tioned sum being, of course, for the large cities where rents and all other expenses are the highest.

Ex-President Eliot believes that the maximum common school class should have 15 pupils. Other educational authorities place the maximum at 20, 25 and 30. These standards would mean an average class of from 12 to 24 pupils. The typical classes in the great majority of public school systems are now over 40.

In view of the expense of a school teacher's training ample salaries should be paid. From the educator's standpoint a proper standard has nowhere been reached. Perhaps the nearest approach was in New York City when the beginning teacher's salary was fixed at $600. But the cost of living has risen nearly 50 per cent since that time and there has been no substantial salary increase whatever for men, while women secured a moderate advance only through an "equal pay" law. Conditions are as bad, or worse, in the other large cities, and much worse in the country and small towns.

A minimum common school program would require.

(1) That classes should be reduced to one-half of the present size.

(2) That teachers' salaries should be doubled in most places, and largely increased even in the great cities.

This would mean that the cost of these schools would be increased to three or four times the present amount. This would require an additional billion or billion and a half dollars for the nation-which could easily be raised by a national income and inheritance tax heavily graduated against the wealthy classes-and entirely exempting the smaller incomes.

Such a policy, if applied to the secondary schools also, would not only increase the expense per pupil by three or four, but it would also double or treble the number of students who would find it economically worth while to attend these improved schools. For we can assume that the new expenditures in the secondary schools would largely take the form either of a general industrial or of a specialized technical education. The United States now expends only $70,000,000 a year on its public secondary schools. It would then expend from $420,000,000 to $840,000,000—an outlay that surely ought to appeal to the "patriotic" advocates of national efficiency, since it would add. several times their value to the national product—a large share of which would, of course, go to employers.

Thus the total expenditures for public, primary, and secondary schools together would increase from $600,000,000

to $2,000,000,000 or $3,000,000,000—which corresponds to Eliot's estimate that we should and could spend four or five times as much as we do on public schools.

It will be some time before the majority of mere reformers gain the courage of their convictions and demand such expenditures-though these expenditures would be for the most important of all objects and would total less than our tobacco and alcohol bill..

A national organization for federal aid to education has already been launched, and seems ready to go as far as public opinion will justify. The new movement has received the endorsement of such leading educators as Professors Dewey, Monroe, and Kilpatrick of Columbia, Presidents Mezes of the College of the City of New York, Brown of New York University, and Edmund J. James of Illinois, and Dr. John H. Finley, Dr. Felix Adler, Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mrs. Florence Kelley. The movement is too new to have reached far from New York, where it was launched this May. But there is no doubt that it will secure the support of nearly all leading educators and reformers-and of all radicals.

DEMOCRATIZING THE SCHOOLS.
By RANDOLPH BOURNE.

Democratic education is not simply a matter of providing common schooling for all children. It is not a matter of providing a uniform schooling for all children. A democratic school is one wherein children have equal opportunity to make what they can of themselves, and where each child has a chance to get what it needs. The American public school has been democratic in the sense that it has provided free schooling for all children. But in the other sense it has only begun to enter on the democratic stage.

The school has been primarily a bookish school. Its aim has been to teach the three R's, historical and geographical information, and perhaps a little drawing. In the higher grades it has shaped its work in mathematics and language and literature to prepare children for the college. It has sought to give this education uniformly to all, whatever the future vocation of the children taught. The result has been to ignore the differences in capacity and interests and to make the school really a vocational school for a restricted class, that is, the intellectually inclined. The children of the wage-earners too often had to leave school early and go into unskilled work or pick up their training as best they could outside the school. The school was free, but the

opportunities were not really equal, for the school discriminated in practice against the motor and manually-minded children.

The "Gary Plan."

The progressive educational effort of today is directed toward repairing this inequality of opportunity, and providing a kind of school where the future wage-earner will have the same chance of training as the future professional man or woman of leisure. This is the purpose of the industrial training movement and of the introduction of commercial and industrial and domestic science courses in the high schools. But a more fundamental reorganization is needed. The roots must be laid in the elementary school before the child's interests have been dulled. An interesting attempt to reorganize the public school to meet the new demand is that made by Supt. William Wirt in the schools of Gary, Indiana. The "Gary plan" has aroused the widest public interest, and has been extensively experimented with in other cities, notably New York, where over fifty schools are in process of reorganization. The essence of the Gary plan is to provide the school with a great variety of activities-in play-grounds, gymnasiums, science laboratories, industrial and manual training shops, kitchens, sewing-rooms, gardens, school theatre, etc.-covering all the wholesome interests of children. The school day is lengthened to seven or eight hours, and the children are kept busy at work, study and play in the school instead of being turned out on the streets after a few hours of study. The regular studies are not neglected, but each child has a chance to try his hand at the activities that interest him. The younger child goes into shop or laboratory as observer or helper to the older child who is working there. He thus gets practical contact with tools and processes. He can sift out what he does not like, and discover what his real capacities are. If he wants to lay the foundation of a trade he can get the training there in the school shops. The shops are in charge of trained union mechanics who work on the school plant. The children learn by helping them on repairs and maintenance. Each child in such a school has a chance to get exactly the training which will be beneficial to him. The whole child is educated, mentally, manually, physically. There is no classdistinction between the intellectually-minded and the manually-minded. All have equal opportunity to develop in whatever direction they can.

