percent from the Federal Government. Currently approximately 52 percent comes from local sources, 40 percent from the State, and about eight percent from the Federal Government. Over 80 percent of the local funds come from property taxes. As many critics have pointed out, given this structure of support, wealthy communities with high property values are able to provide better-financed schools than are poor communities. Such differences in educational opportunity have been held in recent court suits to

violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth amendment to the Constitution, most notably in 1971 in the California case of Serrano v. Priest.

As the Serrano case illustrates, one of the striking features of the financing of the American educational system is the difference in support to be found in differing regions, a variation that has characterized the financing of public education throughout the Nation's history. Robert D. Reischauer and Robert W. Hartman have pointed out in Reforming School Finance, for example, that school districts in New York spend on the average more than twice as much as the average district in nine other States. Throughout

Rural

the country the districts with the highest levels of expenditure are usually those found in the most prosperous suburban areas, a shift from the pre-World War I era when the city districts were typically the leaders in educational expenditures. areas - particularly those in the South- have always spent the least on public education. The estimated range there for the 1972-73 school year was from $590 in Alabama, $651 in Arkansas, and $689 in Mississippi, in contrast to the figures for the three highest States: $1,584 for New York, $1,473 for Alaska, and $1,307 for Vermont.

tions, but two issues are clearly significant. One is a demand for a more diverse financial base for public education than the present heavy reliance on local property taxes. The second and subtle hypothesis involves citizens' loss of faith in the capacity of the schools to accomplish the many tasks assigned to them, a reaction compounded not only of

a

more

tradition of overexpectation but of certain noteworthy recent developments.

One of these arises from the fact that for the first time in American history we have reached a point where children no longer regularly receive more formal education than their parents did and where opportunities for children to do better than their parents economically do not abound. Many college-educated parents today are aghast at the lack of concern displayed by their teenage or young adult children for college or for entering the economic mainstream. Others who were unable to attend college themselves but who have worked hard children could do SO are similarly disturbed. Both groups may attribute their offsprings' disinterest in these oppor tunities to what they see as permissiveness in the schools. Such parents cannot vote against the changed culture that has in fact produced their children's attitudes, but they can vote against school budgets.

SO that their

Dissatisfaction with the schools is en demic. Ever since there have been schools there has been criticism of them. It comes from parents who blame the schools for the inadequacies they find in their own children. It comes from employers who find their employees ill prepared (somehow young people were always better prepared a generation ago when the employer was young). It comes from teachers who find their students uncooperative (again, a generation ago when the teachers were young the students were better). And it comes from the students, who find the schools dull (as students always have.)

With the American educational sys tem-as with most systems-the halcyon days always seem to be in the past. Its contemporary triumphs are often obscure. particularly to persons currently struggling with it. Since education has become so widespread in America today-and that. of course, is one of its principal ac complishments - higher proportions of Americans are directly concerned with how it fares. Many of them believe the past to be preferable to the present; what survives from the past tends to be the successes of the past, not the failures. What troubles us in the present are our difficulties, not our achievements. It is to our credit that we are dissatisfied with the present, for then our future may be even better.

C

Mr. Stanton, President of the Board of Education of the Common School System of Philadelphia, stood in his starched collar and long coat before the school board on that February afternoon almost a century ago and verbally sketched a stunning picture of what the school children of the Quaker City would prove to the Nation and to the world.

The occasion was the International Centennial Exposition, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution, with Philadelphia as the host city. The Philadelphia schools exhibit, Mr. Stanton declared, "will be commensurate with its dignity as the most comprehensive scheme of popular instruction conducted in any city in this country."

Actually, the Philadelphia exhibit was just one among scores of Exposition attractions devoted to education, displays of one magnitude or another having been mounted by most of the States and some of the Territories, and the city was in fact the site of an international education conference held in conjunction with the Centennial observance. Parochialism being what it is, however, it was the home town exhibit that attracted the attention of the local newspapers. And in truth it was one of the more elaborate, the school board having spent the extraordinary sum of $8,500 to house its demonstartion of how far the schools had advanced in the young country that had been born amid that city's very cobblestones and red brick buildings. There were triumphant pictures and displays of the latest in the teaching of science

and the industrial arts,

and even physical education.

The visitor quickly perceived that a solid grounding in English literature, correct speech, and proper posture was routine among the young scholars from the Philadelphia Common Schools, and that the girls could cook and sew with the best the world had to offer.

The 31 members of the school board took considerable satisfaction in putting this kind of foot forward to visitors not only from throughout the United States but from many foreign countries as well. In doing so, however, they were compelled to ignore a crisis or two and to sweep various problems under the rug, for in Philadelphia as elsewhere in the Nation in 1876, education suffered its trials as well as its triumphs.

The most convulsive problem, aggravated by the lingering effects of an economic depression, arose from what the

board regarded as the unreasonable stinginess of the city's Common and Select Councils, which controlled the purse strings. So tight was the situation that construction of scores of needed additional schools had been indefinitely postponed leaving, in the words of Board President Stanton, 20,000 school-age children "running wild in the streets, growing with years in wickedness, and recruiting the strength of the army of the depraved." In the existing schools, meanwhile, the teacher-pupil ratio was 50 to 1, and Philadelphia teachers were paid an annual salary of $486.14, in contrast to the handsome yearly stipends of $814.17 in New York and $973.35 in Boston. The result was loud complaint and heavy turnover of teaching staffs. At one point the Common and Select Councils flatly refused to pay the salary of Professor August Perrot, who was in charge of the system's music programs. Board members scored the town fathers, but the professor took the more pragmatic step of filing suit, and funds to pay his salary were somehow found. The Board was unable to scrounge enough money to pay a superintendent of schools, however, so the city limped along without one until 1883.

