5. The effect on the cities addrest was good. The letter from the Children's Bureau evidently acted as a stimulus.

In the press of other work the Children's Bureau has not been able to prosecute the inquiry further this year. Plans are being made, however, to take it up again soon and to carry it on to more definite results.

The Council of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in its session last winter in Chicago voted to establish a National Committee on Juvenile Vocational Supervision. It has offered its services to the Children's Bureau to do preliminary investigation thru its branch associations. It believes that it can be of service in finding out: (1) in what cities and towns forms of vocational guidance or employment supervision are being carried on; (2) the organizations, public or private, which are carrying on such work; (3) the names and addresses of officials having the work in charge.

We hope that the Bureau may find it possible to take up this inquiry very soon, and that it will publish a report which will (1) show exactly where adequate vocational supervision is being carried on in the United States; (2) make a study of methods in use in different cities; (3) make some recommendations as to the best way in which to establish vocational guidance or employment supervision in cities where they do not yet exist; (4) make recommendations as to the best methods of carrying on the work in cities of various classes.

As a second piece of work this committee has planned to bring before clubs and schools the need for vocational supervision and to suggest methods for beginning and prosecuting the work. The need for vocational supervision is especially urgent now. More children are leaving school than ever before in the history of the school system.

Many causes are operating to cut short the education of these children. The enlistment of bread-winners, the increast cost of living, and, perhaps most potent of all, a feeling on the part of the child that in some way he is doing his bit for his country by going to work. The retarded child who is already dissatisfied with school would leave under almost any circumstances if he could get a job. The superior child leaves now only because he believes that in so doing he is helping his family or his country.

Perhaps the first thing we can do for these children is to show them that patriotism points to an education rather than to a job. Commissioner Claxton has pointed out that this country will need trained workers at the end of the war as no country ever needed them before.

The children should be led to see the future value of a few years more in school. They should be told that the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education has found that of one hundred children who go to work at fourteen, ninety-eight remain untrained workers all their lives; that the Henry Street Settlement has found that after working three years those people who have had two years of training are making

wages two and one-half times as great as those who have been working five years and who left school without training.

The committee is planning a circular for distribution among the clubs which make up the Department of School Patrons, giving the foregoing facts in as telling a form as possible. It also plans a series of charts to be used in public schools, community centers, etc., giving graphically these facts and quoting such statements as the following:

The most useful thing a high-school boy can do is to finish his course.-SECRETARY BAKER.

Any boy who has the opportunity to complete at least a high-school course and fails to do so is making the greatest mistake of his life. The present war conditions only emphasize this.-SECRETARY DANIELS.

The committee plans also to distribute widely circulars on the subject of scholarships, or direct financial aid to keep children in school. It hopes to organize as many vocational-guidance centers and scholarship committees as possible thruout the country, and in every way it will seek to awaken a wider sense of parenthood in the great body of the public, and a desire on the part of every adult in each community to obtain for all the children of the community the best possible training for their life-work.

GUARDING THE SCHOOLS IN WAR TIME

MARGARET S. MCNAUGHT, COMMISSIONER OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS OF CALIFORNIA; CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON SCHOOL

REVENUE, SACRAMENTO, CAL.

(Paper read by Mrs. Grace P. Andress)

Suddenly the war has summoned the school to the tasks of the nation. To its duties as a community center there have been added those of a national center. This summons has come directly from the President of the United States, and no message to Congress, nor any to a foreign power, shows in its language more evidence of careful thought, deep feeling, and sincerity of eloquence than his message to the public schools. He said:

In these vital tasks of acquiring a broader view of human possibilities the common school must have a large part. I urge that teachers and other officers increase materially the time and attention devoted to instruction bearing directly on the problems of community and national life. Such a plea is in no way foreign to the spirit of American public education or of existing practices. Nor is it a plea for the temporary enlargement of the school problem appropriate merely to the period of the war. It is a plea for a realization in public education of the new emphasis which the war has given to ideals of democracy and to the broader conceptions of national life.

Secretary Lane's statements are no less significant. In his annual report for 1915 he refers to the "twenty-two million boys and girls in our

schools as our chief resource and chief concern," and in a personal letter to your chairman of the Committee on School Revenue he says:

We cannot afford to do anything that will interrupt their education. We are fighting that democracy may be preserved for them, but we must not let the war turn us aside from our duty of seeing that they shall be mentally trained to take their places in the world when life's responsibilities shall come to them as men and women.

Undoubtedly this attitude of our President and of our Secretary of the Interior has had much to do with influencing public opinion regarding the stability of education; for so far as investigation reveals facts, there is no direct effort being made to deprive children of this all-important factor for good citizenship.

In order to place these facts plainly before the people and to state clearly reasons why the schools should be held to their present standards of efficiency or even increast inefficiency, two leaflet bulletins were printed, entitled, The Safeguard of Democracy and Guard the Schools as Well as the Trenches. The former was intended for general distribution in order to fix as firmly as possible in the minds of our people the idea of the importance of maintaining our schools at a high degree of efficiency. The latter was intended to be used in those states whose legislatures were advocating retrenchment in school expenditure. Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane, on request, wrote a letter supporting the facts set forth in the leaflet.

These leaflets, embodying Secretary Lane's letter, were distributed as follows: To the state chairman of legislation and of education of the General Federation of Women's Clubs; to the general officers and sectional vicepresidents of the Collegiate Alumnae; to the officers of the Council of Jewish Women; and to the officers of the Southern Association of College Women. A circular letter was sent with the leaflets explaining their nature and purpose and stating that if necessary a limited number could be supplied for distribution.

