to teach industrial efficiency. Moreover, it does not seem that this illiteracy is disappearing rapidly.
For instance, nine per cent of American children between ten and nineteen years of age cannot read and write. Moreover, there are millions of children who, judging by the figures for the school year 1909–10, are not going to learn to read and write, for of the Americans six to fourteen years of age there were 3,125,392 who were not in school a single day during that year. If we take the eleven million youths fifteen to twenty years of age for whom vocational training is particularly adapted, we find that nearly five per cent of these, or 448,414, are absolutely illiterate; it is not too much to assume that a million of them have not acquired enough of the ordinary tools of intelligence to make the most of efficient vocational training.
Confining ourselves to the white people, over fifteen per cent of the white children six to fourteen years of age, or 2,253,198, did not attend school during the school year 1909–10. Of the native white children of native parents ten to fourteen years of age nearly a tenth were not in school during that year; 121,878 native white children of native parents, fifteen to nineteen years of age, were illiterate.
If we confine our attention to the colored children, the case is, of course, much worse.
We cannot hope to make intelligent workmen and intelligent citizens of a group of people, over forty per cent of whose children six to fourteen years of age were not in school a single day during 1909–10; for the other sixty per cent the school term in the
