or a fraction of a term by reason of a lack of standardization in grades, which comes from a lack of standardization in the textbooks.

Mr. DONOVAN. Do I understand, then, that you think it would be ideal to have the several States to substantially have the same subjects and books which the children are to study, to have them standardized, so that the children would go into the same grade and have the advantage of not losing any time

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN. Exactly; and not only that, that a textbook which is taught in New York may be taught in California, and that the people at large, who are patrons of schools, shall not be perennially burdened with the millions of dollars wasted by reason of textbooks being nonadapted to a locality where the family moves.

Mr. TOWNER. Let me state that any such power or the exercise of any such authority is absolutely prohibited under the terms of this bill.

Mr. DONOVAN. I understood that.

Mr. TOWNER. I want it made clear, so you would know that the bill would have to be changed in order to comply with the gentleman's suggestion. There is much in what he says, but it is not the purpose of this bill under any circumstances to interfere with the State or with the system of public education. The object of it is to assist and stimulate them and leave the direction and control of education exclusively with the States, so that it shall be organized and supervised and administered by the legally constituted authorities of the State. I am not criticizing the gentleman's statement, but it is directly in contradiction to the terms of the bill.

Senator SMITH. And entirely contrary to the purpose of it, and we do not propose to put in anything of that kind.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN. It is difficult to understand how, under the terms of compulsory education, that the Federal authority can evade providing something in the way of textbooks. If this bill is designed to benefit the greatest number, it seems to me imperative that there should be a provision whereby there might be a national standardization of books and of grades, and there can not be a standardization of grades without a standardization of textbooks.

Mr. ROBSION. I might suggest to the gentleman that perhaps a majority of the States have free textbooks.

Mr. TOWNER. And some States publish them themselves.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN. There is one point that I would like to put stress upon before the committee, and that is the absence in rural districts of high schools. It is my understanding, from the reading of this bill, that under its terms it will be possible to provide highschool facilities, at least up to the fourteenth or sixteenth year, for the children of people that live in rural communities. As a rule, and especially in the part of the West where my home is-Missouri-the absence of high-school facilities in rural districts is an unsatisfactory and hurtful thing, and may I point out that one great reason for the tenantry, for the growth of tenantry, in this country to-day is the migration of farmers to towns in order to obtain advanced education for their children? I contend that if this bill accomplishes this, if it accomplishes nothing else, it will do something that will inure to the benefit of this country.

Mr. TOWNER. There are two other persons to be heard, and we have to adjourn at 12 o'clock.

The CHAIRMAN. Are you about through?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN. I have just finished.

Senator PHIPPS. As secretary of your organization, Mr. Chamberlain, are you aware of any form letter being sent out to the citizens which they might use in addressing Members of Congress asking their support for the so-called Smith-Towner bill?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN. I have never seen a copy of that.

Senator PHIPPS. My mail has been flooded with propaganda, and a form letter has evidently been sent out by some institution, which is almost as bad as the packers' bill.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN. So far as our organization is concerned, I can deny that.

Senator SMITH. Some organization in Colorado evidently has been taking it up. I have letters from ladies out there showing a deep interest in the bill, and I think it is a Colorado organization. The CHAIRMAN. If there is no one here for the opposition, we will now hear from Mr. Bagley.

STATEMENT OF DR. WILLIAM C. BAGLEY, OF COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY.

Dr. BAGLEY. I am a teacher at Columbia University, and a member of the emergency commission of the National Education Association. I may say that my particular business in Columbia University is the preparation of workers for normal schools, the training of men and women who are to train teachers.

Mr. DONOVAN. Are you connected with the teachers' college?

Dr. BAGLEY. I am connected with the teachers' college, which is a part of the Columbia University. I appeared before the committee of the Senate last year, and what I said there is incorporated in the minutes. It had reference to the particular problem of the preparation of teachers. What I would like to do to-day is to review what to my mind are the principal arguments for the entire bill and set before you, from my point of view as a student of education, the facts which go to support these arguments.

