are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

In the 21 years between the Declaration of Independence and his Farewell Address, Washington had struggled through 8 years of perilous war, 6 years of almost equally perilous peace, and more than 7 years of intensive work as President in making of the Constitution a living, vital thing and thus creating a nation which has grown to undreamed of wealth, population, and power in 150 years.

* * *

The last sentence of the Declaration of Independence as quoted above states that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed," and the Constitution, devised under the guidance and direction of Washington himself, was written for the express purpose of carrying that fundamental idea into effect. And Washington in 1796 wrote into that Farewell Address all the wisdom gathered during 21 years' experience in trying to make the Declaration of Independence a beautiful promise and not a mockery of words.

Washington foresaw that if the people are to control the Government, as they should if the Government is to derive "its just powers from the consent of the governed," they must be an educated people-educated in the science of government in general and particularly in the science of the Government of the United States, without religious, political, or racial bias.

VALUE OF BROAD UNBIASED KNOWLEDGE-FORCE OF PUBLIC OPINION

Washington likewise foresaw the need of educating the public as a whole, and not in special groups so he wrote in his farewell address the sentence: "Promote, then, as an object of primary importance institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge."

It will be noted that Washington uses the word "knowledge" in the broadest sense i. e., general knowledge. Such knowledge cannot show partisanship in politics, sectarianism in religion, or confusion in the scheme of government. It must be knowledge as distinct from opinions. It must be basic, as the science of numbers, as the science of reading, writing, and spelling, of geography, history and the moral law founded on a broad background of religious belief.

And then Washington added these words: "In proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion, it (public opinion) should be enlightened."

While the Government set up by Washington under the Constitution, April 30, 1789, was an unprecedentedly liberal one for those days, and extended the rights of citizenship (which alone "gives force to public opinion") to an unheard of degree, we have gone in recent years far beyond Washington's days by granting voting privileges to women and others, thus broadening immensely the force of public opinion.

Should not then the "general diffusion of knowledge" be increased so that the added "force" we give to "public opinion" is an enlightened one in the correct sense of being education in fundamentals, nonpartisan, nonsectarian and thoroughly American?

NO PUBLIC FUNDS FOR PRIVATE OF SECTARIAN SCHOOLS

There has recently arisen a demand that private and sectarian schools shall be suppported by public funds, either wholly or in part, thereby increasing the cost of public education and also creating a division of public school funds between public and church schools in violation of the American ideal of separation of church and state, in addition to being hurtful to the public schools through decreasing the funds available for them. The use of public funds to promote private or sectarian schools, or schools to promote foreign racial or political ideals is incompatible with that "enlightened public opinion" which alone makes a nation a free people.

Care also must be taken to see that the increase of nonessential fads and frills in education shall not be permitted to crowd out those fundamentals which 150 years of teaching have made of the United States of America the richest and most desirable dwelling place on the face of the globe.

FIRST CENTURY OF OUR NATIONAL LIFE

For the first century of our national life, the free public school was the very direct concern of every parent, and, for that matter, of all good citizens, including those who had the misfortune to have no children. The good of the public school was a subject in which everyone took a deep and vital interest. The financial support of the school was in the hands of the neighborhood. Debating societies, spelling bees, school closing exercises with presentation of gifts for excellence in school, were neighborhood events of first-class importance in which everybody took part and pride.

The quality of the teaching was high. If anyone doubts the success of the schools of that day let him consider the unprecedented progress of the United States in all of the arts and sciences during that period. From a vast wilderness, the Nation grew across the continent and achieved more human progress than any other nation attained in a thousand years.

As further evidence of the value of the methods used in the public schools in the "old days," we see those methods being copied today by the formation in many States of spelling bees, debating societies, and similar activities in the public schools.

Friends of the Public Schools believe it wise to encourage a return to the teaching of fundamentals and to the renewal of the keep interest of parents including those, who, having no children or whose children have grown up, are yet strongly interested in the public schools.

Fundamentally that is the basic idea back of the organization of the Friends of the Public Schools of America.

The foundation laid for the ambition to succeed, the thirst for more knowledge, all that relentless drive to wrest from nature the secrets of the soaring eagle, the depths of the ocean, or the speed of the wind came from the free public school, and the deep family interest in that school.

90 PERCENT OF ALL AMERICAN CHILDREN ATTEND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Upon the proper support, development, and protection of the public schools, depends the whole future of the Nation. That is conclusively shown by the fact that more than 90 percent of all children in the United States between the ages of 5 and 13 attend the public schools.

