Excerpt from Report of the Commissioner of Education: Made to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1870; With Accompanying Papers Sir: Less than eight months have elapsed since I entered upon the duties of this office. I found that the entire working force of this Bureau at that time consisted of two clerks, at a salary of $1,200 each, and that the rooms assigned to its use were so crowded with books, pamphlets, and desks as to be wholly unfit for successful clerical work. The aid you were able to afford me, by the detail of an additional clerk, was of great service. The efficiency of the office was further increased by the favorable action of Congress in passing the law of July 12, 1870, allowing three clerks, one at $1,800, one at $1,600, and one at $1,400, and a messenger at $840, and also making an appropriation of$3,000 for additional work in compiling statistics and preparing reports. Since September the work has been greatly facilitated by the transfer of the office to the more ample quarters supplied by your order. The office had already experienced various vicissitudes of fortune. First established as an independent Department, it was afterward reduced to all office in the Interior Department, where now the law styles it a Bureau. The salary of the Commissioner, originally $4,000, had been diminished to $3,000. The compensation of the clerical force had suffered a corresponding reduction. In addition to the difficulties and limitations in the office itself, I was at once made conscious of most serious obstacles, arising not only from a general misapprehension with regard to the character and objects, but from a failure to see any necessity for the existence, of the Bureau. The idea of national attention to education, as well as to agriculture, had been urged in vain by Washington and his compeers, and repeated from time to time by many of our most patriotic statesmen, until finally the special action of a convention of school superintendents, in a well-considered memorial to Congress, led to the enactment of a law, approved March 2, 1867, establishing a Department of Education "for the purpose of collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several States and Territories, and of diffusing such information respecting the organization and management of school systems and methods of teaching as shall aid the people of the United States in the establishment and maintenance of efficient school systems, and otherwise promote the cause of education throughout the country." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.