taxation, school libraries for rural schools, and improvement of schoolhouses. An important step has been made toward securing better supervision in the counties. Varying somewhat in specific aims, agencies, and methods to meet local needs, this work conducted in North Carolina is being repeated in the other Southern States, and may be taken as a type of what is being done throughout the field. The bureau of investigation and information.—In addition to the campaign work conducted in the field by the district directors and their associates, the Southern Education Board assumed the parallel function, as provided by the original Winston-Salem resolution, of conducting a bureau of investigation and information. This bureau was organized and located at Knoxville, under the directorship of Dr. Charles W. Dabney, with P. P. Claxton and J. D. Eggleston, jr., as associates. Its purpose.-The bureau outlined for itself two main lines of work: (1) It proposed to make a careful and thorough study of educational conditions in the South, in other sections of our own country, and in the more important foreign countries; and (2) it proposed, by means of its own publications, through the public press, and the campaign orator, to give the results of this comparative study to the public, and thereby to educate the people into the adoption of sound constructive educational policies. This is among the most important tasks undertaken by the board. It is not a difficult task to arouse a popular momentary enthusiasm on vital subjects. The campaign of education, as being conducted, has already awakened in many communities educational enthusiasm amounting to religious fervor. But unless this emotion be transformed into quiet intelligent interest it can not last, neither can it construct efficient schools unless it be guided by sane educational statesmanship. This statesmanship can not be adequately supplied by a few minds capable of taking the larger view, for in a democratic community schools and school systems must, in the last resort, be constructed by the people. It is of the highest importance, therefore, that while the campaign orator is kindling a popular enthusiasın the people be given a broad perspective of the real problems before them. They should be given the facts which portray the schools and school systems as they are in the Southern States. They should be led to view the situation in the light of the larger educational experience of other sections of our country and of other countries, and to use this comparison for constructive criticism in harmony with the genius of their own civilization. This should constitute the objective of the whole campaign, and the bureau calling into its service the educational leadership of the South should be, in President Ogden's happy phrase, the “ordnance department." This is the theory of the bureau. Methods of the bureau.-On March 10, 1902, the bureau issued the first number of its publication, entitled "Southern Education Notes;" a bi-weekly publication, interded to furnish matter in convenient form for newspapers. As stated in the issue of April 21, "The object of Southern Education Notes is to act as a clearinghouse of educational information and comment for the convenience of the newspapers of the South." And in the issue of March 24 we find that "Southern Education Notes is gratified at the reception of its first issue by the newspapers throughout the South." A single number of the Notes consists of six single column leaflets printed on one side. The matter is composed of brief paragraphs of educational statistics, quotations, and comments. It is intended to be terse, striking, popular, so as to win its way into the columns of the newspaper. Any adequate discussion of an important topic is obviously impossible in the columns of the Notes. In April, 1902, the bureau issued the first of a series of circulars, intended not for the press but for the reading public. Each issue was devoted to a special sub ject, and was intended to supplement the Notes by giving opportunity for more adequate statement and discussion. Only four circulars were issued. In March, 1903, the bureau began the publication of "Southern Education," a weekly publication in magazine form which, taking the place of Southern Education Notes and the circulars, combines the best features of both, and assumes the function of a more definite campaign document. The issue of May 11 may be taken as typical of its best methods and results. This is the North Carolina edition, and was prepared as a special campaign document for the campaign now being conducted in that State. It was prepared at the suggestion of the State superintendent of public instruction and of the central campaign committee for the promotion of public education in North Carolina, and the proof was submitted to them for approval. It contains 176 pages devoted to the special educational conditions and problems of North Carolina. It is a document of facts carefully gathered, clearly stated, and arranged in convenient form, portraying in a most graphic and forceful way the conditions in North Carolina along the lines of illiteracy, local taxation, consolidation of schools, schoolhouses, rural libraries, county supervision, the preparation and pay of teachers. Exhibits are made by county, by township, by city, and village, thus enforcing on the consciousness of each community its relative educational standing in terms both of effort and of accomplishment. One brief quotation may serve to show how this document uses facts for purposes of persuasion: DOES CONSOLIDATION PAY? During 1902 three school districts in Mangum Township, Durham County, were consolidated into one district, with the following results: I. Salary of teachers before consolidation: 1. Salary of teacher in district 1, $35 per month. II. Length of term before consolidation: 1. Term in district 1, six months. 2. Term in district 2, six months. 3. Term in district 3, six months. III. Average daily attendance in districts before consolidation: 2. Average daily attendance in district 2, 16. IV. Results of consolidation: 1. Total salary of two teachers. $100 per month. 2. Length of term, seven months. 3. Average daily attendance, 80 out of total enrollment of 113. 