It is gratifying to be able to report that no responses were received stating that in any state was there a tendency to lessen the amount of school expenditure. However, certain very definite requests have been made for the leaflets. Four hundred were forwarded to the Biennial Convention of the General Federation of Women's Clubs held at Hot Springs, Ark.

Mrs. Maynard Kimberland, chairman of education, General Federation of Women's Clubs, Wheeling, W.Va., wrote on May 5, 1918, as follows: "We have a movement on foot to revise the state school laws. . . . . I think The Safeguard of Democracy most adaptable to our local situation and should like to have a quantity soon to scatter over the state."

Correspondence with Miss Lucy Bartholomew, treasurer, Southern Association of College Women, Virginia, reveals the fact that Virginia has increast its appropriation of school funds to the amount, approximately, of $776,050.

The report of Miss Elizabeth L. Clarke, Williamstown, Mass., states: "So far as I know there has been no question in the Massachusetts legislature of restricting educational appropriations at all. Indeed the tendency is the other way, a new bill making application for physical training being now in committee."

Miss Cora G. Lewis reports that Kansas has no thought of dropping back.

Mrs. E. Buchner says that in Maryland a number of destructive education bills were brought in, but public opinion defeated them.

Miss Anna J. Hamilton, dean of women, University of Kentucky, writes: "The Kentucky General Assembly adjourned March 20, and the tendency was toward raising rather than lowering the apportionment."

Mrs. Mary Leal Harkness, of Louisiana, secretary of the Southern Association of College Women, says that there is no tendency in that state toward retrenchment; on the contrary, there is a strong campaign on for increase in teachers' salaries.

Mrs. Florence M. Hale writes that in Maine people are thinking of increasing rather than of decreasing school appropriations. In connection with this statement, however, it is well to call attention to a publisht letter of State Superintendent A. O. Thomas. He writes:

The pull of greater compensation in business positions and in clerical work for the federal government has depleted our ranks. Teachers who have taught for several years on a salary of $10 to $12 per week for thirty-six weeks in the year have accepted government positions, recently, at $1,100 to $1,200. There is a national call for a 25 per cent increase in the wages of teachers for the coming year.

Facts such as these clearly demonstrate the necessity for an increase in teachers' salaries and therefore in the funds from which salaries are paid. Mrs. J. N. Kelly reports favorably for Montana, saying, "Appropriations by the last legislature for school purposes were as liberal as usual."

It is the part of wisdom to guide the thoughts of people along right lines before they have been turned in wrong directions. Thus while there seems to be no cause for fear at present that school revenues thruout the United States will be reduced, it is well to remember that changes in opinion are made with surprising rapidity these days. Therefore it is advisable to have fixt in the public consciousness definite reasons why the schools should be maintained at a high degree of efficiency, so that if an attack is made in the attempt to weaken their efficiency these facts will be in mind ready to repulse the attack.

RURAL SCHOOLS IN THE WAR

MARIE TURNER HARVEY, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON RURAL SCHOOLS, KIRKSVILLE, MO.

On March 15 last, Secretary of Interior Lane addrest a letter to the Chairman of the Senate and House Committees on Education.

What it reveals cannot be overemphasized. He says:

The war has brought facts to our attention that are almost unbelievable, and that are in themselves accusatory. There are in the United States (Census of 1910) 5,516,163 persons over ten years of age who are unable to read or write. There are 700,000 men of draft age who cannot read or write in English or in any other language. Over 4,600,000 illiterates are twenty years of age or more . . . . over 58 per cent of this number are white persons, 1,500,000 being native-born whites. . . . .

The federal government and the states spend millions of dollars trying to give information to the people in rural districts about farming and home making. Yet 3,700,000, or 10 per cent of our country folk, cannot read or write a word. They cannot read a bulletin on agriculture, a farm paper, a food pledge card, a Liberty Loan appeal, a newspaper, the Constitution of the United States, or their Bibles; nor can they keep personal or business accounts.

An uninformed democracy is not a democracy. A people who cannot have means of access to the mediums of public opinion and to the messages of the President and the acts of Congress can hardly be expected to understand the full meaning of this war to which all must contribute in life or property or labor.

The obvious relation of illiteracy to the democracy of American ideals demands nation-wide concerted action by all educational forces of the United States to eliminate as speedily as possible the curse of illiteracy.

Some 12,000,000 of America's youth are spending at least seven of the most important years of their lives in the typical one- and two-room school buildings, inadequate viewed from every standpoint, and under the direction of itinerant teachers.

Since the emergency demands that we make every rural community in the land realize its possibilities thru its present legal educational machine, the school teacher is obviously the pivot on which this big project swings. Our public school system, rural and city alike, must be made to serve the cause of democracy as efficiently as Germany made hers serve autocracy.

Money must be found to call into the rural field men and women having necessary qualifications for this pressing national service. "The National Education Association Commission on the Emergency in Education and Program for Readjustment during and after the War" has no more important work to do than to evolve a plan for immediate nation-wide propaganda in the interest of state and federal aid to expedite the entrance of a small army of such teachers into the rural field. Given such teachers, with freedom to readjust the traditional course of study, etc., to local conditions, what could result in five short years is best indicated by citing a case in point: the Porter School District, Adair County, Missouri, containing nine square miles of prairie farming land, having a sparse popula