ranged from 50 to 64 per cent.! In Public School 106, the rate ranged
from 43 to 94 per cent.!"

The conditions, we are assured, are no exceptions to the rule of
public schools in New York, where the fatal effects of overcrowding
in education may be observed in their most sinister but significant
aspects.

The forgotten fact in this case is that efforts for universal and
compulsory education cannot keep pace with the overproduction of
children. Even at the best, leaving out of consideration the public
school system as the inevitable prey and plundering-ground of the cheap
politician and job-hunter, present methods of wholesale and syndicated
"education" are not suited to compete with the unceasing, unthinking,
untiring procreative powers of our swarming, spawning populations.

Into such schools as described in the recent reports of the Public
Education Association, no intelligent parent would dare send his child.
They are not merely fire-traps and culture-grounds of infection, but of
moral and intellectual contamination as well. More and more are public
schools in America becoming institutions for subjecting children to
a narrow and reactionary orthodoxy, aiming to crush out all signs
of individuality, and to turn out boys and girls compressed into a
standardized pattern, with ready-made ideas on politics, religion,
morality, and economics. True education cannot grow out of such
compulsory herding of children in filthy fire-traps.

Character, ability, and reasoning power are not to be developed in
this fashion. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether even a completely
successful educational system could offset the evils of indiscriminate