The Bismarck tribune. [volume] (Bismarck, N.D.) 1916-current, 1927-10-29

MINNEAPOLIS JournaD


| That twenty-six cents of every tax dollar
collected in Minneapolis is spent for school pur-
poses, and this despite the board of estimates
failure to allow higher salary maxima for
teachers, is enough to make the average citizen
do littel pondering
The problem of rising school costs is not Pc
culiar to Minneapolis. 1t is nationwide prob
lem, and one that is beginning to inspire dis
cussion and debate in many parts of the coun-
try. In 1890 it cost American taxpayers a
hundred and forty million dollars to teach
twelve million children. In 1925 teaching
twice as many children cost fourteen times as
much. The figures are those of the United
States Bureau Of Education.
Taking into consideration the lowered value
of the dollar, that remains a whale of an in
crease in the school bill. It is an increase
hitherto not criticized as freely as it might
have been, for the American public, during
the third of century that has seen the bill
multiplied fourteen times, has had habit Of
looking on school expenditures as something
sacrosanct, something hardly open to examina-
ton by mere laymen.
the air. Schoolmen themselves are beginning
to speculate on whether an unlimited enrich
ment of the public school curriculum has not
been carried to the point where not only is it
| orohibitively costly, but is working all actual
detriment to the pupils. One such critic is
DR.. Henry S. Pritchett, president Of the Carne-
gle foundation for the advancement of teach
ing, who says:
The striking characteristic of our
schools under the process of enrichment of
the curriculum is superficiality, coupled
with tremendously rising cost Edu-
| cation in the elementary schools, instead
Of meaning thorough grounding in the
fundamentals means a smattering of many
things, some of them important, some of
them pleasant, and many of them medi-
OGRE and trivial
The pupil is injured instead Of being helped,
thinks DIR. Pritchett, and those who agree with
him, not only because he gets trifling smat-
tering of great many things instead Of learn
ing few things well, but because intellectual
discipline has been notably weakened" That
is to say, the pupil is SO busy acquiring shall
low snacks of information, that he has no time
in which to learn to think.
DR.. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of
Columbia, goes even further in deprecatng the
value of the education now dispensed in the
public school. 1.-THE ability to read" he says,
has wellnigh disappeared, if the reading
be serious, instructive or enrolling; the
ability to writ, SO far as it exists at all,
delights to manifest itself in forms of ex-
ceptlonal crudeness and vulgarity; the
ability to perform the simplest mathemat-
/ lcal operations is confined to teach
ers Of mathematics or to specialists.
DR.. Butler is known to be such sturdy
apostle of things as they used to be, that his
criticism may be looked upon as slightly n.y.
periodic, but, the country over, employers COM
ing into direct contact with the product of to-
days schools find evidence to support the con-
tention that the curriculum has been "en-
riched" with so many new subjects that the
Three RS have been sunk without trace as
DR.. Butler laments. Furthermore, important
confederation comes from DR.. William M.
Thornton of the University of Virginia, who
says colleges and universities today are get
ting from the lower schools students
the majority of whom can neither read in
diligently, nor write respectfully, nor spell
correctly, nor compute as accurately as an
ordinary grocer's clerk.
We do not think things are fraction that
bad here. Surveying school courses early this
wear The Journal found much that was admir-
able, when contrasted with school courses of
an earlier era. Still, is it not just possible
that here, as everywhere else, an attempt is
being made to pour over the sponge of the ju-
ven'le mind more liquid knowledge than that
sponge cen absorb, the result being school costs
that are disproportionate with results?