school attendance should be greater than upon high-school attendance, but that is not apparent.

2. The Kalamazoo case in 1872 tended to determine the legal status of the high school and lend prestige to it. Shortly before 1890 President Eliot, of Harvard, began a campaign for shortening, varying, and enriching high-school programs. The elective system gained ground, freeing the pupil from imposition to some extent. This was followed by committees on reorganization and for studying curricula. The gradation of pupil progress into steps, eight in the elementary and four in the high school, was determined, thus setting up goals, however formal, which served as incentives. More varied programs, including the business course, were introduced into the high school. Colleges multiplied courses, departments, colleges, and schools, each reaching out after numbers to justify existence. Electives and options became common in high school and college. The free high school more completely replaced the tuition academy; education was freed from ultra formalism; the traditional goals were replaced by others more attractive because more immediate. From that time on the increase in high-school attendance has been nothing less than phenomenal.

3. Since 1890 there has been a continued attempt to bring about a closer relation between school and life, between activities in school and the activities demanded by life after school, or out of school. Vocational education was introduced in the furtherance of this idea. The schools could then appeal for attendance on a new basis, and they made much of the opportunity. Articles evaluating education in dollars and cents became common. Some of them were quite exact in the determination of the value of a year in school, or of graduation from eighth grade, high school, or college. What matter if the premises were false and likewise the data selected for the purpose? It was effective advertising.

4. College entrance examinations were largely replaced by evidence of high-school

graduation. This emphasized the value of high-school work and at the same time tended to make college appear more valuable because of restricted entrance. Later, civil-service requirements stressed highschool graduation. Then the war, the selective draft, and soldier placement advertised the desirability of high-school graduation as a means of entrance into the more desirable positions. The teaching profession, into which about one third of all women college graduates enter, began to make high-school graduation a standard requirement. All of these measures have been formal means of increasing high-school attendance by discounting experience out of school.

5. The common method of disbursing public and high-school revenues on the basis of school enrollment, average days attendance, aggregate days attendance, and so on, has placed a monetary value on the child from the standpoint of the school administration. The child is worth $50, or $100, or $150 to the school, according to the ratio of children to the amount of money to be disbursed. This has started a veritable craze for numbers which has in turn led to methods of advertising and holding that are subject to criticism.

It may be granted that the school formerly placed too much emphasis upon mere book learning and an artificial school environment as a preparation for life. There had been little connection between school and life. Recently a science of education has been developing, but it is so new and so radically different from traditional conceptions that few of the rank and file of the teaching profession have grasped its significance to any extent-just enough to illustrate the old adage that "A little learning is a dangerous thing." This developing science of education depends upon a recognition of individual differences, and upon the whole-hearted, purposeful activity of the pupil. To the average school man, steeped in tradition, a superficial understanding of these principles is all that is possible, so he attempts to appeal to

individual differences with a variety of activities into one or more of which the individual student may plunge whole-heartedly, but without regard to educational values. In consequence many pupils engage in mere diversions which in turn furnish diversion to other pupils as on-lookers, so that distraction from worth-while activity is general. There are "teams", county meets, district meets, state meets, "pep" meetings, and rallies; school spirit that is merely noise; school loyalty that is merely prejudice; and emotional excitement that continually interferes with intellectual processes and discourages a recognition of real values. If the old way was too formal, lifeless, and artificial, the new is too much a doing something for nothing, a dissipation rather than a direction of intellectual power.

Formerly the parent and pupil might make many personal sacrifices in order to have the advantage of school in furthering a definite purpose. Now it is rather popular for the student to have no definite purpose or responsibility. Even the teacher, lost in the pseudo-educational fog, spreads the heresy to the parent, that the student is better without a purpose, in order that the school may shape him as plastic clay into a model citizen. We must see that any education which does not result in a gradual assumption, by the pupil as an individual, of responsibility for his own acts and ideals, is worse than useless.

Education is largely habituation-the forming of bonds between environmental stimulation and muscular response, and then exercising the connections by repetition until they become a permanent equipment of the individual. If the pupil acquires those habits which do not carry over into life out of school, he has wasted his time. If then he drifts purposeless through high school he not only acquires the habit of

drifting-taking the way of least resistance but he invariably forms other habits which go with that one as a natural consequence. If he drifts on into and through college, certainly eight or more years with the current has perfected tendencies to drift. Let any successful student of men and affairs talk, not with the one high-school or college student in ten who knows where he is going, but rather with the 90 in a 100 who are in school because it is the fashion, or because it is the easiest place to be, and he will conclude that we must have better educational ideals and a redirection of educational organization and procedures.

The situation is not hopeless. Despite the fact that the craze for numbers prompts superficial advertising; that time, effort, and public funds are too frequently wasted; and that emotionalism rather than reasoned procedure prevails in education; there was never before a time when so much real study and constructive work was being done in and for education. We have our educational laboratories, our experimental schools, our departments of educational research, all making contributions faster than they can be assimilated even by any considerable number of our army of 900,000 teachers now in service, many of whom resist the new in educational science because they fear their own ability to make the necessary adjustments to the new order, just as many resist the truths of science in general, lest they be shaken out of their comfortable assurance, and be compelled to grapple with new ideas in what they fear may be an unequal struggle.

