let us not be deluded into thinking the battle for the equality of opportu¬ nity in the school has been won. More and more frequently as the economic stress continues and increases, men of moment, long steeped in the sound American traditions, are expressing doubt, and even open opposition to the completely organized system of free education. When a dominating figure in the affairs of one of ouri great eastern states publicly announces his oppo¬ sition to any education at public expense below the age of six years or above the age of eighteen years, when an influential member of the legislature of another great state argues with force and persuasion that the elementary school only should be the extent of the state’s responsibility, when an organi¬ zation of no mean influence includes in its plan of economic reform a teacher wage of one dollar per day, we are made aware that there is new work be¬ fore us. If the American way of life is to be followed in the years immediately ahead, then the mind of the American people must be revitalized to the end that the principles of equal educational opportunity may not be destroyed in the economic maelstrom. Eternal vigilance may be the price of liberty. An unending sacrifice is the ultimate cost of that foundation stone of democracy called free education. The founders of our republic conceived education as a prize political necessity. Our generation has been compelled to conduct education as an es¬ sential part of our economic life. We have learned that there can be no sem¬ blance of equality of educational opportunity without occupational training and education. Now that the jobs in the world are jumbled and in all likeli¬ hood permanently diminished in number, it is all the more demanded that youth be rightly trained for whatever individual work is to be done. Other¬ wise it is merely an empty sentimentality to talk about education for citizen¬ ship or education for character. Such widespread unemployment as we now have in the country is a stupendous national problem. Yet widespread employ- Department of Superintendence 601 ment of the coming generation at the wrong sort of jobs might easily be a na¬ tional spiritual disaster. The relation of education to the bread winning work of life is more than ever a critical and unsolved problem. From the beginning, the government of the American school was an inte¬ gral part of popular government. The controlling center of the American schools is to be found in the lay boards of education of the 145,000 school units and in the lay boards of trustees of the several hundred public higher institutions. As one observes the easy readiness with which a large number of the citizenry, charged with responsibility for the lay oversight of schools, retreat from their posts as defenders of the cause, one wonders whether there is not a tragic and immediate need for education. It should not be forgotten that boards of education are the instruments of the people rather than of the profession of education. It is my seasoned judgment that the present crisis places squarely on the shoulders of the educational administrators of the country the responsibility for a careful, critical examination of the entire public educational system for the purpose of discovering objectively — not politically, nor emotionally how far this system, all the way from the elementary school thru the public university and professional school, is actually and pioperly serving the eco nomic, the political, and the cultural lives of our people ; people who are living not in the past, nor in the future, but now. We may wisely reconcile ourselves to the grim fact that the shrinkage of funds for public education is not merely temporary. In all likelihood this is to be a situation, more or less permanent, during the remainder of the pro¬ fessional lives of many of us. Yet, as we are compelled to retreat financially, should we not undertake to effect such reconstruction of oui educational plans as will enable a more effective concentration of effort, in eveiy grade of school, upon the minimum essentials of training? There are grounds for the opinion that the vast majority of the lay boaids of school officers in the country would enthusiastically welcome proposals calculated to simplify and intensify the manifold activities which have been built into the educational pyramid during the recent decades. I may be wrong, and indeed many will immediately conclude that I am, but in the present peril, I am unable to rid my professional thinking of the conviction that a much larger share of the responsibility for the training of children must be assumed, directly, consciously, and intelligently, by the American home, and by American business and industry. Such an idea is not reactionary. Rather, in application, it would be a test of the strength of that individualism which has constituted the basis of the distinctiveness of our Americanism. The complete realization of the social theory of equality of educational opportunity may not be confidently expected from and thru the school alone. For the past twenty years, and in particular, since the year of the war, we have heard much in this country of the baleful influence of agencies and doc¬ trines inimical to American institutions. The hunting down of all of that which they termed some form of treason has been seriously undertaken by 602 National Education Association those who considered it an essential duty of patriotism to stamp out all de¬ structive opposition to the existing political, social, and economic orders. One encounters on every side today sharp opposition to government, its cost and the accompanying bureaucracy. Without question the times de¬ mand a reduction in the expenditures for public activities. That this must be accomplished with discriminating and intelligent foresight goes without saying. No public school, worthy of that name, either in times of prosperity or in times of poverty, is entitled to spend a single penny that does not directly serve the high purposes of its creation and its existence. No public school, worthy of the confidence of a free people, may fail to assume its full share of the burden of economic distress. These are practical moral axioms. Similarly, every rightly conducted public educational institution has an inherent right to be exempted from the invidious classification as a bureaucratic part of government. And its workers not placed under a cloud of criticism making them appear as unworthy beneficiaries of a governmental tax wrung from an unwilling and suffering people. It may easily be that the most perilous of the problems growing out of the existing emergency is not that of reducing educational expenditures, nor that of limiting educational activities. Instead, this may take the form of under¬ mining the confidence of our people in the fundamental worth of the prin¬ ciples embodied in the free school system. Less cash for education need not lead to less confidence in government. We are entitled to doubt the quality of the loyalty of the many who, in this perilous hour and behind the camouflage of economy1, in government, seek to weaken the allegiance of the people of our states to the institution of free education. The combating of such subversive movements is not only a duty of educational leaders but an obligation of the loyalty that sees, in the equal¬ ized school, the only hope of the mass of our people for that civic security, that economic salvation, and that opportunity for living that are the very life of our democratic civilization. GENERAL SESSION, WEDNESDAY MORNING, MARCH 1 The Improvement of International Materials for the New Frontier THE SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF TEXTBOOK MATERIALS B. R. BUCKINGHAM, LECTURER, GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. Many of the old unhappy practises, attitudes, and cleavages regarding text¬ books are vanishing. There never was a time when school people and publish¬ ers were so closely in agreement upon essential attitudes. For example, two years ago the National Society for the Study of Education received with en- Department of Superintendence 603 thusiasm the report of its textbook committee — a report characterized by a new rapport between publishers and school people. Immediately thereafter the directors of the society took action which led to the creation of an organi¬ zation of school men and executives of book companies known as the Buffalo Conference. It has held two annual meetings and will hold a third next sum¬ mer. The common interests of these two groups are so numerous that free discussion is no longer avoided. In further support of the contention that a better understanding is arising between educational people and textbook publishers I offer myself as an ex¬ hibit. The mere fact that an editor of a textbook} house is asked to speak on this occasion suggests the real community of interests between publishers and purchasers of instructional materials. Altho I am required by my topic to be scientific, I have ventured to refer to the human relationships involved in this question. The evaluation of textbooks merely as an objective procedure will lose most of its force and some of its science if these human relationships are disregarded. You cannot infallibly put good books into the classroom and certainly you cannot secure their effective use there unless you take full account of the interests, convic¬ tions, and even the prejudices of the people concerned. I shall assume that evaluation as distinguished from development means the appraisal, the measuring, or the judging of textbooks after they have been placed on the market. The persons especially concerned are the school people. It is they who do the judging, and the normal motive for exercising this judgment is the need for selecting textbooks for adoption. It is true