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of foreign birth. When new educational methods are agitated, it secures special correspondents and contributors who set forth the pros and cons of the Montessori system , the Gary plan, the
educational survey, vocational training, night schools for for eigners, and other mooted questions. It encourages the study of current events in schools, gives reduced rates to school classes, and offers prizes to school children in innumerable contests. Education on its side establishes schools for the training of
journalists and introduces courses in journalism into educational curricula . It maintains generally amicable relations with the
press, except when it is under criticism by it. These criticisms it resents as coming from a source it deems incompetent to pass
judgment on the work of experts, yet it is at a distinct disad vantage in all controversies with the press since educational organs are comparatively few in number, they are published at infrequent intervals, they are little read outside of the profession , and their opinions receive scanty approval when transferred to the columns of the ordinary press .
But in its general relation to education , the press is between Scylla and Charybdis. Boards of education and the teaching staff
wish better school buildings and better equipment, but this demands money from the taxpayers, and the taxpayers demur. School superintendents and teachers are anxious to maintain discipline in the schoolroom , but the parents of undisciplined children insist on the sacred rights of parenthood and protest. Specialists in educational theory and practice advocate the intro duction of new subjects into the curriculum , but the constitu
tional objector condemns them as “ fads." Eminent scholars and successful teachers prepare new textbooks based on their studies
and their classroom experience , but the conservative finds " the old ones good enough .” Taxpayers, parents , constitutional
objectors, and conservatives are all subscribers and advertisers, and they form the numerical majority in every community , what attitude is the press to take? Probably in every community the press is divided against itself on all disputed educational questions and thus the historian must also steer between oppos ing dangers in his efforts to reconstruct from the press alone the intelligent public opinion on education .
