Doctor MARVIN. That is right.

Mr. BLACK. And you would have been better off if the Government had had nothing to do with that, but the State had controlled the expenditure of the funds?

Doctor MARVIN. Absolutely.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. I confess again that I may be obtuse, but in what way is this bill we are considering going to bring about this unification?

Doctor MARVIN. How is the department of education going to bring about this unification?

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. This legislation.

Doctor MARVIN. The answer is this: This bill gives us the first step toward correlation of all the educational work of the country through Federal activities; and secondly, it provides for activities in research and dissemination of knowledge regarding the best educational practices throughout the country.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. But these various activities remain scattered in the various departments.

Doctor MARVIN. My own personal view, frankly, is that if we had our own way about this we would correlate all the higher branches of education to-day.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. I congratulate you for having the courage to say what you think ought to be done.

Mr. BLACK. Would you also add the Federal aid to that?
Doctor MARVIN. To this bill?

Mr. BLACK. Yes.

Doctor MARVIN. No; I would do away with Federal aid.
Mr. BLACK. You are absolutely against it?

Doctor MARVIN. Yes.

Mr. BLACK. Why?

Doctor MARVIN. There is no need for it. It is taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another and creating a possibility of bureaucratic government that we have no right to use in this country. The CHAIRMAN. Don't you think, Doctor, that the very enactment of this bill, creating a department of education, would bring out facts that would prevent Federal aid and gradually eliminate it?

Doctor MARVIN. My answer is that it would ultimately.
The CHAIRMAN. That is just what I believe.

Doctor MARVIN. That is my feeling in the matter. It is nothing but an academic judgment, but that is the way I feel about it.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. After all, will you not have to have the Government, through its legislative body, say that certain of these activities must come under a common head? We have two presidential secretaries now administering affairs in Alaska, and 11 different bureaus functioning in that connection. The mere fact that you create a secretaryship isn't going to accomplish correlation. Doctor MARVIN. I have already answered that, so far as my personal feeling is concerned. Good business would only say one thing.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. Well, I again congratulate you on saying what ought to be done by Congress.

Doctor MARVIN. I am not saying that in reference to Congress. I am saying it about centralization.

Mr. LEATHERWOOD. Well, it must come through legislation, if you get it.

The CHAIRMAN. Doctor, if there are no further questions, and you are through, we thank you, and we will give a chance to some of these gentlemen who may have to leave early.

Doctor DAVIDSON. Mr. Chairman, the next speaker will be Mr. Joy Elmer Morgan, editor of the Journal of the National Education Association, the official organ of this association.

STATEMENT OF JOY ELMER MORGAN, EDITOR THE JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C.

Mr. MORGAN. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I have one or two statements that I have been asked to present here from other organizations, whose officers could not be present. The first is from Mr. R. L. Cooley, president of the American Vocational Association. That association has drawn together in one great organization of some 3,000 members several other organizations, so that it is representative of vocational education throughout this country, and is in close touch with the great economic and business interests of the country that are interested in the products of the schools from a vocational standpoint. The president wires:

The American Vocational Association is squarely behind you in favor of the bill for the creation of the national department of education. The bill (CurtisReed-S. 1584 and H. R. 7) as drawn is satisfactory to us and we urge its support. I have another statement from the president of the American Library Association, Mr. Carl B. Roden, the librarian of the Chicago Public Library. The American Library Association draws together the library interests in the country as represented by the libraries and the librarians, some seven or eight thousand very fine workers, maintaining an institution largely supported from public taxation. The American Library Association has considered this question, as I personally know, at many successive meetings and has taken a stand for it. It has not considered this particular bill, but it has considered the idea of a department of education. They say:

I am very glad to reaffirm most emphatically the support and indorsement on the part of the American Library Association of this bill now before Congress to establish a national department of education with a secretary in the Cabinet. The association and the 10,000 librarians of public, reference, and university libraries comprising its membership have long favored such a measure. We are convinced that the important cause of public education in America in all its various aspects and its constant and rapid growth would be immensely advanced and strengthened by the creation of a department of education.

I have another statement that represents the stand of the Educational Press Association of America, made up of the educational journals, having a total circulation of more than 1,000,000 copies among the teachers and laymen interested in education in this country. This statement says:

A Federal department of education with a secretary in the President's Cabinet has become an imperative necessity if education is to be economically and efficiently guided throughout America. The project for the creation of such a department has had the active support of leading educational and lay organizations for seven years. The Educational Press Association urges its members to continue their work on behalf of this measure until a department of education has been created.

Now, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, the nature of my work as editor of the Journal of the National Education Association, with wide correspondence and wide travel, with constant handling of thousands of manuscripts that reflect the educational needs of this country reveals to me the need for leadership and research such as a department of education would provide that is perfectly tremendous, and I am in a position to know that the school people in the Nation are overwhelmingly for this department.

Now, when the question comes before one, one of the first things to do, naturally, is to consult the people who know most about it and who work it out. The school people of this country, some million teachers, organized in State and National groups, most of them, in one form or another, have gone on record over and over again for this measure, and I have here a table, which with the permission of the committee, I would like to insert, not taking the time to read the details, which shows the growth of the National Education Association, and of the various State associations during the period from 1920, when these organizations began working actively on this bill, from a membership of 24,000 in 1920, to 181,000 plus now, and I would like to have the committee realize that during that time that organization has met twice each year, and has drawn together in different sections of the United States, ranging from Washington to Dallas and Seattle to Boston, and in between, so that the people who might be interested have had a chance to come there, hear careful discussion and analysis of its provisions. The bill has been printed in full in the journal of the National Education Association in its various forms. It has been considered so far, perhaps, as any measure can be considered in the brief time it has been before the committee, and this body's opinion that has been formed is a solid, intelligent, increasing body of opinion that will not decrease, but rather increase until this department is finally created.

