Daily New Dominion

Nearly 15,000,000 Children in the Public Schools of the United States.

The past few weeks most of the schools of the country began the new term. As the Chicago Times-Herald puts it, "nearly 15,000,000 American children are unhappy."

"It is all very well to say with Bacon that 'knowledge is power', but to the infant mind the author of the book of Ecclesiastes put it more correctly when he said: He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow'. However much the youngster may be fond of learning in seeming, really he does not enjoy the school routine. The boy who really likes to go to school is so scarce that he is pointed to more in scorn than with pride by his school mates. Think of the barrels of tears that are shed by the 15,000,000 school children, the billions of complaints that are made, the trillions of sighs and objections, the quadrillions of wishes that they did not have to go.

"Though young America may not be glad to get back to school, old America is. That is, all of old America except the teachers. They, poor mortals, rail at fate just as bitterly as do their pupils.

"There is guess work, of course, when one gives estimates of tears shed and wishes expressed. But there is none about the number of pupils. The public schools have an enrollment of 14,465,371. This includes those of elementary grades and second grades only—not those of higher education, even when supported by public taxation. The private schools have an enrollment of 1,531,826, making a grand total of 15,997,197 students in the common schools. This vast army is more than one-fifth of the total population of the United States. The average number of school days is 140, so the aggregate number of days of schooling is 1,369,882,913. To teach these requires the services of 400,325 instructors. The women teachers outnumber the men two to one. There are 240,968 school houses and the value of school property is $181,453,760 per year, or $2.61 per capita of population. For each pupil it costs $18.62.

"Everybody knows, of course, that the United States has more school children than any other country in the world, but it is not so generally known that the United States, with but one-twentieth of the population of the world, within her confines has one-third of the world's school children and spends one-half of the amount spent by the world for education."