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"A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens, from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so it shall be the latest of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest."

Thomas Jefferson.

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LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL.

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,

BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Washington, February 19, 1918.

SIR: To make more valuable to the people those things from which the people are accustomed to derive value has very appropriately been said to be the prime business of legislators. That the schoolhouse, whose value to the people is already great, may become still more valuable to them, is the purpose of the community-organization movement which this bureau has undertaken to foster.

A great democracy like ours, extending over more than three and one-half million square miles of territory and including more than 100,000,000 people, must be alive, intelligent, and virtuous in all its parts. Every unit of it must be democratic. The ultimate unit in every State, Territory, and possession of the United States is the school district. Every school district should therefore be a little democracy, and the schoolhouse should be the community capitol. Here the people should meet to discuss among themselves their common interests and to devise methods of helpful cooperation. It should also be the social center of the community, where all the people come together in a neighborly way on terms of democratic equality, learn to know each other, and extend and enrich their community sympathies.

For this purpose the schoolhouse is specially fitted; it is nonsectarian and nonpartisan; the property of no individual, group, or clique, but the common property of all; the one place in every community in which all have equal rights and all are equally at home. The schoolhouse is also made sacred to every family and to the community as a whole by the fact that it is the home of their children and the training place of future citizens. Here all members of the community may appropriately send themselves to school to each other and learn from each other of things pertaining to the life of the local community, the State, the Nation, and the world.

The appropriation of the schoolhouse for community uses has well been called "a master stroke of the new democracy." These facts are not new, but the emphasis on their importance is new and

amounts to a new discovery. The Nation's immediate need to mobilize the sentiments of the people and to make available the material resources has directed special attention to the schoolhouse as an effective agency ready-made to its hand for this purpose. The national importance of this new organization is evidenced by the fact that the Council of National Defense has planned a nation-wide movement to organize school districts or similar communities of the United States as the ultimate branches of its council of defense system, believing that the organization of communities will enable the Council of National Defense to put directly before the individual citizen the needs of the Nation, to create and unify their sentiment, and to mobilize and direct their efforts for the defense of the Nation.

In order that this organization may be most effective and be made permanent, the council has expressed a desire to cooperate with the Bureau of Education, and I have detailed one of the specialists in community organization to cooperate with the council for the accomplishment of our common purpose. That the people may have information in regard to community organization in its simplest form, I recommend that the manuscript transmitted herewith be published as a bulletin of the Bureau of Education. It has been prepared at my request by Dr. Henry E. Jackson, the bureau's special agent in community organization.

Respectfully submitted.

The SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR.

P. P. CLAXTON,

Commissioner.