I think that the great change that has come about in our conception of education in this country because of the war has been this: Before the war we were prone to look upon education as an individual advantage and upon ignorance as an individual handicap. We thought that the person who was unfortunate enough to be ignorant was handicapped in the struggle for life and that the person who had the advantages of education had a very distinct advantage in this struggle. It seems to me that the point of view we must take now is that education is a national advantage and ignorance is a national handicap. This does not preclude the other point of view, but it does give us a different attitude toward education. For the first time we are impelled as a people to take a national point of view and to consider education from a national standpoint. Under the older system we had the development of what has been aptly termed the neighborhood" conception of educational responsibility. If a town or city or village had good schools, it was usually complacently self-satisfied; if other towns had poor schools, it was their business. The point of view now, I think, is that poor schools in any part of the country are a handicap to the country as a

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whole. It does not make a difference to the business man of New York whether there are poor schools in Georgia or Iowa or North or South Dakota, or Nebraska, or New Jersey. We can not "live to ourselves alone" educationally any more than we can isolate ourselves industrially or politically. The exclusive support of public education by State and local authorities has not been effective from the national point of view. As a nation we have certain fundamental weaknesses that are due to educational weaknesses, that are due to the fact that our schools are not 100 per cent efficient throughout the land.

A great many of these defects came to light during the war. When we found that 700,000 illiterates were subject to the first draft and that 200,000 of them were actually drawn into the training camps and were holding us back, we came to understand that illiteracy was more than an individual disadvantage, and was, in fact, a millstone around the neck of the body politic. What we found in the Army in regard to limited illiteracy was even more startling. A great many people can read and write, but their education will not carry them much further. If I recall the figures correctly, it was estimated that nearly one-fourth of the men drawn into the service were unable to write a letter intelligibly or read a newspaper intelligently. This "limited illiteracy" is a serious problem. It is as serious as illiteracy, because it means that with a large part of the population the schools have not done what they should.

The weaknesses of our educational system are centered, concentrated, I think, primarily at two points. They have already been referred to this morning. In the first place, the system of rural education is notoriously inadequate. The proportion of illiteracy in our rural districts is twice as high as in our urban districts. Consequently the problem of illiteracy is largely a problem of rural education. We have another significant fact, namely, that the nativeborn children of the native-born population are proportionately three times as illiterate as the native-born children of the foreign-born population. In other words, we have done three times as well for the children of the immigrants as we have for our own children. The reason for this is that the immigrants tend to congregate in the large cities where adequate educational facilities are provided, where compulsory education laws are generally enforced, and where schools are generally attractive. The children will go to school, they are well taught, and their tendency to regular attendance is very much. greater than in the country.. We have another fact that was brought to our attention strongly because of the findings of the Army tests, namely, that approximately one-half of the young men drawn into the Army camps had had only six years of schooling or less, and if we think of the draft as forming a cross section" of our population, this means that one-half of all of our citizens are limited to six years' schooling or less. This gives us a conception of the inadequacies of the public-school system that we could not get in any other way. I believe that the only way to correct this condition is through some such form of national stimulation as is proposed in this bill.

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I believe that the only permanent remedy for illiteracy is a very much higher grade of instruction in the rural communities. I do not think anything else will solve the problem entirely. And it is

not a problem of the South alone. In a county not 100 miles from New York City I recently had a conference with the attendance officer of the county-the person who looks after the enforcement of the compulsory school law. The State is a rich State; it has one of the best compulsory-attendance laws of the Union; but that attendance officer told me that she could not enforce the attendance law in the rural districts of the county. She said, "I do not know that it would pay to enforce it, so poor are the schools and so ill-prepared are the teachers." But enforcement or the attempted enforcement of the attendance laws is not alone going to solve the problem. The only way to solve the problem for all time is to have better rural schools. I am inclined to think that one of the most significant problems that this bill looks forward to correcting is this great problem of rural education.

Now, the second problem is the problem of teacher training. What I shall have to say in regard to that will be very brief, but I would like for the purpose of this discussion to bring before the committee a picture of the "teaching population." This population comprises 600,000 men and women. As a group they are, perhaps, the most important of all public servants. It is well to know who these people are, what kind of homes they come from, what preparation they have had for their responsible duties.

