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THE GOSLINGS

A Study of the American Schools

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I begin this study of the American school system with Southern California, because that is the part of the country in which I live, and which therefore I know best. It is a representative part, being the newest and most recently mixed. We have all the races, white and black and yellow and red; but the great bulk of the population is of native stock, farmers from the Middle West who have sold or rented their homesteads and moved to this “roof-garden of the world.” It is our fashion to hold reunions and picnics for the old home folks, and there are few states that cannot gather thousands of representatives.

We have the most wonderful climate in the world, and soil which is fertile under irrigation. Our leading occupation is selling this soil and climate to new arrivals from the East. We are eager traders, and everything we have is for sale; you can buy the average house in Southern California for two hundred dollars more than the owner paid for it, and I know people who have sold their homes and moved several times in one year. Also, we have struck oil, and this sudden wealth has fanned our collective greed. We boast ourselves “the white spot on the industrial map.” Hard times do not touch us, we build literally whole streets of new houses every week, and labor agitators are banished from our midst.