FRANCISCAN friars, the first white settlers who plodded northward into California, came with books in their hands, for the purpose of their pilgrimage was to educate the heathen Indians. Their pioneer successors-fur trappers and gold miners-were often men of action rather than learning, but they had an extraordinary respect for the wealth bound between the covers of books. With first-hand knowledge of the many miles from California to the older institutions of learning in New England and Europe, they voted generous expenditures for schools.

For California's native Indians, five decades of rigorous training-planned to make them civilized tax~paying subjects of the Spanish king-were in store when the Franciscan missionaries arrived in the spring of 1769. Beyond manual and religious training they did not aspire, however. Mission authorities feared the growth of learning among the Spanish, as well as the Indian population, claiming that education had no purpose but to breed discontent in the common people. They excommunicated two of the province's most illustrious citizens, Juan Bautista Alvarado and Mariano G. Vallejo, for reading Jean Jacques Rousseau.

The first efforts to found secular schools were made by the Spanish Governor, Diego de Borica (1794-1800). During his administration, schoolmasters-mostly retired soldiers who could wield the disciplinas (cat-o'-nine-tails) began teaching reading, writing, and figuring in one-room schools at San Jose, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, San Diego, arid Monterey. No sooner had Borica left the territory, however, than his educational system collapsed. The schools established during the next thirty years were also short-lived.

Governor Jose' Figueroa (1833-1835) reported, soon after his arrival, that only three schools were in existence, taught by incompetent and ill-paid teachers; he established six more schools and ordered higher salaries for the teachers. Juan Bautista Alvarado (1836-1842) imported teachers from Mexico to give instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, and the catechism; girls were also taught needlework and boys typesetting and printing. Attendance was compulsory for children between the ages of six and eleven. The schools were handicapped by their lack of funds and equipment. Despite the meager opportunities and the opposition of most of the clergy, some of the more ambitious sons of the land-owning families acquired a fair classical education, but only with the private tutoring of educated military officers, foreigners, or priests.

The American immigrants of the 1840's followed eastern and Midwestern rather than Californian precedents in education. In December 1864 California's first American school was founded-in a dilapidated structure, once a stable, on the grounds of Mission Santa Clara. Here an overland immigrant, Mrs. Olive Mann Isbell, taught two dozen pupils, sitting on boxes around a fire in the center of the earthen floor. In the following year a schoolroom was equipped with desks and benches in the Monterey customhouse, and Mrs. Isbell tried to teach ~6 scholars, although she could speak no Spanish and they no English. San Francisco's first American school was opened April 3, 1848 in ~ redwood schoolhouse on Portsmouth Square. The building was also used for town hall, court house, church and jail. The schoolmaster, Thomas Douglass, a Yale graduate, began with a class of six pupils which soon increased to 38, but six weeks later the gold rush excitement swept him off to the mines. On April 8, i85o the first free public schools were established by an ordinance of the city council in San Francisco. This was California's first public school ordinance.

The educational needs of children in mining towns, lumber camps, ports, and rural villages were recognized by the State when California 5 first constitution provided, that a school "be kept up in every school district at least three months in every year." Fabulous revenues were expected from the sale of Federal Government land grants, "inviolably appropriated to the support of the common schools"; but since the total proceeds from grants of 500,000 acres were only about $250,000, that early ambition had to be curtailed. Gradually State school legislation was extended until by i86o it provided for levying of city and school district taxes, appointment or election of county and city school superintendents and city boards of education, and authorization of boards of examination to grant teachers' certificates. Finally, in i866, California's legislators adopted the Revised School Law, drafted by the far-seeing superintendent of public instruction, John Swett, which fixed State and county school taxes at adequate levels and established district school libraries, county teachers' institutes, and city boards of examination. For the first time in the State's history, public school~in rural as well as urban areas-were free for every child.

