both the nature and the purpose of education was advanced. Schools were
declared to be essentially civil affairs; their purpose was asserted to be
to promote the common welfare and advance the interests of the political
State; ministers of education began to be appointed by the State to take
over and exercise control; the citizen supplanted the ecclesiastic in the
organization of education and the supervision of classroom teaching; the
instruction in the school was changed in direction, and in time vastly
broadened in scope; and the education of all now came to be conceived of
as a birthright of the child of every citizen.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century a great world movement for the
realization of these new aims, through the taking-over of education from
religious bodies and the establishment of state-controlled school systems,
has taken place. This movement is still going on. Beginning in the nations
which were earliest in the front of the struggle to preserve and extend
what was so well begun by little Greece and Imperial Rome, the state-
control conception of education has, in the past three quarters of a
century, spread to every continent on the globe. For ages a Church and
private affair, of no particular concern to government and of importance
to but a relatively small number of the people, education has to-day
become, with the rise and spread of modern ideas as to human freedom,
political equality, and industrial progress, a prime essential to the
maintenance of good government and the promotion of national welfare, and
it is now so recognized by progressive nations everywhere. With the spread
of the state-control idea as to education have also gone western ideas as
to government, human rights, social obligations, political equality, pure
and applied science, trade, industry, transportation, intellectual and
moral improvement, and humanitarian influences which are rapidly
transforming and modernizing not only less progressive western nations,
but ancient civilizations as well, and along the lines so slowly and so