Mr. Sorenson has also condemned the low pay of teachers. I agree with him perfectly on this point. I think the low pay of teachers is traceable to a mistaken educational policy on the part of educational administrators. Let me give you an illustration. In the New York Times it was reported that in 1905 we had 177 medical schools. Today we have about seventy medical schools. Thirty years ago we had actually five or six thousand more medical students than today. They raised the standards of the medical schools, made the requirements more rigid, and the problem has been solved. Instead of that in the teaching trade, we have opened many more colleges, normal schools, etc. and society has been filled with teaching ability. Salaries have therefore dropped. The real solution to the problem lies simply in restricting the supply of teachers. Automatically salaries will rise. I had occasion to examine the entire data for all the South Dakota teachers for last year,-salary, tenure, and many other things, and I found that the average wage of South Dakota teachers was $750 a year. You cannot expect full blooded people to enter a trade that pays such a salary. The thing we ought to do is to declare a general moratorium for ten years for the creation of new teachers. We would then get men and women who wouldn't need to be told how high to draw the window shades. I do not believe in teachers' unions. They are going to do it here and there, but we know that unions cannot raise wages as a whole, and they couldn't raise wages in an individual case. Our economic studies show that quite well. Until they restrict the supply of labor which enters a particular kind of trade, the problem is unsolved.

One reason why Mr. Green and Mr. Lewis disagree is because Mr. Green says that even if you do organize a union, you will not find the great masses of American workmen flocking into the union, and even if they should flock, the pay would not be raised. In other words, the secret of raising the pay for a specific group lies in the restriction of numbers. That is true socially, of course, and so far as the subject of education is concerned, the secret, ir my opinion, lies in that direction.

Now I don't know what the speaker meant about teaching for today. After all, today or the present is nothing but the dividing point between the past and the future.

In regard to federal aid, I also disagree. If you try to get state aid for local communities, or federal aid, then you will tend to perpetuate vested interests in local communities where they ought to be allowed to wither away. The quicker we move them back to where there is a little vitality, the better for us. In the long run it is not wise to perpetuate citizens in areas that cannot maintain their own schools, their own farming population, etc. That is the ideal. Underlying the philosophy of Mr. Sorenson, there was, of course, a feeling that we have to improve our education in order to improve our citizenship, and I suspect what he had in mind was to improve our earning power so that we will have a greater amount of income.

I submit one more point to you. I think it is true that education, instead of making for greater equality of incomes, makes for greater inequalities of incomes. Numerous experiments prove conclusively that

the smart boys and girls benefit so much more by general education than the duller that by the time you have put them all through a training course, you will only have increased the inequality.

DISCUSSION-Dorothy Holmes, Emergency Education

Department, WPA St. Paul.

I have had some experience in teaching a group of young girls, particularly from work relief and direct relief families. Therefore, I am interested in some of the very practical aspects of this problem brought out by Mr. Schmidt's dicussion. Mr. Schmidt says it is impossible to conceive of human rights without property rights. Many of these girls have

no property rights.

He suggests declaring a moratorium in the process of making teachers, which doesn't answer the question of the surplus that we already have. You see, I see the surplus that we already have, unemployed young people who are definitely the surplus that we have in the given situation. It hasn't been a very pretty picture. I remember one young girl who sat telling me about the time she had to go on relief, and they ate cold pancakes for three days before they finally brought themselves to go on relief. Mr. Schmidt is thinking of it from a long run point of view, he says, and yet I know that people eat in the short run.

We have been talking for a long time about educating for a new social order. Somehow we are still educating for a new social order. Young people are looking toward the future, but they have first of all to learn to face the present. They don't know what the problems are in the present. Some of the girls that I have, for example, know what it is to be hungry and unemployed, but they do not realize the general problem of unemployment extending over the country. They don't know such things as the fact that there are questions of work relief and direct relief. EduIcation in the lives of many of our young people has ceased to be a vital source. They haven't learned to face their particular problems.

We hold the attitude that we must be impartial, that we must preIsent all the facts. I think we should also state our personal convictions on the given subject, making the young people feel that the problem touches us, that it is not something vague and far away, and then proceed to prosent all the facts impartially. Teach with a definite viewpoint.

We start with our particular problems, for instance unemployment. We work from that to try to develop in them a sense of the actual vitality of education; that it really can accomplish something; that they can work

towards something.

If education is going to mean anything, if the help that we are supposed to give people in our teaching is going to accomplish anything, it is going

with the education they have had.

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DISCUSSION-Howard P. Longstaff, Lecturer in Psychology

University of Minnesota

I have noticed running through the two speakers' talks certain points of view that have been expressed differently, but it seems to me there is a basic problem involved in all of them. Mr. Dugan said they were very much interested in the guidance of these individuals, as well as in trying to get them jobs. Mr. Sorenson reported that the curriculum of the future is going to be modified, and has to be modified, and I think underlying these two statements is a basic question.

I think one of the fundamental difficulties with the present, or old system, is the fact that when free public education was established, it was established more or less on the idea that this was a democracy, that everyone has an equal opportunity, and to carry out these ideas of democracy, everyone should be given an equal amount of education. Anyone who has studied much psychology knows that that is absolutely impossible, because we are not free and equal in any sense of the word. One of the things that modern psychology and modern education is realizing more and more is the fact that we are all different. Consequently what we are going to have to do is not think in terms of masses but to think in terms of the individual. Only as we come down to realize that each individual is different and that education is a matter of individual education. and that we have to find out how individuals differ and teach them according to what they can profit by, will our educational system actually be bettered.

