SCHOOL AND COMMONWEALTH

by Henry C. Morrison '95. University of Chicago Press, 1937. p. 238. $3.00.

This volume of selections and addresses on the perennially timely topic of school and society represents not only the best thinking of Professor Morrison's experience of some forty-five years in the field of Education, but also the ideas and principles most generally accepted by the leading thinkers in this field. Dartmouth men in Education will be doubly pleased by the fact that this volume is dedicated to James Fairbanks Colby, Professor Emeritus of Law and Political Science at Dartmouth. More than one outstanding graduate of the College has been stimulated by the thinking aroused in the classroom under the guidance of one of Dartmouth's greatest teachers.

This volume contains twenty-three essays, some of which were delivered before various educational meetings, and they range all the way from articles on the objectives of public education to the development of education as a profession. Here is a volume written in lively style, typical of Professor Morrison's manner of speaking and thinking which should be of tremendous stimulating value to all intelligent citizens in the commonwealth. It is the type of book which the layman should read because in it he will find the rational justification not only for the maintenance but of the continuance of our public system of education along lines which will assure the continuance of our democratic state.

The schools are the first defense of the nation, and as Professor Morrison says in one of his articles, "In the long run the people must choose between the schools and something else, no matter where the money comes from." These essays are all timely because the current recession has once more paved the way for violent attacks on the administration of our public school system. Only through the wide dissemination of the information and philosophy such as is contained in these lectures can we hope to maintain an adequate system of public instruction.

Professor Morrison is to be commended as usual for his brave and rational defense of all those principles and practises which make for the best types of public school education. Every intelligent man must agree with Professor Morrison that unless the schools and colleges of today are made to accomplish what they are supposed to, our democratic institutions are bound to degenerate

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