should have a local individual development; that they minister to the needs and aspirations of each community. We have already too strong a tendency to have every college duplicate every other college and every high school to imitate every other high school. That which a centralized department of education can lo for the schools of the country belongs to the machinery of organization. ¿ducation needs to-day not more organization but less. It needs to revive respect and regard for the relation of teacher and pupil and to put sincerity and thoroughness above organized corricula.

The essential educational weakness of the measure lies in the fact that those who propose it are thinking neither of the country nor yet of education, in the deeper sense, but of particular pedagogic tasks-the teaching of illiterates, instruction in hygiene, the better training of teachers. These things are important but there is another consideration far more important. A country does not exist for its schools. It does not exist for its government. On the contrary, both the schools and the Government exist for the people. What matters chiefly is that the quality of human life shall be high. The schools exist that the quality of human life of the American people may be high, that their children may be brought to think and that they may learn to use freedom wisely. These things can not be compassed by organization, they can not be brought into a community by a distant government bureau, they must arise out of the strivings of the community itself. This is of the very essence of democratic government, a conception which we constantly talk but whose methods we are only too ready to reject in favor of some short cut. There are no short cuts that are not dan

gerous to civil and intellectual liberty.

Whether one study this bill from the standpoint of public policy or from that of public education he can not fail to see that it contains grave risks and promises doubtful gains.

7. There is one matter involved in the clauses of this bill which must arouse the sympathy of every thoughtful American. That is the meager reward that

society offers to the faithful public-school teacher.

The pupils of our public schools are taught almost wholly by women who make up 85 per cent of the body of public-school teachers. Many of the men who comprise the small minority are in administrative posts. Teaching in public elementary and secondary schools is rapidly becoming distinctly a woman's job. There is nothing comparable to this situation in any other country. The American woman bears, and bears bravely, the heavy load of public-school teaching. Many of these teachers are poorly educated, many go into teaching not as a profession but as the most available means of earning a living. Yet to their devotion, to their conscientiousness, to their long-suffering labors we owe the fact that we have a system of schools able to admit to instruction the enormous army of pupils. None the less the situation is abnormal. It ought not to last. The education of boys ought not to be so completely in the hands of women. Men ought to find in the public schools a career to attract thoughtful scholarly

men.

The refusal of men to go into teaching is not wholly due to low salaries. A large proportion of high school graduates who become stenographers, clerks, salesmen, and who enter similar callings never reach places comparable in dignity, in income, in security or in the durable satisfactions of life comparable to those available in the profession of teaching. There are many reasons why this situation exists. One of the strongest lies in the fact that the courses offered in the public schools are so planned as to appeal mainly to the commercial hopes and motives of a young man but present little appeal to his scholarly tastes or ambi tions. The public schools, whether in their formal studies or in their numerous outside activities-athletics, clubs, papers and what not-have done little to dignify the profession of the teacher or to attract to it able and gifted young men. Stenography, salesmanship, journalism, advertising, insurance are the typical careers toward which boys are pointed and for which they believe they can be prepared in the high school. These are excellent vocations but society cannot absorb an indefinite number in them. It is far more interested in obtaining an adequate supply of farmers, of skilled mechanics and of well trained technical workers who are producers of food, of clothing, of fuel, and of metals. It stands in equal need of teachers to deal with the still greater task of training the minds of boys and girls. These objects can not be accomplished by a school system conducted almost entirely by women, however fine their devotion.

The situation can not be corrected by grants of money. Not that better salaries are not sadly needed, but because no salary scale will create an able and thoughtful corps of teachers unless they come into the profession with high ideals of the profession itself. Men will become teachers when the profession of the

teacher has in their eyes the dignity and respect of a great calling. To the creation of this sentiment the colleges and the public schools must furnish ideals that appeal to the intellectual aspirations of young men.

Salaries of public-school teachers have been greatly diluted by the enormous expansion of the courses of study. Following the example of the colleges, the public school seeks to teach everything. Under the process education has come to be conceived of in the public mind as a superficial knowledge of many things. The discipline of first learning a few things well is almost forgot. Under the process courses and teachers are multiplied and salaries are necessarily inadequate. The way to decent salaries for teachers lies along the same path as that by which the real interests of the pupils are to be served-to think out clearly what the public school can do and to sift out from its overburdened curriculum those things which can not be taught profitably and insist first of all upon thorough training in the few essentials. To read and write the English language well, to master the simple arithmetic used in common life, to know the constitutional rights and duties of a citizen, make the beginning of a good education. With these one can do much. Without them he is helpless as worker, as thinker, and as citizen.