The State's first colleges were established almost as early as its first public schools. Santa Clara College (now the University of Santa Clara), founded by Jesuit Fathers Giovanni Noboli and Michele Accolti, and California Wesleyan College (now the College of the Pacific at Stockton), founded by the Reverend Isaac Owen of the Methodist Episcopal Church, were both opened at Santa Clara in 1851. A year later the town of Benicia welcomed girls, who came to attend opening classes of the Young Ladies' Seminary. Southern California 5 first institution of higher learning, St. Vincent's College (now Loyola University), was opened in Don Vincente Lugo's adobe home on the Los Angeles Plaza in 1865 by Fathers of the St. Vincent de Paul Mission.

The first State constitution called for establishment of a State university to promote "literature, the arts, and sciences." But the nucleus of the University of California was a private institution, known at first as Contra Costa Academy and later as the College of California. Opened by the Reverend Henry Durant at Oakland in 1853, it began collegiate instruction in i86o. On March 23, i868, Governor Henry

H. Haight signed the legislative act creating the University of California. The institution was formally opened September 23 of the next year on the College of California 5 campus. In 1873, the year in which the first 12 graduates ("the twelve disciples") received their diplomas, the university moved to its present site on the slopes of the Berkeley hills.

Although the first public high school was opened in San Francisco in i8~6, the legislature declined to support secondary institutions for more than half a century. The more thickly settled communities were obliged to conduct high schools at their own expense. In 1884 the University of California inaugurated the "accrediting system," which admits pupils with excellent high school records to the university without examination. The result of university supervision under this system was to raise secondary school standards to a uniformly high level. Finally, in 1903, the legislature amended the school law by passage of an act providing for State support of high schools.

The legislature in 1907 authorized high school boards to prescribe postgraduate courses of study. First to take advantage of the new regulation was Fresno, followed soon by Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. By 1910 the number of these "upward extensions of high

schools" had grown to ten. A law enacted in 1917 recognized junior colleges as an integral part of the State's secondary school system. Today California has 42 such institutions.

Colleges as well as high schools multiplied in the late nineteenth century. The University of Southern California, founded under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church in i88o, has grown into an institution with a faculty of 1,000. Other colleges established in Southern California were Pomona College (now a unit of Claremont Colleges, Inc.), Occidental College, Whittier College, the University of Redlands, and the California Institute of Technology. Leland Stanford Junior University, wealthiest privately endowed university in the West, and now the State's second largest institution of higher learning, was opened at Palo Alto in 1891. Public normal schools were established-the first at San Francisco in 1862 (moved in 1870 to San Jose), and others at San Francisco, San Diego, Chico, Fresno, Santa Barbara, and Arcata. By legislative enactment these became in 1921 State teachers' colleges.

Today citizens of all ages find in California's educational system every sort of practical and theoretical training. In the 6,500 public schools, with their more than 1,000,000 pupils, $135,000,000 is spent yearly. The University of California registered 25,806 full-time resident students in 1938. This institution includes universities in Berkeley and Los Angeles, the agricultural colleges at Davis and Riverside, colleges of oceanography at La Jolla and of astronomy at Mount Hamilton, and affiliated colleges of law, medicine, pharmacy, and art. By the expansion of its facilities to include study centers, lecture courses, traveling libraries, correspondence study, and scientific and technical instruction at various points throughout the State, the university is extending the advantages of higher education to many who have hitherto been denied college training.

In addition to the State university, 7 State colleges, and 42 junior colleges, California today has 7 schools rated as junior colleges, and 23 publicly or privately endowed universities and colleges-including three noted women's colleges: Mills College in Oakland, Scripps College in Claremont, and Dominican College in San Rafael.

California's educators have faced the problem, common to educators everywhere, of adapting traditional schoolroom methods to a swiftly changing social structure. A State curriculum study, made in 1925, led two years later to formation of a permanent curriculum commission to evaluate school study courses and recommend minimum standards. In a detailed Teachers' Guide to Child Development, the commission expounded the philosophy and methods of the new education used in California's more progressive schools. The publication of the guide gave a strong impetus to the modernizing of California's entire school

system. Progressive communities began to eliminate the old, formal, coercive teaching of subjects, and to substitute activity programs.

