To just what extent does the plutocracy control our schools? In “The Goose-step,” pages 28-29, I quoted from a study by Scott Nearing, reported in “School and Society” for September 8, 1917, showing that in 143 of the leading colleges and universities of the United States there were a total of 2,470 trustees, of whom 1,444 were of the commercial and financial class—that is, a percentage of 58. In “School and Society” for January 20, 1917, Scott Nearing gave the results of a similar investigation with regard to school boards. He wrote to the superintendents of schools in all American cities having a population of over forty thousand; there were a total of 131 such cities, and 104 replies were received.

The total population of the cities was twenty-four million, or one-fourth of the American people at that time. The number of board members was 967. The business class, including merchants and manufacturers, capitalists, contractors, real estate and insurance men, and officials in railroads, banks and corporations, numbered 433, the professional class 333, and miscellaneous 201—this last including 18 teachers, mostly college professors, 48 clerks and salesmen, 39 mechanics and wage-earners, and 25 foremen. Nearing points out that in these cities the wage earners and clerks included five-sixths of the employed population, but that they had only one-tenth of the school board representation; nine-tenths of the members had been chosen from one-sixth of the population. It is interesting to note that women compose 48% of the population, but only 7% on the boards of education in large cities, and only 3% on the boards of trustees of colleges and universities. The commercial class, with their lawyers, compose 58% of college boards, and 59% of city school boards.

So we see that the plutocracy really does hold the whip hand; whatever this class has wanted to do with the schools, it has done. Let us now see, in the form of statistics, just what it has wanted to do.

First: It has been far more interested in killing the young than in educating them. We are able to put this preference into figures—which is how the plutocracy likes a thing put. Its interest in war has been ninety-three times as great as its interest in education and science put together. According to an analysis of federal appropriations by the chief of the United States Bureau of Standards, the appropriation of the government for the year 1920, which was a year of peace, was as follows: Past wars, 68%; future wars, 25%; civil departments, 3%; public works, 3%; education and science, 1%. Disregarding small fractions, out of a total of $5,685,000,000 appropriation, the share of wars, past or future, was $5,279,000,000, and education and science combined got only $57,000,000.

That represents federal appropriations. Still more illuminating is a study of the total expenditure of the American people for education, as contrasted with expenditure for other purposes. The “Survey” for July 16, 1921, presents a table: “The Schools’ Share in the Nation’s Wealth.” According to this, it appears that the American people spent in 1920, upon joy-rides, races and pleasure resorts, $3,000,000,000 and upon all departments of education in the entire country $1,000,000,000. The American people spent upon sundaes, sodas and drinking fountain delights, including ice cream, a total of $600,000,000, and upon higher education $137,000,000. The American people spent upon face lotions and cosmetics $750,000,000, and upon the public elementary schools $762,000,000. They spent upon chewing gum $50,000,000, and upon schools to train their teachers $20,000,000. They spent upon candy alone as much as they spent upon all departments of education, and upon cigars, cigarettes, and tobacco more than twice the amount.

We are a self-satisfied people, and we propose to make our foreign population like ourselves; but we really ought to hesitate, because the 1920 census shows that in illiteracy we are behind nearly all the civilized nations—Australia, England, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. We boast of six per cent illiteracy, while Denmark has only two-tenths of one per cent, Switzerland and New Zealand three-tenths of one per cent, England and Wales one and eight-tenths per cent; the German Empire, which we went to war to destroy, had only three-hundredths of one per cent, which is two hundred times better than the United States!

The war brought us some definite information about our education. The Army test of illiteracy was based on the ability to read as well as children in the second grade, and 25% of our would-be soldiers “flunked” this test. We cannot get away by attributing our illiteracy to the Negroes, because Camp Devens in Massachusetts showed 22%; nor can we attribute it to the foreigners, because there were seven hundred thousand native-born illiterates in the first draft. The chief of the Americanization Bureau estimates that there are three and a half million native-born adults who cannot read any language.