Now, there is nothing new to this day in a difference of opinion over educational policy in America. It is the whole story of the development of our democracy. The first great question that had to be answered about this was, "Shall we have free schools supported by public taxation?" For a long time that question was debated back and forth by people, perfectly honest and perfectly sincere, who thought the very foundations might be cut out from under this Republic if we should do such a radical thing as to take money from all the people through taxes and spend it on the education of the children. But looking back over our national history, we wonder how the Republic could have grown at all without the development of the free, tax-supported school.

A little later there was a battle in an effort to answer this question, Shall there be in each State a State department of education? That was not fought in any particular year nor over a particular decade, but over a period of years; at different times in State after State, the battle lines were drawn, and we have that heroic struggle of the pioneers, like Horace Mann in Massachusetts, like Henry Barnard in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and others in other States in this Nation, where efforts were made to create a State leadership in education, and where, on the other side, efforts were made to break down and destroy and prevent that leadership. But gradually it has developed, and we have a noble record of what Barnard did in

Connecticut, of what Barnard did a little later in Rhode Island, of what Horace Mann did in Massachusetts, to draw together the friends of the schools that had grown up and to knit them into an effective service that would benefit the children of these great commonwealths, until we do not have in America to-day a single State without its State leadership, and I wonder if there is anyone here who would question the benefit of that leadership. And yet it had to go through the same kind of a struggle, the same kind of an education campaign to get the people to believe in it as this measure has to go through.

The CHAIRMAN. Is it not true that the people who advocated taxsupported schools in those days were characterized very much as the people are to-day as "Reds" and un-American and all that?

Mr. MORGAN. They were called all the names that a resourceful opposition could think of.

Mr. LowREY. I can remember even when I was a boy some citizens were against free public schools, and claimed it was unjust and unrighteous to tax one man to educate the children of another man.

Mr. MORGAN. Exactly so. Another one of the questions that formed one of the historic battle lines in America was the simple question, Shall high schools be maintained from public taxes? Going back to 1821, when the first high school was established in Boston, there was a period of half a century when high schools came very slowly, then as they came more rapidly in city after city, there was a fight that shook the cities to the very depths of their public interest as to whether there should be a policy of free high schools, and you heard that record of increase in high-school enrollment that was presented here, beginning back in 1880, and in every decade a doubling, until in this decade it has doubled in less than two-thirds of the decade.

I wonder if any one would question the wisdom of the free high school in the development of the country. I wonder if the very interests that opposed the free high school and said it would literally bankrupt the cities, if they could look back now, wouldn't realize that that has been the chief factor in making America the most intelligent and economically the most powerful nation in the entire history of civilization?

Mr. BLACK. Just what effect has it had economically?

Mr. MORGAN. Why, sir; it is perfectly obvious that a person who is a high-school graduate, and who has the knowledge and skill and ability to live well and take care of his health and energy and has the buying power and taste that the high school creates is a better unit around which to build than one who is illiterate or does not have that education.

Mr. BLACK. Transfer them to a barren waste, and that doesn't accomplish much.

Mr. MORGAN. They would make out of the barren waste a garden. Mr. BLACK. That is an assumption.

The CHAIRMAN. The illiterate nations to-day are the most backward and uneconomical, even though the natural wealth is there. Mr. MORGAN. Why, sir; you can take an encyclopedia of statistics for 40 years, and compare the standing of American education with the standing of education of the other nations of the world, and you will find that is the epoch during which America came into her great

leadership and power in the family of nations, and she could because the foundations were laid in the schools.

Mr. BLACK. No doubt it has had a great contributing force, but to put it all upon education is going far afield.

Mr. MORGAN. Take France. What did she do? She sent a committee around the world, and when the committee got back to France to recommend what they should do to save their trade, they said to put art into the French schools, and you know the result that has come in the decades to follow. France has come to be looked upon as the great producer of the fine things in the economic world.

To go on with our story. That question of the high schools settled itself. Everybody is happy about it. Everybody believes it is a good thing for the children and for the nation.

Another question came again at different times in different States, but a battlefield, nevertheless, in different States: Shall children be required to attend school? And what a bitter fight that was. People perfectly sincere thought it contrary to the entire spirit of America and democracy, and yet that battle has been won, and I don't know of anyone to-day who questions the necessity and the right and the justice of requiring that every child shall have some educational opportunity, even though his parents might not have the foresight and the wisdom and the good sense to send him, in certain cases, without being required to do so.

Then another one of those battles concerned the question of the teacher: Shall any one be allowed to teach, as they were in the beginning days, or shall there be set up for the profession of teaching standards for the admission of people to this great vocation? Shall there be created professional schools for them and shall they be required to attend those schools? That struggle is hardly over now. In some of the States they are still trying to decide, as President Morgan pointed out this morning, whether they shall have four years training, or whether they shall have two years, and most of them have a great deal less than two years at the present time.

I think it may help to look at education in that great sweep of its development and realize the things which seemed doubtful at the time have turned out to be the very foundation upon which we have built our prosperity and our progress and our national well being.

Now, there are certain more important questions that concern the creation of this Department of Education. You, here in this committee, most of you, are business men. You, looking at the activities of the National Government in education, would want to know how to carry on the activities that exist now in the most effective and economical way. I drew up the other day a statement of some of the things that we now do in two different places, just as samples, not as a complete statement of the case, that could be bettered if they were drawn together in one place. Take the Federal Board for Vocational Education and the Bureau of Education, for example. Each of those agencies maintains a separate library. If you want certain facts you have to go over in this direction. If you want certain other facts, you have to go over in another direction, neither one covering the whole field. By drawing those together you could make the same