A KICK AGAINST THE BRICKS

President Hoover has invited a group of educators to attend a conference at the White House in January. Its purpose will be to decide on a satisfactory method for preventing a lowering of the present public school standards, for in the last two years the amount of money allotted to schools has decreased while the number of students has gradually increased. As Mr. Hoover and many persons interested in education have realized, this situation cannot continue to exist without bad results.

The predicament of secondary education in America is the inevitable outcome of the heedless materialism that characterized the twenties, a materialism accompanied by a expanding complex that blinded public educators to the fundamentals of education. The motives which prompted communities to erect palatial surroundings for the secondary school system were doubtless admirable, but they tended automatically toward the neglect of the standards of teaching, and they were expensive. If the first of these effects has, by its lesser concreteness, been concealed from public attention, the second has been painfully obvious. For the long term loans which made the physical improvements possible were made in terms of inflated values; the deflation of the past three years has made the burden on the budgets of less cautious communities a heavy one. The call for retrenchment is not only inevitable, it is just.

It will be the problem of the proposed conference to readjust three results of the depression,--restricted budgets, increasing enrollment of students, and growing numbers of unemployed teachers,--to the best possible advantage of the community. In all fairness to the latter, it must be stated that in almost every instance education has been the last public service to have its appropriations reduced. And it is not the economy which is to be criticized but the features of the educational system which have suffered most from that economy. For in many instances, the physical adjuncts remain in full force, untouched by financial retrenchment, while appropriations for the payment of teachers have been cut to the limit. Such a method is to be expected from an age and a people that regards the physical element as more important than the intellectual in allotting educational costs. But the attitude is contradictory to any sound evaluation of fundamentals.

If it emphasizes this prevalent error and shapes its suggestions to correct it, the conference will perform a service of real value to American secondary education. The Depression has been calamitous, but it has served well if it can effect a forceful reiteration of the medieval assertion that the foundations of education are to be found in "men, not buildings."