There has never been a greater number of real students in the schools than there is now. They are simply lost for the present in the crowd of sight-seers and holidaymakers. Out of it all a new education may arise which shall appeal and function more effectively than ever before.

T

HE central problem in every school system for some time to come is that of maintaining adequate financial support for professional service. Eventually when education has become highly professionalized as is medicine or law, ordinary people will not consider themselves competent to pass upon financial budgets or the adequacy of the educational provisions. The people will depend upon specialists for such service.

Meanwhile there is constant need of public support of the increasing budgets due to constant improvement in educational equipment, to better trained teachers and to more scientific methods of teaching and administration.

What do people think of the schools? How ready are they to stand back of new and more expensive programs? What confidence in the present administration is generally found? How do parental attitudes condition children's failures or attendance records?

There are many reasons why school administrators should know the attitudes of a community concerning schools and school programs. But the question is, "How can societal attitudes toward schools be discovered?"

It must be remembered that while societal attitudes are at certain periods of their history purely subjective, they take on or can be made to take on, an overt or objective character. It is necessary then to find the objective expressions of societal attitudes.

What is a societal attitude? What is an attitude? An attitude is a tendency to react

positively or negatively toward the totality of a situation. It is made up of the wishes of a person, which wishes in each instance. combine with various strengths. The attitudes themselves become organized into temporary personal objectives or into semipermanent or permanent life purposes. Such life purposes then become the central tendency of attitudinal organization which leads the person to play certain rôles in his group. Thus a person who is a red-hot democrat will tend to oppose educational measures in an election when they are advocated by republicans, even though they are inherently supportable.

Societal attitudes are personal attitudes that recur in enough instances sufficiently similar to be sociologically significant and statistically formulated.

Now where are societal attitudes toward schools to be found in objective forms?

I. First, they can be found precipitated in school laws ranging all the way from local laws to laws of the state and federal government. An analysis of attitudes embedded in the laws, unless recently passed, say during the past two years, will not give evidence of the attitudes of the citizens at present or in the community under investigation, for many persons at the moment may be very much opposed to the laws. Analysis of legislation must be checked over by other evidences of a more immediate and present character.

Among such may be listed (1) tax rates and the election experiences in relation to them; (2) political campaigns especially when educational measures are involved;

example the chamber of commerce, others are relatively isolated-an athletic club. Some have great influence in community life touching almost every aspect (political club), some very little (Literary Guild). However that may be, people operate in terms of their group alliances, group norms and expectations. Who would expect a tooth brush manufacturer to vote contrary to the avowed platform of his chamber of commerce or Kiwanis Club? Such behavior does occur, but rarely.

It is easily seen, then, that the run of attitudes of these organized and active groups affords further data for the administrator. If he has worked out by investigation and analysis a schedule of the prevalent societal attitudes significant for educational administration, he can readily index the group similarity or diversion from the complex of attitudes of the community as a whole. He can further index their tendencies with regard to conservative or progressive educational effort. Frequently he finds today that these vital-interest groups are fast appreciating the importance of exploiting the schools for their own objectives.1 In fact, one of his problems is to forestall undue interference by vital-interest groups in schools and school work. When he has analyzed these group attitudes and compared them with societal attitudes (city, county, state, or sometimes nation), he will then be able to define and locate the resources and liabilities in terms of the forces of his community. What is more to the point here, he will have a factual basis for differential publicity. He can organize it in terms of the facts of variability of attitudes of the different vital-interest groups and again substitute control for hit-or-miss guessing.

V. In the improved records of investigations of cases of pupil absence, the visiting teacher or attendance officer has revealed parental attitudes toward schools and school work. High absence rates reveal negative attitudes as a rule for parents who fail to coöperate in keeping children in school. While some of these data may have an inTeachers College, Report of the Dean, Nov. 1925.

direct significance, they repay investigation where records are of the better kind.

VI. Many newspapers run special columns on educational news and open the correspondence columns to educational matters. Here are revealed attitudes of the more active citizens who are therefore strategically important. They tend to propagate their ideas through private discussion and debate at election time. At least, such material is an area of investigation for making up the totality of societal attitudes in any community.

The methods for securing data from these sources are: first, documentary analysis, record, interviews with representative persons for sampling of attitudes, and third, attitude tests, whereby to check up the sampling by interviews.

From such investigations, and others that may be devised, specific attitudes can be listed as the items of attitude tests concerning schools and school work. Such tests can be submitted to parents through pupils, to vital-interest groups and to people in general through newspapers. If the person reacts toward an object or an idea in action or thought, if he moves to get it, to maintain it, to defend it, this is a positive attitude. The converse is a negative attitude. Indifference or no reaction is a neutral attitude. The results of the tests can then be checked against the other data and vice versa.

When one remembers the important relation between personal, social and societal attitudes and civic behavior, it is quite clear that the study of attitudes will contribute not only to scientizing the publicity efforts but also to the discovery of civic shortages in the determination of school objectives and curriculum subjects and content.

In the control and direction of human behavior the attitudes are so central in importance that it is amazing that so little scientific investigation by educators has been done in this field. It is for the educational sociologists to indicate the sources of such data and the methods of discovery. The administrator will be keen to utilize such data when he is sensitized to their value.