Here are wholesome lessons for our American schools. Instead of giving sufficient individual help or providing expert teachers for the less intelligent, we permit them to become repeaters or to drop out altogether; in place of taking the child from an evil environment before he becomes a moral delinquent and placing him under moral surroundings in some good home, we hesitate to interfere with parental rights--as though they were greater than social--and permit him to become a law-breaker; and rather than give to school officials the authority and necessary equipment to care rightfully for the child who has committed some error, we place him in the hands of the law and he is probably sent to a reformatory having neither facility for his proper treatment nor any connection with the schools whatsoever.
Closer co-ordination of these educational functions and institutions would prevent much misfortune, cure a vast amount of misery, and accomplish more efficient results.
DIRECTING AUTHORITY AND MANAGEMENT OF SCHOOLS
Norway's educational authority is definitely centralized in the person at the head of the Department of Ecclesiastical and Educational Affairs, who is a member of the King's cabinet. The several departments, bureaus, commissions, and boards for control are radiations from this central focus. Furthermore, their schools are parts and parcels of one very definite, though somewhat complex, system; each class of schools, in its respective field, is ordered according to certain specifications; and all are coordinated so as to result in a unified whole without overlapping, or exposure of ragged and loose ends.
The controlling features of greater importance such as curriculum, appointment of teachers, plans of instruction, and the determination of qualifications for teaching positions are in the hands of the higher authorities. In effect the state determines the policies, the officers are expected to respect them, and the patrons exercise but little direct control. For example, the law provides that completion of certain grades of school work shall mean practically the same throughout the country, that the middle school and gymnasium examinations shall be uniform everywhere in the state, that standards of academic fitness for teaching positions must be the same, and that teachers' salaries shall not be below a certain minimum amount. Local opinion never has a thought of departing from these requirements.
