A letters exchange between L. Corey and H. Rugg about the analysis of American class relations.

It is now four months since the Curriculum Committee of the National Society completed the General Statement. I have just reviewed it carefully. I find myself in substantial agreement with it.

Not once in a century and a half of national history has the curriculum of the school caught up with the dynamic content of American life. Whether of colonial reading or reckoning school, Latin grammar school, academy, or modern junior high school, the curriculum has lagged behind the current civilization. Although the gap between the two has been markedly cut down in the last three-quarters of a century, nevertheless the American school has been essentially academic. Today, much of the gap persists.

The steps of a century of development in America: industrialism, urbanization, mass education. Machines and rapid transportation produced factories, cities, the graded school. As towns grew, the task of educating youth became complicated, and even by 1800 the mounting hordes of youth swamped the itinerant and intermittent "reading, writing, and reckoning schools." As early as 1805 New York took up enthusiastically Lancaster's "monitorial" plan; hundreds of pupils were herdeu together and lessons were heard by the youthful corporals of the teacher's regiment.

1890! The frontier obliterated, a continent conquered! The crude physical pattern of the new nationality sketched in. The world's greatest experiment in democracy under way, based on the premise of universal education at public expense.

Approximately to 1910 the leadership in curriculum-making was in the hands of college and private-school administrators and of subject-matter specialists, and curriculum-making was dominated by an interest in scholarship, mind training, and knowledge for knowledge's sake. With the close of the first decade of the twentieth century, however, a new and vigorous leadership was offered—that of the students of more objective procedures in education.

In the rise of mass education in America, following the middle of the century, two opposing theories contended for supremacy: the doctrine of discipline and the doctrine of growth and initiative. Corresponding to those doctrines, two sects arose among laymen and professional school people. These groups, avoiding the more difficult task of thinking to the bottom of the apparent issue, ranged themselves at the two extreme ends of a scale of scholastic theory and practice. Occasionally, others appeared at points somewhere between, seeking a truer educational theory in the integration of the elements of both extremes.

The story of curriculum-making in American schools is now before us. The historical backgrounds have been sketched, the so- cial and educational forces at work have been considered, the major features of conventional procedure have been outlined, the more significant progressive practices have been described, and the chief trends and tendencies have been traced. The data for a critical evaluation of the contemporary situation are therefore at hand.

It is probable that there are close to 500,000 boys and girls in our elementary schools whose verbal intelligence as measured by a Binet I.Q. is above 125. It is also very probable that there are a half million more of like intelligences in our high schools. Altogether American public schools are now responsible·for the training of upwards of one million children of distinctive mental ability.

In our schools upwards of twenty million children between the ages of 6 and 17 are preparing to meet the difficulties of industrial, social, and political life. Those difficulties are becoming increasingly great—in recent years they have brought about what almost amounts to an impasse in citizenship. The impasse has been frequently revealed by indifference to matters of public concern and by lack of trained intelligence on the part of the rank and file of our people to deal with their collective affairs. It appears to be very difficult, if not impossible, to secure an intelligent popular judgment on an industrial or political issue.

Our purpose is ultimately to prepare a complete scheme of materials and activities from the primacy school through the senior high school. Hence this junior-high-school course not only serves the purpose of supplying illustrative material for the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, but it also provides the curriculum-maker with valuable data for the selection and arrangement of the courses below and above the intermediate school. From all standpoints these grades form a strategic level at which to make the first attack on the problem o:f curriculum reorganization.

In Chapter I and again in Chapter IV of this Yearbook it is shown very clearly that courses of study in the social sciences have been constructed by inadequate methods. The content of the material, its assignment to particular grades, and its modes of presentation have been determined by arm-chair opinion instead of by scientific investigation. Vigorous criticism has been made during the past ten years of the existing courses and of the methods by which they have been organized.

The purpose of this chapter is threefold: first, to describe for teachers and administrators common and elementary methods of treating test data (Section I); second, to summarize the newer and more elaborate statistical methods for research workers (Section II); third, to present an annotated bibliography which will put the advanced student of educational statistics in touch with the new methods (Section III).