Also it is worth while to glance at the physical condition of our people. More than one-third of the country’s best manhood between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one was disqualified because of physical defects; and another large percentage was later rejected for the same reason. One-fourth of all college boys were rejected—it would appear that shouting at football games does not constitute the whole of physical training. A report of the committee on health problems of the National Council of Education estimates that three-fourths of our twenty-five million school children are suffering from physical defects; the professor of physical education at Columbia University tells us that 25% of our school children are underfed, while from 50 to 75% have defective teeth. You would think that our plutocracy would be concerned about these matters, even on purely business grounds. Taking the state of Massachusetts, one million workers lose an average of nine days a year from sickness, which means in wage losses and medical bills $40,000,000, and $35,000,000 a year additional expenses to the state.

We spend on our school children less than fifty dollars per child per year, which does not seem a munificent sum. Let us see what we spend per teacher. The United States Bureau of Education has provided up-to-date figures, in a study of rural school salaries for the year 1923, covering one-half the counties in the United States. The number of “one-teacher schools” reported was 97,758, and the average salary was $729. Sixty dollars and seventy-five cents per month will keep a teacher alive, but it won’t keep her a teacher. According to a bulletin of the National Education Association, there are approximately 600,000 public school teachers, and one-fourth of them serve in the schools two years or less, and half of them serve less than five years; in other words, teaching is a temporary job, by which the teacher earns pin money until she can get a husband or something better. Naturally these teachers do not trouble to acquire fitness for their work; one-sixth of them are under twenty years of age, and half of them have no professional preparation whatever. Ten per cent have no education beyond the eighth grade, while half have no more than four years beyond the eighth grade; in other words, the teachers know as much as the pupils will know at the end of the school work—and no more!

These figures include the city schools, whose teachers have considerably more training. Let us see what reward they get for this extra training. The National Chamber of Commerce, in its survey of school salaries covering 359 cities, shows that in 1919-’20 more than half the male elementary teachers were receiving less than $1262 a year; their salaries had increased 33% in six years, while the cost of living increased 104%. So naturally the men teachers are leaving the public schools; from 1880 to 1915 the percentage of men teachers fell from 42.8% to 9.6%; and this was before the increase in the cost of living! Said the “Bankers’ Magazine,” discussing this question (January, 1919; the Bankers’ Publishing Co., New York): “We pay the day laborer more than the teacher because he is worth more—because he produces a service of greater value to society—just as the corporation manager is paid more than the preacher.”

Who is to blame for illiteracy in America? Is it the fault of the children and of the parents, or is it the fault of the propertied classes, who will not furnish schools for the poor? Upon the opening of the public schools, September, 1923, it appears that in New York, the richest city in the world, 150,000 children can receive only part time instruction, while 200,000 will be taught in double sessions; of the high school pupils more than two-thirds will have to be content with less than normal instruction. Los Angeles is even worse, with 16% of its pupils unseated; Chicago follows with 12%. In the year 1921, with one-sixth of its population in the public schools, the propertied classes of the country saw fit to tax but one cent and a half in every hundred dollars of their income, to provide housing for the school children.children. The National Chamber of Commerce reports that 37% of city school buildings are fire-traps, and only 5% are considered fire-proof.

There is a strong movement under way for federal expenditures upon education. Educators recite that our government spent $600,000 for a book about horses; we spend $30,000,000 annually on the prevention of diseases in hogs and cattle, and the destroying of insects which injure crops; so surely we ought to spend something on the child! But this money will have to be spent through our present political machines; and consider the figures of ex-Congressman John Baer, who made a study of federal educational expenditures, and showed that out of more than thirty million dollars appropriated for educational purposes, our chief educational agency, the Bureau of Education, expended less than one per cent in actual administration of education. “Federal educational activities are now directed through more than eighty different offices, divisions, bureaus, commissions, and other agencies of the government.”