4. Greatly increased interest in public education; three poor schoolhouses abandoned and one neat, comfortable house erected; a graded school. This edition is now being used by the press and by public speakers in the campaign in North Carolina, and has demonstrated its effectiveness as a campaign document. Special editions have been prepared for Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alabama, and it is intended that similar editions be issued for each of the Southern States. Soon after its organization the bureau planned a series of bulletins, by means of which it proposed to give out the results of its most mature study of educational conditions and problems in the South. The first number, entitled "Educational Conditions in the Southern Appalachians," appeared in May, 1902. This was followed with a bulletin on the educational conditions in Tennessee. A number of bulletins were planned, and much material has been collected for some of them. III. SURVEY OF THE CONFERENCE AS IT IS TO-DAY. Inorganic character.-Not the least striking, and perhaps not the least valuable, feature of the conference is its inorganic character. It has had, as we have seen, five years of continuous and wholesome growth, and that without a constitution or by-laws. It has from year to year elected a presiding officer, has appointed committees from time to time to render such service as seemed to demand special committees, has selected places of meeting, prepared its programmes, and published its proceedings without an exchequer, annual dues, or even a definitely constituted membership. * * * It has illustrated the brotherhood of man [says President Ogden] by electing executive officers and committees with no by-laws to restrict, with perfect freedom for unlimited overwork, and the right, by appeals to altruism, patriotism, or fear, to impress into the service of the conference all whose assistance may be required. Cordially appropriating the generous hospitality of locality after locality; piling boundless cares upon local committees; placing upon its chief officers responsibilities broad as the tenderness of conscience or capacity for initiative; trusting, as the birds trust the hand that providentially feeds them, a treasurer without an exchequer; appropriating for the use of its executive committee the whole American Republic of letters that a proper programme should annually be presented, the conference has gone forward from grace to grace and from strength to strength, until now it convenes in this beautiful city of Richmond with a robust intellectual appetite waiting with faith and hope to be fed and satisfied. This lack of definite organization has tended to emphasize the inner life and spirit of the conference and has kept it plastic for unlimited expansion. Membership.-The conference at its first three sessions was entertained by Captain Sale at Capon Springs, W. Va., and membership was, obviously enough, limited to the list of guests invited by him. But at present “the only qualification needed by a delegate," says President Ogden, "consists in personal presence and sympathetic accord. Thus the conference is a purely voluntary association." Within the limits of its printed programme it is an open forum, with a constituency commensurate with the catholicity of its purposes. A more representative body could not be found on the continent. This is an assembly [says Dr. Alderman in his address before the Athens conference] of the representatives of all classes of educational institutions and educational forces. Heads of great universities, that once sat apart in Olympic isolation, are here, and humble school teachers, clad in new robes of civic usefulness and civic self-respect. Men and women of the North and of the South are here, with their memories swept clean of all bitterness and misunderstanding; men of affairs of the North and South are gathered here with constructive purpose in their minds, with willingness to compromise, to readjust old view points, to shed old prejudices and reconstruct new theories, and above all to covenant highly with themselves that this educational crusade shall not cease until every child in this nation-high or low, white or black, bond or free-shall be emancipated from the great black empire of ignorance and night. The Richmond conference was in like manner an assembly representing the constructive forces of American democracy-men and women from all sections, officials and citizens, professional men and men of affairs-all united for the time being in the one interest of serving humanity through the education of the child. Its agencies.—The conference has not favored the creation of new educational agencies; it has endeavored rather to discover the agencies already at work in the field, to make these more effective wherever possible by more efficient organization and more adequate equipment, and has recognized in them the instruments for the realization of its ends. It has thus called into its service the women's clubs, the pulpit, and the press, and the whole educational machinery of the Southern States, with those social, political, and economic forces which this comprehends. Thus the conference, needing but little organization within itself, is a tremendous spiritual force working through all existing social organizations, and although convening but once a year is nevertheless continuous in its activity. It is the center from which new life radiates in all directions, permeating every fiber of the social organism. What the conference is doing for education at the South.-If nothing more should be done, the conference has rendered a worthy service and accomplished a lasting result in this new life which it has infused into our present educational systems. The extent to which this quickening influence has been felt can be appreciated only by those in the field in personal contact with educational agencies in remote rural communities. A single example may be suggestive. Sevier County is one of the remote mountain counties of East Tennessee, with not a railroad touching it at any point. There are but two schools in the county that give instruction beyond the fifth grade of the Tennessee rural system. And yet that county, unaided from outside, took the initiative last spring in its own educational campaign. The movement was inaugurated by an educational mass meeting called at Sevierville, the county town, for a Sunday evening in the latter part of May. The people came in from the surrounding country, and a large auditorium was filled to overflowing. For an hour and a half they listened to the discussion of educational problems with the interest and enthusiasm usually reserved for political meetings. An effort has been made during the summer to carry the campaign into the remoter coves and to quicken every community into larger aspirations. The school at Sevierville