Mr. TUCKER. Oh, yes.

The CHAIRMAN. According to the size of the organization, according to how many members it has?

Mr. PAGE. Yes. There was something like 1,800 votes cast on this.

(Mr. Page submitted the following to be inserted in the record:)

MAJORITY REPORT OF SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE UNITED STATES ON THE PARTICIPATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN EDUCATION

[Frank J. Loesch, Chicago, Ill.; John G. Lonsdale, St. Louis, Mo.; Henry S. Pritchett, New York, N. Y.; Henry D. Sharpe, Providence, R. I.; James J. Storrow, Boston, Mass., chairman]

RESOLUTION OF BOARD OF DIRECTORS

This committee was created pursuant to the following resolution of the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States:

"The resolution adopted by the civic development department committee recommending that the board submit to a referendum the subject of education, the participation of the Federal Government in education work, and the correlation of the education work of the Federal Government to other activities of the Federal Government was considered, and it was voted that the president be authorized to appoint a special committee on education to consider the questions involved and report to the board."

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

THE QUESTIONS BEFORE US

By far the most important subject submitted to this committee is the question of Federal participation in education.

Shall the States continue to maintain and be responsible for the public schools of the country?

Shall the National Government take over the support and control of the schools?

Shall there be a divided support and control, partly vested in the National Government and partly vested in the States?

These questions are not academic. They are of the utmost practical importance and they are now before the American people for decision.

For a decade, and with especial vehemence since the war, a nation-wide propaganda has been carried on looking toward the gradual transfer of responsibility for the support and control of our public schools from the State, and local unit within the State, to the Federal Government at Washington.

If we travel this road we shall end with a great bureaucratic machine at Washington having its secretary of education in the Cabinet, its assistant secretaries of education, and a horde of bureau chiefs and clerks and three-quarters of a million of Federal employees teaching in the schools and bossed by several thousand field inspectors, supervisors, and other petty traveling officials.

FEDERAL BOARD FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

This nation-wide propaganda succeeded in 1917 in securing the passage of its first bill and created at Washington a special Federal board to control vocational education. This National Vocational Board is now operating from Washington, disbursing Federal money, laying down regulations, controlling, inspecting, and dictating the manner in which vocational education shall be carried on by the States, the cities, and towns, and other local educational units.

STERLING-TOWNER BILL

Now comes the Sterling-Towner bill, prepared by collaboration between representatives of the National Education Association and representatives of the American Federation of Teachers, composed of those teachers who have joined the American Federation of Labor. This bill was introduced at the request of

the National Education Association and the American Federation of Labor, hearings were held, and it was favorably reported in the last Congress by the House and Senate Committees on Education, but failed to come up for action before the end of the session. It has again been introduced during the present Congress and is now in the hands of the Senate and House committees.

STERLING-TOWNER BILL MOST RADICAL STEP TOWARD

FEDERALIZING SCHOOLS

This Sterling-Towner bill, which constitutes a long and radical second step toward federalizing the schools of the country, calls for the appropriation of the round sum of $100,000,000, of which $7,500,000 is to be expended for teaching illiterates, $7,500,000 for Americanization work (chiefly teaching illiterates beyond school age English and to read and write), $20,000,000 for physical training, $15,000,000 for training teachers, and $50,000,000 to raise the pay of teachers throughout the country.1

FRAMERS OF CONSTITUTION INTENDED TO LEAVE EDUCATION IN HANDS OF STATES

The Constitution does not mention education and nowhere gives the Federal Government authority to direct or control education. As this power was not reserved by the Constitution to the Federal Government, it is clear that the framers of the Constitution deliberately intended to vest in the States the power to establish, maintain, conduct, and control education. This does not mean that the framers of this Federal democracy failed to realize the importance of education, but that like many other activities vital to the welfare of our people they believed education could be carried on with better regard to the interests and wishes of the people, with better adaptation to local needs, and with greater efficiency and more economy if left to the States than if it should be federalized and so controlled and conducted by Federal officers located at the National Capital.

DANGERS OF FEDERAL CONTROL

Great is the danger of handing the power of controlling the ideas and ideals of the growing generation to a group of bureaucrats located far away at the seat of government.

They may willfully do great damage. They may unwittingly sow seeds on a nation-wide scale which will fructify only after many quiet years of germination so that the noxious weeds can perhaps be eradicated only by the slow growth of public reaction after grievous injury to our body politic.

