Parochial schools should be required to report to the county superintendent the names of their teachers, length of term, etc. The teachers should be required to make monthly reports and be subject to the same supervision of inspection as those of public schools. Their certification should also be subject to state approval. Failing this, the pupils should be required to attend the public schools for at least eight full years, or until they complete the regular eighth-grade work.
Near St. Cloud, Minnesota, there is a Slovenian colony of about fifty to sixty families. Near by there is a much smaller German colony with a German parochial school in which the teacher, at the time of the writer's visit, was a German and the teaching language was German. Quite a number of the Slovenian families sent their children to this school, where they were Germanized instead of Americanized. A Slovenian family head explained to the writer that those Slovenians who are sending their children to the German school do it for a practical reason. They expect some time to visit their native Austria, where German is the state language. The man claimed that about one tenth of the settlers do not understand English, and that only about one fifth of them can speak and write English, although the colony was founded in America about fifty years ago.
The following statement made by the Superintendent of Public Instruction in the state of Michigan to the writer, September 11, 1918, shows the situation in regard to the private schools in that state. Parochial schools exist as follows:
One hundred and sixty-six Catholic; 124 German Lutheran; 19 Adventists; 22 Christian Reform. There is a total of 331. Of these, 190 maintain as many as eight grades, and 62 maintain more than eight grades. In the grades below the high school there is an attendance of 43,836, and in the high schools, 2,813. There are employed about 1,200 teachers. Eighty-six schools use German as a medium of instruction, German partly; sixteen use Polish; 5 use French. Only 2 schools in the state give no time to the teaching of the English branches. Seventy per cent of all the schools use the English language only as a medium of instruction. The census of the state contains 892,787 children of school age, five to nineteen years, inclusive. There are enrolled in the public schools of the state, 635,020. We regret that we have not yet the data from Saginaw and Detroit. The city of Detroit alone would perhaps show a parochial-school attendance as large as the parochial-school attendance of all the rest of the state.