We find ourselves in this country in the happy situation where attendance at school by the vast majority of children of school age is a fact accepted as normal by everyone, and as proper by all except a few restless ones among the children and a few eccentric ones among the parents. For the school year I949-I950 (the last year covered by the biennial survey of the Federal Office of Education) some 25,4II,000 pupils were enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools and an additional 3,380,139 in private and parochial schools. They represented over 91 per cent of the nation's 5-I7 year olds. These children were not merely enrolled in school; they came, which is more to the point. For I949-I950 average daily attendance in the public schools was reported at 88.7 per cent.1 With only slight variations in individual states, these percentages held true throughout the country and for all classes of the population. Current figures, if available, would undoubtedly present totals no less pleasing to the educator's eye. In short, we are at a point where no one questions the obligation of the state to make education available to all its citizens, where parents realize and voluntarily discharge their duty to send their children to school, and where the children either go willingly or submit without too much fuss to parental and social pressure. To disturb contemplation of this fortunate condition by a discussion of compulsory attendance laws might seem not only ungracious but unnecessary. And it is true that no one claims for such laws chief credit for the present favorable record of enrollment and attendance.2 But things were not always as they now are in this matter of going to school, and the coercion of the law has had no inconsiderable part in producing the change for the better. More pertinent perhaps, attitudes toward school attendance will not continue to be the same in those states where preponderant public opinion finds distasteful the legal and sociological views expressed in Brown v. Board of Education.3 Assuming as I think one can at this time that the states whose practices are affected by that decision will continue their systems of public free schools, they may continue or may repeal their compulsory attendance laws. Where such laws are left on the books, local officials may enforce