THE EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM OF A DEMOCRACY

BY AMBROSE L. SUHRIE, PH.D.,

Assistant Professor of Elementary and Rural Education, School of Education, University of Pennsylvania.

"It is my hope that the time may soon come when the poorest child living in the meanest hovel on the remotest mountain side in all this commonwealth may enjoy every educational advantage he is willing to improve."

This sentiment was expressed-if the newspaper reports may be relied upon by the governor of Pennsylvania in a public address recently delivered to a group of rural folk assembled at a village railway station in a remote part of the state. It is a restatement in modern form of the plea with which Thaddeus Stevens thrilled and moved his colleagues in the Legislature at Harrisburg in 1835 when the repeal of the law providing for a free school system in Pennsylvania seemed imminent. It is an epigrammatic and very impressive statement of the educational aim which has dominated the efforts of all our great leaders for a century and which has guided the best impulses of all our people in all sections of the republic since the founding of our state school systems.

On the opening page of his School and Society, published in 1900, Professor John Dewey says: "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy."

The extent to which we have succeeded in effectively embodying the ideals set up in these two quotations in the working program of our twentieth century educational systems-local, state and national -has given the world the real measure of our civic achievements. It has also furnished a fair indication of the soundness or unsoundness of our national democracy. And whether our educational achievements as a people are creditable or otherwise, when measured by the ideals we have professed, it is at once obvious that the sacrifice made by individuals, communities, and states to realize these cherished ideals constitute one of the most inspiring chapters in the whole history of social progress.

EQUALITY OF EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY

If we have failed to provide democratic "equality of educational opportunity for all the children of all the people" it must surely be due to some fundamental misconception of the meaning of equality or to our inability to reshape our practices in any given community with sufficient rapidity to meet the changing intellectual, social and economic conditions of a new era. Or the failure may result from both these causes. At any rate it would seem worth while to attempt a statement of what is involved in making (and keeping) our educational system truly democratic. The following propositions would appear to be defensible and sufficiently important to merit some special emphasis:

1. There should be an efficient school reasonably accessible to every child who may profit by its ministry.

2. The school system should be so organized and conducted as to minister with equal diligence to the needs of pupils of each of the several grades of natural ability.

3. The program of school studies and activities should be so many-sided as to show equal deference to the tastes and interests and needs-vocational and cultural-of all.

4. The school system should be so organized as not to encourage or permit the segregation of social classes and should be so conducted as not to exemplify an undemocratic control of student activities.

5. The administration and control of our educational systems should be vested jointly in central and local authorities and the highest intelligence and best judgment of expert and layman should be brought to bear on the formulation and execution of general educational policies. 6. All the educational agencies of the local community, of the state, and of the nation should be brought to bear upon the postschool education of both adolescents and adults.

It is the purpose of the writer to develop these several theses as fully as the space allotment will permit.

SCHOOLS MADE ACCESSIBLE

There should be an efficient school reasonably accessible to every child who may profit by its ministry. There is a very general impression abroad among us that this has long been accomplished. Not so. We have, to be sure, made legal provision in most states for bringing elementary school facilities within easy reach of all our children, but we have in many instances gone no further than

the mere enactment of such provisions. They are by no means uniformly enforced-not even in the spirit of the law.

In many of our large cities a considerable proportion of our children of elementary school grade are on part time for lack of adequate school accommodations and tens of thousands of others are in schools which ought long ago to have been abandoned. In rural districts thousands of the smaller children reach school only by traveling unreasonable distances, and it frequently happens that they are then housed in most unsuitable buildings-lacking all the ordinary comforts which are conducive to health and school progress. The decline in rural population has left many of these schools with so small an enrollment as to render anything like efficient work wholly impossible.

In the city the rapid growth of population and the constant shifting of congested centers have made the problem of providing suitable and adequate school facilities very difficult of solution. It is gratifying, however, to note that in many places where the school population has been increasing most rapidly-in the congested areas of our tenement districts-splendid modern elementary school buildings are springing up. Many of these are so magnificent and substantial as to suggest the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages. In the open country the movement for the consolidation of oneteacher schools by the free transportation of pupils to some central point in the district has made much progress in many sections and promises an easy and satisfactory solution of this problem in all communities where mountain barriers or impassable roads do not render the plan impracticable.

In the field of secondary education the situation is far less. satisfactory. The feeling is not uncommon among large numbers of our people-in city and in country-that the state's obligation has been fully discharged when the mere rudiments of an education have been provided at public expense. As a result, adequate educational facilities above the elementary school grades are provided with certainty only where the majority of the people are aware of the educational possibilities of the golden period of adolescence. And even in such communities the equipment of the high school plant usually makes no adequate provision for all the work of a manysided curriculum. There are still large areas, including whole states, where free secondary education is within reach of only a very

PUPILS IN HIGH SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES FOR EACH 1,000 PUPILS ENROLLED IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS IN EACH STATE IN 1910

(From publications of the Russell Sage Foundation. There is no good evidence that the distributions have been radically changed since 1910-the date of this chart.)

small fraction of the boys and girls that are eligible. At a time when intelligent men and women everywhere agree that the free education of all normal young people should continue well through the period of adolescence, it is surely a violation of every principle of sound democracy to deny high school advantages to any adolescent merely because of untoward circumstances over which as an individual he can have no control. Unhappily, too, these advantages are most frequently denied to the alert and ambitious boys and girls of the rural districts where it would seem the nation is just now in most urgent need of capable leadership.

It is most gratifying, however, to note the achievements of the past two decades in the rapid extension of high schools. Up to the year 1900 there were scarcely a dozen public institutions in all of the South which by the best standards of the times could be called high schools. These were exclusively in the large cities. Today almost a thousand high grade public secondary schools exist in that section alone and the progress elsewhere has been almost equally noteworthy. A single small county in Indiana has built fifteen magnificent rural high schools during the past eight years. The outlook for the immediate future is bright. The recent rapid growth of permanent state school funds and the practice of apportioning large grants of money for the aid and encouragement of the smaller high schools will in the near future-unless all signs fail-bring secondary education, certainly in all our more thickly populated states, within reach of all who really desire its benefits.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that there is need for a more general equalization of opportunities for university, college and technical school training at public expense among all the professional and industrial groups in our complex population and for a more equitable distribution of such facilities in the sparsely settled areas of our country. These readjustments are, in many respects, as vital to the interests of democracy as is the general promotion of elementary and secondary education among all the children of all the people. Lack of space forbids the full development of this statement.

The situation as described above, while satisfactory in many respects, presents some bad symptons. The reason for the delay in many sections-in city and in country-in providing school facilities equally satisfactory in character and reasonably accessible