Under the new methods the class is no longer treated as a group of artificially isolated units, but rather as a world in miniature, where enterprises are undertaken by children and teacher, all working together. The requirement that a child shall behave c~operatively is accented in order to check the tendency toward "self-expression of all types, at all times, in all places," favored by some of the earlier progressive educators. The Sequoia Union High School at Redwood City and the Alexandria Demonstration School at Los Angeles are progressive schools~s in which standards formulated in the Teachers' Guide are being realized.

As soon as California's schools were conspicuously committed to a changed procedure, the public, as well as teachers and administrators, began to question and appraise. In 1930 the California Commission for the Study of Education Problems, composed of nine lay citizens, reported on a year's study and a post-card survey of public opinion. The activity type of program was criticized as failing to train pupils in the use of the "tools" of learning-spelling, arithmetic, punctuation, sentence and paragraph structure, and penmanship-and in habits of precision and promptness. On the other hand, young people educated under the newer methods were found to excel former generations in intelligence, initiative, and physical fitness.

In accepting and applying the newer conceptions of education, California has kept pace with the rest of the country and in some respects stepped ahead. Even in early days, the California high school teacher of mathematics was likely to stress the value of original demonstrations, while California high schools led from the beginning in adoption of laboratory methods in teaching natural sciences. Today California's public schools teach scientific subjects integrated into the social studies unit in the elementary grades. Los Angeles high school students have built and are operating a seismological station, school weather stations, astronomical observatories, amateur radio stations, and sound-recording studios.

The general tendency to emphasize functional knowledge has been marked in the State. The department of education's commission for vocational education directs an extensive vocational training program in agriculture, business, homemaking, trade and industry, and vocational rehabilitation. Its bureau of agricultural education, in 1935-36, was supervising 137 vocational agricultural departments in the schools and a teacher-training course. The bureau of business education oversees courses of training adjusted to the needs of merchants and businessmen, in which specially selected students are taught. All except 13 of the State's 519 high schools conduct classes in homemaking, a third for

boys as well as girls, under supervision of the bureau of homemaking education. The bureau of trade and industrial education supervises apprentice training programs, organizes trade advisory committees of employer, employee, and public school representatives in many communities, and conducts State-wide conferences of foremen, personnel managers, sales managers, and other executives.

In the California Polytechnical Institute at San Luis Obispo, established in 1901, agriculture students conduct their own farm enterprises and aeronautics students operate a Government-approved commercial airplane repair station. The California Nautical School, conducted on board the U.S.S. California State with Tiburon as its home port, trains personnel for the coast's merchant marine. Three months nautical courses are given on three-masted, square-rigged ships, the Tusitala and the Joseph Conrad, sailing from Government Island off Alameda.

In carrying out the new curriculum, California schools have taken advantage of the State's many opportunities for outdoor play to stress their physical training and recreation programs. During the four depression years, 1932-1936, more gymnasiums, tennis courts, playgrounds, and swimming pools were constructed than in any previous four-year period. The recreation program is supplemented in many schools by health supervision. Both the construction and the recreation programs were conducted largely with the aid of the Works Progress Administration.

The Co-ordinating Council has been operating in California cities for more than 18 years. Originating with Virgil E. Dickson, now superintendent of schools in Berkeley, the plan sets up a voluntary board of members from school, police, health, and recreation departments, welfare societies, and research and guidance bureaus, to pool ideas, information, and mutual support in all matters pertaining to the welfare of youth. Not only are problem children given understanding aid, but also the gifted are sought out and provided with special opportunities. The work of California's co-ordinating councils, particularly those in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, has so materially decreased juvenile delinquency that scores of communities in other States have organized similar bodies. In 1933 the National Committee on Crime Prevention reported: "Your Committee believes that there is no other single step that could be put into operation that would be as far-reaching and as quickly beneficial as the widespread use of the co-ordinating council."