that evaluation has sometimes been carried on as a scholarly problem, but even then the purpose has been to provide tools or methods for use in a prac¬ tical situation which calls for choosing the best from a number of com¬ peting books. Sometimes score cards are used. I think a score card of some sort is desirable, even if it is no more than a series of topics to be thought about. But a score card does not insure scientific methods or results. Science calls for something more than an instrument. In the first place, the instrument must be a good one. In the second place, the instrument must be properly used — USed so as to yield a valid measure. In the third place, the user of the instrument must have a scientific attitude. Now it is not easy to make a good score card, and textbook committees soon discover this. They then cast about for a ready-made card and too often a friendly book man stands ready to provide one. Such a card is likely to omit items not applicable to his book and to over weight those on which his book stands high. The basis for weighing and even for selecting the items will probably be neither objective nor impartial; thus the first requisite for a scientific measurement — namely a scientific instrument — will be lacking. The committee must either make its own score card or adopt one from an unbiased source, probably with some modifications to meet local conditions. Almost any score card will be a good one if it is 604 National Education Association open mindedly arrived at with a real knowledge of the schools concerned and of the purposes to be served. A score card is not properly used when each committee member merely judges or guesses a number applicable to a given book under each rubric. Here, let us say, is a set of headings for use in appraising a series of lan¬ guage books. One heading is “provision for drill on matters of good usage.” Let us suppose that the weight attached to this item is 150 out of 1000. Now the thing I deprecate is the turning of the pages of a book and guess¬ ing that it is worth 100 or 125 out of this possible 150. This seems to me to be indefensible either as common sense or as science. It would be better to count the number of drill exercises which meet a defined standard of quality. It would be still better to note the distribution of these exer¬ cises in various ways which the committee would set up after discussion. Under each rubric of a score card every reasonable effort should be made to base the ward upon objective facts. This may involve no small effort, but selecting textbooks is rightly regarded as important. It is so important that members of textbook committees should be given some sort of train¬ ing for their task and should be allowed free time for it. Again, a score card is not well used wThen the ratings for each item are merely added to produce a score for the book. Let us assume that a book has been rated under a dozen headings. To suppose that a rating for the book may be had by summing these ratings is childish. Some of the items are dependent upon each other. To some extent they tell the same story. To add the scores on two such items is a misrepresentation. The numbers we have attached to items A and B on the score card give each item all the weight it should have. To the extent that A and B tell the same story it is clear that the sum of their weights over emphasizes this story. Again, an item may be such that if you have a certain amount of it you have nearly all that is advantageous. Let me illustrate from a score card for predicting the success of teachers. One of the items is physique. Now a certain amount of physical fitness is absolutely necessary for success in teaching. If we are to allow a maximum of ten points for physique, something like four points for a given individual may be indispensable. Increments up to six or seven may rapidly increase the probability of teaching success, but robustness be¬ yond seven contributes little or nothing. Probably the difference between the physique of a normally well-conditioned person and the physique of a Jim Thorpe or a Babe Didrikson would be of no consequence in teaching. Increases in this quantity mean increases in teaching ability only in its middle ranges. We cannot take care of this condition by anything so simple as adding up scores for a general rating. Permit me to illustrate one other aspect of the question. A certain famous textbook score card gave a weight of 40 out of 1000 for the physical fea¬ tures of the books, namely to type page, illustrations, and binding. Now a book could be printed on wood pulp with no illustrations and with the pages merely stapled together. Such a book might be scored as low as 10 or even zero without much damage in the final rating. Such a book ought Department of Superintendence 605 obviously to be ruled out. Any proper use of a score card will provide for a minimum on each item below which a book will be disqualified no matter what its rating on other items may be. I have suggested three essentials in scientific evaluation . first, a good instrument; second, its proper use; and, third, the presence of a scientific attitude. The greatest of these is the scientific attitude. It is greatest be¬ cause without it neither of the other requisites may be assured. Granted a reasonable degree of technical competence on the part of a committee or ac¬ cess to good advice of a technical sort, a scientific attitude is so important that with it the committee will need little else and without it will be little the better for anything else. By a scientific attitude I mean open mindedness, freedom from prejudice, willingness to listen to all sides. I mean critical mindedness, the ability to distinguish the specious from the essential. I mean a preference for objective data and at the same time a willingness to entertain subjective data according to their importance. I mean a willing¬ ness to seek facts where they may be found, welcoming even the statements of book men instead of erecting a wall of pretended secrecy. I mean the drawing of no conclusions which the findings do not warrant. Such an atti tude is a directive influence. It colors and conditions every act and goes further toward guaranteeing the integrity of the result than any other consideration. I now wish to refer to a rather remarkable evaluation of textbooks which occurred in connection with an important adoption of arithmetic books. A score card was employed, and this score card was notable in that it be trayed little internal evidence of bias toward any particular book. If I were merely to read its major topics most of them would seem rather ordinary. Such things appear as problem material, processes, drill, diagnostic and remedial features, provision for individual differences and physical fea¬ tures. It is not until one considers the long list of sub-items, many of which are themselves subdivided, that one realizes the thoroness with which this instrument permits the examination of arithmetics. Moreover, two or thiee of the main heads are worth mention even apart from their sub-divisions. One of these is informational arithmetic, defined to include materials where emphasis is placed upon understanding, interpretation, and use lather than upon processes and skills. Another is balance, defined as the proper proportioning of materials. Another is vocabulary and sentence structuie a heading which deserves far more detailed attention than it usually gets. The particular evali/ation of textbooks to which I am referring was remarkable not alone because of the measuring instrument employed, but because of the commendable way the committee used this instiument. It did not rely upon guesses or even upon discussion, where the most vocifer¬ ous often win the votes. It sought objective information under most of the headings of the score card. For example, one of its fourteen objective studies related to the heading — diagnostic and remedial features. The sub¬ committee which made this study did not fail to distinguish between what 606 National Education Association is named diagnostic in the textbook and what is really of that character. Mere drill material and review exercises are often called diagnostic be¬ cause the term has a certain vogue. The committee set up its criterion for exercises of this sort and then proceeded to count the occurrence and note the distribution of such exercises in each of the competing books. It was then in a position definitely to state the number of tests and test items which met its definition for diagnostic and remedial material. Several other considerations ought to enter here besides the number of these tests and items, and whether or not the committee gave weight to them I am not infoimed. The point which I wish to make is that in one essential par¬ ticular, namely the quantity of material of a definitely defined sort, there could be no dispute. This seems to be much better than merely arguing about something which can be determined beyond the need of argument. I wish to allude to a promising method which is being increasingly em¬ ployed by school people in evaluating books. It is a method which I under¬ stand publishers are, in general, glad to have employed. If a city is con¬ templating the adoption of a history for the fourth grade, it purchases thirty- five or forty copies of each competing book which it cares to consider. Each of these sets is then used in a class, and judgment is based, at least in part, upon the satisfaction which these books give. I do not need to point out to you that this sort of competitive tryout may be well or poorly conducted. All the elements which enter into scientific method have application here. Special care to hold constant the immaterial variables — the considerations which would spuriously affect the result — should, of course, be exercised. Care should likewise