has just added to its curriculum a professional course for teachers for the purpose of training into greater efficiency those teachers in the rural mountain schools that can not be reached by any institution outside the county. This has been done with no aid or direct suggestion from without, and yet it is a manifestation of that spirit of educational reform which pervades the air, and is thoroughly typical of the forces at work in the remotest communities of the South. Teachers are organizing, schools are being consolidated, houses are being built, rural libraries established, manual training being introduced, and these centers of activity are springing into being in the most unexpected places and in the most unaccountable way. The great promise of this awakening lies in its spontaneity. Just how the conference has contributed to this result can not be adequately stated, but may be remotely suggested. In the first place, the spirit of the conference, especially at the Athens and Richmond meetings, has been thoroughly infectious; no man or woman could come into this atmosphere without being caught up into its fine enthusiasm and borne on to new and higher resolve. Here the educational leader, who has been working in lonely isolation with the odds against him, has found himself in touch with other leaders who echo his aspirations and second his courage; and these find themselves reenforced by the wholehearted cooperation of lawyers, and ministers, and politicians, and business men, and from this contact of social forces hitherto separated there springs a new courage born of the consciousness of indomitable power. Here the humble teacher from the remote community has found himself an integral part of a tremendous movement-has caught the larger vision which transforms the drudgery of teaching into the joy of social service. And from these meetings hundreds of men and women have returned to all parts of the South to become the centers of a new light and life in their respective communities. What the Athens and Richmond meetings have been on a large scale, the State and district conferences have been in a lesser degree. When to these lines of infiuence one adds the work of the campaign speaker before educational mass meetings, the work of the women's clubs and the pulpit, the work of the bureau reaching directly through its publications and indirectly ED 1903-25 through the campaign speaker and the daily press the whole reading public, one may get some suggestion of how it has come about that education is in the air, and that, breathing this atmosphere, our educational systems from State superintendent to district director, and from the elementary school to the university have been quickened into new life. The conference as a directive power.—But the work of the conference does not end with the mere giving of inspiration or new impetus to educational activity, it has done much toward directing the energies which it has called into play. It has at no time in its deliberations invaded the province of technical pedagogy, but it has considered some of the broader problems of educational policy, and has brought to bear upon these the best educational statesmanship of the country, North and South. It has made no effort to formulate conclusions or in any direct way to affect legislation, but as a result of these deliberations some things have become reasonably clear, conclusions have been registered in the individual consciousness and through the campaign speaker and the public press have been transformed into public opinion and are being carried out in reconstructive activities. The campaign speakers and the campaign documents of the bureau have, while kindling enthusiasm, consistently and persistently urged certain definite lines of constructive reform. And as the reports come in from the field one is struck by the harmony of endeavor which they reflect. During the recent session of the summer school of the South at the University of Tennessee a day was given to each of the Southern States for the presentation of its educational conditions. The similarity in problems, in present awakening, and in lines of constructive policy being urged and carried out was a matter of common remark. The five "next things" in educational progress in Alabama [says Dr. Edgar Gardner Murphy] seem to me to be the right of local taxation for school purposes; school consolidation, by which I mean the occasional combination of weaker schools into a strong central school, in the interest of economy and proficiency; better schoolhouses; better supervision, and closer adaptation of our public school instruction to the needs of agricultural population. This constitutes a vital part of the general programme. To it we may add the better education of teachers and the establishing of rural libraries. Practical results are being achieved along all these lines. The problem of local taxation is for the present the most difficult, because the right of local taxation for school purposes is in most of the Southern States restricted by constitutional limitations. To remove these limitations will require time. In the meantime the work of consolidation is going on as rapidly perhaps as is consonant with wholesome development. In Tennessee, for example, the last legislature passed a law establishing a minimum enrollment and requiring the consolidation of all schools below this standard. The combination of small schools into larger central schools involves the building of new houses and at the same time by diminishing the number of schools brings the possibility of an adequate supply of well-equipped houses within easier reach. The crusade for rural libraries is just getting well under way. Some States, as Kentucky and North Carolina, have State laws which are operating in a systematic way to stimulate the growth of libraries for the rural schools. In other States the work is being conducted by counties and by individuals. The teachers of Upson County, Ga., a few weeks ago organized a system of circulating libraries for the county, raised money enough to inaugurate the movement, and adopted a system of regulations for its control. A report has just come in from a county in Texas in which the woman's club of the county town has established a circulating library which is already reaching every part of the county. And so in sundry ways the movement grows apace. The bureau has ready for press a library number of "Southern Education," which promises to be the most stimulating and most directly helpful publication that it has issued. |