They must assert that every American child has the inherent right to an elementary education. It is a sacred right, which no one, not even a parent, may be allowed to defeat. They must require attendance of every child within fixed ages at school whenever the schools are in session unless excused for imperative cause by a responsible educational officer. They must punish parents with fine and imprisonment for not seeing that their children are in school.

It makes no difference whether the school is public or private. The public and private schools must cooperate. An up to date and reliable registration of all children is imperative, and every one must be accounted for. Nothing but sickness or disability or a death in the family or some overwhelming cause can be accepted as an excuse. Farmers have no more right to keep their children at home for farmwork or housework than people in the slums of the cities have to keep their children from school to sell papers or go begging.

Ample school accommodations are to be provided and evening schools maintained. School attendance laws and child labor laws must conform to each other, and the officers of the school departments and the labor departments must cooperate. Local authorities must have no option about enforcing the laws. And any officer of the school system or any public official who winks at violations of school attendance laws, or who refuses to enforce their penalties according to their intent, must be sharply punished for it.

To this end the common sentiment must be quickened. Surely the people of the United States are not willing to admit that we are permanently to have more ignorant men and women in this country than they have in other civilized countries.

Perhaps there is a factor in this problem that springs out of English and particularly of American history, and lies deep down in the nation's caution and self-consciousness. Americans are fundamentally opposed to any unnecessary meddling with their affairs by the government. They have always had great confidence in a resourcefulness which seems able to meet any actual peril when the time comes. They attach the greatest importance to the free chance for every one.

It begins to look as if it is quite as important to look after the rights of those who can not look after their own rights to an elementary education as to hold out to the few the opportunities for an advanced education.

If it is no more important, it is as important. And it will be a crowning glory to our republican system if the nation will put away its youthful vanity, submit with cheerfulness to the regulations which really enlarge liberty, deepen the common respect for the law by enforcing it, meet difficulties in practical ways, and make certain that all of its children have the elements and instruments of knowledge as well as that the stronger ones have the chance to scale the mountain peaks of learning.

A FEDERAL EDUCATIONAL PLAN NEEDED

REPRINTED FROM THE OUTLOOK OF OCTOBER 5, 1907, BY COURTESY OF THE EDITORS

There is very little adaptation of instruments or of administrative methods to ends, very little that is expressive of professional experience and opinion, and practically nothing in the way of logical scheme, or comprehensive plan, or progressive outlook, about the educational arrangements of the federal government. Congressional legislation has ordinarily resulted from isolated and political initiative, and executive officers have resorted to expedients, both good and bad, to meet passing exigencies. It has never been understood that the general government had large or continuing educational responsibilities, and now, when it is clear enough that it has, the plans for meeting them are illogical and inadequate.

There is excuse for the situation, but none for not mending it. The federal Constitution contains no mention of schools. Aside from a brief and barren suggestion of a national university, there was, so far as we know, no discussion of education in the Constitutional Convention. It was not an ignorant or obtuse convention. Twenty-nine of the fifty-five members were college bred, and of the twenty-six who were not, Washington and Franklin were two. Six members of the convention were clergymen. The convention clearly assumed that, so far as education was a function of government, it was a function of the states. There were less than a dozen primitive colleges in the country which had been chartered by the king, but in each case it had been done at the instance of one of the colonies, and the resulting college had become the college of the colony and then of the state. Several of the state constitutions had already provided for colleges. State-supported systems of elementary schools had not yet been provided by law or established in fact, but things were beginning to move rather strongly, for in the next half dozen years definite and decisive beginnings in that direction were made. Wherever there was a state, the state had done and expected to do it all. Where there was no state, Congress felt responsibility and acted freely. Even before the Constitutional Convention the Continental Congress had, in 1785, reserved the lot no. 16, and one third of all gold,

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silver, lead, and copper mines, for the maintenance of schools in each township which should be laid out in the Northwest Territory. And all are familiar with the provision in the Ordinance of 1787 for the government of that territory, that "religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." So it is evident that the very definite and common understanding at the time of making the "more perfect union" must have been that the federal government had distinct responsibility about schools and morals in federal territory beyond the limits of organized states, but that this function was reserved to the states wherever there were or whenever there should be organized states.

The practice has squared with this understanding. Congress has often legislated upon, and federal executive officers have never hesitated to act upon, school matters in the territories; never in the states. The United States government has several times made gifts to education in the states, and has sometimes made these conditional upon certain acts by the states, but it has never invaded the principle that wherever there is a state the educational system is a state system, over which the state government holds the exclusive and sovereign authority.

The United States government in 1867 created a federal Bureau of Education, which gathers and distributes educational information from and to all parts of the world, and has become a sort of clearing house for information concerning the schools for all of the states of our Union; but it has never been invested with the slightest authority over any matter within the limit of a state. The present object, however, is not to emphasize that fact so much as to point out that this organized and quite natural instrumentality of federal educational administration has never been utilized to meet the national responsibility for schools, recently much enlarged, or to propagate educational activities outside of the schools, in federal territory, and to inquire why.

Let us recall the situation, which has grown up. In the territories of Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Oklahoma there are superintendents of public instruction, appointed by the territorial governors. The superintendents report to the Governors, who are appointed by the President, and the Governors make occasional references to education in their reports to the Secretary of the Interior. There is no professional and no located respon

sibility. The Bureau of Education has nothing whatever to do with the matter.

In the District of Columbia the management of the schools is intrusted to a board of education appointed by the judges of the Supreme Court of the district. This board appoints a superintendent of schools. The schools are supported, one half by the district and one half by the United States. The Bureau of Education has no relation to the subject. Once, at least, when the school system of the district got into a muddle, the United States Commissioner of Education was asked to intervene and straighten things out, but that was only a temporary expedient in an emergency.

Congress makes annual appropriations for the schools of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations in the Indian Territory, and the Secretary of the Interior appoints a Superintendent of Schools for the territory; but, again, the Bureau of Education has nothing to do with it.

The other Indian schools are under a superintendent appointed by the President, who reports to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and is under the directions of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the Secretary of the Interior. The United States Commissioner of Education is allowed no official word concerning

them.

A dual administrative scheme for managing schools seems to be deemed necessary for Alaska. Schools for white children and civilized children of mixed blood are under the supervision of the Governor, who is ex officio Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Congress makes appropriations for schools for natives, which are subject to the Secretary of the Interior and are in some measure, at his pleasure, committed by him to the Commissioner of Education.

The Military and Naval Academies are wholly subject to the Secretaries of War and of the Navy, and no distinct school man carries the light of his guild into the recesses of their affairs.

The educational activities of the Department of Agriculture have been much expanded and accelerated in recent years. Through appropriations to the agricultural colleges and experiment stations the federal authority has already made rather long, but perhaps pardonable, inroads into old-time fundamental principles, but the Federal Bureau of Education has no word about them. Perhaps, above all, the war with Spain brought to the people, and particularly to the government, of the United States, for the