be taken to base the final appraisal upon conditions which are really important and which are uniformly and fairly applied. I must now say something about the other part of my double-headed sub¬ ject, namely, the scientific development or making of textbooks. This is the joint task of author and publisher. Something, whether it is science or common sense or intuition, has caused school books to improve vastly dur¬ ing the past twenty or twenty-five years. The textbook is undeniably a bet¬ ter teaching instrument today than it has ever been. It does things that the books of earlier days never even attempted. In its treatment it dares to be free to a degree that never used to be allowed. Its greater length (made possible by better teaching of reading) permits the inclusion of at¬ tractive approach, concrete data, episodes, illustrations, applications, com¬ parisons, summaries — in short the inclusion of all ^he characteristics of the best books of any sort. Textbooks have become less “textbookish.” In the old days no one ever read a textbook unless he had to. Now the textbook need not be dull to be acceptable. How far is this due to science? No one can be sure, but it is an interesting coincidence that the era of the modern textbook corresponds pretty closely to the scientific era in education. One of the ways in which the publisher secures scientifically-made text¬ books is by selecting authors who will furnish that kind of material. The Department of Superintendence 607 better authors in these days know the literature of their field. Moreover they are either teachers of the subject at the level for which the book is fur¬ nished or they have studied the needs of students of that level. They know what has been tried and found good. T. hey have frequently published arti¬ cles and monographs on important aspects of the subject or of its teaching. Much, therefore, of the matter which they will put into their books will in the very nature of the case be scientifically grounded. In fact no series of maneuvers however scientific if made merely ad hoc can take the place of the slowly matured judgment of the author who has studied and taught his subject to the point of mastery. On the other hand well-grounded knowledge is distressingly spotty and insufficient. The textbook writer must cover a broad field. He often needs to secure definite knowledge for the purpose of making the text. This is particularly true in the case of a relatively new subject or when new out¬ comes from old subjects are sought, or when specific applications of estab¬ lished principles are to be made to new material. Consider, for example, an author who is preparing a set of readers for the grades. Suppose that she — I am thinking of a woman in this partic¬ ular instance — wishes above all other considerations to make the reading mat¬ ter interesting to the pupils. She has the studies of Jordan and Dunn and Hosic. These will give her the qualities which stories ought to possess if they are going to appeal to children. From these studies she can also identify particular stories which have the desired appeal. But there are not enough of these and they have all been used frequently. A new set of readers, if it is to be justified, should contain new materials. Accordingly, in the instance which I have in mind, a definite and pro¬ longed effort was made to furnish on a research basis the type of material which the author had in mind. The query was, “What do children like to read?” In order to afford an answer, many teachers recorded the sponta¬ neous questions of children concerning their environment. Moreover, seven subjectmatter specialists each prepared 100 questions which he thought were important, interesting to children, and not generally answered so that chil¬ dren could get the meaning. Several thousand pupils were then asked to indicate which of these questions they would like to have answered. Then well-written stories or informational pieces were prepared to answer the questions which came out on top in point of interest to the children. Finally these pieces were tried out, first, thru adult judgment and, second, thru trial in classrooms. The result of all this was a body of material which without question possessed the one quality which the author wished it to possess, namely, interest for children. Another way in which authors and publishers assure themselves that their offerings are appropriate is by actual tryout in the classroom. Sometimes, the author teaches his book in mimeographed form. On the other hand, he may secure the tryout of his material — by having them printed on his own initiative and by having them used in as many schools as are willing to pur¬ chase them. Such a method was employed on a large scale in the case of a 608 National Education Association social-studies senes. In recent years the scientific tryout of materials has sometimes meant that the publisher has issued in printed form an experi¬ mental edition. This method was used with notable success a few years ago in the case of a series of arithmetics. Not only was an experimental edition of the series tried out extensively, but special forms were employed for securing the reactions of teachers as they used this trial edition. These experimental editions, whether prepared by the author or by the publisher, are extremely expensive. It is a question whether at the prices now charged for textbooks such a procedure can become at all general ; yet it is highly desirable that it should become general. I have sometimes imagined a great publishing house organizing its own school for testing purposes. Such a school might even carry its own financial weight if it were staffed with excellent teachers and made so attractive that people would be willing to pay rather high tuition rates. With such a school a publisher could go a long way toward guaranteeing his product, somewhat as a manufacturer of rubber tires or of typewriters may guarantee his prod¬ uct thru testing. Such a dream may not come true in my day, but I am convinced that I have often dreamed more idly. Publishers sometimes develop important tools to aid them in editorial work. I have in mind a very extensive investigation which eventuated in a graded list of some 15,000 words. In fact the grading went farther than the mere word form. Anyone who stops to think about the matter will agree that our numerous word lists have centered attention upon a mere visual or auditory symbol when attention should in reality be centered upon meaning. For example, children probably learn in different grades a deck of cards and the deck of a ship, a person’s lap and to lap milk, a scale on which you weigh things and a scale of a fish, not to mention still other kinds of scales. Indeed this matter of different meanings assumes large importance in textbooks on particular subjects. For instance, there are the special geography meanings of pole (not of wood), coast (not on a sled), cape (not to be worn), race (not to be run). In history period does not mean something you put after a sentence, a date is not fruit, and a party is not a social gathering. By using a list which assigns on a reasonably satis¬ factory basis each of about 20,000 meanings as expressed by English words, it has been found possible to improve the adjustment of books to the grades for which they are intended. The making of a textbook includes its manufacture as well as its writing and editing. It will interest you to know that certain publishers are co¬ operating in research concerning the type page. Investigations of this sort have hitherto been carried on by psychologists and students of education. Their results have been conflicting, due in part to a failure to understand the technical problems involved. It is not too much to believe that the out¬ come of the experiments which the publishers are conducting will be ad¬ vantageous to the schools and to their budgets. Department of Superintendence 609 Frontier thinking in education gets its greatest effectiveness thru the textbook. In making that statement I use the term “textbook” in a broad sense. I mean printed instructional materials. I am not limiting myself to the idea of one bound volume for each pupil in each socalled subject. Textbooks themselves will change, the way of using them will change, the making and judging of them will change. These changes will occur, not only in response to frontier thinking, but as a means of making it real among us. In the Teachers College Record two months ago Doctor Harold Rugg reported concerning the Sixth World Conference which met at Nice last summer. What is the program of this conference? What ideals, what frontier thinking, do they advance? Here are a few items: Organize the program (of education) around modern modes of living. Present to our youth an honest and courageous description of the new civilization and the . . . trends thru which it has developed. Give people practise from infancy to old age in reviewing evidence, drawing conclusions from data, and discussing proposed alternative solutions. These are challenging proposals. How can they be realized? An annual council held in Europe will not do it. The pulpit, the platform, and the daily press will not serve the purpose. Books for home reading will not suffice. The school is the only agency big enough for the job, and in the school the concrete means will be the textbook. Introduced in early days to support the short-comings of all but the most gifted teachers, the text¬ book is needed for that purpose more today than ever before. Teachers are vastly better now than they used to be, but frontier thinkers are moving so rapidly that teachers in general are farther behind their best thought than they have ever been. No community, committed to universal educa¬ tion, can possibly command enough teachers of first-rate ability to realize its aspirations. There will always be need of instructional materials. Ex¬ cept thru their use, we know of no other way to keep in sight of our fron¬ tier thinkers. Teach pupils to read well and to think. With that accom¬ plished, the textbook becomes the surest guarantee that the children of the common people can get the education which modern life demands. CURRENT ISSUES RELATING TO THE CURRICULUM AND INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS A. L. THRELKELD, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, DENVER, COLO. Shall our schools deal with the current, live, vital issues that face human¬ ity today in its everyday living? Shall the curriculum include a forthright consideration of the reasons for unemployment and other maladjustments in our present economic situation ? Shall it deal with the laissez-faire versus a planned-economics question? Shall it deal with the international relations problem? In other words: Shall our schools deal with issues? 