Among the most important matters to be considered by the Friends of the Public Schools, is how to prevent the introduction into the public schools of unwise theories and unwise experiments in education.

The Friends of the Public Schools of America propose through organizations of Friends in every county and eventually it is hoped in every school district, to encourage a keen, persistent, and enlightened interest in the public schools to the end that the youth of America may be thoroughly grounded in the fundamentals of knowledge-reading, writing, and arithmetic and the other courses which go with them, including a thorough knowledge of our Constitution, those who wrote it, their background, and the development of our Nation under the Constitution.

DANGEROUS TEXTBOOKS.

SUBVERSIVE PROPAGANDA, LOYALTY TO THE UNITED STATES

"Knowledge is Power." Whether that knowledge is power for good or evil depends on the activity of the man who wields that power. The monthly bulletin to be published will contain information concerning dangers arising from improper textbooks, from legislation in various legislative bodies in the United States, and from the introduction of subversive propaganda against our form of government, our ideals and national heroes and any other dangers to the public schools and the Nation that may arise from time to time.

Children in the free public schools and in all other grammar and high schools must be taught American history, American ideals of liberty, justice, morals, truth, tolerance, courtesy, honesty, kindness, fair play, respect for the Christian and other religions, and for the aged, temperance, chastity, and fidelity with devotion to the Constitution of the United States and respect for our flag.

THE MONTHLY BULLETIN

The monthly bulletin will carry information in regard to matters concerning education that come up in Congress and elsewhere, and particularly those things that affect the public schools.

Many bills have been introduced in the Congress of the United States seeking to appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars and many more will be introduced. which vitally affect the public schools either through moneys appropriated or laws passed influencing, extending, or restricting the schools themselves. Suggestions will be made as to what bills are good or bad and whether the bills should be passed, defeated or amended, and if amended then in what manner, Each month this information will come to you in the bulletin, as well as other information that may affect the public schools or be of interest to the parents and all other taxpayers who support the public schools.

TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION IS TYRANNY

If you do not want to be taxed with representation, that is without a voice as to what your taxes shall be used for so far as schools are concerned; and also if you want information on other matters affecting the public schools referred to above, join the Friends of the Public Schools of America by signing and sending to your State chairman the enclosed application blank for membership.

Mr. McCOWEN. Mr. Gwinn, have you any questions?

Mr. GWINN. General, I have been trying, from the witnesses and from the Library of Congress, while these hearings have been going on, to get some proof that our educational system, as we now conduct it, is designed to cure delinquency and crime, and disorder.

General FRIES. I can find nothing in it that does that. I have tried to show where we have got to lengthen the school year, and also they are not doing any teaching in this town. They are sending the children home with school books to study at night, sometime under poor light, when they should be kept in school under supervision. I have a grandson going to one of the high schools here. He has been in a military school. He was getting along well in algebra, but when he came here he said he got along fine when he was going through that part he had been over, but that now there is no one to teach him. He has to get that at home.

Mr. GWINN. I do not know who has made a study-certainly, somebody must be studying the trend of education and what it is designed to do in building character. The evidence seems to be that in the States where we spend the most money we have the greatest delinquency and crime and insanity. Therefore, it seems silly to argue that the more money you spend the surer we have of improving our society.

General FRIES. Well, that will not do it.

Mr. GWINN. They cite that they spend in Russia 7 percent, and try to draw the conclusion from that that the more the Russians spend the better their education.

General FRIES. Well, we must remember we are 150 years ahead of Russia in universal education. Russia needs to spend about 10 times, or 20 times what we do, if she wishes to catch up in the next generation. That is giving full credit to the information that comes out from behind the "iron curtain," but our studies over these 9 years, and Mrs. Fries and I put in our whole time on it, show that as to child delinquency in this city, where we have teachers among the highest in the United States, that delinquency is caused by the boys getting in gangs. Now, we have baseball coming

Mr. GWINN. That argues, then, that the materials of our education in some areas, where delinquency is the greatest, are not the right materials of education. Does that follow? If it does, we should do something else besides what we are doing in trying to stop delinquency in the big cities.

General FRIES. May I say one thing? It is the women and men making speeches, like the woman did over here in Western, the other day, I have a complete stenographic report of that. All of it praises Russia. Where there was any comparison, the United States was away below. That thing has been going on here for 25 years, and I can get you the proof, if you want it.

Mr. GWINN. Now, do you think it is proper for us to inquire, as we go along talking about spending more money, to inquire and try to find out what we ought to spend it for?

