nted the size of the
educational problem that an intricate system of school machinery has
been devised to keep the whole in order.

The rural, or village, school was a one or two-room affair, housing a
handful of pupils. Aside from matters of discipline, the administration
of the school was scarcely a problem. General superintendents, associate
superintendents, compulsory attendance laws, card index systems, and
purchasing departments were unknown. The school was a simple, personal
business conducted by the teacher in very much the same way that the
corner grocer conducted his store--on faith and memory.

The growth of cities and towns necessitated the introduction of
elaborate school machinery. In place of a score of pupils, thousands,
tens, and even hundreds of thousands were placed under the same general
authority. City life made some form of administrative machinery
inevitable.

The increasing size of the school system,--and in new, growing cities
the school system increases with a rapidity equal to the rate of growth
of the population,--leads to increase in class size. A school of twenty
pupils is still common in rural districts. In the elementary grades of
American city schools, investigators find fifty, sixty, and in some
extreme cases, seventy pupils under the charge of one teacher, while the
average number, per teacher, is about forty.

Recrimination is idle. The obvious fact remains that the rate of growth
in school population is greater than the rate of growth in the school
plant. The schools in many cities have not caught up with their
educational problem. The result is a multiplication of administrative
problems, not the least of which is the question of class size.

II Rousseau Versus a Class of Forty

A toilsome journey it is from the education of an individual child by an
individual teacher (Rousseau's Emile) to the education of forty children
by one teacher (the normal class in American elementary city schools).
Rousseau pictured an ideal; we face a reality--complex, expanding, at
times almost menacing.

The difference between Rousseau's ideal and the modern actuality is more
serious than it appears superficially. Rousseau's idea permitted the
teacher to treat the child as an individuality, studying the traits and
peculiarities of the pupil, building up where weakness appeared, and
directing freakish notions and ideas into conventional channels. The
modern city school with one teacher and fort