610 National Education Association This is no simple question. It raises a point of view that is contrary to the traditional function of schools. Thruout the centuries in which the evo¬ lution of our society was transpiring very slowly, solutions to the prob¬ lems of living were to a high degree constant in nature from generation to generation. The preparation of the young for adult life consisted mainly of transmitting to the young the accumulated solutions of the social heritage. The social heritage was to a great extent a storehouse of ways of reacting to situations, which situations, and consequently the ways of reacting to them, remained practically constant. This was true, at least for some thou¬ sands of years; and during this long period schools, insofar as they existed at all, were for the purpose of assisting in transmitting these ways of re¬ acting, these solutions to the problems of living, from one generation to the next. The implication for curriculum content was that the thing to be taught was a program of ready-made solutions to the problems of living. The way a father carried on his farming operations or his simple life as a tradesman would work for his boy when he became a man. The specific standards of good citizenship of today would hold good tomorrow. What the young needed to learn was what had worked. The adult life of the child could be accurately predicted, for the simple reason that life was not changing in any fundamental way. It was only natural that the curriculum was made up mainly of ready-made solutions which would guarantee success for the future of the child provided he learned them and practised them well. What the schools should teach, then, in this kind of situation was almost automatically determined. On the side of teaching method the implication was quite as definite. The solutions that were being handed down to the young had been sanc¬ tioned by generations and even by centuries of experience. Anything that has worked well for centuries carries tremendous sanction back of it. Noth¬ ing succeeds like success. When certain solutions continue to work thru generation after generation, they come to be accepted with very little ques¬ tioning. Only the eccentric mind that shows up here and there tends to question such a program. It logically follows, then, that the method adopted for teaching such solutions is a method that approaches pure indoctrination, as far as it is psychologically possible to do so. The child is taught that the solution the school is presenting is^ not only the correct one, but that it is a sin for anyone to question its correctness. The objective is to get the child to accept the solution as quickly as possible and as thoroly as possible, and questioning interferes with this process. The successful teacher in such a philosophy of education is one who most quickly and most thoroly causes pupils to conform to the system of habits and series of tenets contained in the curriculum. Teaching becomes a definite process of imparting par¬ ticular ways of doing. Out of this background come our traditions with reference to the nature of schools. Schools have traditionally been for the purpose of teaching solu- Department of Superintendence 611 tions by indoctrination methods. Let us keep this in mind as we approach the present situation, and let us also keep in mind as a parallel considera¬ tion that traditions resist change. Historically that is what they are for. As so clearly pointed out by Dewey in his Human Nature and Conduct , we are here talking about the stubborn side of human nature, the side that is hardest to change. It takes a long time for the human race to get a fundamental idea, and what it takes so long to get it will not give up easily. In any fundamental sense, mind changing is very difficult. Now we come to the present situation in which our schools exist. What is it? Far be it from me to try to analyze it in any comprehensive fashion. But one thing that I do know about it beyond any doubt is that it is no longer a static civilization in which we live. It is one of change. What does this mean for the program of solutions which was worked out on the basis of an unchanging order, one in which the same situations kept repeating themselves from generation to generation and therefore called for the same solutions over and over again? Surely no one would argue that conclusions reached as to ways of reacting could remain valid after the conditions that gave rise to them have changed. Yet a period of change, such as that in which we now seem to be, creates precisely this inconsistency between many traditional solutions and present life problems. We find ourselves left with a vast store of formal concepts, habits, and the like, from which the realities that gave rise to it have departed. The new realities are as yet so dimly perceived that we have come to no general agreement concerning how to react to them; and so, with Hamlet, we would “rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.” In other words, we have no social sanction upon a program of solutions to our new social problems. By way of emphasizing this fact, may I submit the fol¬ lowing questions : What is the solution to the economic problem today? Shall we revert from our present industrial order to some simpler life such as the agrarian civilization? Or shall we take charge constructively of the power which science has given us, manage it successfully, and go ahead to new eras? If the answer to this question is Yes, then the next question is How? If we are to go ahead, shall we consider the function of government today to be the same as it was in the preceding agrarian civilization? If not, in what ways and in what particulars is it different in an industrial civilization? Is individualism as evolved in the agrarian civilization practicable to¬ day? If not, does the industrial type of civilization imply the loss of the in¬ dividual? If so, obviously we should have to reverse our direction at once. If not, what is the new type of individualism to be? These questions are merely suggestive. They coujld, and should be broken into thousands of more specific questions if they are to be included as curriculum content in our schools. The point I am intending to em¬ phasize here is that we do not have socially sanctioned solutions to these questions at the present time. An individual may have what he thinks is 612 National Education Association the solution to any one or all of them; but obviously we are living in an age in which society is in a period of transition, and for the moment, at least, it does not know what to do about these questions. So far as it does offer us its sanction upon curriculum content, it is upon the side of sticking to the obsolete. We, therefore, have two alternatives before us with reference to what curriculum content shall be. One is to continue to teach the irrele¬ vant, and the other is to introduce in a direct and comprehensive manner the study of issues for which solutions are being sought. To the extent that we insist upon the former, we shall make of the schools not merely an inconsequential, albeit expensive enterprise, but a serious obstacle to the social adjustments that so obviously need to be made. To the extent that we follow the segond alternative, that of dealing with new realities in the field of social problems which call for new concepts and ways of reacting, there is hope of making our schools vital factors in social progress. If it is decided that we shall introduce in a forthright, comprehensive manner the consideration of controversial issues in this period of transition, then let us realize that we shall be doing something in our schools which has never been done in any extensive way before in the history of education. To me, it is obvious that whether we are in a period of transition from a previous relatively static order to a future relatively static order; or whether we are in the beginning of a continuous process of rapid change, we seriously need to deal frankly with the current social problems that now perplex us to the end of working out some generally accepted way of reacting to them. If such new' curriculum content be brought into our schools, let us see what is implied on the side of teaching technic. I have attempted to point out that in the old order a definite concept of teaching as indoctrination, pure and simple, was evolved and became the traditional method of teach¬ ing. Now I wish to raise the question as to how this method of teaching would fit in with a consideration of issues as such. The answer is not at all. I am not saying that we could, or should, eliminate indoctrination altogether from our schools. I am simply saying that indoctrination as a method of teaching is incongruous to a study of current issues. For any specific act of indoctrination is predicated upon the existence of