Chart Made

''To give us the proper chart by which to steer our educational course" President Hoover two years ago appointed the National Advisory Committee on Education. Chief question to be mulled over was whether to revive (not, as many people think, create) the Federal Department of Education which existed briefly after Congressman James Abram Garfield (see col. 3) helped establish it in 1867. Under Director Charles Riborg Mann of the American Council on Education and President Henry Suzzallo of the Carnegie Foundation, 52 savants labored and brought forth last fortnight a bulky report.

On its face, the report contains the headline-making recommendation that a Federal department be established, with a Secretary of Education in the Cabinet. This has been urged by many an educator; the National Education Association has gone on record for it every year since 1917. But President Hoover has only vaguely encouraged the idea. Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur announced his forthright opposition to a Department of Education. Because of this. Dr. James McKeen Cattell, able editor of scientific periodicals, onetime Columbia professor, expressed alarm last September at a "Memorandum of Progress" which the Advisory Council published in July 1930 intimating that a Federal department would be disapproved. Dr. Cattell called secretary Wilbur and President Suzzallo creatures of "private philantropic trusts." He sent out a questionnaire to pedagogs. whose answers purported to be a "damning judgment" of the Advisory Council and its sponsors.

Last fortnight's report, disarming, recommends establishment of a Federal department. But it is a shadow department, with a Secretary stripped of legal, financial, executive and administrative powers. The report strongly disapproves Federal control of education by means of money-grants with strings tied to them. Let the Government give money, maintain fact-finding services; but let all real control remain with cities or States. Also, the report proposes that after five years no grants be made for special forms of education-adult, vocational, agricultural. To this section, the Committee's Negro members-President Robert Russa Moton of Tuskegee Institute, President Mordecai Wyatt Johnson of Howard University, President John W. Davis of West Virginia Collegiate Institute-took strong exception in a minority report, pointing out that Negro education is highly dependent upon special grants.

A second minority report came from the Council's two Roman Catholic members, Vice Rector Edward Aloysius Pace of the Catholic University of America and Rev. George Johnson, secretary of the National Catholic Educational Association. They fear a Federal department as bureaucratic, likely to assume too much power, to use its power for political propaganda. This conclusion w?as hailed last week by President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, who said: "With the mad fanaticism, intolerance and bigotry exhibited in the presidential campaign of 1928 still in mind, one hesitates to think what would happen if a Secretary of Education representative of those powerful but discreditable traits were to find himself in the

President's Cabinet."

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