286 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION.
SCHOOL SAVINGS BANKS IN THE UNITED STATES.
BY J. H. THIRY OF LONG ISLAND CITY. N. Y.
In the sessions of the World’s Congress Auxiliary from July 17 to July
26, the whole question of the education of the young seems to have been
quite fully presented, and yet among all things that have been said, not a
word has been mentioned in relation to the practical lessons of thrift and
cconomy that may be inculcated during the early training of children.
The aim of this paper is to make up this deficiency.
In March, 1885, while I was the Commissioner of the Third Ward
School of Long Island City, I introduced the European system of school
savings banks as a trial to one school. That trial proved to be so com-
plete a success that, one year later, about fifty other schools of different
cities adopted the system with same results. Now, eight years later, what
oetter evidence of the efficacy of the plan could be given than by laying
before the public the following results of its application to three hundred
id seventeen schools of seventy-eight cities and villages of America ?
From a register of 82,072 pupils in these three hundred and seventeen
schools of twelve different States of the Union, 53,810 have saved $345,-
534.52, which is deposited in banks in the respective names of those 33,810
scholars, This large amount would have been partially expended other-
wise for worthless things. We have in this wide domain a large number
of criminals, and of paupers, insane, bedridden, homeless, aged, infirm
people ; we have also among us many that are needy, but who are not yet
the wards of the public. With the increase of the population comes an
increase in society’s burden. The only way to put a check upon this
alarming increase in our non-producing classes is to educate our children
to become producers, contributors, and thrifty citizens. In our public
schools we can supply the remedy.
If frugality in grown-up people repairs the waste of our resources, in
little people it accomplishes comparatively more. We have already learned
that the school savings bank, when introduced harmoniously, fuses with
overy one of the other branches of school work. With our modern civiliza-
sion, this new education is received as the purest expression of the social
maturity.
Our ancestors, in inangurating and adopting the public school system,
did not merely do so to prepare the children to buy, to sell, and to get
cain in the active, material, business pursuits of life, but also to prepare
them for good citizenship in the Republic. Animated with the same
spirit, we must extend our school programme if we want to enable our
children to face the difficulties of existence.
A really progressive civilization, such as ours, demands and prompts us
