Word: systemic
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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With the great Mississippi flood of 1927 quietly seeping into the Gulf of Mexico, attention turned toward preventing the river from ever again driving valley-dwellers from their homes in hundreds of thousands. It appears certain that the levee system will continue to carry the main burden of flood prevention, but various adjuncts to it have been insistently urged...
Reservoirs. A system of reservoirs in the upper reaches of streams tributary to the Mississippi would, it is claimed, absorb the spring overflow of these streams, thus catching the floods at an early stage and eliminating them. Such a system would, however, be tremendously expensive (Dayton, Ohio, alone spent $30,000,000 on a reservoir project after the 1913 Dayton Flood), and would not affect rain-swollen streams at points below the reservoir sites...
Basins. A sort of dry-reservoir idea is proposed in a system of basins-stretches of lowlands bordering the river and surrounded by levees. These basins would be dry land in normal times, at flood period an opening would be made in the levees and the basin flooded, thus taking up some of the overflow. These basins could be owned by the Government and rented out for private farming with the understanding that they would have to be inundated in flood time...
Partaking as it does of the nature of a special tutorial system, such a plan would have many of the peculiar tutorial advantages. Personal contact, appreciation of individual difficulties, all the special attention which a tutor or a supervisor can give and which a large course of necessity fails to supply, are perhaps more needed in the teaching of English than anywhere else. The practical difficulties of the suggestion, inadequacy of instructors and scarcity of student time, could be met by having the instructor meet his charges at considerable intervals, watching their development rather than furnishing them with constant precepts...
...restrictions. Tuition fees should gradually be raised to cover the cost of instruction. A loan fund could then be established with the endowment funds now used to cover the difference between the cost of education and the tuition income. To the man with means it would mean abolishing a system of philanthropy which is neither added nor wanted. To the man who could not afford such a charge at the time it would offer a self respecting means of obtaning an education without inflctng useless hardships...