The first speaker made the point that about seven per cent of the students that they had observed had gone no further than the sixth grade. In all probability, that seven per cent would not be able to go further than sixth grade. Should everyone be forced to wear a size seven and a half hat, size twelve shoes, etc. just because this is "the land of the free and the home of the brave"? It is just as foolish to say how much education everyone should have. These individual differences do exist. I agree thoroughly with Dr. Sorenson in the statement that the curriculum of the future is going to be liberalized. If it is carried out wisely, it will be liberalized with the individual in mind. We will have to have greater and greater attention directed to the individual. We have to develop better techniques of individual diagnosis so that we can discover the individual's strong points and his weak points. Now a great deal of work has been done in this particular field lately. As a matter of fact, at the University of Minnesota, we are doing a great deal of it. Still, we have merely scratched the surface, and the greatest value of any test we have at the present time is that we can do a fair job in telling people what they ought to stay out of. Most of our techniques can't tell us what these people should go into, however. Each individual is so complex that it is nearly impossible to say what will be best for that individual.

The basic problem is that of the individual, and when we start thinking about the individual, what his assets and liabilities are, and training him from that point of view, then I think we will be getting at something more fundamental, and will be more likely to succeed.

DISCUSSION-Bernard Saibel, Division of Relief,

Department of Public Welfare, Minneapolis

Incidentally, I am not a social worker. I have agreed and disagreed with many things which the former speakers have said. Obviously, they take different points of view,-points of view which to my mind cannot be reconciled with one another, things in which there will always be friction. There is a difference between questions of truth and questions

of value.

Now in questions of truth, propositions which one finds in logic or mathematics, one can win assent to those propositions by proving them, and proof is always public in the sense that you can always indicate to another man how you happered to arrive at that particular truth. I have never heard anyone get emotional about the great and eternal truth that two and two equals four, although I have heard a great deal of argument and heated discussion over the effects of the new deal, the powers of fascism, or the other political questions. I think that is primarily because we confuse judgments of values with propositions about matters of fact, and I don't think there can be any agreement in propositions of judgment or value, because I be eve as most social workers don't believe, that values are subjective.

That is, when a person says something is good, what he really meant to say is that he desires it. Now there is a truth value to the assertion that I might make that I desire something. If it is a matter of fact that I do desire something, there is no controversial material. It is true that I desire it, and that is what all propositions reduce to. For that reason you can have no unanimity of opinion on these subjects.

If I look through a telescope and say I see a new planet, all you number of people see it, then it is an established fact in science that a have to do is to look through it, too, and you will see it, and after a new planet has swung into our canopy. Or if I make a deduction in mathematics,-a deduction which you haven't made,—and I offer you the conclusion, you can go througn every step of my proof and there you are. You have to accept it. It might be that people really do want the same thing. It may be that there is a great deal of unanimity in the Republican would say that his interest is the welfare of the great multitudes of people of this country, and a Democrat will say that the piece of legislation he proposes is a means to the greatest welfare of the greatest number. It may be that the only thing they violently disagree on is the means by which this welfare can be brought about. However, I don't think that people really do desire the greatest happiness of the greatest number. I don't think they mean what they say when they say that. I think they are usually interested in a certain class, in a certain vested interest, and what they mean to say is that this plan of action is the best plan to bring the greatest happiness or the greatest good to this

particular class.

So much for the fundamental considerations which should be kept in mind when considering highly controversial subjects.

REBUTTAL-Herbert Sorenson

Very seldom do I have the privilege of meeting a person who opposes me so diametrically as Mr. Schmidt does in this instance. It is a particular pleasure that I enjoy immensely. Mr. Schmidt has brought up the old wheel horse of "supply and demand." I am willing to enter the field of economics, although that is not my field. I got into that same difficulty with a man down in Louisiana, and the only thing that saved me was the fact that he supported a school of economics that has been failing for many years. Mr. Schmidt, you proposed to cut down the number of workers. Let's cut down the number of teachers, doctors, dentists, and the number of firemen. You have a whole, and you cut a piece off here and there. What are you going to do with those pieces? Cut down the number of teachers? We should not cut down; we should increase the number of teachers. We haven't enough teachers. If we reduced classes to their proper size and instituted the proper psychological service, guidance service, etc., we would have such a short ge that our training mills couldn't satisfy the demand. We would have a shortage of teachers. The same with doctors-if we had the medical treatment we need, we would have a shortage of doctors.

Now, I agree with you that individual differences increase with education. Relatively, the strong became stronger through education. To him who hath shall be given, and him who hath not shall be taken away, even that which he hath. That is true because, relatively, the strong become stronger and the weak weaker. Now it is a question of philosophy. You said we should look out for Number One. On that basis, conditions will get worse. If we spend the state's money in educating people, and open up our libraries and laboratories to them, and send out the most capable and most gifted, and if we send them out with the philosophy that they should look out for Number One, I agree with you that conditions will become worse, Is that necessary, however? Can't we send out the strong, the gifted, and the brilliant, and have them think not only of themselves but of others? Couldn't their concern be for the underprivileged? Shouldn't he say to himself, rather than saying he would get it all for himself, “I have been fortunate. My parents had good germ cells and I have the advantage of good heredity. I happen to be brighter than others. I have had good educational opportunities." Shouldn't he go out with the philosophy that he is going to use his talents not for himself but for the people as a whole? Instead of an individualistic philosophy, have more philosophy for the group-a wider social philosophy.

There is a fallacy in your argument that the amount of wealth people possess and the amount of their worldly possessions follows the curve of individual differences. It is true psychologically that we have individual differences. There are people, it is true, who can't acquire more than sixth grade education. That is psychologically sound. There are individual differences, but that does not mean that the distribution of wealth or income or property follows those individual differences. It