2. Comparative Table- Support and Staff - Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Education

The following comparative Table shows the relative staff and support of the Department of Agriculture (a Bureau until 1885), and the Bureau of Education, since the establishment of each.

3 Does not include appropriations for reindeer or education in Alaska.

VI. THE IDEA OF A NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

With all of the large and valuable collections available for purposes of study in the city of Washington, the question naturally arises, why has not the Federal government established a national university and utilized them for advanced study and instruction. This is an old idea but has never been realized. Selected documents will be found in the Source Book in the History of Education in the United States.

1 Secretary Wilson appointed.

2 Does not include $2,000,000 annually from this date on for forest reserve purchases.

The table of appropriations given on p. 118 ante does not include certain permanent and continuing appropriations and balances, now approximating seven to eight millions annually.

CHAPTER IV

CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENTS FOR NATIONALIZING AMERICAN EDUCATION

Up to the present time the American Federal policy with regard to questions of direct, or even indirect, educational consequence has been of a distinctly fortuitous character. While the trend is continually toward a more constructive and systematic national attitude, the existing situation points conclusively to the tasks yet undone. We reproduce in this chapter two selections which serve to indicate both the tendencies and the difficulties. The first selection states well the larger aspects of our national educational problem.

I. EDUCATION AND THE NATION

[PRITCHETT, HENRY S., in the 6th An. Rept. of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1911, pp. 45-49.]

The United States has grown, in the course of a century and a quarter, from a group of associated states into a nation. The difficulties in the way of this result were enormous. The original thirteen colonies were jealous of one another. They were afraid to intrust power to a central governmental agency. The welding of these jealous and suspicious states into a nation could be accomplished only by time and the experience that time brings with it.

It was natural that at the inauguration of the confederation the framers of the constitution should have been careful to create as few central agencies with strong powers as possible. Even where powers were given to the general government, checks and limitations were imposed upon them at every step.

Education as a national unifying agency did not lie within the field of view of the framers of the American constitution. Neither national supervision of education nor a national system of schools was considered.

The idea of a university at the seat of government was indeed in the minds of several of the earlier leaders of the nation. Washington in particular was attracted by the idea of a university at Washington which might bring together the youth of the various states. He was led to entertain this idea by his keen realization of the intense rivalries generated by the jealousies and suspicions of the various states. He feared that these sectional forces would disrupt the newly formed confederation, and he hoped that a university in which the youth of the country might come together in student relations would help the people of the different states to the realization of nationalism rather than sectionalism.

Since the field of education was not touched by the constitution, it remained with each state to deal with its educational system as it might choose, with no guidance from the central government looking toward unifying and coördinating the separate state systems. When, therefore, one undertakes to study education and the progress of education in the United States from a national standpoint, one must take up such a study with the state systems as units. Not only has each state its own system of public schools, but nearly all of the states have tax-supported institutions of higher learning as well. Other agencies which have entered the field of education, notably the religious denominations, have also grouped their systems of higher institutions in accordance with state lines. Many of the larger religious bodies have in most states one or more colleges or universities. In some states a single denomination has a half-dozen or more institutions bearing the name of college or university.

Furthermore, in the development of our educational system, private initiative in the field of education has been both unguided and unrestrained by supervision on the part of the state governments. In all but a few states of the Union any association of men who, for educational or business reasons or as a matter of local pride, desire to start a school or a college, may incorporate under the state law and obtain the right to grant all the degrees that higher institutions may confer.

This lack of supervision both on the part of the general government and, to a large extent, on the part of the state governments, has resulted not only in an extraordinarily large number of institutions bearing the name college or university, but it has resulted also in the fact that these institutions have become involved in local rivalries, so that they represent in very small measure national ideals or national purposes. One of the most difficult things for the European student of education visiting the United States to understand is the absence of any national feeling with regard to

education, and the absence as well of loyalty on the part of those in the colleges and the universities to higher education in itself. Instead of this relationship toward national ideals in education, one finds loyalty toward a particular institution. Higher education in America is intensely local and personal in its sympathies. College loyalty takes the place of devotion to educational ideals; the former is local, the latter national.

The general government, while exercising no control over the state systems of education, has by legislation and the appropriation of money carried out two measures that concern the educational policy of the several states. Through the Morrill Bill and the measures that followed it, Congress has made large appropriations for the support of agricultural and mechanical colleges in all states. The federal government, however, has left the administration of these appropriations to the states themselves, and has preserved over the expenditure of this money a scrutiny so vague as to affect in but small measure the direction that the institutions thus inaugurated have taken.

A second act on the part of the central government looking toward the preservation of some form of educational efficiency and unity was the creation of a bureau of education under a commissioner of education. This office was established in 1867, and while the powers of the commissioner have been somewhat increased in recent years by appropriations for specific purposes, the duties of the bureau are still practically limited to the work of a statistical agency dealing with existing educational institutions to the extent to which the latter are willing to coöperate, and to the publication of reports showing the progress of education in this country and in others.

Both of these measures, while tending in some degree to initiate action over broader areas, have nevertheless been inaugurated without any well thought out policy regarding education. In fact, the government of the United States, like most federal governments, has had no policy with regard to education. The Morrill Bill was largely an accidental measure, due to personal initiative and enacted without any thinking of a careful sort as to the effect that the educational agency thus created would have.

The contrast between the crude methods with which our state governments deal with education and the careful and well-considered methods under which the Prussian government, for example, proceeds in such matters is strikingly brought out in the steps recently taken looking toward the inauguration of an endowed university at the city of Frankfurt. For a long time Frankfurt has been ambitious to possess a university, and has been quite