Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/363

Rh ; (2) the miscellaneous schools (of cookery, music, oratory and various special arts), the business schools, the orphan asylums and other benevolent institutions are founded and supported as private institutions. Of the remaining educational institutions, some are public, some private. The percentage of attendance of pupils and students, as calculated from the table given on page viii of Vol. I. of the Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Education printed in 1907 (from which are taken also the general data given above, and which will hereafter be referred to simply as U. S. Report), is as follows:

It will be seen that the state is doing in a tolerably complete manner what it has evidently assumed is its duty, in all but two of the classes of institutions to which it gives any attention whatever. But in the case of the professional schools and the colleges and universities the state is merely dabbling in the matter, leaving so great a proportion of the work to private enterprise that of the youth being educated in such institutions seventy-four per cent, are receiving such education through private munificence. If our postal system, or our system of criminal reformation and punishment, were carried on partly by the state, partly by private enterprise, we should regard it as a very curious condition of things, and should cast about us for a remedy. But as yet we fail to observe the anomaly in this very important matter of public education.

Let us now take up the subject from the point of the comparative number of public and private institutions, rather than from that of the total attendance of students, and confine our examination to one of the two kinds of institutions of which the state controls but an insignificant proportion. We may classify the colleges and universities conveniently through the aid of tables 29, p. 578; 32, p. 636 and 34, p. 640 of the U. S. Report. All institutions classed as schools of technology (table 36, p. 650) are omitted from this consideration, even though their official title is sometimes "College of ." (It may be stated in passing that according to this table the national government is responsible for 2 and the states for 34 of these institutions. The source of support or the founder of the remaining 8 is not specified and has not been investigated.) These statistics may be