8. The present weakness and superficiality of our public education-whether in tax-supported or endowed schools-is a natural result of the movement to break away from the hard and fast curriculum of classical studies and to meet the multiform educational demands of the new industrial order. It would have been strange if this transformation had been made without losing something of the discipline of the old régime or without confusing intellectual values. The pendulum has swung too far the other way. We need now to turn our faces resolutely toward the ideals of simplicity, of sincerity, and of thoroughness. These are things of the mind and of the spirit. They are not to be compassed by organization or by subsidies but by the patient labors of wise and devoted men and women. Those who know best the teachers of American schools and colleges have no doubt that through their labors and their thinking, teaching in our schools will be brought—it may be slowly-to a stage where it will be generous but thorough, and where the career of the teacher will appeal to men no less than to women. The future of American education lies in the hands of American teachers, to be wrought out by their brains and their consciences and in accordance with their ideals of liberty, of truth, and of work.

HENRY S. PRITCHETT.

The CHAIRMAN. Have you any preference as to the order in which the speakers shall be heard? I understand that Mr. Goodnow, president of the Johns Hopkins University, Mr. Marbury, and Mr. Rawls are here from Baltimore and wish to be heard. Perhaps, inasmuch as we have had these other statements from college presidents before us, we should now hear Doctor Goodnow.

STATEMENT OF DR. FRANK J. GOODNOW, PRESIDENT OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE, MD.

Doctor GOODNOW. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I appear here in opposition of this bill, and the reasons, or some of them, at any rate, for my opposition are as follows:

In the first place the bill intends to provide that the head of the new department of education which is to be formed shall be a member of the Cabinet of the President. Of course there is no official recogtion, I believe, nor law providing for the Cabinet of the President; but the secretary of education for whom provision is made is to be appointed as a member of the Cabinet is appointed, and other heads of departments are appointed, and shall receive the same salary, and the tenure of office shall be the same as the heads of other executive departments.

Now, what that means, as I see it, is that this new department of education that is established will be just as much of a political

department as any other department in the Government. In educational circles throughout the States one of the purposes which has been in the minds of all those interested in education, I think, and which has as yet been only imperfectly realized, is to take the whole matter of education, so far as possible, out of the influences which have to do with matters which must necessarily be political in character, and the tendency at the present time is, I think one may say, that State superintendents of education are not to be changed with changes in political belief, so far as that is exemplified in the State governments, and what is true of the State superintendents is also getting to be more and more true of the city superintendents. With that feeling-and I know that is the feeling of all persons who are interested in education-it seems a pity that a movement which is, I imagine, intended to dignify education by giving it a fuller representation in the National Government should take what would appear to be a backward step. The inevitable result of providing that the head of this department of education shall be a secretary, and thus inferentially a member of the President's Cabinet, will be throwing the whole field of education, so far as it would be influenced by what the National Government should do, into the field of active politics. Personally, I think that would be a fatal mistake. It would have the effect of stamping with the approval of the National Government the idea upon education that it is political, as a great many other branches of the Government are and must be.

For that one reason I am opposed to that particular provision in the bill.

Now, the purpose of the bill, apart from its desire to dignify education by giving it a more prominent place in the National Government, is I think to aid the States through the appropriation of money.

Personally, I do not believe that that is unconstitutional at all. That is, I certainly do not believe that the Supreme Court, in view of its recent decision in the case of the maternity bill, and in view of the history of our Government, will declare this aiding of education by the Federal Government to be unconstitutional. But at the same time, even if we admit that a thing is unconstitutional we are not necessarily obliged to take the further step of holding that it is a wise or expedient measure, and I do not believe that it is wise or expedient for the Federal Government to aid education in the States in the way in which it is provided here that education shall be aided.

The attempt has been made in this bill to overcome a good many of the objections which have been made, I think, to former bills of this general character, and that is by the provision that the Federal Government shall exercise no control over the expenditure of this money or of the State moneys which the States have to appropriate in order to be able to receive these subsidies from the United States.