a solution, and a solution ends an issue, at least for the time being. In general, we would not be permitted to indoctrinate our pupils with reference to solu¬ tions to those phases of the economic problem, the problem of government, the problem of international relationships for which there are no socially sanctioned solutions. If we are to take up a consideration of current issues in our schools, if we are to proceed upon the assumption that the problems of life are calling for new solutions, we shall have to make a radical change in our method of teaching. Indoctrination, as a basic concept of method, will have to give way to an inquisitive attack upon problems yet unsolved, teacher and pupils working cooperatively in the attack. The classroom must become a place where questions are studied rather than answered, a situation in which analyses and comparisons of data are carefully made and Department of Superintendence 613 such progress accomplished toward tentative decisions as working bases, as maturity of pupil and information available may seem to justify. It is obvious, then, that to make such departure from the traditional con¬ tent and method of the school curriculum as would be represented by an earnest, comprehensive classroom attack upon controversial social issues re¬ quires that some authoritative decision be made that it be done. How is such a decision to be made? To my way of thinking, the approach to this decision must be made thru a program of adult education. We shall have to go directly to our adult citizenship and raise the question, What are the schools for? What are they for, in the light of the facts of our new economic order and the kind of transition period in which we seem to be? This is an opportune time to raise this question and call for a revaluation of school objectives. In times of prosperity it is difficult to secure adequate attention from the lay public to go fundamentally into such a question. Of course, even now we cannot expect our adult citizens to come to school in a formal way in order to be taught something about this issue. That is not the concept of adult education here suggested. Rather it is that it may be practicable to con¬ duct discussion forums in the various communities of our country in which this question can be frankly considered. It may be possible to secure the cooperation of the press in raising this question. Of one thing I feel sure. If that part of the press that is continually using its tremendous power merely to tear down the schools of our country were to address itself to an earnest effort at reconstruction within the school program itself, it could lay some claim to statesmanship in this very vital matter. So far, many of the most powerful newspapers, and even one widely read magazine, have given themselves over to mere tirades of negation, in some instances suggestive of mere senility of mind, and in others of that type of selfishness that always has opposed humanistic movements. But much of the press has been actively in support of education thruout the present depression. Most of it probably would give active support to any well-founded attempt by the profession of education to approach the public with questions seeking a review and a reconstruction of school objectives and methods. The radio could surely be used to good advantage in presenting the vari¬ ous points of view incident to such an issue. It is conceivable that the exigencies of our present social situation might, when thoroly considered, cause our adult citizenship to desire that the schools function, as far as at all practicable, to prepare the up-coming gen¬ eration to deal more quickly and intelligently with the problems presented by a changing civilization than their forbears have been able to do. By no means would this objective rule out a study of the past, as some would immediately fear. On the contrary, it would accentuate interest in the genuine historical approach to the understanding of current problems, and this would insure a purposeful study of the past, one that would have mean¬ ing for the pupil. The fact that there is now a sudden shifting of the scene of life which invalidates much in mere precedent as a guide for the 614 National Education Association present, in no degree detracts from the importance of historical knowledge. We cannot know what traditional solutions to discard, what ones to modify and how much, unless we know what conditions gave rise to them, and how these conditions contrast to, or compare with present conditions. Not only an appreciation of the continuous elements of human experience, which are, in fact, the basis of civilization itself, but an appreciation of the con¬ trasts between then and now, which is needed to stimulate pioneering, require a scholarly understanding of the past. Current issues cannot be constructively dealt with by people of meager background in terms of his¬ torical knowledge. No one is prepared to deal with the present who knows only the present. There is never any anchorage to such a person. All of this should be assumed as included in the curriculum as we discuss the question of bringing our schools into a more vital functioning with reference to the solution of current controversial issues. Once this objective for the schools is accepted by our adult citizenship, boards of education will reflect this point of view, and we can proceed to reform school procedures in con¬ sistency with it. This in itself will be no small task. Many changes in school procedures, involving the problem of adequate physical equipment, changes in attitudes of mind and technics of teaching, a different education for the teacher, and many other difficulties would have to be worked out. With regard to curriculum materials much more reliance would have to be placed upon library service than we have ever thought of in any exten¬ sive way in our schools up to now. Such materials as books, reports, period¬ icals, magazines, newspapers, in great variety and abundance would have to be available. Such materials would have to be expertly selected in order to insure a fair representation of scholarly points of view and facts pertinent toi the issues being studied. Reliance upon one textbook in the social studies or even a textbook plus a few socalled standard references in the school library would not be adequate. Vital, up-to-the-minute material would have to be available in sufficient quantity to make it immediately usable in the classroom. Classroom libraries in addition to the central, general school library would be necessary. To organize the kind of library service in con¬ nection with a school that would be necessary to carry this out efficiently would in itself be no simple task, quite aside from the question of cost of materials. Such obstacles would be quickly overcome if our adult citizen¬ ship were brought to see the importance of this and should decide upon its being done in our schools. On the side of method, teachers would have to develop great skill in effect¬ ing a scholarly development of the various considerations pertinent to any particular issue. Departure would have to be made at once from the im¬ mediate teaching of solutions. The whole procedure would be based upon the understanding that as yet no workable solution has been found; and until one has been found, the process has to be one of study rather than one of teaching in the traditional sense. I realize this may seem to some like a dilatory, colorless method of teaching; but my contention is that we must, in a period of transition when vital issues are perplexing mankind, study Department of Superintendence 615 issues rather than teach solutions, because no socially sanctioned solutions are available. As the study of an issue carried on not only in the schools but also by our adult citizenship results in solutions that may be accepted, at least tentatively, teaching method might, and probably would, pass over into the teaching of solutions. No solution should be accepted as final. This implies the continuous remaking of issues out of old solutions, as well as new issues which may arise from other angles. If we are to have a changing civilization, we should accept the con¬ tinuous study of issues as a major consideration in both curriculum content and method of teaching in our schools, albeit we do wish to make decisions as we go along and to teach the validity of those decisions to a certain ex¬ tent, the extent to which they secure social sanction. One phase of the modern school curriculum, then, might come to be a study of issues and the other the teaching of solutions that are, for the time being at least, ac¬ cepted as working bases. In addition to the vast enrichment of curriculum materials which would be required by such a program and the radical change in teaching method required by it, it is definitely implied that the teacher in such a program would have to be a zestful and capable student of social problems. Teacher training would have to change to teacher education. There would be great danger of the most chaotic and superficial condition in our schools, were the highest standards of scholarship with respect to social intelligence to be overlooked in the preparation and appointment of teachers. The kind of program being considered here is the kind that only the teacher of gen¬ uine scholarship can make function constructively. It is a big order, but what a challenge! Why should not we professional school people desire to see such a change occur in our schools? Would it not be far more in¬ teresting for us to be right in the middle of the main current of life, battling with the elements and helping to direct the current constructively, as con¬ trasted to being off to one side in one of the eddies, peacefully floating around, having nothing much to do with the main part of the stream, becoming