New and Enlarged Conceptions of the Relationship of the Federal Government to Education

Abstract

Earlier articles in this symposium must have made it clear that active participation by the Federal Government in education and related fields was contemplated from the beginning and was effectuated almost before the nation was born. I have never met a really responsible person of any race, color, creed, or economic status who looked into the question of national concern for education without eventually accepting Federal participation, in some form or measure, as thoroughly sound and desirable. do you think of me for recommending Federal subsidies for education? asked a distinguished American university president as we rode down in the elevator in a Washington hotel some years ago after a meeting on Federal aid. He knew that I was aware of his very conservative attitude over the years on this matter of financial aid for schools from the Federal Government. What had happened to him was that when he took part in a careful study of the situation in the light of modern needs, the logic of events had led him to come out wholeheartedly for a program of generous help from the National Government. It has been this way since the beginning. We have been frequently told that the Constitution left education to the states. Readers of Madison's Journal, however, will recall that the motion to give Congress power to establish a National University (probably involving more than we mean by a university) was lost by a close vote, and that before the vote was taken the representative of one of the States voting in the negative explained his vote by stating that the special provision was not necessary-the exclusive power at the seat of government will reach the object.' That it did reach it, in certain very important areas at least, is evident, from the long history of Federal grants of land and money, beginning with the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the application of the sixteenth-section provision to all the states, developing through the period of the land-grant college legislation, and coming on down to the SmithHughes Act of more recent years and the very important steps taken by the Federal Government in education during the depression. Men in public affairs and education alike have recorded their conviction as to the significant part the Federal Government should play. In his report for 1872 John Eaton, United States Commissioner of