Furnishing textbooks at the expense of the community, free to the individual school children, is not a new idea in the United States. It began as a movement in city school administration nearly a century ago. Philadelphia made provisions for free textbooks in 1818. Other cities, principally in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts,…

In the Federal Census of 1910, 58.5 per cent of the population of the United States from 6 to 20 years of age, both inclusive, are classed as rural, which means that nearly three-fifths of the total American school population live in the open country, or in villages and small towns, under rural conditions. The total rural population of this class…