The Gary plan widens the school opportunities in that it makes the school a wholesome environment of work, study and play from the child's earliest years. The more usual form of school reorganization, involving the so-called "junior

high school" plan, postpones industrial and technical work till the seventh or eighth years. The first six years are given over to books; after the sixth year the child chooses whether he shall go on to academic or manual training. The Gary plan puts all activities on an equal footing. It is held that this school gives greatest opportunities for the wage-earners' education, and equal opportunity for every child.

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION,

By BENJAMIN C. GRUENBERG.

After years of discussion of the need for industrial education, the thoughtful educators are coming to realize that what we need is not so much training for efficiency in industry as training for life in an industrial society. In the course of economic evolution the ownership of the land was first placed in the hands of a special class; the Single-taxers recognize this and expect to solve all problems by socializing the land. Then the industrial revolution segregated the tool-owning class-and we all recognize our dependence upon the owners of machinery and other forms of capital. But in the meanwhile a more subtle and insidious form of ownership has developed, incidental to the others--and that is the ownership of the world's technology. Whatever may be said of the foresight of the original fence-builders, in justification of private ownership of land, and whatever may be said in historical justification of the ownership of other forms of capital, it cannot be denied that the scientific and technical principles upon which modern industry rests are the resultants of the efforts and inspirations of millions of men and women, mostly dead-that these are no more the product of the present owners nor of isolated individuals than are language and customs and rituals. Yet the usufruct of this accumulated skill and invention is preempted by the owners of the machinery of production.

The importance of this fact for the workers is seen in connection with the minute subdivision of labor whereby the individual is deprived of the spiritual content of his work, and is at the same time prevented from having the material benefits that would enable him to obtain his spiritual satisfactions outside of his work. Educational organization and effort must take this situation into serious account.

The True Basis of Education.

There must be first of all a more general acquaintance with those principles and activities that are at the foundation of all productive effort-handiwork for all children to the end that they become familiar with tools and materials and the principles of human control of force and matter. There

must then be an abundance of natural science for an understanding of the principles that are applied in our common machinery and appliances. In properly organized schools, these studies and activities, correlated with history, literature, art, dramatics, etc., will lead to the emergence of specialized talents that are of vocational significance, thus determining further special training for a certain portion of the children. For the mass of children, those who do not show any talents that are of significance vocationally there will have been laid a foundation of common experience which is essential for social integration in a democracy. Further education of the "masses,' as well as of those who require further professional or technical training, should include comprehensive courses in economics and other social sciences, instruction in occupational hygiene, in the laws that apply to workers and working conditions, in practical civics and politics, and in the cultivation of special play or leisure interests.

That these principles are not utopian is attested by the experience of those states that have made the most farreaching experiments in readjusting the educational work to meet the new conditions. Wisconsin has found that the continuation classes for young people who have gone to work have little opportunity to give valuable instruction in technical matters to the rank and file of the workers. Whatever need there may be for technically trained workers, the large mass seems doomed to be machine tenders. This doom is not in itself deplorable; it is devastating only because of the conditions of speed, time, sanitary conditions and inadequate return. Investigations have shown that routine work, however monotonous, may be entirely satisfactory to thousands of healthy and intelligent men and women if the conditions surrounding the work are suitable, and if there is adequate leisure and the opportunity to utilize it properly. In the continuation schools of Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio there is found the need for giving a great deal of "general" instruction in language, mathematics, history and civics, and so on. Industry demands specialized skill and speed in comparatively simple operations; the workers need an opportunity to live a human life and training for more favorable bargaining and for utilizing their slowly growing leisure.

A Warning to Workers.

There is some danger that the agitation for vocational education will tend to bring about too early specialization of young children. This should be guarded against most jealously. There is positive danger that certain commercial