Germany, to her ruin and sorrow, has reaped her harvest from seeds quietly sown in her schools for many years by the Berlin bureaucracy. The world's history is strewn with the wreck of governments whose disintegration began when the people saw the local control of their dearest concerns taken away and concentrated in the hands of a bureaucracy at the seat of empire. The creators of our Federal Government clearly foresaw and wisely undertook to protect us from the inefficiency and the dangers of overcentralization.

CONTROL OF SCHOOLS FOR THE PEOPLE SHOULD REMAIN NEAR THE PEOPLE

The genius of our people should and must control our schools. There is nowhere else to place this trust. But if our people are to control our schools and to cause them to be sensitive to their ideals, to their varying needs from year to year and from locality to locality, those in charge must be near them, accessible to them, and responsive to them. A vote once in two or six years for a Member of Congress or a Senator who is to live at the seat of government far from home, and who must be elected to attend to a hundred other things and can therefore rarely be elected on an educational issue, coupled with the rigidity which would almost certainly be attained by the managing bureaucracy at Washington, would make our school system about as sensitive and responsive to the average man as as ton of pig iron to a tack hammer.

The language of the bill is $50,000,000 "to equalize educational opportunity." These words of the bill are certainly vague, but the understanding among the proponents seems to be that this $50,000,000 is to be used to raise the pay of teachers.

"The appropriation for the equalization of educational opportuniries will contribute $50,000,000 annually to this end, and while the same is relatively small (adding less than $100 to the salary of each teacher), it will operate upon the basis of a public sentiment already alive to the imperative need of raising teachers' salaries." (Keith and Bagley, "The Nation and the Schools," p. 285.)

CONSTANT PRACTICE IN LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT VITAL

Moreover, if our Government is to survive, if these 100,000,000 people, soon to become 200,000,000 people, made up of racial stocks from many countries, embodying many varying degrees and forms of civilization, and of governing knowledge or rather lack of knowledge of self-government, are to succeed in maintaining and carrying on this great Federal democracy, it will only be by the constant practice of local self-government in things which vitally concern them. Our people should have constant practice in critical local affairs, in affairs which are not matters of comparative indifference but of such vital consequence that the people of the community will be hurt, and seriously hurt, if they are not conducted properly. These alone will teach each succeeding generation and the millions of less experienced people arriving from foreign shores what good government is, what bad government is, and how to secure the former.

SELF HELP BUILDS CHARACTER AND CITIZENSHIP

The doctrine of self-help, the idea that the things we get for ourselves are the best things we possess, that sturdily striving to care for ourselves builds character and citizenship, seems recently to have evaporated from the minds of many. They seem to think that each local group of American citizens should stand around like a Greek chorus waiting for the gods at Washington to make the next event happen.

FEDERAL CONTROL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION INEVITABLE UNDER STERLING-TOWNER

BILL

Many of those who advocate the Sterling-Towner bill urge that Federal control or interference with our public-school system will not result from the passage of the bill.

This Sterling-Towner bill did not spring up overnight, and it is perhaps significant that as originally framed with great deliberation by its present sponsors and pushers, it directly contemplated a high degree of Federal control just as is now being actually exercised by the Federal Board of Vocational Training in distributing its Federal money.

There have now been inserted in the bill, however, specific words stating in effect that the Federal Government shall not interfere or endeavor to control the expenditure of the money which it is to turn over to the States.

Apart from the fundamentally unsound policy of having A levy the taxes, collect the funds, and then wash his hands of all responsibility for the expenditure of the funds by B, it only takes, we think, a moderate experience in affairs to realize that people are bound to be sensitive to the views of the dispenser of their annual largesses even though his wishes are not embodied in words of command but are conveyed in terms of suggestion and recommendation.

But right at the outset and on the face of the bill its proponents are trying to sit on both sides of the fence at the same time, as another part of the bill sets up certain standards which the States must meet and maintain if they are to receive Federal money and the new Cabinet officer, the secretary of education created by the bill, is given authority to withhold the money from any State which fails to meet the standards.

