Charges Against the System.

We charge upon the system of State schools, as now carried on in these United States, the perpetration of manifold injustices and the upholding of false principles.

First, It is an infringement of parental rights and duties, inasmuch as it compels poor people, who educate their own children for conscience's sake, to help educate their richer neighbors' children.

Secondly, It cruelly oppresses poorer citizens by giving to their richer neighbors' sons not simply an elementary education, but an education sufficient to earn their living by means of a learned profession. To put both on an equal footing, poor children should be taught a trade at the expense of the State.

Thirdly, The State does not know what its system should be. In some States the education is restricted to rudimentary studies; in others, it extends to a University course. Some States allow a qualified amount of Evangelical teaching; others, professing to exclude all religion, permit any except the Catholic. These are the inconsistencies and hypocrisy of the system.

Fourthly, it is narrow, contracted, limited in its scope, afraid of rivalry, and incapable of the very function for page 57 which it was established. Its right to educate is denied by its admission that it cannot educate in the true sense of the word.

Fifthly, It stultifies itself; for, beginning on a religious basis, and acquiring its chief renown by the fruits of its first work, it would end by banning and barring all religious beliefs, even "the existence of an overruling Providence."

Sixthly, It establishes a monopoly of business best left to individual enterprise and the immediate control of parents.

Seventhly, The principles on which it is justified will justify with greater force the claim of the Communist to labor and bread.