200 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 



I want to submit a few more figures, and I wish you men might retain 

 a few of them. Because you are doing your share, because you are working 

 in an educational program I know you will be interested in the succeeding. 

 generation, the boyhood and girlhood, the citizens of tomorrow, on whose 

 shoulders we shall so soon cast the heavy mantle of citizenship, the heavy 

 burden of responsibility, and we owe it to them that these boys and girls 

 must have a chance that comes from better learning, better training, and 

 they can only get it when we give the people the money to build these 

 schools, and that means that they must make a special endeavor in the 

 rural districts. And men, in this nation each year approximately 4,100,- 



000 boys and girls at the average age of six enter our elementary schools. 

 If all were placed in one great school room what a wonderful sight it 

 would be, but how wonderful too if they would stay until they finished. 

 But by the time we get that vast army through the fifth grade approxi- 

 mately two million of them have dropped by the wayside and bust go 

 through life with nothing more than a fifth grade education, except such 

 as they can glean from the university of experience and the school of hard 

 bumps, and 2,100,000 in round numbers, only are left, and by the time 

 they get through the elementary school along up to the seventh and eighth 

 grade we have left about 972,000 only and a little in excess of a half 

 million enter high school and 196,000 of them go through. A mere frac- 

 tion of one per cent get college or university training. And I give you 

 these figures that I might further say to you that the federal government 

 tells us that on the general average the young man or young woman with 

 a high school training, that if he or she shall go into any business what- 

 soever that on the general average their earning power is between $900 

 and $1,000 more per year than he or she who must travel along without 

 that opportunity of advanced education. 



And so we are thinking about all that. You men are not only building 

 fairs but you are building farm factories, you are not only building fairs 

 but you are building homes; you are not only building fairs but you are 

 building men and women, you are building citizenship, you are building 

 school houses, for you are showing people what can be done by reason of 

 dint of hard work and mental effort. You are building school houses, and 

 you are building wonderful ones in Iowa; consolidated schools. I often- 

 times think when I think of school houses and I think of these figures I 

 have given you, I see in my mind some of the rural school houses I have 

 seen in other states. 



You men are upbuilders and optimists in the community in which you 

 live; you show us the best at least once a year; you give us an occasion 

 to smile; you bring to the eyes not only a great gathering of the fruits of 

 the year's labor and show us that the harvest has not been in vain, for you 

 teach us that to sow is to pray, and that working and building and con- 

 structing are things worth while and that we shall only reap in proportion 

 to the effort that we have expended. 



So I say to you that as secretaries and as managers of the institution 

 which bring a profit in an indirect way to the communities you represent, 



1 am hoping you can do bigger things in Iowa than you have ever done. I 

 wish I might have the opportunity to be useful to each of you individually. 