mentally and physically lazy and stagnant. Nature grows scum over water that is never stirred. If we are to bring the schools into this vital relationship to current issues of life, we shall have to take a vital part in the affairs of life ourselves, and bring our adult citizenship to desire, even to demand this kind of program in its schools. Much can be done even under present circumstances to vitalize the content of our school curriculums and our methods of teaching, and much is being so done, but it is far from sufficient at best. It is my contention that a forthright and comprehensive attack on the vital issues that face us in this critical and most interesting transition period cannot be made purely upon the motion of professional school people themselves. A broad social sanction will be necessary for this kind of attack. I have not intended to make the impression that I am claiming that the whole of school life should be given to a study of social problems. I have 616 National Education Association been speaking of a center of emphasis, or what might be called a core curriculum, to which in some way or another everything taught in schools would be related. Studies of the problems of production and distribution of economic goods, international relationships, and governmental services would, by no means, exclude studies in music, painting, and the fine arts generally, vocational training, and education in many other areas of life. What I have said does imply that the social studies program would be the center of school life, and the nature and scope of the problems brought up in it would vary in accordance with the experience levels of the pupils. I am convinced that by the time the high school is reached, a very comprehen¬ sive and rather thoro-going attack could profitably be made upon most of the social problems that so sorely vex us at the present moment. If this were done, I believe we would greatly speed up, thru the early introduction into our adult ranks of millions of young people educated under such a pro¬ gram, a much more satisfactory adjustment or synchronization of the vari¬ ous phases of our social process than could otherwise be effected. To effect this synchronization is the big challenge that faces the leadership of our society in general. Bringing the schools into a vital role in effecting such synchronization is the principal challenge facing the profession of educa¬ tion at this time. FREEDOM FROM RED TAPE AND STATISTICS —A FRONTIER BLESSING ERNEST C. HARTWELL, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, BUFFALO, N. Y. With all of our admiration for the heroes of the American frontier, none of us would willingly live as necessity required them to live. The pooled experiences of mankind, scientific experimentation and research, and speciali¬ zation of effort have combined immeasurably to raise the standard of com¬ fort, security, and prosperity for the mass of our citizenry. Whether in the evolution we have sacrificed the frontier virtues of individual initiative, cour¬ age, and independent thinking for the benefits of a greater material prosperity is a question which is raised with increasing frequency. The answer most often heard to such a question is that, after all, individual opinion is less valuable than demonstrated truth. In industry, commerce, and government and education we are asked to believe that scientific research is the strong support upon which we should rely, rather than upon individual conviction. I would not be misunderstood in the discussion of the topic assigned me as in any sense disparaging the incalculable value of genuine research. Neither can the intricate machinery of administration in any field of presentday activity be dismissed with casual generalities about red tape. Attention may properly be called, however, to the difference in the methods of such original investigators as Columbus, Pasteur, and Edison, and the technic employed by some of those who masquerade today before the altars of educational research. It is not on record that the pioneer thinkers to whom Department of Superintendence 617 the world is so greatly indebted were bigoted believers in the tabulations of questionnaires. 1 hey recognized the limitations of the statistical method, and above all they realized that real progress requires something in addition to mere fact-finding. If Columbus had sent out a set of questions' on naviga¬ tion to all of the people of his time who had ever seen the sea, 99.5 percent of those receiving the questionnaire would have asserted their belief that the world was flat. Something more was required to discover America. It is always well to remember that a majority vote of the class in arithmetic is not required to determine the correct answer to a problem. Even if the subject being investigated has some promise of value, and this is not always the case, the only fact established by many of the innumerable questionnaires with which our profession is afflicted is that there is a considerable divergence of opinion among those who take the time to make answer. A tabulation of personal opinions and experience may or may not be interesting. It can scarcely be conclusive. It ought to be read with the frontier philosopher’s warning clearly in mind. He said: “We must be careful not to get out of an experience more wisdom than there is in it. A cat who has sat on a hot stove lid will never sit on a hot stove lid again — but also she will never sit on a cold one any more.” The pioneer had mosquitoes but he was free from questionnaires. Neither was he greatly worried over per capita cost comparisons or statistical state¬ ments generally. He regarded statistics with suspicion. He wanted to know who made them and for what purpose. It was a typical product of the frontier who said that while figures might not lie, liars could figure; and while it was Talleyrand who coined the epigram that language was designed to conceal thought, it was a true son of the Middle Border who declared that statistics too often succeed in preventing it. Thoughtful school men know that it is almost impossible to make a sheet of figures dealing with education tell the whole truth. Stipulating that they are honestly and intelligently made, which stipulation is frequently contrary to fact, it is1 impossible to make mere figures tell a complete story. They are instruments for the measurement of quantity only. To state that the average enrolment of pupils per teacher in a given school' is 39.5 may be an accurate quantitative statement. It is a valueless statement until the terms “average,” “pupil,” “teacher,” and “enrolment” are defined. After this is done and the honest application of a uniform formula is by some miracle assured, it still remains a statement from which deductions of any value must be drawn with great care. There is so much missing from the statement that one needs to know if it is to mean anything. In what grades are the pupils, what is their age, mental capacity, physical condition, what courses of study are being pursued, are the teachers experienced or inexperienced? All of these things and many more must be taken into account to give this particular statistic any true, value. And yet there are still those who feel that necessarily some¬ thing must be wrong if the statistics maker discovers that Puckering Valley, Ark., has an average enrolment of 44.7 while Gargle City, Pa., has only 43.8. 618 National Education Association Few things right now would contribute more to an intelligent administra¬ tion of educational affairs than a clear understanding on the part of everyone of the limitations of statistical methods. Boards of education and superinten¬ dents, confronted with the problems of operating a school system subject to the provisions of hundreds of pages of educational law, court decisions, local tradition, political pressure, journalistic interference, conflicting professional advice, overcrowded schools, civil service requirements, mandated salary schedules, permanent tenure, and restricted revenues, require something more in the way of relief and comfort than dubious per capita cost comparisons and uninterpreted, inadequate, and often misleading statistical statements. Here and there people may still be found who believe, or affect to believe, that comparing per capita costs of educational service by cities really proves something. It would seem that even a wayfaring man ought to know that the chiefly important services rendered by the school are not measurable in the first place nor uniform in the second. We can measure how rapidly a child reads but not the discrimination with which he selects his books nor the ap¬ preciation with which he reads them. With what yardstick is the statistician to measure the service of the teacher in her effort to instill desirable attitudes of mind, capacities, tastes, and ideals? Every school man knows that the service rendered within two schools in the same city is not and ought not to be uniform. He knows that the services undertaken in no two cities are uniform. He knows that properly, and of necessity, service is conditioned upon the racial, social, and industrial needs of a community, and that an infinity of considerations outside his control prevents a standardization of these services. As long as the educational services undertaken by our various cities are neither measurable nor uniform, an attempted comparison of their per capita costs can serve no largely useful purpose. The makers of such compilations may be merely statisticians in a happy state of nature, or even more possibly they may be special pleaders carrying on a propaganda under the awe-inspir¬ ing name of research. The school superintendent who joyously discovers in reading their latest compilation of hand-picked cities that his community is third lowest in per capita costs, may derive