THE REPUBLICAN

June 17, 1892

 

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL MAP

                                                                                                                                   

 

            The public school map puts the American educational system in a striking form.

            Thirteen million pupils are now enrolled in the public schools of the United States – that is, there are more than three times as many pupils as the entire population of the United States in 1800.  The entire population in 1830 was 12,866,000; there is consequently a larger nation of children now in our free schools than the whole nation of sixty years ago.

            These 13,000,000 public school pupils are one-fifth of our present population of 65,000,000.  There are something over a million more in private and parochial schools.  But it is this nation of our free school youth, this nation within the nation, that will be controlling the republic fifteen years from now.  These “children of the states” imbued with our characteristic American spirit, will soon be the leaders of the people who are to solve the problems of the opening years of the coming century.

            One-fifth of our population in the public schools means that the American idea is that childhood and youth shall enjoy a sacred immunity from labor while the preparation for life is going on.  In all our states the age when children can be employed for wages during the school term is steadily creeping upward. The time is not far off when one-fourth instead of one-fifth of its population will be enrolled in the schools.  Here is the place for state legislation to make rapid and sure strokes.  When the children of a poor family are hired out for wages there comes an apparent relief to the family; but child labor invariably reduces the labor of adults.  Raising the school age always operates to raise the wages of the men and women to whom labor belongs.  In the states not yet awake to this, the children who ought to be in school are with their little hands holding down the general rate of adult wages.  If fifteen were made the universal school age, with strict penalties for hiring a child under fifteen during school hours, millions of toiling children would be added to the hopeful nation of pupils now in the public schools.

            Who are the instructors of this vast democracy of youth?  Three hundred and fifty-two thousand teachers are employed.  One-third of them are men, two-thirds are women.  The men are usually well trained.  The proportion of trained female teachers is increasing year by year, as the normal schools send out their classes.  Nevertheless, scores of thousands of these female teachers are untrained.  Forty per cent of all the female teachers teach for only one term.  Think what that means.  In the rural districts of many states teaching is a “job” to which almost any girl may turn.  Careful examinations of teachers are not expected when the school fund is so penurious that the cheapest teachers are the only applicants.

            The faults of the American public school system, however, are all on the surface and can easily be remedied.  State superintendents and higher educators generally are giving to all the weaknesses discernible in our system their careful attention.  They are determined that the new century shall open upon an educational plant as nearly without defects as progressive energy can make it.

            The public school is our most distinctive American institution.  It is this same public school which, more than race, has made the difference between this republic and the republics of South America.  When the world gathers here at our 400^th anniversary to scrutinize our life this, our proudest institution, will be pointed out as the clearest source of American greatness and enlightenment.

            It is a very fitting thing that the celebration of Columbus Day, Oct. 12, be placed in the hands of the American public school.  Through the schoolhouse flag movement, and the education in patriotism aroused by it, the schools of the republic have been grasping the significance of their relation to the life of the nation.  As our 13,000,000 of public school pupils see committed to them the celebration of America’s greatest anniversary they will receive a new and inspiring lesson in the responsibilities of public leadership which devolves upon the educated American.