Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 216, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 September 1912 — School Children in U. S. [ARTICLE]

School Children in U. S.

There are in round numbers 18,000,000 children attending the public schools of the United States. Of this number 17,000,000 are in the primary schools and 1,000,000 in the high schools and academies. In private schools of various sorts there are about 2,000,000 pupils, making a total of 20,000,000 school children and students in the country, an army almost inconceivably vast, and prophetic of tremendous consequences for good to the nation. The idea of a thorough secular education originated with that great man Thomas Jefferson, who claimed that the. only safeguard for the republic lay in intelligence, the kind of intelligence that is afforded in the public schools.