some temporary happiness from the comparison, but it will be only temporary. Even if he succeeds in getting his local newspapers to print the glad tidings, the owners of unnecessary office buildings and superfluous apartment hotels will still be unconvinced. There will always be those who believe that whatever the schools are spending is far too much. With the bonds sold for the construction of their buildings in default, and with their taxes in many cases unpaid, the only remedy for the situation which occurs to them is still further to reduce the purchasing power of faithful public servants. Statistical claptrap about per capita costs of education is one of the favorite weapons of people who subscribe to this formula. And now a few words about red tape. No one will for a moment dispute the necessity for all reasonable safeguards against waste in the purchase, dis- Department of Superintendence 619 tribution, and use of educational supplies and materials. Let that be stipu¬ lated. No one disputes it. But any system, however: businesslike it is alleged to be, which requires a principal to make out too many requisitions for a box of chalk or which involves the visa of too many different persons be¬ fore a manual training teacher can secure a hundred feet of lumber, is itself wasteful and inefficient. It is not only costly in money but it is tremen¬ dously wasteful in its effects on the initiative and enthusiasm of teachers. Nobody ever won a ball game by card-indexing the bats or by computing the per capita expenditures for liniment. Doubtless it may be helpful for the school administrators to be at all times informed on the unit costs per building of chalk, kindling wood, and rat poison, but there are other and more important matters deserving consideration. Poor teaching methods and misdirected teaching effort have cost the taxpayers a thousand times more than all of the lost and wasted supplies and equipment put together. The absence of sufficient, wise, and competent supervision of instruction is the most extravagantly wasteful feature of our present educational or¬ ganization, but the situation can neither be proved nor cured by statistics or cost accounting. Just as real economy consists of something more than the mere non-spend¬ ing of money, so does efficient school operation require more than bookkeep¬ ing. It requires primarily an intelligent faith in the fundamental purposes of public education and a defensible conviction as to what a minimum program of public education should include. It demands a mind alertly open to new truth but always aware of the difference between real progress and mere change. It presupposes an ability to distinguish education from propaganda. It requires a judgment as to what may be locally desirable which is not too easily upset by the ephemeral theories of alleged experts with no responsibility for results. It assumes an understanding of the fundamental difference be¬ tween a private business whose success can be measured in terms of profit, ^ and a public school system rendering a service which is not susceptible to sta¬ tistical measurement. And above all it demands an enlightened public atti¬ tude on the problems of school administration. The traditional political atmosphere surrounding the operation of municipal services is far from healthful to the development of an efficient or economical educational system. If and where the public permits such an atmosphere to exist, it requires some¬ thing more than elaborate statistical studies to correct it. To paraphrase Mr. Kipling : “If statistics be the price of efficiency, Lord, God! We have paid in full.” Multiplication of executive heads, the division of responsibility among an army of reviewing boards, the creation of a chaos of governmental machinery, cost-accounting bureaus, inspectors, auditors, and efficiency experts have all been tried. The net result suggests the regret of the colonial doctor who recounts how a certain worthy man was bled by four different expert surgeons within three days and yet “in spite of this the man did not recover.” 620 National Education Association What we most need right now is a revived emphasis on the frontier virtues of independent thinking, courage of convictions, initiative, and resourceful¬ ness. Thousands of banks equipped with auditors and comptometers may close their doors, industrial plants with elaborate cost-accounting systems may go into bankruptcy, corporations with efficiency experts and production engineers may pass their dividends, but the school is expected to carry on. In such a situation the spiritual strength of the pioneer is too precious a heritage to be ignored. We can take full advantage of all that is really sound in genuine research and in improved business practise and still remember that statistics and red tape are poor substitutes for sincerity of convictions, inde¬ pendent thinking, and courageous defense of the purposes for which the schools were organized. THE SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF THE CURRICULUM CHARLES H. JUDD, DEAN, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. I have a paper here but I think it is fair for me to depart for a time from the paper. Some of us lived in those good pioneer days before 1897. Why do I men¬ tion that date? In 1897 an editor by the name of Rice went to the major school systems of the United States. He asked those in charge whether he might try a list of words with the children in the schools. They said, “Yes, very glad to have you, because spelling is one of the things that we do admirably in this school.” Up to that time, pioneer methods of teaching spelling had depended on courage and insight and enthusiasm — I wish I knew the rest of the words. Spelling was one of the great achievements of American schools, conducted by superintendents who knew exactly how to do it. Mr. Rice took these measurements of something which educators had not been able to measure up to that time, and he wrote an article in 1897 that has transformed instruction in American schools. The title of that article is “The Futility of the Spelling Grind.” That was the first piece of careful statistical meas¬ urement of spelling in the United States or anywhere else in the world. We cannot any longer make an attack on scientific methods without an¬ swering quite definitely the question, what is it that has made improvement in American education? That improvement has come from the application of the best scientific technics that could be devised. Whoever is willing to face the problem of improving those methods, let him come before us and tell us how to improve them. But to banish this scientific movement with any criticism of questionnaires, with any criticism of cost accounting, belongs back two decades. I am asked to talk this morning on the science of education and its rela¬ tion to the curriculum. Of course, there was a curriculum before there Department of Superintendence 621 was any science of education. The very first school that was established came into being because somebody had something to teach. The something taught was the curriculum. That teaching was done, at the outset, with great enthusiasm. It was done out of the meager resources of a human being who was eager to make improvement in civilization. But civilization has grown increasingly complex as the years have passed. It is no longer possible to determine either the content of the curriculum or its modes of procedure without careful checking of the results, and those results appear in the experience of the young people who attend the schools. It is possible to determine, with a very high degree of accuracy, how far the efforts of our educational group have been effective in changing the content of expe¬ rience of these young people. That original curriculum was devised without any careful, scientific in¬ quiry. When the Puritans decided that they would establish on this continent a school somewhat different from the school that had been established in Europe for the common people, they did not determine their choices by any careful scientific measurement. They did the best they could, and it was not until that great leader in American education began to determine, with some degree of accuracy, what was happening in the schools of Massa¬ chusetts, I refer to the early years of Horace Mann’s administration, that those pioneer efforts were called into question. Horace Mann made one of the first quantitative statistical statements made in the history of American education, when in 1838 he said, “I have canvassed the schools of Massachu¬ setts, and I find under the antiquated methods of instruction employed in these schools that eleven out of twelve of the children fail to understand what they are reading because they have been taught merely to pronounce words.” He criticized the method of instruction that had been in operation since the beginning of the modern period. Horace Mann wrought one of the great reforms in American education because he went out and conscientiously determined, in the schools with which he had to operate, that there was a deficiency that could be stated in definite, quantitative terms. Then comes the period of the great revival of American education. For years there had been complacence with regard to what we had been doing in American schools. There is that great epoch from the time of Horace Mann up to the period when the revival began, when men and women taught earnestly and eagerly in the schools. Their memory is sacred to us. But they did not have the instruments and devices for determining with any degree of accuracy what they were doing. The Herbartians came to us with suggestions from another land ; Stanley Hall came to us with the eager desire to understand children better; John Dewey came to us with a careful analysis of society; Harris came with