The Crisis in Seattle’s Classrooms

A very intelligent, well-educated gentleman asks a pertinent question: what interest the average taxpayer has in a system of education which is nothing but an elaborate preparation for landing a mass of children, nine-tenths of whom must perform manual labor, at the door of our colleges? This same thought has prompted School Commissioner Schuyler Crosby of New York to call for a drastic change in curriculum. He is disgusted with the misappropriation of public money, finding that students in graduating classes cannot write a business letter or a proper letter of application for a job. The machinery of the school system runs like clockwork, yet students are turned out by a machine contrived for a college course most cannot pursue. We are teaching children sixteen different subjects at once and nothing with thoroughness. As one observer noted, we are wasting a five-thousand-dollar education on a fifty-cent boy. The schools that fit the most children for the work of life are being robbed to maintain the high schools for the few.