Abstract
THE Federal Government of the United States seems likely, in future, to play an increasingly important part in the education services of the States. A summary has recently been published (“The Federal Government and Education”. Washington, D.C.: Superintendent of Documents. Price 10 cents) of certain findings and proposals of the President's Advisory Committee on Education relating to present conditions with special emphasis on inequalities of educational opportunity, the national interest in education and proposals for federal grants amounting in 1939–40 to 72 million dollars and increasing gradually to 202 millions in 1944–45. The Committee found that “glaring inequalities characterize educational opportunities throughout the nation” and it is argued that federal aid is the only way of adequately remedying this evil. It is pointed out that while the abilities of the States and local communities to provide education have always been unequal, recent changes in social and economic conditions have magnified this inequality and at the same time education has become increasingly important. Fundamentally the inequality is largely due to drainage of wealth, through migration and modern methods of organization of manufacture, commerce and finance, from all parts of the country into the towns and cities and particularly the great metropolitan areas. Hence such glaring contrasts as that between a farm population in the south-eastern States responsible for 4½ million children, with only 2 per cent of the national income, and a non-farm population in the north-east with 8 million children, and 42 per cent of the national income—21 times as much income from which to educate only twice as many children.
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The New Deal in Education in the United States. Nature 143, 112 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143112a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143112a0