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As school enrollments increased, the demand of the public proved insatiable. At school-board meetings, wistful parents kept showing up to ask for something new. Why not courses in dancing and music and tennis—it didn't seem fair that the children of the poor should be entirely cut off from such things. Shrewd managers of factories appeared to ask that vocational education be tailored to meet their immediate employment needs. People worried about safety asked why courses in driving automobiles couldn't be instituted. Others requested courses in family life to help reduce the divorce rate, and instruction about alcoholic beverages to help reduce alcoholism. The schools were asked to encourage good citizenship, patriotism and international understanding.
In spite of that, an extraordinary amount of progress has been made. More education is being passed on to more children than ever before in history, as well as more health care, entertainment and all the rest of it. The advance is perfectly measurable: the average scholastic attainments of soldiers in World War II were tested and found to be much higher than those of the soldiers in World War I.
Most suburban schools in America are incredibly good, compared to any sort of school in the past. Many centralized rural schools give the children of farmers an education as good as anyone in the nation can get. The people seem to vacillate between complacency at these gains and exaggerated horror at weaknesses which have not yet been overcome. Maybe everything would be all right if the public just realized the nobility of the goal it has set for the schools, and also realized the enormous amount of money, time and thought needed to achieve it.