RECENT MOVEMENTS FOR FEDERAL GRANTS FOR

EDUCATION

THE Morrill acts and the acts supplementing these have for many years been used by politicians and others as precedents for extending the appropriation of federal grants to other forms of education besides agriculture. The pressure on the federal government for an extension of its munificence has never been so insistent as during the past six years. Scarcely a session of Congress has passed since 1910 without the presentation of a number of bills for this purpose. In 1910 Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver of Iowa introduced a bill to provide federal grants "to coöperate with the states in encouraging instruction in agriculture, the trades and industries, and home economics in secondary schools; in preparing teachers for those vocational schools in state normal schools." This bill he amended later in the year to provide coöperation in maintaining extension departments in state colleges. These extensive provisions were based on the recommendations of a committee to the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations made at the annual conference in 1909. The committee suggested the appointment of a director and field agents in each land grant college and financial support from the federal government. The extension work was to be confined to agriculture, domestic science, and other phases of rural life; technical, scientific, and business management; homemaking; sanitation; and economic, social, and moral subjects for adults and youth and children in towns and cities as well as in the country. The Dolliver bill has been the starting-point of the proposed legislation along these lines. In the House of Representatives Senator Dolliver was supported by Mr. Charles R. Davis of Minnesota in the same year. In 1911 Mr. William B. McKinley of Illinois proposed an increase in the annual appropriations to land grant colleges and for the demonstration of practical and scientific methods of agriculture. Mr. Asbury F. Lever of South Carolina in the same year introduced his bill for the establishment of agricultural extension departments in connection with the agricultural colleges and experiment stations in the several states receiving the benefit of an act of Congress approved March 2, 1887, a bill which was passed after repeated efforts in 1914. Senator Dolliver's advocacy of federal grants for agriculture and vocational secondary schools was assumed in 1911 by Senator Carroll S. Page of Vermont and persistently continued, only to be taken up in 1915 by Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia. Senator L. S. Overman of North Carolina in 1911 sponsored a bill for the "support and maintenance of farm life and rural high schools."

Of these proposals the Lever bill alone has succeeded in securing enactment. This measure, passed in 1914, provides for federal aid to state agricultural colleges for cooperative agricultural extension work in coöperation with the Department of Agriculture. The work is to be given to persons not attending or resident in agricultural colleges by means of farmers' institutes, lecture courses, movable schools, correspondence courses, and other methods. The appropriations from federal sources began with

$480,000, or $10,000 for each state. This sum is to be raised by annual increments until a total of $4,100,000 annual appropriation is reached, to be divided by the Secretary of Agriculture among the states in the proportion that their rural populations bear to the rural population of the whole country. Each state is required to raise an amount equal to the appropriation from the federal treasury. The important point in such legislation is not the advisability or need of the measure in itself, but the danger that may come by an extension of the precedent of federal aid. With regard to this measure in particular, however, it may be of interest to quote the statement of one of the leaders in the field of scientific agriculture. In a report1 on the Relations between the Federal Department of Agriculture and the Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations Professor E. Davenport said: "I am convinced that most of the irritation and difficulty and most of the absurd 'coöperation' have arisen from the department's undertaking to solve local problems entirely outside its proper field of activity, often to the embarrassment of the stations, and with no other excuse than that it had the money and the inclination to do it, and that it is easier to secure funds by indirect than by direct taxation. He was of the opinion that the sphere of the national department should be "national, international, or at least interstate in operation," while "to the state institutions belong the study of local questions."