The school system was meanwhile run lock, stock, and patronage by the central board of education and by 31 sectional boards established in a wave of enthusiasm for the concept of decentralization. The latter bodies, elected by the voters of each of the city's 31 political wards, had total control not only over the hiring of every employee but over the day-to-day operation of the schools in their jurisdictions. Critics railed in vain against "31 little independent forces now each pulling its own way."

One teacher, according to a magazine report, complained that when she attempted to correct a pupil's pronunciation of the word "piano" the boy retorted scornfully: "My pop says 'pyanner' and he's a school director." Impressed by this logic, and wanting to keep her job, the teacher settled for

"pyanner." The situation was not eased, one observer pointed out, by the

persistence of voters in choosing owners of

saloons to fill the regional councils. A

saloonkeeper "may be an admirable

person," this critic declared, but few display any qualifications to serve "as a guide for teachers, a chooser of textbooks, a manager of school expenditures, an authority on school methods, (or) an arbiter of the destinies of education." Not that the central board was above reproach. On November 28, as thousands of persons were flocking to the Centennial Exposition grounds to see exhibits of "the foundation of our national strength," the president of the Philadelphia Common Council was declaring in City Hall, a short distance away, that the Board of Education was "the most corrupt ring that has ever disgraced the City ...." Money was being spent, he said, on school building repairs never made, textbooks that never appeared, furniture never delivered. When asked to produce specific evidence in court, however, he backed down, and within a few months the uproar was reduced to a grumble.

More penetrating and enduring

criticism came from Eliza S. Turner, whose thoughts on humanizing education transcended the boundaries not only of Philadelphia but of her time. The schools, she said, must somehow find a way to "teach children to read without tears." In other comments that seem as much Bicentennial as they were Centennial, she made such observations as the following:

On the purpose of schooling: "If education meant simply the fixing of certain facts and definitions in the youthful mind, it would not be so much amiss; but it should mean instead the real awakening of that mind and the strengthening of its own capacities for acquirement. It is the larger part of our business to make the pupil want to learn."

On innovation: "Newer and better methods of the day are supposed to be taught, but these newer ways very seldom get into the classroom. The young teacher

goes from her practice to her school and settles down to the daily grind of memorizing."

About tests: "The aim of examiners should be to discover the general development of a child's intellect, rather than the number of unassociated facts, dates, and rules which he has succeeded in memorizing."

is

As a matter of fact, many other comments about education that found their way into print in 1876 have a 1976 ring to them, too. Thus School Board President Stanton on dropout: "The practical fruits [ of this persistent problem] are to be seen in the criminal calendars all over the country, and the expense to be estimated in the appropriations for sustaining police, criminal courts, jails, and almshouses, to say nothing of the dens of vice and crime in perpetual existence." A teacher on the rigidity of the formal classroom: "How much of the time which should be employed in actual teaching is wasted in the mere effort to keep order. Discipline must be maintained so unnatural, so irksome to a healthy child, so almost brutal in its exactions, as to irritate and demoralize the pupils, to weary and unnerve the teacher, and to abstract an immense proportion of time from the true object of the school." And Ms. Turner again, this time anticipating the concept of career education: "We know that man cannot live by textbook education alone, yet we see not where he is to learn the art or trade by which he must earn his bread. As the times change we must change, or suffer disaster."

In short, the process of looking back to a century ago contains a strong dose of deja vu. Not unexpectedly, for the basic issues and goals that led to the Nation's founding, are essentially constant. Thus though the common school system of a century ago has advanced from tentative to assured, there is still a plentiful supply of problems to be solved and challenges to be met. As with the preservation of liberty itself, there will always be a need for renewal and rededication if our system of education is to remain "the chief foundation of our national strength." -J WILLIAM JONES

Director, Informational Services, Philadelphia School District.

Il kinds of novel developments in education were on display at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, from demonstrations of

the latest wrinkles in School of Practice Teaching techniques to modern design in pupil's desks.

One newfangled idea that attracted particular attention, since most visitors to the Exposition had never heard of such a thing, was called a kindergarten. So much attention did it draw, in fact, that an enterprising photographer made it the subject of a stereopticon slide, roughly the contemporary equivalent of being featured on a network TV news program.

The children who were part of the exhibition's model kindergarten were from an orphanage, and not coincidentally, since the kindergarten movement in the United States began largely as a charitable venture.

education circles the controversy over Froebel's theories still persists 100 years

Its emergence also stirred up being impractical and wrong-headed. considerable controversy. On one side were Though muted by now, in preschool the followers of Friedrich Froebel, a German educational reformer who had created the "kindergarten," as he called it, later. in 1837. Froebel's notion was that in the proper setting, their natural organic processes stimulated by specially designed games and other play activities, children would blossom more or less on their own like plants in a garden -- the role of the teacher being in effect that of admiring onlooker.

On the other side were those who took up Froebel's creation but gave short shrift to his premise, among other things adding book-learning to the agenda and giving the teacher a more direct role in cultivating the children's intellectual growth. This new form came to be called the American kindergarten, to distinguish it from the German original.

The steadfast Froebelians heatedly rejected the New World departures as "ignorant imitations and perversions." The deviationists scoffed at the Froebelians as

Meanwhile, this dispute aside, the kindergarten has established itself as a standard aspect of the American education system, although most of the early ventures were operated under private and not necessarily "educational" auspices. Even prior to the Centennial, in 1873 the city of St. Louis had included the kindergarten as part of its public school program, and by the turn of the century many other cities were following suit.

Kindergartens are today maintained by more than 70 percent of the public school systems in the Nation, enrolling nearly 2.6 million of the more than three million youngsters who are today participating in public and private preschool programs.

- L. V. GOODMAN Editor, American Education