today, without a doubt the public school is the most efficient and most
serviceable. Today the school offers and compels a boy to get certain
related courses of study which will make him a better citizen by fitting
him in a measure for the procuring of an intelligent and adequate
livelihood. The school by no means is perfect in this matter, and as
long as over fifty per cent. of the boys fail to graduate even from the
eighth grade in the grammar school, and but one per cent. go to college,
there will be great need of a reconstruction of its methods of work.
Without question, the curricula of the public school should be modified
so as to meet the needs of all the boys in the community and vocational
and industrial training should have larger place in our educational
plans. The boy who is to earn his livelihood by his hands and head
should receive as much attention and intelligent instruction as the boy
who aims at a professional career. However, with all its limitations,
the public school is the only institution which has a definite policy in
the education of the boy. The leaders of the public school system know
whither they are going and the road they must travel to reach the goal.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of our public school system today is the
inability, because of our division between church and state, to give the
boy any religious instruction in connection with what is styled "secular
education." For the first time in the history of the world has religious
instruction been barred from the public school, and that in our free
America. Most intelligent Christian men now realize that, because of the
division between church and state in our country, religious instruction
in the public school is impossible, as the school is the instrument of
the state in the production of wealth-producing citizenship. The men who
with clear vision see these things also see this limitation of the
public school system and recognize that the church has a larger mission
to fulfill in America than in any other country, it the education of the