Apml 27, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



649 



mental sense, the. difficulties are greatly 

 increased and differences of opinion will 

 multiply. For one, however, I venture to 

 believe that the movements under way will 

 not rest until ia some conservative way we 

 have a national attachment — that is, a gov- 

 ernmental point of attachment. It must 

 be conceded in the words of Commissioner 

 Andrew S. Draper, upon the legal status 

 of public schools, 'that while they are not 

 national, neither are they local institutions 

 — rather are they state institutions.'^ In 

 another place he says : at the close of the 

 Revolution, 'it was easily conceived to be 

 a function of government to eiicourage 

 schools. '° 



Since the American school system has come to 

 be supported wholly by taxation, it has come to 

 depend upon the exercise of a sovereign power. 

 In the United States the sovereign powers are not 

 all lodged in one place. Such as have not been 

 ceded to the general government are retained by 

 the states. The provision and supervision of 

 schools is one of these. Hence the school system, 

 while marked by many characteristics which are 

 common throughout the country, has a legal or- 

 ganization peculiar to each state.'" 



Great as are the systems of state schools 

 covering the most of the land and culmi- 

 nating in New York in the most complete 

 state system, unifying the public and pri- 

 vate institutions, they do not satisfy, but 

 on the contrary they feed the hunger for 

 a national system, but better, for a federal 

 coordination of the state systems. The 

 state of New York blazes the way for an 

 analogous plan blending the private and 

 state institutions and relating them to the 

 federal government. 



An objector will recall the legal status 

 above conceded, and specifically that the 

 Bureau of Education is only advisory, a 

 collector of statistics and an educational 



* Proceedings and Transactions, N. E. A., 1889, 

 p. 183. 



' ' Education in the United States,' edited by 

 Nicholas Murray Butler, Vol. I., 1900, p. 5. 



»76id., pp. 17-18. 



clearing house.^^ But as 'necessity is the 

 mother of invention,' and brought forth 

 after the Civil War with the need of edu- 

 cation in the south for the freedman and 

 for the immigrants, through the advocacy 

 of a Barnard and a Garfield, in 1867 the 

 Bureau of Education, so again, following 

 the Spanish-American War, necessity for 

 education in our new possessions, including 

 Alaska, has tended to a development of the 

 Bureau of Education.^^ 



The committee on resolutions of the Na- 

 tional Educational Association, Nicholas 

 Murray Butler, chairman, brought in a re- 

 port adopted by the association earnestly 

 urging 



Upon the Congress the wisdom and advisability 

 of reorganizing the Bureau of Education upon 

 broader lines; of erecting it into an independent 

 department on a plane with the Department of 

 Labor; of providing a proper compensation for 

 the Commissioner of Education; and of so consti- 

 tuting the Department of Education that, while 

 its invaluable function of collating and diffusing 

 information be in no wise impaired, it may be 

 equipped to exercise effective oversight of the 

 educational systems of Alaska and of the several 

 islands now dependent upon us, as well as to 

 make some provision for the education of the 

 children of the tens of thousands of white people 

 domiciled in the Indian Territory, who are with- 

 out any educational opportunities whatever. 



Such reorganization of the Bureau of Education 

 and such extension of its functions we believe to 

 be demanded by the highest interests of the people 

 of the United States, and we respectfully but 

 earnestly ask the congress to make provision for 

 such reorganization and extension at its next 

 session. The action so strongly recommended 

 will in no respect contravene the principle that 

 it is one of the recognized functions of the na- 

 tional government to encourage and to aid, but 

 not to control, the educational instrumentalities 

 of the country.'^ 



Dr. Butler in an editorial in the Educa- 



'^ ' History of Education in the United States,' 

 Dexter, p. 202. 



" ' Addresses and Proceedings,' N. E. A., 1901, 

 p. 4.35. 



" ' Addresses and Proceedings,' N. E. A., 1900, 

 p. 31. 



