In behalf of the 22,000,000 children now in the public schools of America, in behalf of others, yet unborn, I plead for this appropriation in order that these children may not suffer from inefficient teaching. It behooves everyone interested in the welfare of children to support Senate Bill 4987 now before Congress. Let us abolish illiteracy; develop a more stable patriotism thru the Americanization of foreigners; show the true democratic spirit by the equalization of educational opportunities; promote the physical well-being, recreation, and health education in the interests of economy, health, and happiness; provide better facilities for the preparation of teachers and better training for those in the service, in order that the educational and social efficiency of each child may be more highly developt. Let us dignify our profession by the creation of an executive department known as the Department of Education. Let us have in this department a secretary, A man of God's own mould; Give us the department and then let the President of these United States. give us a man-a man of vision, who will so organize, coordinate, and unify the educational forces of this country, thru the free expression of his associates from the most humble teacher to those most capable, to the end that this nation may be preeminent in public-school education, and that it shall be greater in this than in natural resources, production, manufacturing transportation, and wealth. Let us place the child above the dollar. A NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR EDUCATION C. N. KENDALL, COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, TRENTON, N.J. I believe in this bill. First, because education is in part a federal function. It is a long road from the old neighborhood school, which some of us knew, to the statecontrolled school of the present day. Who doubts that the schools have gained from this? It is not so long a road from our present conditions to a partially supported system of schools by the federal government. I am not afraid that the federal government will control our schools, or dominate them, under the provisions of this bill. What is the situation? Here we are, a great democracy, the greatest on earth. It is a democracy far from perfect. We have grave problems to face. Democracy is not license. Democracy must be restrained. The successful ongoing of this democracy can be settled only by education, and education not for some but for all. Our public schools have accomplisht wonderful results in the fifty years since the Civil War. Let us not forget this. Let us not fail to remind the lay public of this fact, with a bill of particulars, which can easily be presented. But is it creditable to the leading democracy that five or six millions of its people-native-born-cannot read or write? Democracies, to succeed, must be based on two things-intelligence and morality. Railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, and the motor car have in a measure broken down state lines. Our people are more homogeneous because of these things. No state can live to itself alone any more than the individual can live to himself alone. We are all interested in the brand of public education carried on in South Carolina. Massachusetts is interested socially, industrially, politically, physically, in the brand of education in New Hampshire. Steel rails and copper wires have transformed the nation. People can and do move freely from one state to another. We educate our future citizens not merely for the local communities and for the states but for the nation. How many graduates of a given high school will remain citizens of their community, or even of their state, after twenty-five years have past? Is the necessity of Americanization, which we all feel and which was uncovered by the war, a state or local affair? Who shall say that Massachusetts and New Jersey shall pay the entire bill for Americanization in those states because of the fact that by reason of geographical conditions they have large numbers of foreign-born? States like Indiana and Iowa have a comparatively small proportion of foreign-born. Shall not these states help to pay the bill for Americanization, which is a tremendous problem in Massachusetts and New Jersey? Shall not the wealth of these two great central states be taxt to pay in part for Americanization in these two Atlantic states? The proposed bill partially corrects this and other inequalities. Secondly, this bill encourages the states to make larger appropriations for education because the federal government likewise will make appropriations for education. Human nature is such that under these conditions larger appropriations will be made by the combined sources for education. Thirdly, I remember when the original surveyor of city schools, Dr. John Rice, was almost ostracized by this department because he dared to criticize in a magazine certain school systems in the country. Those were days of universal and unstinted praise for our school systems on the part of school men. Those days have gone. The most serious critics of our publicschool systems are now found among school men and school women themselves. This bill if enacted will help to better our conditions. It cannot correct all of them. Its enactment will not bring about the millennium. Here are some of our weaknesses: 1. The immaturity of teachers. One-half of our teachers are under twenty-five; one-sixth of them are less than nineteen years of age. Who shall say that we shall secure from young women of less than twenty-one years of age, who are without life-experience, the kind of teaching or training of children that is worthy of schools in a great and wealthy democracy? 2. The lack of professional training. Over 50 per cent of our teachers are wholly untrained. 3. The meager scholarship attainments of teachers. In one northern state one-fourth of the rural teachers have less than four years of high-school education. 4. The brevity of the teacher's service. The teaching experience of a teacher in this country is not more than five years. As a friend of mine puts it, teaching is not a "profession" in America, but a "procession." 5. The lax enforcement, or non-enforcement, of compulsory-education laws. We lose, for example, in New Jersey nearly a million dollars a year because children do not go to school as they might go. 6. The shortness of the school year. For only one-sixth of the hours that the children are awake, taking the calendar year as a whole, are they in school, and this under the best school systems of America, where compulsory laws are most strongly enforst. 7. The lamentable conditions of so many rural schools, both as to teachers' service and as to equipment of these schools. 8. The inequality of wealth for the support of schools, which this bill aims partially to correct. 9. The gradual withdrawal of men-I mean vigorous, active menfrom teaching. And why should not this be so? New Jersey ranks fifth in average salaries paid to its teachers, and yet the average salary paid to high-school men teachers was last year $1724. These men are college or university graduates. 