new modes of instruc¬ tion and new contents. Charles W. Eliot gathered the Committee of Ten, and there was launched by 1890 an entirely new attitude in American educa¬ tion, and that new attitude began to spread, and the influence of it became 622 National Education Association so great that we have to recognize the fact that there was a change from the old complacence which depended upon personal judgment to that type of comparative thinking and exact evaluation which was the dawn of a new era in American education. The interesting point is that in the early days, most of the effect of this scientific study was negative because when you have a race which has been complacent about its modes of operation, has been depending upon its own independent judgment, the first thing that science has to do is to break down complacence. It took the decade of 1890 to 1900 to change the attitude of American people with regard to the effectiveness of the schools that they had been assuming were being conducted as they should be. That decade of 1890 to 1900 is a period of great agitation in American thinking and, in American education, and, as I have already indicated, just at the end there was devised by the genius of Rice a new method of determin¬ ing whether our work is effective or not. Now we come to the first fifteen years of this century, and again we find that many of the results of the early measurements were negative, for the simple reason that there was inefficiency in our teaching. Rapidly during those first fifteen years, the science of education made progress and established the measurement movement, and again and again it was said that there were features of the school work that could not be measured. I remember distinctly when it was said you could not measure the results of reading ; when it was said that you could not determine any¬ thing about the competence of children by measuring the rate at which they read ; when it was said you could not evaluate that type of thinking which you cultivate in arithmetic, which you call the ability to think with precision, because that is something you cannot measure. It took us fifteen years to determine the fact that you can quantitatively evaluate the work of the school in most of these lines. About 1915 you find the beginning of the survey movement, which was resented. It is indeed difficult to have your school systems surveyed and to find yourself confronted with one hundred recommendations for improvement. It is a trying experience to be subjected to the examination of your processes in the school by these methods of evaluation, but the survey method has estab¬ lished itself to the point where it has become routine. Here and there are established, in connection with the administrative offices of the great school systems in the states, agencies that shall continuously survey the work of the schools. If there has ever been one achievement of American education of which we ought to be proud, it is the fact that we have turned administra¬ tion from mere observation into carefully recorded measurements of results. One of the great catastrophes that has come to us in these times of emergency and withdrawal of funds is that it has seemed to many lay people that it was entirely possible to dispense with those instruments of evaluation of the school work which have been so significant in recent years in changing the character and efficiency of American education. Department of Superintendence 623 Now, all this culminated, about 1915, in a demand that there should be a sweeping revision of the curriculum. Since that date, we have been working on the problem of trying to change the curriculum. Might I review one or two of the effective positive results that have come from these measurements. Take the field of spelling to which I have referred. We used to get the spelling words out of the dictionary. We made up long lists that looked alike, that began with the same letter, or ended with the same syllable. We taught these to children, whether they had any value and significance for common life or not. There came that genius who, after making a survey of the school system and convincing himself and the community that it was quite impossible to go on teaching seventh-grade children this arbitrary list of words, went home to the Russell Sage Foundation and used the resources of that agency for finding out what are the thousand most common words in ordinary life. He laid down a principle which is quantitative, direct, explicit, the result of measurement, and he said, “These one thousand words that are most common should be the first to be taught.” What is the result? Generations of spelling books have disappeared. You cannot find a modern spelling book that is not based on the findings of that quantitative measurement carried on by Leonard P. Ayres in the Russell Sage Foundation. Not only that, but we have found it desirable to have exactly those determinations made not only in the spelling of the ver¬ nacular but; in the vocabulary that is taught in foreign language. Not only shall we do it in foreign language with regard to vocabulary, but we have quantitative determinations of the idioms that are most common. We have made similar progress in geography and history. All teachers have systematically collected material, in the past, for the courses of study which they administer, but there has never been a time when, with that definite outlook upon quantitative possibilities, we have so eagerly sought for the explicit material that must be included if we are going to have any¬ thing like a complete survey of civilization, and this has been done by quan¬ titative methods. It has been done by scientific procedures that do not blush, as they present themselves to you, as the reformers of American education. Let us now take some other illustrations, perhaps a little more subtle in character. We once taught reading in the schools, and we were enthusias¬ tic about the reading that we taught. We remember the distinction that Horace Mann had drawn between spelling and the A, B, C method, on the one hand, and reading for meaning on the other. We had modified our school practise, but an obscure psychologist, determining the character of the reading process in his laboratory, working with methods that were quantitative but extraordinarily difficult, came to the conclusion, and almost timidly reported that conclusion in 1908, that there is a distinction between: oral and silent reading, a distinction so fundamental in character that if you give instruction only in oral reading in the schools, you will fail to cultivate- that power which will make the individual independent in his use of printed! material. 624 National Education Association Mr. Huey, that obscure psychologist, wrote a book on the psychology and pedagogy of reading.1 The teachers at first, as they examined that book, said it was not very practical. They said that it was difficult to read. They said that there was too much theoretical psychology in it. A few years later the findings of Mr. Huey were verified and amplified in labora¬ tories, where nothing but quantitative determinations made it at all possible to draw that distinction, with the clarity that it has been since 1912 and 1914. What is the result? You could not find a textbook handed to the children in the schools in 1908 that said a single word about silent reading. And in 1933, I venture the statement that you cannot find a set of readers that does not, in the preface, say: “This book will help to train in the only form of reading which is fully fluent and that is silent reading.” There has come a distinction into our ordinary school operations that has been determined by quantitative, laboratory work, and I venture the state¬ ment that it will be quite impossible for the American school system to proceed on the basis of anybody’s courage and accomplish a reform in in¬ struction that remotely compares in significance with the change that has come thru laboratory investigations of the processes of learning. 1 am enthusiastic about what the science of education has accomplished. I could go on and give you example after example, but you know, after all, the science of education is *just like every other sincere enterprise. It is eager to amplify itself. It is eager to accomplish more and better results in the future than it has in the past. I am very eager to take advantage of this opportunity to establish the right of the science of education to be recognized as one of the foundations of modern education. I am eager to secure, if possible, the cooperation of this great and influential group in seeing to it that we shall make progress. I am thru with the history. The history stands for itself. What} do we have to do in the future? The science of education has had meager resources. Here and there, in a few centers, it has been possible to carry on these laboratory experiments and these quantitative determinations. It has been extraordinarily difficult to get the means to make scientific in¬ vestigations for the simple reason that the schools of the United States are eagerly concerned to carry on the routine of tomorrow’s work, and no one understands better than I do the importance of seeing to it that that rou¬ tine is carried on. But I make a plea for resources that shall amplify the base and understanding of that routine. We have had a science of education that has dealt primarily with the problems within the school. That is where the science of education natu¬ rally began. It measured spelling; it measured arithmetic; it measured all the operations, little by little, making progress and securing devices that were reliable. But now the time has come, and certainly this/ session of the Department of Superintendence has made it clear that the time has come, when we shall 1 Huey, E. B. The Psychology