ity also, among the taxpayers, to introduce a certain proportion
of primary pay schools, for the frank purpose of separating the lower
middle from the working classes, and to charge fees in all secondary
schools so as to bring a new source of income and _decrease_ the number
of students and the amounts spent on the schools. This in spite of the
annual plea of Superintendent Maxwell for more secondary schools, more
primary teachers, and primary school buildings. Instead of going in the
direction indicated by Dr. Eliot and preparing to spend four or five
times the present amount, there is a strong movement to spend less. And
nothing so hastens this reactionary movement as the tendency, whether
automatic or consciously stimulated, towards class (or caste)
education--such as Dr. Eliot and so many other reformers now directly or
indirectly encourage--usually under the cloak of industrial education.

The most anti-social aspects of capitalism, whether in its individualist
or its collectivist form, are the grossly unequal educational and
occupational privileges it gives the young. An examination of the better
positions now being obtained by men and women not yet past middle age
will show, let us say, that ten times as many prizes are going to
persons who were given good educational opportunities as to those who
were not. But as the children of those who can afford such opportunities
are not a tenth as numerous as the children of the rest of the people,
this would mean that the latter have only a _hundredth part_ of the
former's opportunities. Under this supposition, one tenth of the
population secures ten elevenths of the positions for which a higher
education is required. As a matter of fact, the existing inequality of
opportunity is undoubtedly very much greater than this, and the unequal
distribution of opportunities is visibly and rapidly becoming still less
equal. In 1910, of nineteen million pupils of public and private schools
in this country, only one million were securing a secondary, and less
than a third of a million a higher, education. Here are some figures
gathered by the Russell Sage Foundation in its recent survey of public
school management. The report covers 386 of the larger cities of the
Union. Out of every 100 children who enter the schools, 45 drop out
before the sixth year; that is, before they have learned to read
English. Only 25 of the remainder graduate and enter the high schools,
and of these but 6 c