The handicapped child in California, if completely disabled, is taught at home or in a hospital or preventorium; if crippled, he is transported to special classes; if handicapped by vision, hearing, or speech defects he receives remedial instruction. California is the only State that carries on a program of speech correction with adequate

State aid. Classes have been established in 54 cities, with more than 14,000 students and ISO speech-correction teachers. The State's method of training mentally subnormal children may be seen applied in San Francisco's Ungraded School. When the handicapped child is i6 years of age, responsibility for his further instruction is transferred to the bureau of vocational rehabilitation.

Rural school children in California enjoy special attention, thanks to general recognition of the concept that "a child in the rural district is worth as much to the future of a state as one in the city." Constitutional amendment No. i6 (passed in 1920) provides for collection of school money where the wealth is and expenditure of it where the pupils are. The task of instructional supervisors, working from the county superintendent's office, is to weld the isolated rural schools into one closely co-ordinated county school system. Their "supervision," as the department of education likes to call it, does as much for the rural school as the automobile and radio do for the rural home. They are aided by the periodicals issued by the department of education's division of textbooks and publications: the Science Guide, the monthly California Schools, the quarterly California Journal of Elementary Education, and the hi-monthly children's magazine, The California Nugget. Another aid to rural pupil and teacher alike is the county library system, established in 1911, under which county libraries in 46 of the State'~ ~8 counties bring to the children of 2,313 rural districts collections of the best modern books and classics, as well as phonograph records, motion picture films, prints, globes, maps, and exhibits. Acting as advisor to the libraries of the entire State is the State Library at Sacramento, with its nearly 500,000 volumes. Rural children are also given the benefits of health education. Most counties employ traveling health nurses to examine children, remedy defects, advise in nutritional problems, and conduct health clinics. The children travel to and from school by means of tax-supported school transportation systems in most rural districts.

California was one of the first States to set up a division of adult education and to finance adult classes from its public education fund. In 1938 enrollment in adult classes equaled more than a tenth of the State's total population. So complete is the curriculum that entrants may study even the chemistry of lubrication or the Cantonese language. Among the most popular of many vocational training courses are the San Francisco classes in aeronautics, which are attended by about half as many women as men; these classes own two planes and study navigation, theory of flight, meteorology, air law, and solo flying. Courses in homemaking and consumer education are always in demand. But most popular of all are the classes in sociology, economics, and public affairs, conducted in accord with the department of education's belief

that "if this civilization survives it will do so because of the wisdom expressed in adult activities. If it disintegrates, adult incompetence will have to carry the onus.

A modern school system calls for well-trained teachers as well as a modern curriculum. California elementary school teachers, certified by county examinations, are now decreasing in numbers, and those certified by the State-which require a four year university or college course, including practice in directed teaching-are increasing. Unique in California is the requirement that high school teachers be university graduates with at least one additional year of graduate study.

The planners of California's activity program believe that an eager exploring spirit is stifled by the old-type schoolroom, with its desks nailed in stiff rows and its walls covered with black slate. The State division of schoolhouse planning finds architects whose inspiration coincides with its own. The educators and architects of this division have worked out a one-story functional plan in which each schoolroom has an activity alcove and an outdoor terrace for class sessions on pleasant days. The old desks have been replaced by movable chairs and tables, the "blackboards" by light-colored slate. Flowers, pictures, and curtains give charm to the room. In the activity alcove are a workbench, tools, a gas plate, a sink, and built-in cupboards for raw materials. Assembly rooms in these new schoolhouses have level floors so that they can he used as playrooms in rainy weather. In the two years from 1934 to 1936 more than 500 sets of plans for new and remodeled school buildings were submitted by school districts to the State division of schoolhouse planning; and as finally approved, 75 per cent of the elementary classrooms provided a proper setting for activity programs. The men and women who guide the development of California children believe, that "the chief purpose in organizing a school is not to obtain economy in effort; it is to give to each little child within its doors as nearly as possible the best environment in which to grow."