But really common sense is sufficient without argument to tell us that if the 600,000 teachers of this country find themselves on the Federal pay roll, they are going in the long run to be subject at least to a dual influence and a dual control. Besides, if the Sterling-Towner bill passes and 600,000 teachers begin looking to the Federal Government for $50,000,000 of their pay, why in their opinion should the Government stop at a fifty million bonus? The argument for a second fifty million will be almost exactly as good as for the first and the desire of the beneficiaries probably not a whit less. Certainly the new secretary of education who will be in contact with the President as the head of one of the great political parties and with his fellow Cabinet officers and other political leaders and with the appropriation committees of Congress, will not need to speak much above a whisper to have his perhaps quite recently acquired views as the holder of a quite recently acquired office sway the whole course of public school education. Moreover the proponents of the Sterling-Towner bill are, in our judgment, handing the teachers of the country poisoned fruit because for each dollar received from the Federal Government $5 will be held back by the States and local authorities waiting for Uncle Sam to make the next move.

NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

We differ in this report from views officially formulated by the National Education Association and set forth by its official representatives at the hearing on the Sterling-Towner bill. We do so with entire respect. The National Education Association is performing great public service in crystallizing and making known to us the views of those engaged in public education. In its arguments urging Federal pay for teachers it is helping the American people to realize the sound public policy of more generous compensation for teachers in the public schools. In stressing the dangers of illiteracy, of the need of Americanization and making known to the American people the shortcomings of their school systems, they are helping to accelerate the constant forward march of our public schools.

QUICK REMEDIES NOT ALWAYS THE BEST

We admire the impatience of the teaching profession with the defects of our public schools and we sympathize with their viewpoint that to get a quick remedy for some of these defects they desire to call the National Government to their aid. Bryce, a thoroughly sympathetic as well as perhaps the most profound student of democracy of our generation, well describes this impatience:

"Reformers, impatient with the slackness and parsimony common among local authorities, have, however, been everywhere advocating State (i. e. national) intervention, insisting that the reluctance of the local citizen to spend freely makes it necessary to invoke the central government, both to supervise schools and to grant the money from the treasury for the salaries of teachers and various educational appliances. Here, as is often the case, the choice is between more rapid progress on the one hand, and the greater solidity and hold upon the average citizen's mind which institutions draw from being entrusted to popular management." (Bryce, "Modern Democracies," p. 436.)

DANGER OF HASTY GENERALIZATION

Hasty, ill-considered generalization based upon incomplete assembly of the facts and superficial study of the facts is the plague of the world.

We shall endeavor now to marshal what seem to us to be the more material facts bearing on this question and to consider them in some detail. He who wishes to arrive at a sound conclusion on this complex subject must examine many facts. There is no short cut to a sound opinion.

HAS OUR PRESENT SYSTEM OF EDUCATION BROKEN DOWN?

Proposals for participation of the Federal Government in the support and control of public education are based upon two premises:

First. That under the present method of support and control by States and communities our system of education has broken down; and

Second. That some of the States are too poor to provide a fair standard of public education for their people.

These are serious charges and deserve serious consideration. fore consider these questions in turn.

We shall there

Throughout the history of our national life the public-school system has been entirely under State and local government and has depended almost exclusively on State and local support. Under these conditions it has developed with constantly increasing effectiveness into a system which, in spite of all its defects, represents an achievement in education unparalleled in any other country.

It is the tendency of overzealous proponents of change in any field of human endeavor to overlook substantial merits and to exaggerate defects. Advocates

of a revolution in our methods of support and control of public education have so directed attention to defects in our present system that we are in danger of overlooking its merits. It is necessary, therefore, to review briefly the great development of public education within the past 50 years.

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PROGRESS IN EDUCATION UNDER STATE AND COMMUNITY CONTROL

INCREASE IN SCHOLARS

The following table shows the growth in scholars under State support and control since 1870:

The increase in scholars attending our public high schools also has been amazing.

(United States Bureau of Education, Bulletin 11, 1920, p. 4.)

IMPROVEMENT IN DAILY ATTENDANCE

In 1920 the United States Commissioner of Education described the progress made as follows:

"No field in education, with the possible exception of school revenues, has in recent years been more prolific of progress as regards legislative provisions than has compulsory school attendance.

"Within the past decade the seven States which had previously enacted no laws on the subject all enacted initial requirements, and they and various other States have by this time made their laws stronger and extended their application." (United States Commissioner of Education, Annual Report, 1920, p. 77.)

There has been a steady increase in the length of the school year.

There has been, also, a steady increase in the average number of years children remain in school.