CONGRESS CONSIDERS NATIONALIZATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS

One of the great problems of reconstruction which will be engaging our attention for a long time after the war will be that of education. Already the European nations have started housecleaning their old establishments. Despite the severe tasks which have confronted them, the British have undertaken a remodelling of their school system, and out of a sorely depleted treasury have voted eighty millions to begin on. Our Congress will shortly be considering a bill which proposes to make a national problem of our public schools, which have hitherto been a state and local issue; according to the bill there shall be a national department of education, presided over by a secretary who shall have a seat in the President's Cabinet, and for the initial year of his administration have $100,000,000 to distribute among the states, largely in proportion as the states appropriate money themselves for the benefit of the schools.

College Men Show Interest.

The public schools in the past have been singularly outside the ken of college men, students, graduates, and professors alike, for the reason that students have come to college very largely from private schools or endowed academies. It is only recently that Harvard has, been receiving fully half her Freshmen from the free public high schools. In the state universities and those where entrance is by certificate instead of by examination, the proportion of students from the free public schools is very much greater. The result is that these schools are rapidly becoming of much more interest to college men. But they have always been of very vital interest to the nation, because in them the great majority of the people have received whatever schooling has come to them. They have served as the melting-pot for the Americanization of our large foreign population. In the past they have had teachers of a very high grade of intelligence and education. But conditions have changed. The teaching profession has become one of the most desperately underpaid occupations in the community. Last year in Massachusetts there were 1800 teachers who received not over $550 in wages. It is proposed to ask the Legislature to force a minimum wage of $750 for teachers in the state. But that is absolutely inadequate if the teaching profession is to attract the type of people who are competent to be the guides during their most impressionable years of the future Americans. The startling number of young men disclosed by the draft who are illiterate or physically imperfect shows that our schools are functioning imperfectly even now. Should not the strong arm of the National Government reach out, then, and correct and regulate our common schools? It surely can do much good by way of improvement. But quite within the range of possibilities are very terrible dangers. If the states must follow the policy laid down by the National Department of Education in order to enjoy the nation's largess, it is quite within the power of a dominating secretary or a bureaucratic department to direct the education of young America in lines far from truth. It is said that the proposed bill is likely to pass Congress. In order that we may make sure and safe on honest and democratic education, we must see to it that national aid and guidance be combined with absolute local independence. This is a problem that concerns nothing less than the future of freedom in the United States. It comes home to every thinking American.