Excerpt from Sixty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Maryland State Teachers' Association: Baltimore, Maryland, October 20 and 21, 1933

Recent appraisals of the public schools by laymen and even by educators interested in economy, show clearly the failure to realize the purposes which education seeks to achieve. The teachers' primary purpose is to do all that parents could do to develop character and competence in the manifold phases of everyday life. Indeed, her purpose is to acquire and apply greater in sight, knowledge and skill in the training of youth to participate constructively n the complex life of our day than parents are capable of doing. she aims to train our youth to participate more widely, more intelligently, more happily and more fruitfully for society than any preceding generation has done. In addition to serving the function of ideal parent and guide, the teacher is held responsible for teaching the pupil an enormous amount of information and skills - reading, writing, drawing, history, geography, science, nutrition, and so on and on. This alone is a huge task but it is a gross error to consider it the only or the main task. Such moves as the increasing of class sizes to 40 or more, the restriction in the purchase of self-teaching materials, etc., are seriously jeopardizing both functions of education. They are forcing teachers to give up the main task - that of developing admirable, well-bal anced, healthy, efficient, fair-minded citizens in order to meet the difficulties of slavishly teaching the school subjects.

To meet the situation, drastic steps must be taken lest the school be forced to give up its primary purpose. One of the first steps is to adopt methods of teaching which recent discoveries have shown will result in enormous saving of time in teaching the three R's and other common sub jects. It has recently been shown that most of the conventional subjects and skills heretofore laboriously taught at great expense of time, through the medium of oral instruction may now be learned in less time by the pupils themselves by the use of newer types of self - teaching materials in printed form. The speaker predicts that in a decade or two these learnings, which heretofore have consumed so much of the teacher's time and energy, will be managed entirely by the pupils, even in the lowest grades. This will mean the abolition of the oral teaching methods now in vogue and the replacementof the inefficient types of textbooks now in use by quite new materials and methods.

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