Evening capital and Maryland gazette. (Annapolis, Md.) 1910-1922, 1911-12-15
COMPULSORY EDUCATION.
Club Women the 0nly Fighters TO
the Finish For it Educators Dut-
eOus LaYmen Tax PAYERS Must
Wake Up.
(Communicated.)


many recent meetings in Baltimore
Of school commissioners seems to be
that there is a general assent to a
compulsory education law. but with
many misgivings and amendments.
Colonel Powell being one of the
doubters.
The club women, however, under
Mrs. Brown, say they are going to
fight for it to finish. Their fighting
seems to be in the line of calling in
some horrid men" to do the fight
ing for them. In fifteen years / do
not just remember ever having seen
one of them answer in the press any
letters directed against them and the
measure. On December z, at a meet
ing of the School Commissioners and
County Superinten lents' Association
in Baltimore it was announced, in
the words of the Baltimore Sun,
that heretofore "A Statewide meas
ure has been baked by officials Of
mountain counties, where il is difficult
for children to attend school every
day IN bad weather, and there has
been opposition from the employers
of child labor" If that were all
am glad to hear that mountain
officials have taken that stand. Let
them preserve it. The mountain
child should not be harassed as is
the child of the slums.
But the fact is that the farmers
of the State are seriously opposed to
compulsory education, although they
have not made such demonstrations
as they should have made. In this
county of Howard a man who has
travled over it pretty well tells me
he finds none but ministers and doc
tors favoring compulsory education.
His statement is borne out by my
own interviews with farmers at the
large Mount Airy farmers picnic,
where | met farmers from the four
counties of Montgomery, Howard,
Carroll and Frederick, Democrats
and Republicans alike, and where not
one wanted compulsory education.
The present fight" for compul-
sorry education law is shaping just as
all IFS predecessors have done for the
past fifteen years. Each fight has
started out with flying colors and loud
hurrahs and gradually cooled off. At
the present outset a bill was drawn
up of drastic character At the inn
mediate present it has been reduced
about one-half, and the Legislature
has not yet convened After it is
handed about by the legislators, who
are true to their farmer constituency,
there will be nothing left of it, es-
pecially if it is introduced, as it
was at the last session, by a noun
taineer school teacher, who boosted
of being its proud father" at the
beginning, and who threatened ply
steal violence to the users of his
name in connection with it at the
end.
The fact is the times are ripe for
a law to compel people to keep their
children away from the public schools.
Mayor Gaynor, of New York, has
preached lately what ought to be their
doom, and following him has come
Hon. Bird S. Coler, of the same city,
proclaiming that most public school
teachers in his city are Socialists
and that public schools breed Social
ism, discomfort and crime. That the
club women are flying in the face of
practical men Hike these without
rhyme or reason, implies that they
are the blind worshipper of fetch
and want the children thrown to the
destruction of the schools the same
as heather mothers once threw
their offsprings to the crocodiles of
the Ganges.
] might observe that Gen. Law
rason Riggs, of Baltimore, one of
the men that club women secured to
do their fighting, says that with a
compulsory education law parental
schools should be established through
out the State similar to the one in
Baltimore. Inasmuch as blacks and
whites are not mixed in such schools,
there would necessarily be two sets of
the schools. 1t would mean two or
more for each county, with at least six
paid officials in connection with each
one of them.
This is only one of the items of
the farmer taxpayer must reflect over
in connection with compulsory edu-
cation. Every farmer says his taxes
go up fast enough already from
good roads, tuberculosis sanitar-
iumS and other things.
FRANCIS B. LIVESEY.
80 a "a Il