CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOLS. Correspondence in struction in its modern form originated in the last quarter of the 19th century. In 1856 Toussaint and Langenscheidt founded a school in Berlin to teach languages by correspondence. In 1868 the University Extension movement in England introduced cor respondence instruction, but its development was left largely to American initiative. The "Society to Encourage Study at Home" was organized at Boston in 1873, but the first formal American attempt in this field was launched at Ithaca, N.Y., by the "Cor respondence university" in 1883. Its purpose was to supplement the work of other educational institutions. In 1892 William Rainey Harper became president of the new University of Chicago and established a correspondence department therein. This ven ture proved successful and during the following two decades spread to a number of other universities throughout the country. In 1928 there were 154 resident institutions of higher learning of fering correspondence instruction and enrolling annually 45,000 students. The correspondence courses offered by these institu tions, for the most part, presuppose that the student has an edu cational background comparable to that of the college student. The granting and exchange of credit for correspondence work have not been standardized.
There is another distinct source of the modern correspondence school. In the '8o's an editor of a Pennsylvania newspaper began to publish questions and answers concerning coal mining. In 1891 he prepared a course covering this field to be offered by the cor respondence method. Other cognate courses were soon added and within a decade this organization grew into the International Cor respondence Schools, offering about 30o courses and enrolling ap proximately 1 oo,000 students annually. Many private ventures in the field of correspondence instruction rapidly followed, until in 1928 there were 498 private correspondence schools in the United States, enrolling annually more than 1,500.00o students. In many instances these schools uphold high educational standards, while others are little more than book selling concerns. The courses of fered are, for the most part, vocational and technical, the texts being written in non-technical language with copious illustrations and drawings, to enable the average adult worker to comprehend readily. Some of the best vocational literature in the English language is found in these correspondence school texts, but since there was no accrediting agency in the correspondence school field during the first 35 years of its existence, a certain amount of medi ocre educational material and unethical practices became current. To meet this situation the National Home Study council, Wash ington, D.C., was organized in 1926 to serve as an inspecting and accrediting agency for the proprietary home study schools.
The U.S. Government endorsed the value of correspondence in struction when in 1920 the U.S. Marine Corps institute offered 225 courses to members of the Marine Corps. There were 36, 700 students enrolling for these courses in 1928. In 1921 the U.S. de partment of war established 342 correspondence courses in mili tary tactics for reserve officers.
Other ventures in this field are as follows: I. The insular department of education in Porto Rico offers free correspondence instruction in high school subjects.
2. Several communities in Michigan are supplementing high school work by enrolling vocational students in private corre spondence schools.
3. In sparsely settled provinces of western Canada children are being taught elementary school subjects by correspondence.