To the student of the history of the federal grants for agricultural education the striking feature in the recent movement is the strong resemblance of the appeals now made for federal appropriations to those made by Senator Morrill. The advocate of federal grants bases his plea on the dignity of labor, the ignorance of the farmer of scientific methods, the low productivity of the soil, a comparison of the products per acre in this country with those of the European countries, and, finally, the possibility of reducing the high cost of living thru intelligent farming. He may refer also to the disastrous drift of population from the country to the city. On the educational side he may mention that "we have drifted away from practical education and have gotten largely into theoretical and what is called intellectual education," but that training along industrial lines can be made to contribute to cultural education. These were the reasons put forward by Senator Morrill; they are the reasons of his modern successors. There is, indeed, an implied confession of failure of the agricultural colleges. These institutions train only a small percentage of the agricultural population, and then turn out only scientific experts. But, while they are doing valuable work, "we have this expenditure of money, wisely expended, and this vast amount of information, continually accumulating, that is not bringing back the returns which it should. It is not bringing back the returns to the farmer and to the Nation, because it is not used."2 Since the farmer does not come to the college, and presumably because the extension work already employed by the colleges was ineffectual, the bill sends the teachers to the farmers.

1 Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, Proceedings 27th Annual Convention, 1913, pages 121-133 (Montpelier, Vermont, 1914).

2 Senator Hoke Smith, speaking in the Senate in 1914 on the Lever bill.

The adequacy of this measure for the regeneration of the farmer and the improvement of agriculture did not commend itself to all the members of Congress. The chief opposition came, for example, from Senator Carroll S. Page, who felt that the measure did not go far enough. This opposition opened up a new campaign for federal grants in aid not only of agriculture but of domestic science, vocational education, and the preparation of teachers of these subjects. Hitherto federal aid had been limited to institutions of college rank; the new movement contemplated an extension of the principle to secondary schools. The fears of those who were originally opposed to the principle of federal grants not merely on the theory of states rights but because of the danger of establishing a precedent are now realized.

In 1914 a Federal Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education was appointed to discuss in general the advisability of such legislation as was being pressed by Senator Page and Senator Hoke Smith. The commission consisted of nine members, and included only two members who were definitely associated with education in its special relation to vocational preparation. A lengthy report was published recommending the application of federal grants to the purposes proposed. The following were the reasons urged in favor of federal grants:

(1) There is pressing need of vocational education.

(2) The problem of vocational education is too extensive to be worked out except by a national agency.

(3) The states are too poor to attempt a solution of the problem.

(4) Federal grants would start an interest and stimulate local effort in the direction of vocational education.

(5) Federal grants in this case are constitutional on the basis of promoting general welfare.

(6) The mobility of the population and of labor in particular justifies the application of federal resources to the problem.

(7) The training of teachers of vocational subjects is expensive and teachers are migratory; both reasons justify federal aid for their training.

(8) A bureau should be maintained by federal appropriation to assemble and distribute information on vocational subjects.

The fruit of this commission can best be indicated by a consideration of the SmithHughes Act, which after several years of discussion in Congress became a law on February 23, 1917. This bill was introduced in the Senate by Senator Hoke Smith of Georgia, and in the House of Representatives by Mr. Dudley M. Hughes of Georgia, and is intended "to provide for the promotion of vocational education; to provide for coöperation with the states in the promotion of such education in agriculture, and the trades and industries; to provide for coöperation with the states in the preparation of teachers of vocational subjects; and to appropriate money and regulate its expenditure." The act provides

(1) For the payment of the salaries of teachers, supervisors, and directors of agricultural subjects. The expenditure on this item begins with an appropriation of $500,000 in 1918 and rises to $3,000,000 in 1926 and for each year thereafter. (2) For the payment of the salaries of teachers of trade and industrial subjects. The appropriations are to the same amounts as under the first provision.

(3) For the payment, in coöperation with the states, of the cost of preparing teachers, supervisors, and directors of agricultural subjects and teachers of trade and industrial subjects. The appropriation begins with $500,000 in 1918 and rises to $1,000,000 in 1921.