General FRIES. Well, we have the boys' clubs here. They are doing a marvelous work. They are doing more than the schools by far to stop child delinquency. But they only have a few thousand dollars a year instead of the 14 or 15 million dollars they want to spend on schools here. If they would take care of those children in the parks, and so forth, and under supervision, you would cut down your child delinquency more than you can with all the other things going on today.

Mr. GWINN. Do you know of any authoritative studies, by educators or others, that you could cite us to support your contention?

General FRIES. Well, I have seen that report in places, and they are beginning to study it. But, unfortunately, as the NEA published in their February issue, 1943, every resort of the NEA has been expended to pass some of these bills instead of studying that and other questions of similar importance to our children.

Mr. GWINN. Thank you.

Mr. McCowEN. Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. KENNEDY. I am sorry I missed your statement, General. I have no questions.

Mr. McCowEN. General, we thank you for your very clear state

ment.

General FRIES. Thank you, gentlemen. I know what a burdensome job you have sometimes, and I appreciate your trying to shorten it. Mr. McCowen. Well, your talk was very interesting.

The next witness is Miss Sara T. Walsh, director of the National Teachers Division, United Public Workers, CIO.

For the purposes of the record, you may state your name, your position, and proceed with your statement.

STATEMENT OF MISS SARA T. WALSH, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL TEACHERS DIVISION, UNITED PUBLIC WORKERS, CIO

Miss WALSH. My name is Sara T. Walsh, director of the National Teachers Division, United Public Workers of America, CIO.

We appear here to urge the passage of House bill No. 2953 by Representative McCowen for Federal aid to education. Enactment of Federal-aid-to-education legislation is an urgent obligation of the Eightieth Congress.

The Senate Education Committee last year made this statement: "For America to build its economic and cultural strength it is necessary to have a continuously high level of education."

Now, a year later, however, the fact is that for millions of children the United States as a Nation does not have the high level of education or even a continuously operating level of education. We have, instead, a great democratic heritage and structure of free public education

built painfully over 150 years which has, in 1947, reached the actual point of operational break-down through neglect, through overburdening and through failure to rectify basic weaknesses in structure.

The break-down of the educational service has this year become a matter of national alarm. Recently, the New York Times undertook to check the findings of educational experts on the educational crisis. The reported findings in the New York Times, in a series beginning on February 10, 1947, include:

Three hundred and fifty thousand teachers have left the American public schools since 1940.

This means that one-third of the teachers have left the classroom. Their departure means the loss of millions of dollars of investment in educational training and experience. In the business field, management would have exerted every effort to have prevented such a disastrous loss of valuable trained personnel. [Reading:]

Seventy thousand teaching positions are unfilled because of the inability of communities to get the necessary teachers.

That means that for every 10 operating classrooms, about one has been closed down. It has meant a reassemblage of pupils into already overburdened classes or, in the case of 75,000 of these pupils, no classes at all. [Continuing:]

Five million children will receive an inferior education this year because of the inadequate teacher supply.

Overlapping and adding to this figure are the 5,000,000 children, age 5 to 17, who are not in any kind of school. [Continuing:]

Fewer students are entering the teaching profession than in the past. Twentytwo percent of all college students attended teachers' colleges in 1920; today 7 percent attend.

That means that even with correction of the basic difficulties, we face a 3- to 5-year period of extreme teacher shortage. [Continuing:] Classroom teachers get an average of $37 a week today. Two hundred thousand get less than $25 weekly.

This shockingly low wage of teachers is the direct cause of the wholesale loss of personnel, the consequent closed classes and large numbers of out-of-school youth. In 1944-45 the average teacher salary was $1,850, with a purchasing power of $1,390 in 1940 dollars. Last year's teacher wage average of $2,000 was actually further pushed down in real value by the year's 18 percent increase in consumers' prices and still further reduced by the 20 percent cost of living increase in 1947. There can be little wonder at the refusal of students to enroll for teacher training or the frequent refusal of college advisers, as noted in the New York Times' survey, to urge students to enroll for such courses. [Continues reading:]

Nearly $5,000,000,000 will be needed to bring the educational plants into good condition.

While educational experts have testified to Congress that $1,000,000,000 is needed for Federal aid to education, this necessary billion, which must be spread over current classroom service and teacher salary needs, would only touch the edge of the tremendous field of necessary plant repair. [Continuing:]

The United States spends 1.5 percent of its national income for its schools. Great Britain spends an estimated 3 percent; the Soviet Union spends 7.5 percent.