I wish to stand these 600,000 teachers in a long line and arrange them in two or three different ways so that we may have a conception of what they are. Let me arrange them first according to age, beginning with the youngest teachers over here [indicating] and the oldest over here, and the others in order of age. If we pass along that line we shall pass by approximately 300,000 of those teachers before we reach a teacher who is more than 24 years old. We shall pass by approximately 150,000, probably more than that, who are 21 years of age and under; in other words, one-fourth of all the teachers in the public schools of this country are scarcely more than boys and girls, themselves. There are thousands of them; yes, tens of thousands, who are 16, 17, 18, and 19 years old. Mr. Strayer said at your first hearing that one-fourth of the boys and girls of the country are getting their education from teachers who have not passed their majority. That is not at all overstating the case. There are millions of boys and girls, citizens of the next generation, who are getting all the education they ever will have at the hands of teachers who are 16, 17, 18, and 19 years old, and teachers who are extremely temporary in the profession and who are practically untrained.

Now extend our 600,000 teachers along a line again, this time arranging them according to their preparation for the work. We pass 300,000 of these teachers before we come to a single individual who has had more than four years of education beyond the elementary grades. One-half of the boys and girls are getting their education from teachers whose own education is limited to highschool education or less. A fourth of them have had only two years beyond the eighth grade, and at least 1,000,000 of the citizens of the next generation are having practically all of their education at the hands of teachers who are only seventh or eighth grade graduates. Let us next arrange the teachers according to their experience in this important work. It takes about four years' experience to make a good elementary teacher. One-half of the

teachers have not served more than four years; one-fourth of them have served two years or less. Some one has well said that our calling is not a profession; it is a procession. The average teacher does not stay long enough to make his or her work thoroughly efficient.

It is important, too, that we should know the kind of families that furnish our teachers, especially the opportunities that these families have for giving their children the kind of education that they ought to have in order to undertake the very large responsi-, bility involved in teaching. Let us arrange the 600,000 teachers according to the income that their parents had at the time the teachers entered the profession. Begin over here with those whose fathers were the poorest and with the most limited resources, and over here with those whose families had the largest resources as stated in terms in income. We pass by 300,000 teachers before we come to a single individual whose family had an income of more than $800 a year at the time when that teacher went into the service. These are prewar figures, of course, and it should be stated that all of these figures are estimates, but they are carefully prepared estimates based upon the best available data. They understate rather than overstate the seriousness of the situation. The fact is that we are drawing most of our teachers from families who live close to the "economic dead line "-families too poor to send their children away to normal schools for extended courses to prepare them for their responsible work.

Now, where are these young, ill-trained, transient teachers located? Primarily in the rural schools. In these schools the length of service is not more than two years on the average. Furthermore, this is the most difficult type of teaching service. The schools are isolated; the teachers have no or little opportunity to mingle with their fellow workers, to get inspiration and help. They have little or no supervision. Of course, if we really attempted to do the work of education properly, instead of sending to these isolated schools the most untrained and transient teachers we would reserve them for the best teachers. In these rural schools and in the schools of small villages 58 per cent of the citizens of the next generation are being educated. It seems to me that one of the great arguments for the passage of this bill is the distinct provision that it makes for the improvement of rural education and for the preparation of ruralschool teachers.

I have called your attention to the more immature and untrained half of our teaching population. We should not infer that the better half represents the high level of training and efficiency that the schools of a great democracy demand. As a matter of fact the proportion of well-trained, mature, and relatively permanent teachers in the public-school service is shamefully small. The rewards of teaching are so meager, the recognitions are so few, the conditions of work are so arduous, that only a small number of men and women prepare themselves adequately for the service and remain in it as a life career. The annual "turnover" amounts to at least one-fifth of the entire teaching population; that is, it is necessary to secure each year more than 100,000 new teachers. Our normal schools, with their inadequate facilities, can furnish only a small fraction of these recruits, and those that are furnished by these institutions have usually