Читать книгу Introduction to the scientific study of education - Charles Hubbard Judd - Страница 44

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We all know something about how much the family invests in its sons and daughters. The provision made by the father for his children is recognized as an expression of the parent’s willingness to give to the second generation as good a start in life as the family can afford. We are less likely to realize the extent to which the community is drawing on its material resources for a similar purpose. The city of Chicago—to choose a single example—gives to each boy or girl who goes through elementary school and high school an aggregate of six hundred and thirty dollars. If a child were notified to go to the city hall when he is eighteen years of age and receive this sum of money, we should recognize what it means for a community to pay for the education of its new generation. We should understand that the children of a city are its wards. When the matter is obscured by the complexities of the social machinery through which this bonus is distributed, we lose sight of the magnitude and directness of public expenditures for education.

The example of Chicago can be pursued even further. The sum stated above is too small, for it is based on the annual expenditures for conducting the schools; it does not include the large outlay for school buildings and for real estate which the city is called upon to make in order to provide rooms in which the education may be given. Nor do the figures cover irregularities. If the pupil does not get through each year’s work in regular order, the city is often called upon to provide more than the normal number of years of training.

One further item is to be added to the calculations above given, in the case of those who go to the city normal college. For these teachers-in-training the city pays an additional two hundred and twenty-eight dollars a year, raising the aggregate expended on such a student to nearly eleven hundred dollars.15 Such students are typical of a vast number of young people who are attending at public expense state normal schools, state universities, and public technical schools. Indeed, even where students attend endowed institutions and pay tuition, the actual cost of their education is commonly borne in very large measure by the community, which in the last analysis is the source of the endowment.