The act establishes a Federal Board for Vocational Education consisting of the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor, the United States Commissioner of Education, and three citizens, appointed by the President to represent respectively manufacturing and commercial interests, agriculture, and labor. The board is to cooperate with the states in promoting the purposes of the bill, and to have studies made on vocational work in agriculture, trades and commerce, and home economics, each subject in coöperation with the particular department concerned. The Commissioner of Education is authorized to make recommendations relative to the administration of the act, and to promote investigations concerning the administration of vocational schools, courses of study, and instruction in vocational subjects. The members of the board other than the members of the Cabinet and the Commissioner of Education are to receive an annual salary of $5000. For purposes of administering the act and conducting studies and investigations $200,000 a year is placed at the disposal of the board. The states are required to signify their acceptance of the conditions of the act thru legislative action, and to appoint a board of three or more members to coöperate with the federal board, which will approve the plans of the states for carrying out the purposes of the act and receive annually and publish financial statements and reports on the work accomplished. The board in each state may be either the state board of education, or any state board having charge of the administration of public education, or any state board having charge of the administration of any kind of vocational education in the state.

It is essential that such a revolutionary measure be considered from all angles. The one large experiment in the provision of federal support for education, the Morrill and supplementary acts, failed for nearly forty years, and the failure was due to the absence of an educational policy. Only when the states really took up the objects, and only when a general social demand arose, was success possible. However sound the theoretical arguments for vocational education may be, all the arguments adduced by the Vocational Education Commission or the supporters of the federal aid bills in behalf of federal aid could be applied with equal weight to any other department of education or social activity. The need of education, the extensiveness of the problem, the mobility of population, the need of trained teachers, and the need of a central information bureau are all reasons that could be applied equally in support of any other

kind of claim on the federal treasury. Of much greater importance than the unsoundness of these claims is the absence of an educational policy underlying this type of legislation. There has been sufficient piecemeal tinkering with educational problems. Federal interference together with an attempt to patch up a small part of the whole simply perpetuates a system that is failing because there is no sound, unifying principle to vitalize the whole body of educational practice. The problem of vocational education cannot be treated in isolation; if it has any place at all, it must be made a part of the general organization. The experts have not yet arrived at any unanimity on the subject of vocational education. In fact, while the experts in general and vocational education have been discovering the very grave difficulties underlying the problem and are less able to present a policy now than they were five years ago, the federal legislators are still discussing the merits of a measure framed, in outline at least, in 1911, and going back in principle to the act of 1862. During this period a new problem has come prominently to the front involving a drastic change in the conceptions and administration of the education of adolescents. Educational surveys are only just beginning to apply real tests to present systems and to formulate the results. The Cleveland survey, for example, in emphasizing the one fact of the vocational uselessness of the age period from fourteen to sixteen, has dealt a severe blow to prevailing conceptions on the organization of vocational education. Indeed, there is no single phase of the educational problem that needs so much consideration as this, which the legislator desires to settle in this offhand way.

The act itself presumes to settle a question that is far from being settled: it divides up the educational process; it would probably sanction the establishment of dual boards for educational control, with a federal board as a third authority supervising these; it fails to set up a successful machinery to supervise the expenditure of funds, since the members of the proposed federal board could devote only a fraction of their time and interest to the subject; it would create in each state conflicting interests between institutions, and set up agents with divided allegiance. The act attempts to legislate for the country as a whole. But the situation with regard to agriculture and trades and industries varies so widely in the separate states that each state has a problem of its own, and legislation which might be good for one state might be wholly unsuited to another. It is true that the act permits each state board to draw up its own plan, subject to the approval of the federal board. Such a provision might serve some purpose if all the states had reached the same educational standards, but they have not. Before any money is appropriated for industrial education by Congress, there should be a thoroughgoing study of present conditions, to show the present situation and present needs. To legislate without a more thorough consideration of the whole subject than the examination by an ex parte commission of ex parte witnesses is to legislate in the dark. But even such an investigation could prove only the need or otherwise of vocational education, not the advisability of federal aid. The only bill that Congress could wisely pass at the present time, if it has a genuine desire to pro