Among the many educational bulletins gotten out by Hon. P.P. Claxton, retiring commissioner of Education, one of the best and most forceful was the What Do We Pay for Education in the United States? Mr. Claxton presents the figures for the years 1905-1918, covering the period from the time a child enters primary school up to the time he graduates from high school. In that period Alabama and Mississippi, the lowest, spent $63 per child. Montana, the highest, spent $637 per child.
North Carolina, next to the very lowest, spent $67 per child, South Carolina distancing us by just one dollar. The average over the United States was $252. Dr. Claxton says:
In a country in which we blithely acknowledge that all things wait on education—the public health, material prosperity and wealth, social purity, civic righteousness, political wisdom, the strength and safety of State and Nation, and, finally, the thing for which all these exist, that is, the individual welfare and happiness of the people, we have recklessly (recklessly is probably the word) spent $252 per child that the attainment of all these things may be assured.
And North Carolina spent only a fourth of that amount! But we are waking up in this State and, particularly since the inauguration of the six-months public school, have expenditures been more liberal. They must be yet more liberal. Truly, since so much, if not all things, waits on education, generous provision must be made for it.
From the Raleigh News and Observer, as reprinted in The University of North Carolina News Letter, Chapel Hill, N.C., June 15, 1921
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