10. The beginning of the withdrawal of so many good women from teaching because so many of them nowadays are inclined to do social or clerical work for which better salaries are paid and which they regard as more attractive than teaching. For example, at Vassar College a year ago there were upward of ninety young women who wisht to become teachers. This year there are but nineteen. Fourthly, can the nation afford to pay this bill? The federal government, so I am informed, paid out in cash in one day last August $125,000,000 for the promotion of the war-$25,000,000 more than this bill seeks to appropriate annually for the processes of education. When the war was at its height the cost to our federal government in eight hours was as much as the total current expenses of education for New Jersey for a whole year. We all approved of these expenditures. In 1908, six years before the outbreak of the war, we were spending more considerably more-for our navy than this bill will provide annually for education. This committee has done an excellent piece of work. It deserves credit, in my judgment, for what it has done, and done so well. I believe it is our business to support the bill-to support it heartily, and to create public sentiment to support it. It is our duty to bring pressure to bear upon senators and representatives, making them understand that the educators of this country want this bill past, not for any selfish purpose, but to make American schools worthy of this great democracy. It is the duty of forward-looking school men and school women to support this measure. If we who are leaders in education in this country do not support this bill whole-heartedly-a bill for the benefit of the children of America now in our schools, and for the benefit of the unborn children who will hereafter be our pupils who will support it? Education is the greatest enterprise in America. Let us not merely say so, as we are accustomed to do, but let us act as tho we believed it. A NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR EDUCATION EDMUND J. JAMES, PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA, ILL. More than thirty-five years ago I entered the lists for a comprehensive scheme of national education. In the columns of the Illinois School Journal, which at that time I edited in cooperation with Charles DeGarmo, whom you all know, I urged as vigorously and strongly as I knew how that the time had come when the nation as a whole thru its own organs and with its own financial measures should take up in earnest the promotion of popular education. Since that time I have never mist an opportunity to lend my voice and pen to the support of every scheme which seemed to promise the further enlistment and commitment of Uncle Sam in the support of education of all grades thruout the nation. It has been a slow process, this one of gaining public support for that idea. The journal in which I publisht my first argument has long since gone to that haven of repose to which all really good educational journals seem ultimately destined to pass-a sort of educational Nirvana which has swallowed up large and small alike, leaving no trace behind them. except possibly good seed which will in the long run spring up and bring forth fruit. Then I was young, and now I am old. Then I was strong, and now I am weak. And during all these years there has been nothing nearer to my heart than federal support of popular education. The poet says that that which you do not see growing you find after a time grown. And so it is in this case. Each decade has seen some definite progress toward this end. The federal government by its establishment of the Agricultural Experiment Stations-one in each state by the Hatch Act of 1887, fathered, by the way, by a man who served four years in the Confederate armiesmade the first really significant attempt to have the nation as a whole assume a part of the burden of national education in the form of cash payments out of the federal Treasury to the states for this purpose. It had long been accustoming itself-slowly, it is true, but steadily-to this idea by its land grants for popular education, culminating in the great grant of 1862 under the Morrill Act. But in the passage of the Hatch Act we see the first definite signs of a new policy from which all the rest has come. The second Morrill Act of 1891 represents another great step in the direction of federal aid to education-a great step in breaking down the old constitutional objections to federal support of national education; in familiarizing the public mind with the idea of national appropriations in support of education; in calling public attention to the needs of our educational system; in overcoming the national inertia in thought and deed in this great field of public policy. The subsequent acts along the same line, known as the Adams and Nelson acts, and finally the Smith-Lever and Smith-Hughes acts, disposed once for all of the notion that the federal government under the Constitution had no right to support popular education. Now to the best of my ability I supported every one of these acts, not because I always believed in all the provisions of the acts, because I didn't, but because I felt that each one was a step, no matter how small or how halting or even how ridiculous, toward the point when it should dawn all at once upon the nation that national education was the nation's business, and that the nation should be about it! Thus for more than thirty-five years we have line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little, been breaking down the reluctance of old-time conservatism as to federal support of education, have been building up a national consciousness on this subject, have been enlightening the people on the importance and urgency of action in this matter, until now we are face to face not only with a great national crisis in American education but with a great educational opportunity which we ought by no means to let slide. Educational progress is much like progress in other lines. A man has a new idea involving large and to many people inconvenient readjustments. It makes seemingly but little advance. A few of the younger men are inoculated. The rising generation becomes more favorable. Finally there comes a time when all that is necessary for a sudden and immense forward movement is a few first-class funerals. That is true today. The Great War and the influenza have done their part. Let us do ours. The Great War has come and gone. Peace, it is to be hoped, will soon be declared, and the whole world will turn its attention to the works of peace, striving to forget the nameless horrors of the period thru which suffering humanity has past. This is well, of course, and yet we shall make a great mistake if we do not learn the lessons of the war and profit by them; if in our work of reconstruction we do not utilize the advantage offered by an absolutely destroyed country to build up new and better cities, to replace those which war has destroyed; if we do not take advantage of the great moral and spiritual uplift which the gladly borne sacrifices of war have brought with |