The proportion is so unexpected that it staggers
us--more than nine-tenths of the children who attend school in the
United States are in the elementary grades! Can this be the school
system of which our forefathers dreamed when they established a
universal, free education nearly a hundred years ago? Did they foresee
that such an overwhelming proportion of American children would never
have an opportunity to secure more than the rudiments of an education?

Be that as it may, the facts glower menacingly at us from city, town and
countryside,--the overcrowded elementary grades and the higher schools
with but a scant proportion of the students. So, if we wish to educate
the great mass of American children, we must go to the primary grades to
do it.

There are, in the public schools, 533,606 teachers, four-fifths of whom
are women. These teachers are at work in 267,153 school buildings having
a total value of $1,221,695,730. Each year some four hundred and fifty
million dollars are devoted to maintaining and adding to this
educational machine.

The school system is the greatest saving fund which the American people
possess. The total value of school property is greater than the entire
fortune of the richest American. Each year the people spend upon their
schools a sum sufficient to construct a Panama Canal or a
transcontinental railway system. Thus the public school is the greatest
public investment in the United States.

It is one thing to invest, and quite a different matter to be assured a
fair return on the investment. Nevertheless, the individual investor
believes in his right to a fair return. From their public investments,
the people, in fairness, can demand no more; in justice to themselves,
they may accept no less. Are they receiving a fair return? The people of
the United States have invested nearly a billion dollars in the public
school system; each year they contribute nearly half a billion dollars
more toward the same end. Are they getting what they pay for?

Turn to another section of the Report of the Commissioner of Education,
and note how, in mild alarm, he protests against teachers' salaries so
low "that it is clearly impossible to hire the services of men and women
of good native ability and sufficient scholarship, training and
experience to enable them to do satisfactory work;" against the
schoolhouses, which are "cheap, insanitary, uncomfortable and
unattractive;" against "thousands of schools" in w