Happily, there is a growing realization among educators of the necessity of relating the school more closely to the children’s future, and it is not an accident that one of the widely known authorities on vocational guidance has had long experience in settlements.[4] * * * * * A friend has recently given to me the letters which I wrote regularly to her family during the first two years of my life on the East Side. I had almost forgotten, until these letters recalled it to me, how often Miss Brewster and I mourned over the boys and girls who were not in school, and over those who had already gone to work without any education. Almost everyone has had knowledge at some time of the chagrin felt by people who cannot read or write. One intelligent woman of my acquaintance, born in New York State, ingeniously succeeded for many years in keeping the fact of her illiteracy secret from the people with whom she lived on terms of intimacy, buying the newspaper daily and making a pretense of reading it. We had naïvely assumed that elementary education was given to all, and were appalled to find entire families unable to read or write, even though some of the children had been born in America. The letters remind me, too, of the efforts we made to get the children we encountered into school,—day school or night school, public or private,—and how many different people reacted to our appeals. The Department of Health, to facilitate our efforts, supplied us with virus points and authority to vaccinate, since no unvaccinated child could be admitted to school. We gave such publicity as was in our power to the conditions we found, not disdaining to stir emotionally by our “stories” when dry and impersonal statistics failed to impress. Since those days, New York City has established a school census and has almost perfected a policy whereby all children are brought into school; but throughout the state there are communities where the compulsory education law is disregarded. The Federal Census of 1910 shows in this Empire State, in the counties (Franklin and Clinton) inhabited by the native-born, illiteracy far in excess of that in the counties where the foreign-born congregate.