Education in the United States

[During August and September the American Notes which have previously appeared on this page are being replaced by a series of articles by our American Correspondent, designed to form a back- ground .against which future notes may be read. They deal with various broad aspects of American life, and outline the general situation in each.—ED. Spectator.] EDUCATION in the United States, as in England, is in a

rericd of intensive self-scrutiny. While the problem in England appears, mainly, to be the quantitative one of extending facilities for higher education, the present concern in America is rather with the quality of the extensive facilities which exist.

The contrast, as other differences between the two Educational systems, derives naturally from the differences in the social, economic and political histories of the two countries since 1776.

The salient characteristics of American education, Particularly where they differ from British practice, are,

indeed, only to be understood in the light of the ideals which the founders of the Republic set and which the spirit and practical experiences of the frontier days confirmed.

The ideal, insisted upon by Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians alike, was equal educational opportunities from the elementary school to the end of the university for all, irrespective of economic condition, native ability, or any other of the selective distinctions which have marked the educational systems of the Old World. Another important characteristic deriving from the democratic aims of the founders was the provision that, in addition to being for all the people, education should to controlled by the people.

Thus in the United States to-day, high school—secondary —education is not only free. It is also open, without selective examination tests, to all who have passed through the elementary school. The evidence of the provision for popular control is seen in the fact that American education has no such centralized, governmental authority as is familiar to Europeans. Under the Constitution, education is primarily a responsibility of the forty-eight States. In practice the responsibility is even more widely divided since it is undertaken largely, in so far as the schools are concerned, by local authorities.

How far has the American aim in education been realized ?

The figures provide a measure of, at any rate, the quantitative achievement. They show not only continuous progress, but progress very greatly accelerated since the War, particularly in the provisions for education beyond the elementary standards.

Of a total population of about thirty million children between the school-going ages of five and seventeen, nearly twenty-five millions are enrolled in the public schools. The enrolment has increased steadily and has more than kept pace with the increase in the number of children of school- going age. Public schools in America, it should perhaps be mentioned, are not public schools in the English sense, but schools maintained by public authorities.

In the past generation there has been an unprecedented growth in the enrolment in public high schools. From 200,000 in 1890 the number of high schools pupils increased to 3,757,000 in 1926, the rate of increase being twenty times the rate of growth of the population as a whole. The marked post-War development is indicated !..-y the figures for the period 1918-14 to 1925-6 when the number of public high school pupils increased from 1,218,000 to 3,757,000.

In the same period the number of college and university students grew from 325,219 to 822,895.

Similarly the expenditure on education has grown enormously.

The annual cost of all public schools rose from $521,546,875 in 1918 to $2,016,812,685 in 1928. The cost of public high

schools in the same period rose from $68,911,000 to $687,912,000—a ten-fold increase. Expenditures for free college and university education increased nearly three hundred and fifty per cent. in a' decade. All told, roughly $2,500,000,000 is spent annually in the United States on free education of one kind or another, public and private.

In addition, as Dr. Abraham Flexner has pointed out : " The age of compulsory attendance in almost all sections of

the country is higher than in any other country. High schools and colleges have been built with absolutely unprecedented rapidity, and their enrolment far outruns the attendance in secondary schools and colleges in any other country. More money is obtained by voluntary gifts than anywhere else. No improvement in respect to facilities has taken place in any other country, such as is now taking place in America."

Such are some of the entries to be placed on the right side of America's educational balance sheet. But, as has been indicated, it is with quality rather than quantity that present discussion in the United States is chiefly concerned. Here the record is found to be by no means so reassuring, and an unceasing output of critical comment pours from the pens and the tongues of educators and laymen alike.

" There is a visible dearth of culture in our life," remarks Professor Will Durant ; " we are a nation with 100,000 schools, and hardly a dozen educated men." " There are countries in which the teacher, elementary and secondary, occupies a strong position, because he is as such esteemed," says Dr. Abraham Flexner, " just as there are countries in which the professor is as respectable as a judge or a general —and America is, in my judgment, not in the list."

" Without background or tradition other than folkway and a perishing ancient dogma," writes Mr. Everett Dean Martin, " and with quantity production methods devised to pamper to its fancy, this multitude tends to cheapen the quality of everything it comes near, while it parades its material prosperity before the world as evidence of superior American virtue. Education has not yet taken root in our soil."

Many of the youths in America, Dr. Harold Florian Clark, of -Columbia University, remarks, go through college merely to be considered " respectable." " The situation is that we get all kinds of students, studious and lazy, dirty and clean; brought in by the force of the compulsory education law," says Dr. William McAndrew, the deposed superintendent of the Chicago schools.

Dean Berry, of the John Hopkins University, declares that our secondary schools, for the most part, provide mere " diluted doses of what our colleges offer " and " in the colleges there is too much standardization." School super- intendents answering a recent questionnaire agreed that "the teachers being turned out by our present-day normal schools are themselves woefully uneducated."

Another survey convinces Dr. Manly H. Harper that, " with rare exceptions, American educators have done but little fundamental thinking relative to our more vital social problems " and that the larger part of them are " super-conservative and reactionary."

" It will be almost universally admitted that the secondary school in these three countries (England, France and Germany) succeeds in imparting to its public a quality that our schools do not," says President Pritchett, of the Carnegie Foundation. In America, he adds, " the boy or girl who has finished the secondary school and entered college in many cases is unable to write or speak good idiomatic English. He has not learned to enjoy good books. On the other hand the graduate of the German gymnasium or of the French /ycee or of the English public school can speak and write his mother tongue with clearness and discrimination, and he reads."

Criticisms such as these abound. They are evidence of the immensity of the task which its ideal has imposed upon education in America rather than of any loss of faith in the ideal itself. No one would propose to-day that the principle of equal educational opportunities for all should be abandoned. The aim, rather, is to develop and supplement it in such ways as will remove existing weaknesses. Formidable problems are involved, but, as Dr. William S. Learned concluded in the survey which he made for the Carnegie Foundation on " The Quality of the Educational Process in the United States and in Europe " : " Even in the welter of our present confusion there are plainly discernible the beginnings of a new order suited to the fresh demands of the new and rising level of our national life."

IVY LED.

New York.