364 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



the obligations that the coming generations will be called upon 

 to discharge. Heretofore our educational policies have been con- 

 fined and cramped by the narrow boundaries of our local units 

 of school taxation and control. Our conception of education has 

 been essentially a neighborhood conception. This principle of 

 local responsibility for the support and control of schools has 

 undeniable elements of strength. It is an expression of that will 

 to independence, self-reliance, and individual initiative which 

 constitutes so striking a quality of American democracy. It 

 must not and need not be sacrificed. But while the interests of 

 the local community must still be the determining factor in school 

 organization and administration, events are rapidly teaching us 

 that our local interests are genuine interests only when framed 

 in harmony with our national needs and our international obliga- 

 tions and responsibilities. 



There can, then, be no fundamental antagonism between local 

 and national needs. There are certain phases of public educa- 

 tion with which the federal government may properly concern 

 itself to the immediate and permanent advantage of the schools, 

 and with an effect upon local initiative and local control that 

 will be stimulating and salutary. Indeed, the outstanding weak- 

 nesses and inequities of our public schools to-day are such as to 

 make their reform on a national scale impossible without federal 

 cooperation, and here as elsewhere in a true democracy it is to 

 cooperation and not to domination that we must look for the 

 solution of our problems. 



It is futile to speak of our public schools as the bulwark of 

 American democracy when tens of thousands of the teachers in 

 these schools are only sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen 

 years old ; when more than one hundred thousand are less than 

 twenty-two years old ; when more than a quarter of a million have 

 not passed the age of twenty-five. 



There are no fewer than five million children in the United 

 States to-day whose teachers have not passed the age of twenty- 

 one, and whose teachers have themselves had as preparation for 

 their responsible work not more than one, two, or rarely three 

 or four years of education beyond the eighth grade of the com- 

 mon schools. Every six or seven years these five million children 

 are replaced by another group equally numerous, subject to the 



