LITTLE RED SCHOOL HOUSE

The National Council of State School Superintendents and Commissioners of Education recently convened in Washington, has requested $25,000,000 of Federal money to keep schools all over the country open for the remainder of 1934. Compared to the enormous amounts the government has recently expended on a variety of projects, $25,000,000 is almost insignificant. It is altogether probable, however, that this relatively small sum properly spent will pay greater dividends in our future national welfare than a hundred million spent on new post office buildings or similar public projects.

Educators in the United States have often been accused of gross extravagance. Mr. H. L. Menckerr and others have bitterly denounced what they consider the too splendid buildings, gymnasium, swimming pools, and manual training shop of city and even rural schools. The present crisis in education, they say, is the direct result of lavish expenditure in better times, when boards of educations piled up huge bonded indebtedness. Now, with no money and less credit, the educators are paying for the sins of their predecessors.

Whatever the cause, the emergency is real. Whatever the extravagances of the past, money is now needed to provide the barest minimum of education. Particularly is it needed in hard-pressed districts in the poorer states of the South which never could become extravagant. Even in the best of times the teachers there were underpaid and the school facilities inadequate. Unless the government comes to their aid, these schools will this year be able to provide terms of only a few weeks. And with relief funds flowing in such golden streams it would indeed seem wise to divert but a portion to this emergency in the most noble cause of youth.