Such is “red tape” in Washington; and if you follow the strands of this tape, you find it extending to all the seven hundred thousand school rooms of the country. We have seen our “great educators” keeping the teachers in submission by loading them with routine work, reports, questionnaires, examinations and re-examinations. The most universal complaint of the school teachers, from Los Angeles to Boston, and from Minnesota to Mississippi, has to do with this administrative and routine labor, taking up their time and destroying their eyesight and their nerves. This of course is the very essence of machine education, the running of schools by business men on the quantity production basis. It occurred to the National Council of Teachers of English to make a survey of conditions in their profession, and they found that the average teacher had four hours of “theme” reading to do every day, while the average high school teacher had five hours. Many reported that they skipped and skimmed through every paper, others destroyed the great bulk of them unread and gave credit without reading. In high schools the teachers of English were required to take care of 125 pupils per teacher! Needless to say, the survey reports that teachers of English are overworkedoverworked, underpaid, underequipped and underestimated.

A detailed picture of this routine in one school is given in a paper, “Should English Teachers Teach?” by Edwin M. Hopkins, professor of English at the University of Kansas, and editor of the “English Journal.” Professor Hopkins complains that English teachers do not have time to teach English, because of the other kinds of work piled upon them by those who run the great educational factories. Many teachers, it appears, have to do janitor work, because the schools have no janitor and divide such work among the teachers. Practically all teachers have to do “school bookkeeping.” In one school the supervisor has provided printed forms with finely divided blanks, in which the teachers have to fill in information concerning no fewer than sixty items. These printed forms vary in size, from ordinary cards to sheets fifteen by twenty inches; there are “quarantine cards, record cards for office and superintendent, record of transfer to other schools, registration cards, three forms of attendance reports, inventories, seating charts, duplicate schedules”; records must be kept of “absence excuses, term record sheets, duplicate attendance slips, library cards and library service, correspondence duty, telephone duty, patrol duty, meeting parents, care of lockers and keys, returning lost books to pupils.”

A single item, the filling out of a library or text-book card for each pupil, occupies seven full hours of the teacher’s time for the pupils of a single section; and this principal makes six sections, of from fifty to sixty-five pupils each, the regular assignment of his English teachers. Other details include the filling in of from forty to a hundred separate items on each of the room cards; also the making of more than seventy entries of each pupil’s full name and room number, on the seat-charts of every recitation-room, for each recitation-hour and subject—there being fifteen or twenty of these for each teacher. Then there are “schedule cards,” handled by a special committee of three members assisted by ten or twelve volunteers. This takes two or three weeks of each semester, and the classes have to wait, doing no work while this is going on. Then there is the “checking of assembly-room slips,” an average of eight slips per pupil in a section of forty pupils. Each of these three hundred and twenty must be checked in its proper compartment on the individual pupil’s room card, which is ruled for fifty compartments. “For this item of duty no time allowance whatever is made.”

And if you trace all this back to its source, you will find it runs in a straight line, through Professor George D. Strayer and President Nicholas Murray Butler, to J. P. Morgan, the elder. I have mentioned that Strayer himself is the author of an elaborate series of card-systems, which are sold in quantities to teachers; and you will find that the young men and women who come out from Strayer’s mill are never happy till they get settled at some job of “scoring.” Thus one Columbia man is marking a city map with a red dot for every high school student in each city block. Another writes to a book publisher, asking for one hundred free copies of six different text-books—he is testing out text-books, a thousand different volumes, using one hundred copies of each. Two other Columbia men, with the highest degrees, have been “scoring” history topics; they have marked subjects mentioned in seventeen leading magazines for five years, a total of 92,000 references, showing how many times Columbus is named, and Magellan, and Theodore Roosevelt! They publish this in the “Journal of Educational Research,” of which Strayer is co-editor.

And every teacher’s college throughout the United States becomes a little Columbia, with some little “Nicholas Miraculous” at its head. I have a friend who was brought up within the shadow of such a place, and writes me what is going on. Listen:

This young lady goes on to explain that so far as she knows, the Columbia ring are “perfectly sincere and earnest gentlemen,” and no one has ever heard of the financial powers taking a hand in the matter. I am advising this correspondent to consult “The Goose-step,” and see who it was that paid for the costly education of these Nebraska educators. All the contributors are Wall Street gentlemen who never contributed a dollar in their lives without being certain that they got two dollars’ worth; and if they can train great educators to serve their interests sincerely and earnestly—and without knowing it—is not that exactly the way the driver of a dray-horse likes the horse to be?