But at the same time, as it is drawn, the act inevitably brings about a good deal of control over the administration of educational activities by the States, and I think that that would be unfortunate. I think at the present time we are confronted by a problem in education which is very different from the problem which we used to find in the case of education. That is, our education has become a

very distinctly democratic education. The compulsory laws which are being passed and have been passed so generally throughout the States, have brought in, of course, a very much larger number of persons to be educated than ever have before been educated in the history, I imagine, of almost any country, and they have necessarily brought in a very heterogeneous lot of students, and in order to be able to solve the very important problems connected with this system of democratic education there has got to be a long period of experimentation.

I was very much impressed by reading the other day a book which has just come out, entitled "Twenty-five Years of American Education," which has been written by a number of individuals, in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the professorate in education of Prof. Paul Munroe of teachers' college, connected with Columbia University, New York. I think no one can read that book without coming to the conclusion that there are a great many unsolved problems connected with this main problem of democratic education, and educators are not agreed with regard to the proper methods which should be adopted, and when they do adopt any at some particular place some particular method they find in a great many instances that it is not successful.

Now, you say that we educators do not know our business. I am willing to admit that we do not. And we do not know our business any more than doctors know their business. Physicians at the present time are unable in a great many instances to do what they would like to do if they only knew more.

But we are in exactly the same position that the physician is. Persons become sick without any volition on the part of the physician, who has to do the best he can for us.

We have in our State systems of education thousands of children coming on every year who have to be educated in some way or other. We have to do the best we can. We have to experiment. As some one has said, I forget who it was, the history of education is the history of the adaptation of knowledge to need, and I do not know that you can express it any better. Needs are changing, education has to change. It will always be in a fluid condition.

Now, under those conditions, to start in with a system whose inevitable result, as I take it-it may not be under this bill, but this bill will be amended without any doubt in the future to start in with a system which is going to have as its effect something in the nature of standardization and crystallization, I think will be a great misfortune, and that is what I am afraid will happen.

Mr. TUCKER. Your idea, Doctor, is that it would destroy or cut down the experimentation?

Doctor GOODNOW. Yes; and we certainly are not in a position to welcome that with any cordiality.

Now, notwithstanding this bill attempts in a very emphatic way to provide that the money that is granted shall be spent in accordance with the laws of the States and that the educational authorities of the States shall determine the course of study, plans, methods, etc., yet if you will look, beginning at the bottom of the eighth page of the bill, you will see that no State shall receive any of this money unless it provides, in the first place, a legal school term of at least 24 weeks in each year for the children of school age in said

State; and a compulsory school attendance law requiring all children between the ages of 7 and 14 years to attend some school for at least 24 weeks in each year; and that the English language shall be the basic language of instruction in the common school branches in all schools, public and private.

Mr. TUCKER. Is that public and private?
Doctor GoODNOW. Yes.

Mr. TUCKER. I never saw that before.

Doctor GOODNOW. Now, no State could get any money unless it passes a law which will prevent the giving of instruction in what are spoken of as common school branches in all of its schools, public and private, in any language other than English.

I think that is an absolutely unjustifiable interference with the freedom of the individual. I look back upon my own experience in this connection. And I may say here that as far as Americanism is concerned, I am as good an American as the majority, because my ancestors came here on my father's side in 1637 and on my mother's side in 1638. So I am not here to plead for any particular foreign nationality. Now, as a boy my mother and father decided it would be a good thing for me to learn modern languages as early as possible, and with that idea I was sent to a school where the common school branches were taught in German and French. I think my parents had a right to do that. I don't think it ever did me any harm. I acquired a facility in German and French that I could not have attained in any other way, and I personally feel that it is an outrage to put in the bill here a provision which would prevent people from learning foreign languages in the best way that we know of to acquire them.

Now, what would happen? The State in order to get this money has to pass a law prohibiting the use of any foreign language in any private school in the State, or else it won't get the money.

Apart from its being unjustifiable interference with individual liberty, in my mind I have grave doubts as to whether a State could pass such a law constitutionally. I doubt very much whether the State could do it in view of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution, which says:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

This bill if enacted into law will make it necessary in order that the State might get the benefits of the provisions of the bill that a child must go to a school where instruction in the common branches must be given in English. I don't know what "common-school branches means. I suppose a common-school branch is German or French, as it is taught in the high school. Now, is that going to prohibit the teaching of German or French in the high school by what they call the direct method? Is it going to prevent the teaching of German or French in a private school, such as a Berlitz School, by the direct method?

I don't know whether it is or not, but if it does I think it is an outrageous interference with individual liberty, and I imagine it is unconstitutional.

Of course you know the law that Oregon passed two or three years ago, a law which prohibits children of a certain age from going

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